Opinionhaver @ Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

A contrarian isn’t one who always objects - that’s a confirmist of a differ

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You can swap out "worldview" with any other term you like as that is neither relevant to the discussion. You're getting hung up on terms and completely ignoring the substance of my argument.

Nobody has claimed your views on AI count as a worldview, nor are they in any way relevant to this discussion. The discussion is about you blanket dismissing everyone who criticizes “wokeness” as a bot.

Yes, really. You're effectively saying “everyone who disagrees with my worldview is a bot,” which is a textbook example of ad hominem - dismissing a position based on who is assumed to hold it rather than engaging with the argument itself. That kind of framing is both delusional and extremely bad faith.

To your question: no, what I said isn't ad hominem. Criticizing someone for making an ad hominem isn't the same thing. I'm not using a personal attack to avoid addressing your argument - I'm pointing out that you’re using personal attacks to avoid having one. There's a difference between attacking someone instead of responding to their point and calling out someone for refusing to make one.

Because I have no issues with YouTube. I'd much rather use American spyware than Chinese one.

All that to say that today we have an epidemic of violent, emotionally inept, unsuccessful men.

Do we, though? I'm not sure if you've come across the Male Sedation Hypothesis but it basically argues that we should be seeing more violence from disenfranchised young men - and yet we aren’t. The hypothesis suggests that this is largely due to porn, video games, and drugs. Rather than acting out, many men are withdrawing from society into their mom’s basements, supplementing real-life relationships and career success with virtual equivalents.

Countering arguments with ad-hominem puts you right up there with AI bots when it comes to providing value to online discussions.

Everything you do changes your brain activity.

This isn’t about using ChatGPT broadly, but specifically about the difference between writing an essay with the help of an LLM versus doing it without. And in this case, I think it all comes down to how you use it. If you just have it write the essay for you, then of course it won’t stimulate your brain to the same extent - that’s like hiring someone to go to the gym for you.

Personally, the way I use it to help with my writing is by doing all the writing myself first. Only after that do I let it check for grammatical errors and help improve the clarity and flow by making minor structural adjustments - while keeping the tone and message of my original draft intact.

For me, the purpose of writing is to convert abstract thoughts into language and pass that information along, hoping the reader understands it well enough that it forms the same idea in their mind. If ChatGPT can help untangle my word salad and make that process more effective, I welcome it.

In my view, even voicing genuine doubt about the validity of elections undermines the very democratic institutions people claim to care about. It feeds into the same narrative that Trump and others have pushed, casting suspicion on the process and eroding public trust. Whether intentional or not, it ends up doing their work for them.

calling out men as predominant perpetrators of violence towards women

...and children, as well as other men. If there’s violence, statistically, the perpetrator is most likely male. Most people in jail are men too. I guess this only becomes controversial to those who believe group averages apply to every individual within that group.

Every time I see this meme format I come to the comments specifically looking to see who gets angry about it this time.

lemmy.today##div.post-listing:has(span:has-text("/trump/i"))

Add that to your adblock custom filters and create a new one for every keyword you want to block. If you start blocking entire communities that post about U.S. politics, you’re going to kill your feed completely - I’ve tried that already.

Keep in mind that these filters apply even when the keyword is part of another word, so if you filter the term “ice,” it’ll also block titles that mention “police.” You can get around this by adding spaces on both sides of the word.

Also, the instance in front of the filter needs to match the one you’re on, so in my case the filter is:

feddit.uk##div.post-listing:has(span:has-text("/trump/i"))

This headline format makes me irrationally annoyed.

They shouldn't be making assumptions about what the reader thinks. It almost feels like they're planting a bias first and then presenting the facts - instead of just laying things out and letting people make up their own minds.

I don’t think actually believing the views you defend is relevant here. Playing devil’s advocate can be done in good faith. It's about your intentions. In fact, I’d argue that being able to clearly articulate a view you don’t hold is a sign that you’ve genuinely understood your opposition’s arguments. You don’t need to be convinced by them yourself.

