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RobbBB comments on Politics is hard mode - Less Wrong Discussion

27 Post author: RobbBB 21 July 2014 10:14PM

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Comment author: Manfred 22 July 2014 12:54:15AM 3 points [-]

If there is no plan to actually start discussing politics more, sentences like "Could we talk about something closer to Easy Mode, so we can level up together?" take on an air of "I think you're failing at politics, and also I'm going to lie to you." Or to look on the flip side, channeling Cialdini, if we start doing this consistency will pressure us to discuss partisan politics more.

No thanks.

How about more neutral language? We seem to have a reasonably high tolerance for complete sentences around here, you could probably get away with something like "discussing politics is usually a bad use of my time, even though arguing with strangers online appeals to my tribal instincts."

Comment author: RobbBB 22 July 2014 01:28:14AM *  9 points [-]

The general problem 'contrarians get a happiness/adrenaline spike when they see someone being sassy and biting and iconoclastic, so they find sassy/biting/iconoclastic memes more interesting and remember/deploy them more independent of their persuasiveness or informativeness' is a very hard one to solve, though, and I'm not sure what to do about it.

It's our subculture's version of the very common problem in-groups have, where angry and aggressive and cut-through-the-bullshit posts catch people's attention more, which makes them more memorable and widely propagated, which causes the culture to increasingly shift in the direction of aggression and negativity. The Internet loves happy hate spirals, and LW's variation on this theme (the reason our kind can't cooperate) might be called a 'happy cynicism spiral' or 'hypercritical supercriticality'.

I'm not sure what the best method is for making kindness/friendship/love seem badass and novel and cool. I guess the MLP fan demographics are some small cause for hope..