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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

> Anyone who has spent time arguing on social media has heard of the straw man fallacy.

I think the main issue is the folly of arguing on social media. It is a setup for dehumanizing and vilifying the other.

I think most arguments on social media are about snark and signaling to your own tribe how smart you are more than actually trying to understand the truth or convince people holding a different view.

Conversations among friends over a beer are much more likely to enlightening and possibly persuasive.

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The lines between real life and social media are blurring. You hear more and more commonly about people cutting all ties with old friends or even family members about relatively simple things. It’s a more accepted thing to do now – complete ostracism of those who we disagree with – instead of trying to find common ground.

It often turns out the person who got cut off was a giant asshole who 100% deserved it. You might not have sufficient visibility into the experience of the person who cut someone off to judge their actions fairly.

You see this a lot in people whose kids have cut off contact. From their perspective, the cutting off was sudden and shocking. From their kid's perspective, it was the last-ditch effort to reclaim autonomy and preserve sanity after a lifetime of abuse and endless attempts to set boundaries and seek change. An outside observer is missing key details.

I believe that the percieved threshold of “giant asshole who 100% deserved it” is lowering.

Perhaps dependencies are being reduced. “Cutting off” is harder when you depend, or might need to depend on someone, assuming they have something of use for you.

But did something happen to make people vastly less dependent in, say, the last five years?

Whether the social stability that came with people putting up with or excusing more abuse and general toxicity was worth more than the dynamism that comes from more people feeling free to build supportive circles is something society is likely to wrestle with over the coming decades.

Anecdotally, every person I know who's cut off people who were harmful to them has found more fulfillment even if things are harder for them. Like chosen family, chosen struggle seems to be easier to live with than a struggle that thrives on disempowerment.

The threshold was high because people didn't believe they had a choice before.

Of course, you could be right. However, an alternative explanation is:

1. The threshold of what constitutes “abuse and general toxicity” has lowered significantly, giving people social tacit permission to ostracize others for lesser and lesser perceived offenses.

2. People always think that discarding something is good, and that they are better off without it, immediately after having discarded it. People naturally want to be able to blame all their problems on a single source, and after they have gotten rid of it, they quite obviously believe their lives to be better in every way. Of course, the worse the thing they discarded was, the more correct they are in their belief, but if they are entirely correct can not be known until much later.

1 is fine if the threshold was too high. People are ultimately free to associate with whoever consents to that association without justifying it to outside observers, or to the confused newly disassociated.

2 might be the case, but people can certainly have a sense that something is wrong. It could turn out they made the wrong call in trying to resolve that feeling, but my ancedata tells me this is vanishingly rare.

I get the feeling my anecdata samples a larger portion of the people who pruned their connections to make room for growth, while your anecdata samples a larger portion of people who were cut off. I've already heard quite a bit from the latter and don't find their defenses compelling, so I'm still not convinced this is a serious problem.

> People are ultimately free to associate with whoever consents to that association without justifying it to outside observers, or to the confused newly disassociated.

Nobody contests that. But freedom was never the issue. The issue was a possible problem with people more and more readily abandoning dialogue for ostracism (with accompanying demonization, etc. as justification) as a normal thing to do on disagreement.

> I get the feeling my anecdata samples a larger portion of the people who pruned their connections to make room for growth, while your anecdata samples a larger portion of people who were cut off.

Both our sample sizes are very small, so we probably can’t draw any definitive conclusions either way. I was highlighting that ostracism seemed to me to become more common, and if this is true, it would point to either a rise in the existence of terrible irredeemable people, or a socially lowered threshold for abandoning conversation for demonization. Per the reasons described in the article, I tend to believe in the latter, not the former.

>> "Both our sample sizes are very small, so we probably can’t draw any definitive conclusions either way. I was highlighting that ostracism seemed to me to become more common, and if this is true, it would point to either a rise in the existence of terrible irredeemable people, or a socially lowered threshold for abandoning conversation for demonization."

