started thinking about it unironically in the shower, but then it all spiraled till I got this.
Throughout the whole history of humanity, most of the language and information were passed through personal one on one interactions. Where disagreement was personal. In the modern age of the internet. Both right and left, rich and poor, have destroyed that. To be a successful scientist before, you needed to learn how to transmit your ideas not only on paper, but also in a conference room filled with tens of people. Nowadays, modern scientists are struggling to even speak, as social anxiety induced by the social separation of the internet makes them publish any of their studies on online platforms. This involves costs not only for the scientists but for the society as a whole. As simply using a source of a science article that is published by a big name now makes you right and the other person wrong. I myself am still debated on this issue.
But what touches me the most is the political debate. Both right and left have sunk into the deep pit of awful, gut wrenching, poisonous and hazardous debates that do not impose a greater meaning than to gain a popular majority. People such as Vaush, Hasanabi and many others construct themselves on the basis of debating on the internet. Most awful detail being that their debate is mostly just critique of a video. While the right in what I’ve personally seen is just as awful, or in my opinion even more. They use nonsensical, straw-man and other logical fallacies filled arguments that do not impose or add anything to the greater picture. Even debates in real life are now a vomit-fest. Biggest example being the Trump and Biden debate. People didn’t even consider it as one and turned it into a joke. Real life debates are now filled with either animalistic screaming or the unacceptance of either one’s platform. It leads nowhere and the result of it is minimal at best. I’m afraid for the future of debates and what it might lead to. Debates are dead and we killed them, but what shall we kill next?
Please prove me wrong, I’m going to sleep with this horrible thought that I hate.
you still need to do that, but also you need to put your ideas in a nice, cohesive, indexable package we call an “article”, and it gets more important than it was before. it’s a good thing solely because of expanding knowledge base. neither absolves you of critical thinking and evaluating your sources, something that you don’t name explicitly
iff that article supports what that other person says, if it doesn’t you can make them look like a buffon very quickly (unfortunately i’ve seen that before)
then you get mix of things like bs asymmetry principle, the fact that right wing moguls push money into very targeted ads that are in general more effective on broke people, the quirk of engagement-driven platforms that select for inflammatory and conspirational discourse, and expectation that if you draw fiber optic into Nondescript Backwater, Oklahoma then Corn University of Oklahoma will get more CS professors (it kinda works, and sometimes Florida Man does get Nobel prize indirectly because of that, but most of the time you’ll just get things like voat)
it didn’t started yesterday and we won’t wake up in idiocracy tomorrow either. people were like this since introduction of long range communication. this, too, shall pass