Wait, you mean internet arguments aren’t a game of chicken where the winner is whoever gets the last reply?
Challenge accepted.
No you’re wrong. It’s a game of votes, whoever gets the most votes is the most correct.
I don’t argue to make them change their mind, I argue to make them angry >:)
So you’re a troll?
90% of statistics on the internet are made up on the spot. Just because people stop replying to you doesn’t mean you’ve “changed their views”, but that’s the only thing you will encounter if you never stop before they do. A big hint that they won’t be convinced is how they will just try to nitpick the most irrelevant points in your replies, ignoring the crux of the argument.
Acting like that is a good way to get stuck wasting your time, just give them a chance to know the facts and correct themselves with actual evidence and citations, and then move on. You help more people “change their views” that way, nobody is going to your shitpost deeply nested reply threads anyway. Nobody worth considering, anyway.
Instructions unclear, am jerking off to political debates on brazzers
Gabagool was the most important story arc in the Sopranos, change my view.
Was gabagool behind the camera in the final scene?
That is one of my favorite theories. Meadow walks in and frisbee throws a full stack of gabagool to Tony. It’s covers the camera, and that was the last of the film for the day. They liked it so much they kept it.
Remindes me of the tweet that said something like “My favorite moment on the internet was when someone said, they believe that people will changed their mind when given evidence. Then I linked TWO SOURCES that said otherwise and they were like I still believe it.”
Or when a hexbearian explained to me that hexbear isn’t toxic at all, it’s just when people refuse to read sources but than it’s their fault for not engaging with the material. Later they refused to open my sources.
Ya got a source for that?
/s
The person you’re talking to is unlikely to be pursuaded but there’s usually silent, invisible lurkers who can be.
I know I’ve changed my mind on things because of arguments I’ve read on the internet.
It is proven that people do double down on their views when confronted with opposing evidence, but IMO this is more about the psychology of trust and confrontation between individuals, rather than proof of the futility of argument as a concept. Hell, Vsauce made a video called ‘The Future of Reasoning’, where he makes the case that argument might have been selected for as an essential part of human psychology and necessary for our survivial.
True. Sometimes it takes more than one random person on the internet to convince you but they might be part of starting a thought process.
Good that they didn’t change their mind. If they had, you’d have been in trouble because your sources said otherwise.
Sir, this is the internet, nobody is allowed to quit
People don’t change their mind so easily…
I do, I really do. If the argument is logical and coherent.
Me too. I want someone to tell me when I’m wrong. What’s wrong with us?
No they don’t
That sounds like the words of someone who quits right before they change the other person’s mind
Well actually they do.
According to this trusted source.
I’m not reading that.
Nuh-uh
Your facts are meaningless to me, a guy with an opinion.
Now I get angry and make hurtful accusations about you.
I’m in 10 levels of clicking it, when will I finally be able to read the details of it?
It’s trusted sources all the way down.
👋 Me. I clicked it.
Hey, i think that lady by the license plate stand was talking to you…
Nuh-uh
Wether it’s on the internet or at a bar counter, I like to engage in debate to better myself. If your goal is to turn every fanatic that crosses your path, you’re gonna be depressed real soon.
If your goal in an argument is to change the other person’s mind, then changing your mind (by taking in new information, learning, and understanding a different point of view) is seen as losing. That’s a terrible way to look at what is ultimately personal growth.
As I’ve just said in two other comments, “changing someone’s mind” is just a return to barbarism and Middle Ages. When a few literate theology doctors would publicly “defeat” their opponents, the barely literate mass of their audience (monks, nobles and such) would watch and approve, and the illiterate mass would kinda get that those pesky heretics\infidels got totally owned by facts and logic.
So any person arguing with that emotion and visible goal should just be left to eat other such ignorami. Nobody worth arguing with has those.
Love this, thank you.
There’s no hope in changing the mind of every fanatic you come across.
But we generally don’t have internet debates in DMs, we do it in public forums. The goal isn’t to sway the fanatics, it’s to publicly quash their arguments. To sway curious onlookers away from fanaticism before they become fanatics themselves.
People always forget about the lurkers. Most people with less-informed, more impressionable views on a given topic aren’t posting and debating, they’re reading and learning (despite the unfortunate exceptions). Seeing some wacko extremist nonsense or voter suppression tactic go unchallenged by a more reasonable argument may be enough to sway a not-yet-fanatic in the wrong direction.
The goal isn’t to sway the fanatics, it’s to publicly quash their arguments. To sway curious onlookers away from fanaticism before they become fanatics themselves.
As I’ve said in another comment, this is return to Middle Ages. Debating skills have not much in common with reasoning skills.
Nor are they mutually exclusive. A competent debater can intertwine rhetoric with logic to make a compelling argument for a well-reasoned position.
For my argument it’s sufficient that they are very much not the same.
This is similar to saying that a big company leading in some area can be benevolent and do good things. Yes, it can, like DEC, Sun, at some point even IBM. Doesn’t prove the statement that every social institution and mechanism out there must be replaced by markets.
You’re the only one making that argument, and it doesn’t follow from my initial point. I’m not even really sure what point you’re trying to make.
How does anything you’re saying negate the fact that people make bad but persuasive points online, and gullible people fall for that persuasion? Or that those gullible people lack the entrenchment of the bad actors, and can be redirected from those bad points to better ones if persuasive arguments are presented directly in response to the bad ones?
he goal isn’t to sway the fanatics, it’s to publicly quash their arguments. To sway curious onlookers away from fanaticism before they become fanatics themselves.