Third option: those people were always there, but more people are realizing they can set and enforce boundaries. You no longer have to just ignore the relative who sexually harasses children, or the relative who's sliding deeper into conspiracy theories and fringe rhetoric that leads to material harm to them and people they care about.

Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away. If you can't convince people around you to support doing something, parting ways is increasingly a socially acceptable option. Most people can't summon up a #MeToo to deal with their problems, and negative peace[0] has been the order of business for so long most people don't even realize it, so cutting people off is often the only option other than status quo.

It seems like your concern is that this movement is lopsided in favor of people giving up on solving these problems rather than sticking with someone who is reachable. That hasn't been my observation, and like I said upthread, I haven't found the evidence in favor of this view persuasive. Most excommunications I witness (or have participated in) followed a long, sometimes lifetime, campaign of patience and persistence. Often a mental health crisis brought on by not forcing the boundaries precedes the no contact situation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_conflict_studies#Con...

> Third option: those people were always there, but more people are realizing they can set and enforce boundaries.

This is certainly possible, but why, then, are they realizing this now (in the last five years)? This option lacks a cause for it to be happening now. But the reasons I proposed, a lack of tolerance of differing opinions, do have a quite obvious potential underlying cause, namely a hardening political climate and polarization.

It’s possible that both are true, of course. I.e. a hardening political climate with accompanying ostracism and demonization of any disagreement has also made it socially acceptable to ostracise really irredeemable people in situations where it was not previously feasible.

I'm not sure where you got your five year number from. I ignored it because it seemed arbitrary. This certainly didn't start 5 years ago. It amped up with one major political party going fully mask off after the 2016 election, but it's gone on for as long as the internet allowed people from vastly different lived experiences to connect and compare notes.

I am now collapsing this subthread and moving on since this doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Good luck!

I simply think that I started seeing more and more of people at least talking about ostracism as if it were a primary go-to since about then. I now also think that you are probably also right; people for whom ostracism is the only option left now have an easier time doing it.

> most arguments on social media are...

... detached from any real trust system.

"Social media" is not social. As a business, it is the monetisation of strife.

As an exchange of ideas, social media is (as you say) mostly people flinging words at one another.

To be "social", participants in social media would need to manifest commitment to real solutions and people would be accountable for their words and deeds. This is how human society works. There are social consequences in real social exchange. It is a trust system.

I propose that the reason why we hear of people's long-time friendships and family ties collapsing is because those social ties have simply become weak. The pretext for the rupture doesn't much matter.

> To star-man is to not only engage with the most charitable version of your opponent’s argument, but also with the most charitable version of your opponent, by acknowledging their good intentions and your shared desires despite your disagreements.

This is an excellent approach. But it depends on the trust system of real society.

It's also the case that that social trust and those social ties have been weakened, intentionally over the last four or five decades, to produce a "post-political" system of governance.

Margaret Thatcher famously said, "There's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families." It wasn't true when she said it, but thanks to her and the other architects of neoliberalism, it is true now.

"There is no such thing as society. There are the plutocrats, and a large human economic sacrifice zone for the plutocrats to exploit."

It's a grim, reductionist view of society as a construct for wealth, and general happiness only if the latter does not impede the acculumation of the former.

I think an underlying mega conflict in online communication is sharing more than we want to share, or at least it has been one plaguing me over the years.

I don't think social media communication has to be dehumanizing, I think it comes into how much do I share about how I'm actually feeling and my actual identity on the internet where hundreds if not thousands or millions of people might see it? And yet it can be soooo easy to share on the internet, from our phone or computer, just talking/typing into the screen, at almost any time and any place?

So then I do think it can come into "how do I pretend to be cool and superhuman...so that people don't know too much about me?"

In a conversation with a friend over a beer, one might open up about why they hate inflation because they think they might lose their job and they're afraid if they lose their job, their wive and kids might leave them. I bet that's the real underlying reason for that person, yet on the internet, that same person might say that evil bankers are trying to destroy us with inflation because who admits to being afraid they're going to lose their life on the internet, with their name attached?

> the main issue is the folly of arguing on social media

This approach could be used in meatspace, too. And, like it or not, our lives are increasingly being spent online.

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