My recommended first help would be: think less about stupidity of other people, and more about your own.
This is generally good advice and I do need to be more mindful of my own stupidity, but my problem isn’t that I go searching for other people stupidity so I can get angry at them, more that… I’m getting more and more annoyed every time I accidentally bump into it and I’m trying to avoid reacting by shutting off everything and everyone. Though some of the advice I’m receiving looks helpful about not doing that.
… people usually behave quite reasonably in their everyday lives, and say utterly crazy bullshit about anything abstract or remote.
But historically, way more people got killed becaused they pissed off their neighbors by openly disagreeing with them about something; and it didn’t matter who was actually right.
I guess that could explain the lack of critical sense they show about stuff they aren’t expert on. I’ve never cared about simply agreeing with other people ideas if they didn’t seemed right to me at first sight, and usually thought I were the one knowing best (even when deeply wrong about it) so that’s not a factor my brain considers when trying to simulate other people. Thank you for this useful insight.
There is this “agree to disagree” bullshit, which would be intellectually lazy and kinda offensive against your fellow rationalists, but is a great peace-keeping tool between different tribes.
I hadn’t thought of it that way. I was refusing to “agree to disagree” as if it was a moral rule, but I should stick with that if I see no chances I can actually persuade someone. To be more precise, I had figured out that between non rationalists it was often better to agree to disagree since it would be a lost cause, but I thought I just couldn’t do that, no matter who I was talking to.
I’m still a bit queasy about apparently supporting bad epistemology, so I think I’ll try to state it like “We can’t both be right, but I guess talking about it won’t lead us anywhere, so let’s just forget about it”.
“We can’t both be right, but I guess talking about it won’t lead us anywhere, so let’s just forget about it”
Yep. Let’s not fight about it.
I would say that even among rationalists, it may be sometimes useful to settle for: “logically, at least one of us must be wrong… but finding out which one would probably be too costly, and this topic is not that important”.
Ironically I understood the “too costly” logic between rationalists pretty fast, since I’ve witnessed arguments being dissolved or hitting an objectively hard barrier to overcome really fast.
When I’m dealing with non rationalists, instead, I kinda have the impression agreement is just behind the corner.
“I understood your point of view and I have changed mine if I was doing a mistake. If we are still talking it means I figured out what mistake you are doing, why can’t you just understand what I’m saying or tell me the part you aren’t understanding, I’m doing my best to explain and I’ve been honest with you...”
That’s the sensation I usually feel when I care enough to argue about something and just don’t write the effort as hopeless from the start, but it’s just that, what I feel, it’s clearly not easy at all doing all of a sudden what I specifically trained myself to do.
This is generally good advice and I do need to be more mindful of my own stupidity, but my problem isn’t that I go searching for other people stupidity so I can get angry at them, more that… I’m getting more and more annoyed every time I accidentally bump into it and I’m trying to avoid reacting by shutting off everything and everyone. Though some of the advice I’m receiving looks helpful about not doing that.
I guess that could explain the lack of critical sense they show about stuff they aren’t expert on. I’ve never cared about simply agreeing with other people ideas if they didn’t seemed right to me at first sight, and usually thought I were the one knowing best (even when deeply wrong about it) so that’s not a factor my brain considers when trying to simulate other people. Thank you for this useful insight.
I hadn’t thought of it that way. I was refusing to “agree to disagree” as if it was a moral rule, but I should stick with that if I see no chances I can actually persuade someone. To be more precise, I had figured out that between non rationalists it was often better to agree to disagree since it would be a lost cause, but I thought I just couldn’t do that, no matter who I was talking to.
I’m still a bit queasy about apparently supporting bad epistemology, so I think I’ll try to state it like “We can’t both be right, but I guess talking about it won’t lead us anywhere, so let’s just forget about it”.
Yep. Let’s not fight about it.
I would say that even among rationalists, it may be sometimes useful to settle for: “logically, at least one of us must be wrong… but finding out which one would probably be too costly, and this topic is not that important”.
Ironically I understood the “too costly” logic between rationalists pretty fast, since I’ve witnessed arguments being dissolved or hitting an objectively hard barrier to overcome really fast.
When I’m dealing with non rationalists, instead, I kinda have the impression agreement is just behind the corner.
“I understood your point of view and I have changed mine if I was doing a mistake. If we are still talking it means I figured out what mistake you are doing, why can’t you just understand what I’m saying or tell me the part you aren’t understanding, I’m doing my best to explain and I’ve been honest with you...”
That’s the sensation I usually feel when I care enough to argue about something and just don’t write the effort as hopeless from the start, but it’s just that, what I feel, it’s clearly not easy at all doing all of a sudden what I specifically trained myself to do.