[mikeash]

It's interesting that there's a whole subculture of this stuff now. There's a ton of subreddits starting with "bad," such as badhistory, badlinguistics, and badphilosophy whose purpose is to collect links to comments seen as "bad" in the context of whatever field it's about. This could actually be a valuable service, where you get experts in to correct misconceptions or incorrect claims that are getting a lot of attention. Unfortunately, they're never about that, but are simply about making fun of people behind their backs.

I'm reminded of the Robbers Cave Experiment, wherein all it took to create conflict between two groups of summer campers was the act of dividing them into groups. The subreddit system is genius for allowing one site to serve so many different communities, but it also sets the stage for subreddits to see other subreddits as the enemy.

(And if this comment was on Reddit, I imagine there would pretty quickly be a link to it from /r/badphilosophy talking about how badly I've misunderstood the experiment and how stupid I am, all while not actually educating me or any of the people reading my comment.)