Isn’t that the whole point of an internet argument, though? To get angry, turn your higher thinking off and yell at each other like big territorial lizards until someone gets bored and no longer has an interest in continuing?
(and yes I have gotten bored + actually have things to do now, so the anger has subsided and replaced by “why am I doing this again?”)
It’s been shown by research that almost nobody has their mind changed by these things, and logically it holds up, you’re arguing with someone you have no emotional connection to, over something you have different opinions about and both have strong emotions towards. Also, often there will be a difference of value judgements, that determine to a person which objective facts matter, whether they’re positive or negative, and which don’t matter/“are just the cost of doing business” (e.g. you clearly treat compatibility as vitally important, I don’t really care as long as most things work decently enough, and the Amish treat it as a negative, because to them a computer should be nothing more than a word processor and a calculator, everything else is a superfluous distraction), and value judgements are always subjective.
As an example, the great tragedy of vegans is that they’re as close to objectively correct as you can be with a value judgement, that the animal industry is objectively responsible for almost a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions while consuming vast amounts of land that could be used for growing crops for people (I believe the estimation is 6-7x as much land used for animal agriculture as plant agriculture once you account for feed crops), and if we don’t destroy it soon we’re headed for a vast amount of human suffering from climate change and famine. But you would be hard-pressed to find someone who has been turned vegan or even vegetarian by an internet argument, because a) a lot of people value their beef and bacon over the suffering of other people they’ve never met, and b) almost everyone has an emotional attachment to their current diet, which they perceive vegans as “threatening” (which admittedly they are, but for very good reasons), and so go on the offensive, morality be damned.
In my own experience, living with one + reading up on how much the animal industry is fucking the planet did far more to convince me than a thousand internet arguments with vegans I didn’t know and never interacted with again, and even then, I still don’t have the willpower and self-restraint to go fully vegan or even vegetarian, just greatly meat-reduced.
Isn’t that the whole point of an internet argument, though? To get angry, turn your higher thinking off and yell at each other like big territorial lizards until someone gets bored and no longer has an interest in continuing?
(and yes I have gotten bored + actually have things to do now, so the anger has subsided and replaced by “why am I doing this again?”)
It’s been shown by research that almost nobody has their mind changed by these things, and logically it holds up, you’re arguing with someone you have no emotional connection to, over something you have different opinions about and both have strong emotions towards. Also, often there will be a difference of value judgements, that determine to a person which objective facts matter, whether they’re positive or negative, and which don’t matter/“are just the cost of doing business” (e.g. you clearly treat compatibility as vitally important, I don’t really care as long as most things work decently enough, and the Amish treat it as a negative, because to them a computer should be nothing more than a word processor and a calculator, everything else is a superfluous distraction), and value judgements are always subjective.
As an example, the great tragedy of vegans is that they’re as close to objectively correct as you can be with a value judgement, that the animal industry is objectively responsible for almost a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions while consuming vast amounts of land that could be used for growing crops for people (I believe the estimation is 6-7x as much land used for animal agriculture as plant agriculture once you account for feed crops), and if we don’t destroy it soon we’re headed for a vast amount of human suffering from climate change and famine. But you would be hard-pressed to find someone who has been turned vegan or even vegetarian by an internet argument, because a) a lot of people value their beef and bacon over the suffering of other people they’ve never met, and b) almost everyone has an emotional attachment to their current diet, which they perceive vegans as “threatening” (which admittedly they are, but for very good reasons), and so go on the offensive, morality be damned.
In my own experience, living with one + reading up on how much the animal industry is fucking the planet did far more to convince me than a thousand internet arguments with vegans I didn’t know and never interacted with again, and even then, I still don’t have the willpower and self-restraint to go fully vegan or even vegetarian, just greatly meat-reduced.
Cool story bro.