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Comment by grover35 | Hacker News Reader

I'm American and I can't help but think many of you just lack social skills. It's very convenient to think that everyone's hyper-sensitive and there's nothing you could do to change that, but usually people are pretty receptive to just about anything as long as you respect them. Avoid leading/gotcha questions, don't smirk, appear to genuinely listen and seek to understand the other person, resist the urge to tool on them if it's shown they're lacking basic knowledge, try to find common ground. I'm relatively conservative and I've never had a problem.

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> usually people are pretty receptive to just about anything as long as you respect them.

Non-American here.

I lived in the United States for over thirty years. My experience was different.

I lost a lot of friends in the last ten years, because they started posting completely ridiculous, crazy stuff and were completely defensive of even the most reasonable objections.

I'd put up with "Obama is a Muslim" for a long time, but then it started to escalate. People would get hostile when you mentioned that there were records showing otherwise. After the election, some people become convinced that Michelle Obama was in fact a transgender man and let me hear all about it.

And you know, it's hard not to get a little pissed off about such blatant lies, hmm?

A long-time friend of mine started posting about Sandy Hook being a hoax - that the school had never existed. I pointed out that a friend-of-a-friend of mine had lost two children there, and my friend just went ballistic and started calling me the most unbelievable names, "Do your homework!" I unfriended her. You could see her get more unhinged on other people's pages and unfriended, and I haven't heard anything from her in years.

And now we have terrible lies about medical data, and again, people become incredibly defensive. At least two acquaintances accused me of being a pharmaceutical company shill! (I've never worked anything remotely like that.)

Sorry, it's not just "politeness" - a significant portion of Americans just went off the rails in the last decade.

Spot on.

I finally a cut a relative off after his long slide deeper into extremism culminated in posting Facebook memes demeaning me and people I cared about leading up to the 2016 election. I'm sure he thinks it was out of nowhere because he brushed me off when I asked him to stop saying such cruel and ignorant things.

Said relative was completely unmoved every time I said "that's me. You know me. Why are you saying these things about me? Why are you saying these things about people who matter to me?"

We were strangers long before I realized it. 2016 was just the wakeup call. There's no difference to me between people claiming relatives cut them off out of nowhere "over politics" and estranged parents in estranged parent forums who don't understand why their kids went no contact. They know or were at least told. But they didn't listen.

Growing up I was told hundreds of times "not to believe everything you read on the internet." Parents, teachers, relatives, and older folks all told me that. It was a cliche, and us younger people made fun of it being a cliche in the same way we made fun of downloading cars. Even so, it stuck with me.

Then it stopped. No one said it anymore. What happened?

Unscrupulous marketing people discovered the effectiveness of doublespeak. They turned the natural suspicion of internet information back at itself by implying that “the other people on the internet are lying to you, I’m going to tell you the real truth” and because everyone knows you can’t trust the internet they are subtly manipulated into being more likely to believe something new that is untrue.

every one connected to Facebook>

"A long-time friend of mine started posting about Sandy Hook being a hoax - that the school had never existed. I pointed out that a friend-of-a-friend of mine had lost two children there, and my friend just went ballistic and started calling me the most unbelievable names, "Do your homework!""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_s...

I see no siblings on the list of victims. Your friend-of-a-friend story sounds like some information was omitted which impacts credibilty.

> I see no siblings

Siblings is not the only combination possible, people can mourn a son and his cousin for example, or the best friend of your son, or the son of a close friend. Most people would describe the experience as losing two children.

I'm not claiming that the history is neither real or is false, just that the data don't point clearly to one or the other option

Siblings IS the only combination, unless you are playing word games. You have a job, with benefits available. Go to HR, tell them you want the additional coverage for your children. Mention that one is your best friend's child. Or your daughters best friend. When concise wording matters, this choice will become important. Else it is like the collective "we lost favorite actor|humanatarian|humorist|etc person this year" stuff in clickbait headlines. The collective "we" is about manipulation of perception and feelings.

This is not to minimize the loss felt by the poster I replied to's friend-of-a-friend. Its about not misleading by choice of words. Isn't that a big part of the original post?

You don't know that, you're going off of last names. Why are we justifying conspiratorial thinking

Ah. But the people making the outlandish accusations were your friends, right?

Imagine if it was the media. (Remember the Steele dossier?)

Or if the people making the most noise were actually the worst offenders. (Harvey Weinstein, Michael Avenatti, Mario Cuomo, Chris Cuomo, most recently John Griffin.... 'Party of Women', anyone?)

There is enough craziness to go around, I assure you.

I have crazy friends on both sides. I hope a return to sanity can happen.