Friendly reminder that the above is what I answered first.
Sorry, but this is a load of bollocks. It’s you putting yourself above some “gullible people” and still using debate skills to deceive them, just in some “good” direction. Maybe you are really right, but they believe you for the wrong reasons, and the process itself doesn’t reinforce that you are right in any way.
If they’re already going to believe the wrong things for the wrong reasons, why not present the right things for the wrong reasons? Those who need the right reasons to change their mind are beyond the scope of this approach.
This is outreach to the gullible for harm reduction when they might otherwise filter themselves into a dangerous pipeline. This isn’t using debate skills to deceive, it’s using them to counter those who do use their debate skills to deceive. Even if the content may possibly be wrong, by presenting it in contrast to preceding content it necessarily widens the debate-space from an unopposed confident statement to a dialogue that the onlooker can take into consideration while making their own decision.
posting isn’t praxis
You aren’t going to kill an idea with name calling online either. You’ll, hopefully, be rightfully called out for using pointless ad hominem attacks and be shot down on the spot, pushing people to the fanatic you’re arguing against.
Unless we’re talking about Twitter, then yeah, louder idiot wins.
Posting “posting isn’t praxis” isn’t praxis either. But like, there is value in theory, and you must believe that or else you would’ve believed it was pointless to post “posting isn’t praxis”.
I very much do believe it was pointless. I believe it’s impossible to make someone who believes anyone in an argument online is not tailoring their argument to the amount of upvotes or downvotes they receive understand anything. I believe the infinite recursion you try to trap truth in has in fact trapped you. I don’t mean this in a hostile way, but I do mean it.
Tell me you aren’t going to post another form of “no u” because you interpret what I’m saying as “touch grass”. There is no way to have a good faith discussion with someone who replies like I did, or like you did to me. Which is to say, the internet is no place to spend any amount of time, which invalidates my typing this comment, which makes it pointless.
The inevitability of me having to type this renders it meaningless. The idea that I am trying to do what you are is both true and false, so I find myself in a position where I can explain how we got here but cannot prescribe a solution because there isn’t one. And what I mean by that is, my position forces me to perform an act of hypocrisy (one that I’m painfully aware of). People don’t like hypocrisy, so you can say something true like “this comment won’t change anyone’s mind”, and get smoked for posting by people who believe posting is praxis.
Honestly, if you want to get really weird with it, believing that someone being exposed to an idea renders them helpless to disbelieve it is extremely similar to believing drag queen story hour will turn your child gay.
So now you’re in a bind. You either believe you have to disprove me and in the process invalidate what you actually believe by contesting the last paragraph, or you say nothing and let it look like I’ve changed a mind.
This is unbelievably convoluted. You’ve talked yourself in knots but also somehow believe that your argument is so airtight that any attempt to refute it only invalidates my beliefs.
Your argument is circular, self-defeating and also missing some really obvious things, one of which I already pointed out.
The only thing left to do is to ask if you’re actually curious to understand what I mean.
This is the same as not replying.
You said nothing, alluded to work you didn’t do, and then asked a question I answered when I said I don’t believe posting can change minds.
Like, read what you wrote and tell me it’s not designed to get an upvote? What is the substance? I should stop arguing with AI online.
So to be clear, you’re not curious to understand because you believe you can read my mind and understand the secret motivations behind my words that renders them invalid?
But - debates don’t better yourself. Only your debating skills in particular get better. It’s a return to Middle Ages with theologists publicly “defeating” heretic and Jewish and Muslim philosophy.
And “turn” is an interesting word, making the association even stronger.
If you’re debating in good faith you are bettering yourself by improving your understanding of a different view point, and letting your own views be challenged so you can reassess if you still hold them.
So who debates in good faith and how often?
Apparently not you.
Well, this comment of yours doesn’t look like a good faith argument.
What I meant is that it takes two sides for one. And when two people are ready to argue in good faith, one may downgrade the level of contention from “argue” to “discuss” without any loss.
(For me and my sister it would still be “argue”, but we are just rude to each other.)
Well, this comment of yours doesn’t look like a good faith argument.
Neither did your comment of
So who debates in good faith and how often?
Someone JAQing off is not having a good faith argument, and it does not invalidate my argument if I don’t waste effort on someone who isn’t continuing in good faith.
I see the argument you’re hinting at, and it doesn’t invalidate the argument either, but I’m not going to spend time debating an argument you haven’t bothered to actually make.
You are making a good example of a person who maybe thinks they can argue in good faith but very clearly doesn’t, with emotional pressure and such.
The trick is to argue with the voices in your own head and simply project them on to other people’s comments.
i cannot express how much i hate that, why must people keep imagining points and opinions i never said or made
One of the most refreshing things I’ve seen since joining Lemmy is people actually apologizing in comment threads like this.
Sorry
I’m sorry to hear that! Don’t worry, it’ll get better as more people join, just you wait!
The last few years had made me lose all respect for debates as a field of study. Remembering shit like logos and pathos and all that nonsense for nothing.
Nuh-uh, not me. I stop long before they change their mind.
Oh goodness, I should hope not! I love arguing on the internet, and I would hate to think that I’m actually changing peoples minds.
