Any extreme minority position would take a long time to win converts. People are generally wrong because they have bad concepts, not because they have clear concepts, but mistakenly thought 2+2=5.
It takes a while to penetrate poor concepts, and the people with poor concepts have to be willing to put in the effort to justify their argument, and not just take it as a given that is up to someone else to refute their nonsense, because you can’t refute gibberish. Most people here are intellectually confident. Add to that the consensus of the group, and who is going to expend the effort to honestly defend and justify the consensus?
On the contrarian side, the contrarian is also probably intellectually confident. Unless he finds a productive engagement, he’ll eventually just shrug and move on. I’ve done as much. On one thread, I found the views about clinical trial data thoroughly wrongheaded. I was downvoted a lot, but persisted, being the ornery coot that I am. But eventually, I move on, because I have a day job, and other things to do.
And there’s something about the “comments after blog post” format that isn’t conducive to sustained debate for me. Maybe because it’s one long page, it feels inappropriate to have 20 back and forths, while a serious discussion probably would require that.
I think this is the best comment, at least the one that best captures my own views, on this thread.
Another way of looking at the problem expressed in buybuydandavis’s first two paragraphs is that most people are so busy signalling, rather than thinking, that their concepts are usually “not even wrong”.
Any extreme minority position would take a long time to win converts. People are generally wrong because they have bad concepts, not because they have clear concepts, but mistakenly thought 2+2=5.
It takes a while to penetrate poor concepts, and the people with poor concepts have to be willing to put in the effort to justify their argument, and not just take it as a given that is up to someone else to refute their nonsense, because you can’t refute gibberish. Most people here are intellectually confident. Add to that the consensus of the group, and who is going to expend the effort to honestly defend and justify the consensus?
On the contrarian side, the contrarian is also probably intellectually confident. Unless he finds a productive engagement, he’ll eventually just shrug and move on. I’ve done as much. On one thread, I found the views about clinical trial data thoroughly wrongheaded. I was downvoted a lot, but persisted, being the ornery coot that I am. But eventually, I move on, because I have a day job, and other things to do.
And there’s something about the “comments after blog post” format that isn’t conducive to sustained debate for me. Maybe because it’s one long page, it feels inappropriate to have 20 back and forths, while a serious discussion probably would require that.
I think this is the best comment, at least the one that best captures my own views, on this thread.
Another way of looking at the problem expressed in buybuydandavis’s first two paragraphs is that most people are so busy signalling, rather than thinking, that their concepts are usually “not even wrong”.