My close friend used to be a democrat, then became a Trumper and even worked in his administration. We got into a lot of heated debates, and our friendship finally about ended when he recently told me I was “lying to protect my political allies,” which is about the most rediculous statement I could imagine. Not only do I not have political allies (I’m not in politics), but I’m also giving pointing out opinions and evidence contrary to his viewpoint, which he dismisses as a lie (versus debatable points). It’s gotten so absurd, and I blame media on this one. People go into self-reinforcing areas that just get more and more extreme as people try to score points within their own clan. It’s sad, as he was one of the only people I knew that voted for Trump that I could have a real discussion with. Now I just watch it all from afar.

It’s as if an evil sorcerer kidnapped our friends and family members and turned them into minions.

We could say that brainwashing and propaganda are black magic - after all they turn brother against brother and mother against daughter. Extremism, dehumanization, division often end up in violence on massive scale.

Being able to cheaply and efficiently hypnotize people into an alternate reality and maintaining that is… what kind of power?

I think in person it's easier to adopt this approach because there's a lot more context available. If you ask someone a question in person you can look them in the eye and they can assess if you're being genuine. Online there is a tendency to second guess what the person really means, especially if they're a stranger (which they often are) and then to assume the worst.

The problem is compounded in forums with a really wide general audience with potentially very little common ground. Not only do you not have shared assumptions you can rely on (e.g. we all believe in free-speech, we all believe that the moon landing happened) but you often don't build up any kind of track record or rapport with someone so you know what they mean by a particular (ambiguous) comment. It's the opposite problem to the echo chamber.

It's both.

I work in political communications/as a civics educator. I also grew up in a purple state in the 90s with a half liberal family and a half conservative one.

The media landscape is completely different now. When I was growing up, my dad and I would do things like listen to Limbaugh and then discuss what points we agreed with + how stuff was covered online (he read the Drudge Report and other conservative online news and I read the opposite).

One difference is that back then if I listened, I could get a genuine idea of what the other side wanted: Watching a liberal outlet would tell me, at least broadly, what conservatives wanted. (Fewer taxes, more religion, greater national security, etc.) Likewise for a conservative outlet re: liberals (Gay marriage, no war, etc.)

Now? The media is just constantly spouting things that are completely batshit.

> The media landscape is completely different now

Not entirely. Right-wing talk radio has been fanning the flames of hatred towards "liberals" (e.g., all "others") for decades. It's taken root and flourished.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/us/politics/limbaugh-deat...

I remember. They were the earliest ones acting like that, but now everybody is. The right wing talking heads used to be a novelty; even when people listened to them like my dad + other conservative relatives, there wasn't a media ECOSYSTEM built around filter bubbling those opinions. The idea of somebody being informed with only what they knew from Limbaugh would have been absurd.

You're right that it's been building for a long time; in hindsight we can identify key points (like the development of AM talk radio, the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, the introduction of CNN/the 24 hour news cycle, digital media's embrace of the advertising funding model), but it's a trend.

Both sides are doing it now because it pays.

I agree with the premise that most people are reasonable, but there is a sizeable minority that are extremely vocal and unreasonable that can make you the black sheep at family gatherings or get you fired for saying the wrong thing, etc. The rest of this reasonable population you speak of stays in their lane because of this.

> It's very convenient to think that everyone's hyper-sensitive and there's nothing you could do to change that, but usually people are pretty receptive to just about anything as long as you respect them.

I think a lot of people are willing to listen, but there is a some amount of evidence that indicates political leanings may have some basis in biology:

> Studies have found that subjects with right-wing, or conservative in the United States, political views have larger amygdalae and are more prone to feeling disgust. Those with left-wing, or liberal in the United States, political views have larger volume of grey matter in the anterior cingulate cortex and are better at detecting errors in recurring patterns. Conservatives have a stronger sympathetic nervous system response to threatening images and are more likely to interpret ambiguous facial expressions as threatening. In general, conservatives are more likely to report larger social networks, more happiness and better self-esteem than liberals. Liberals are more likely to report greater emotional distress, relationship dissatisfaction and experiential hardship and are more open to experience and tolerate uncertainty and disorder better.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orientat...

* https://www.routledge.com/Predisposed-Liberals-Conservatives...

> The book is intended as an objective study of the conceptual metaphors underlying conservative and liberal politics although the closing section is devoted to the author's personal views. Lakoff makes it clear however, that there is no such thing as an Objective study of politics, as politics is based in subjective morality.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_(book)

People are really suffering from this attitude. They think “well a leftist was smug about vaccines on twitter, so it’s their fault I’m not vaccinated” and then they die.

Usually, however it would be more among the lines of "I heard a leftist[1] was smug about vaccines on twitter, so ..."

[1]: the leftist was actually fiscally conservative centrist, which would have been in the right wing of any european conservative party, but who cares about the meaning of words anymore, right?

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