[joolze]

You seem to be describing what is commonly known as a "conversation".

I find it hilarious that western society has gradually devolved itself to such an extent with fear-fear mongering, hate-hate speech, and an absurd amount of righteous indignation that people are literally terrified to have opinions outside the groupthink; and you not only have to invent a game to feel human again, but that game is apparently novel enough to reach the front page of HN. This is literally an analysis of how to have a disagreement without reacting like a fourth grader.

[TeMPOraL]

Be it as it may, the fact is that quite a lot of people tend to react like a fourth-graders when facing disagreement. Try to ask a random family member about vaccines, GMOs or nuclear power and see how it goes.

[archagon]

I don't think it has anything to do with "Western society", but rather the nature of internet discussions. They're impersonal. They're amenable to favoritism and the echo chamber effect. You can't interrupt somebody in the middle of a soapbox lecture to ask for clarification or offer counter-arguments. The atomic unit of discussion is the paragraph, at best, and your audience numbers in the hundreds. Basically, it's Permanent Debate Club.

In my experience, people in the real world are far more kind and open even when discussing the most controversial of topics.

[wbillingsley]

I disagree. I think it has a great deal to do with part of western society -- particularly, the rhetorical strategies that social movements of the left have deliberately adopted.

Sure enough, just about anyone can get caught in the idea "Well, if my opponent thought about it, then surely they'd agree with me. They don't agree with me, so therefore they're not thinking people, and I need to use something other than reason to make them change their mind." But the difference is that the left are currently much more willing then to apply theories of social norms instead of arguments.

Terms such as "climate denier", "evolution denier", "free-thinker" (you wouldn't want to disagree with our opinion on religion, and show you're not a free thinker, now would you?), etc, were coined deliberately for rhetorical effect. Similarly, social movements on the left are usually quicker to play the game of rhetorical escalation. Can I find some rhetoric by which to portray my opponent's opinion as "sexist" or "ignorant"? So that regardless of what their reasoning is, the pressure to avoid being socially viewed as ignorant is an incentive for them to change their mind.

[archagon]

The same exact thing happens on the other side with words like "SJW". It's fairly idiomatic of internet rhetoric in general, and it's bad news for reasoned debate.

Most of my friends are very liberal, and literally none of them use this kind of rhetoric in real life. I'm convinced it's an emergent property of internet discussion, not an intentional strategy (for the most part).

[state]

This seems to me to be even more true online, although we like to think that information technology has the opposite effect.

[lostcolony]

It is more true online, and for a lot of reasons.

I meet someone at a party and we become Facebook friends. I then post some sort of political article or comment to my feed. They see it, disagree with it, and (likely) either comment on it in a non-polite manner, or stay silent, but either way categorize me in their head as a crazy right/left winger. Why? Because these are what is easiest to do for 'crazy' opinions coming from strangers.

Compare that with what can happen in real life. I get to know someone over the course of multiple interactions; all my political comments are kept to those I already know and trust. Eventually we get to a point we know and trust each other, and I venture an opinion, one they disagree with. They say "I disagree with that", and we discuss it. Why? Because we already know each other, value each other, trust each other, and are seeking legitimately to understand and/or sway one another, while also preserving the relationship.

The internet has essentially made it so the thoughts we used to reserve for those we knew in depth, are becoming aired to strangers, and responded to accordingly.

While it means that insular bubbles of thought (the rural family who doesn't know anyone who believes in gun control, say) are encountering people who disagree with them, those people are strangers, and there's no reason to give them any credence. If anything, it just makes one even more vociferous, because now you can preach to people who -aren't- in the choir.

[memracom]

So why do you publish your innermost thoughts to a bunch of strangers on Facebook like that? Even in the online world it is possible to find many different forums where you can discuss things with people who are open for real discussion and conversation. Don't let Facebook grind everyone down to the lowest common denominator. Use many forums.

Become a regular in the comments section of certain blogs. Create aliases and join web forums or email lists or a Reddit subcommunity or something. And encourage diversity of discussion groups.

Just being on HackerNews is already a step in the right direction. And maybe some of us will build apps and sites that encourage people to form smaller groups to discuss issues without having to fight off trolls and uninformed newbie types.

The Internet used to have a lot more of that when mailing lists were the main way to have discussions. And there were services like the Well, and Compuserve that put a lot of effort into managing interest groups with sysops who kept them from getting out of hand.

The WELL in particular, put a lot of effort into the psychological aspects of humans in groups, in writing their guidelines for users and for the sysops managing the groups.

[TeMPOraL]

I have a tiny hope that after experiencing this phenomenon from both sides - both seeing and being the lunatic stranger - most people will learn to embrace that their beliefs may not always be correct or universal.

It's a tiny hope.

[lostcolony]

I wish I had that hope. I've seen people who in person I've had intelligent, rational discussions with on areas we disagree, then post virulent political posts that tear apart strawmen arguments. I actually quite like this article because it paints this out as why we do it. With someone we disagree with in person, they're still part of our tribe. We know them, we like them, we trust them. With someone on the internet, they're 'the other'.