What does make it bad faith is if you put those arguments forward but then refuse to engage with the counterarguments - that’s where the line gets crossed.

For example, I don’t agree with the reasons Russia has given for attacking Ukraine, but I can still lay out those arguments in a way a pro-Russian person would recognize as accurate. That, on its own, isn’t bad faith. But if someone responds by calling me a delusional Nazi or something similar, that is bad faith - an ad hominem, specifically - even if that person genuinely believes people who argue that position deserve such a label.

Apollo 11 was quite nicely made.

It's basically a documentary made using remastered original footage along with beautiful soundscape.

they don’t believe in the argument they are presenting

I don't think that's the case here. While people might lie when there's something to gain from it, we generally don't hold views we don’t believe in - because that creates cognitive dissonance.

More often, I think it's that people hold views they feel are true on an intuitive level, but these beliefs usually aren’t something they’ve arrived at independently from first principles. Instead, they’ve adopted them from somewhere else - social groups, media, culture - and haven’t really thought them through.

The belief becomes part of their identity, and they accept it at face value. They know they're right, so anyone who disagrees must automatically be wrong. That makes it easy to dismiss or ridicule opposing views rather than trying to understand where that "false belief" comes from. After all, why waste time listening to someone who just doesn’t get what you already know to be true?

What people need is humility. There's no way one can be right about literally everything - we just don't know what we're wrong about. It might be something trivial but it also might be one of our core beliefs. The truth is not always intuitive or something that we like. Sometimes the truth is uncomfortable.

So you think twisting people’s words, lying, cherry-picking information, and attacking them personally - rather than addressing their actual point - is a good way to make them change their minds?

I don’t think you really believe that either, but if I were to engage with you in bad faith, that’s what it would look like.

Good faith doesn’t mean you have to be polite - it means you make a genuine effort to understand what someone is actually saying and engage with that, rather than a cartoon version of their argument. That cartoon version might get you cheers from the audience, but it’s not going to change anyone’s mind. And if minds aren’t being changed - and no serious effort is even made to try - then what’s the point of the debate in the first place?

I’d argue that if someone is genuinely trying to persuade another person, it’s virtually impossible to debate in bad faith. Acting in bad faith means you don’t care whether the other person changes their mind - you just want to dunk on them, be mean, pretend they said something they didn’t, and rally a mob to dogpile on them. Then you tell yourself you’ve “won” the debate because you're getting upvotes and they’re not - even though all you've really done is push them further into their corner.

I don't even know what truths you think I'm not accepting here.

I don't change my views because people bully me for them. I change my views when someone demonstrates to me that they're worth changing and that haven't happened in this thread. What ever convincing arguments you may have seen clearly have not been convincing to me.

this discussion isn’t about him

It's you who brought him up with your smug "fine people on both sides" misquote and its him you've been talking ever since. Only now you're moving the goal posts back to what I originally was talking about.

You said both sides have plenty of bad faith, which is wrong.

What are you even claiming here? That there is no "plenty of" bad faith on the left too?

I don’t consider anything I’ve heard so far to be the kind of evidence that would indicate what I said is somehow false.

However, two wrongs don’t make a right, and these attacks remain blatant violations of international law and the UN charter. If “we” want to maintain any semblance of supporting a rule-based world order, as opposed to just “right of the strongest”, we can’t accept these kind of violations of international law.

Legally speaking, I agree. I’m speaking strictly from a strategic or game-theoretical standpoint. I see this as a binary situation: either we physically stop them from building a nuke, or they will build one. I’d much rather we strike preemptively now - so long as it actually stops them - than have to deal with a nuclear-armed Iran in the future, especially given their history of threatening violence, using violence, and funding violence.

Nukes never should’ve been invented in the first place. But we can’t put that genie back in the bottle, so this is the best we can do given the current situation. They don’t have to pursue one - they’re choosing to, knowing full well the potential (now actual) consequences. I’d argue that the tragedy of a nuclear detonation in a major city far-outweighs, by orders of magnitude, the human and geopolitical cost of preemptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. I’d be against it too if the facility were in Sweden or Finland - but it’s not.