[TeMPOraL]

Yeah. I've seen those people too. It's about signaling, I think. Hell, I often have to stop myself from resharing stupid strawmans on Facebook just to "stick it" to the outgroup.

[Nursie]

I don't know. I had one or two friends come out as anti-vax IRL and we didn't have a discussion, instead my opinion of them just plummeted.

[DrScump]

Does someone who opposes media-driven thinking (with supporting science to show why) about any one vaccine get lumped into "anti-vaxxers" in your mind? Because that all-or-nothing thinking fallacy is a key symptom of the problem.

[Nursie]

If they have a factual basis for their views that's fine.

But in general I was talking about folks who have, for whatever reason, said things like "oh we're not vaccinating our children", meaning all vaccines.

There is no reasonable basis for this outlook.

[TeMPOraL]

Try to have that discussion. It's enlightening.

[Nursie]

In what sense?

The only thing it can really do is inform me what sort of bizarre misinformation they have bought into. Unlikely ever to repair the drop in my opinion.

[TeMPOraL]

I think you may find out that the "bizarre misinformation" is a bit more nuanced than you think, and the issue is not about facts at all.

I spent some time talking to antivaxxers; I've shared my impressions in a parallel subthread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10878136

[Swizec]

Here's what I don't understand, and I'm likely the weird one here: Why are political opinions considered private? Is it an anglosaxon thing? Is it a middleclass thing? It feels completely alien to me.

Where I come from politics (in one form or another) are the first thing you talk about with new people that you meet. It's the most fruitful ground for conversation that goes beyond mundane boring smalltalk nobody cares about.

I mean, isn't that the whole basis for democracy? That people discuss these things?

Hell, isn't most mainstream-but-not-quite-pop art political in nature?

[Cyberdog]

> Here's what I don't understand, and I'm likely the weird one here: Why are political opinions considered private?

People often keep their political opinions private in polite society simply because of what this whole thread is about - it's very easy for people who don't know you very well to judge you by the political opinions you spout and then possibly treat you more poorly because of that. This is why I tend to keep my mouth shut about political stuff at my workplace. (It doesn't help that I know that, statistically speaking, my opinion will be at odds with most of the others in my industry and location.)

[DrScump]

This.

And if you differ because you are more informed about the topic than your peers, that only makes the social isolation problem worse.

[TeMPOraL]

I think it's an age-old custom. There are two things that are off-topic for casual conversations with non-family-members - political and religious beliefs. People tend to tie them to their egos, and it pretty much always results in resentment. It's a general population equivalent of inexperienced developers arguing about merits of programming languages or text editors.

'pg actually wrote an essay about it once.

http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

[TeMPOraL]

One of the side effects of the Internet is that you can find pretty much any plausibly sounding justification for any view. Couple that with the modern world being insanely complicated - acknowledging which leads to feelings of helplessness - and there's no surprise people end up believing different things depending on what they happened to read. People want to feel they understand things. Nobody wants to feel stupid.

[memracom]

In the British tradition, university students used to participate in debates where two people argued the opposite sides of a question. The debaters got brownie points for winning the debate, not for arguing the RIGHT opinion. Often the debaters had to argue for a question which they themselves were against, or vice versa.

The audiences who voted the winner, paid more attention to the quality of the debate, not to the question itself.

In a culture where this type of debate is practiced in the schools, people of all ages will be more open to discussing an issue in a social setting without strapping on revolvers and a bulletproof vest.

It is not a question of identifying who is the enemy, it is a question of figuring out which path will lead to a better world 100 moves in the future. Because real life really is like a chess game. The outcome of the next move is not the be all and end all.

[TeMPOraL]

I always viewed this kind of debates as potentially harmful though. If you award brownie points for "debate quality", as opposed to "getting it right", you may end up promoting eristic over rationality.

But maybe British universities get it right. I don't know, I haven't had the experience. We had debates in my secondary school, and I remember that the best way to win those was to be the cleverest bullshitter in the room.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I think you're completely correct. It's politically poisonous because it promotes a legal/corporate view of the world where you win by being glib, emotive, and persuasive, over a scientific/rational view of the world where you win by modelling and predicting objective reality more accurately than the other side.

It's easy to see how this destroys any possibility of rational policy-making.

It doesn't help that most countries suffer from literally industrial levels of PR effort, media spin, and online astroturfing, all designed to persuade, influence, and manipulate, and not to inform.

See e.g. http://www.businessinsider.com/astroturfing-grassroots-movem... for a very incomplete list of examples.

The whole point of PR etc is to deny reality. So the idea that the other side might have a point worthy of respect is deeply problematic.

It would be true in a world where everyone had access to unbiased information, deliberately misleading the public was banned by law, and public education was a significant policy goal.

That isn't the world we live in.