I was speaking with someone about how at around age 40 to 50 you stop caring so much. Let them be "right". It doesn't affect me.
Also, I hope my dad enjoyed it. He deserved some good sex.
As you get older, you get better at recognizing when someone is just arguing to jerk themselves off. And if you're really trying to change things, then your time is best spent on people who will listen.
We just finished up, your dad looks satisfied
the key is neither the marketplace for ideas nor debate are good models for accomplishing anything productive. they do not encourage people to come to them ready to listen, but instead create an arena of professional wrestling in the format of "discussion."
a better model is the idea that you have a big pot of soup. your soup is your idea. you invite people to add ingredients to the soup. as a group, any time someone brings a new ingredient to the soup (a new mode of promoting and participating with the idea) you have the opportunity to integrate that ingredient or to say it doesn't go with the rest of what's already in the soup.
your goal, with your idea soup, is to invite as many people as you can to add ingredients so that your pot of soup is as big as possible and can feed as many people as possible. that means when you reject ingredients, you have to explain clearly why those ingredients don't belong with the rest of the soup
That would never work, because everyone likes different soup...
Pour hot soup on stupid people, got it.
Smart people ALSO get the stupid soup.
I banged your dad
IMO the most important part of learning fallacies is not to call them by name while debating. It's to smell the bullshit from a distance. Both in the others' reasoning and your own.
That's what those Reddit kids are missing. This shit is not an "I won!" card. It's a reasoning framework.
(Sometimes I do still call them out by name. But that's usually a sign I'm already losing my patience with the muppet in question, and considering to block them [online] / turn 180° [offline] while saying "I'm not wasting my time further with you and your dumb shit".
I don't debate religion any more, though; unlike in my later teens + early twenties. Zealots get mentally tagged "irrational harmful avoid", and the sort of person who believes with the brain but not the liver isn't usually a problem.)
My personal preference is to always respond first in good faith, even if the shit clearly stinks. Sometimes they just worded things poorly or misunderstood something. However, if their stench becomes apparent, it's then much easier to humiliate them and dip by the second response.
Yes, I understand that you have a very compelling argument, but have you considered the fact that I banged your dad ?
yes, but I banged both your parents and every one of your friends, so I can't complain
I feel like, if anyone calls out a fallacy and acts like it's an "I won" card, you should just pull out the Fallacy Fallacy and uno reverse that shit. Then fuck their dad as a victory lap.
i call out specific logical fallacies when my dad is going off on some bullshit and i want him to set aside his gen x jaded cynicism and actually listen to what I have to say. usually works pretty well but thats because he has critical thinking skills, which one would expect to be a prerequisite for a debate or even a stimulating dicussion but oh well.
To go a step further, arguments are healthier if they're pictured as a way to field test your beliefs to see if they hold up to scrutiny.
If you go into an argument trying to get the other person to change their mind, you'll often be met with failure even if your points were valid simply because people hate changing their mind, and you don't want to be tempted to use bad-faith arguments of your own just to secure that "win."
Instead, just give your argument; if the other person has a good point, see if yours can hold up to it, and change your outlook if you find that it can't. And if it feels like the other person is just saying whatever they think will "win," leave, because their argument wouldn't make a good field test anyway.
In a similar vein, I also try to see it as an opportunity to make my conversation partner smarter (if I happen to be right, of course).
For "winning", it's enough to prove that what they're saying is wrong. But for making them smarter, you need to point out what's correct and why that makes sense.
Well, and in general, it's a whole different way of formulating, i.e. less hostile, more helpful.
In the vast majority of cases, that makes all the difference for actually convincing them.
And it certainly hones your own mind much better, too, when you actually give the explanation rather than just pointing out fallacies.
And if you did change their mind, they probably aren't going to tell you. Or maybe you planted a seed in their mind that helps to change it years and years down the road. You don't know! That's the crazy thing. But people just get frustrated and give up because they had an unreasonable expectation about the argument in the first place.
Calling out fallacies isn't done for the benefit of the muppet. It's done for the benefit of onlookers who might otherwise fall for the muppet's bullshit.
Problem is that simply calling out the fallacies won't convince most onlookers. They don't get convinced by reason, but by emotive appeal. Doing it like in the OP, and saying "I banged your dad", is often more effective.
I tend to call them as a second-to-last resource mostly as a final warning. "Stop saying dumb shit if you feel entitled to my attention".
What reddit atheists and online atheists in general dont understand is that you simply cannot win an argument with someone who isnt willing to listen to reason and doesnt want to argue on the basis of actual facts. Its like trying to win an argument against a reactionary, you can try as hard as you want but at the end of the day they're just gonna respond with "nuh uh" because they arent interested in a genuine discussion.
And someone banged their dad
I'm not necessarily trying to convince them, though. I might be trying to convince somebody else who might come along and read the debate we're having. My opinion has been swayed on numerous issues by arguments I read on reddit and other websites which I took no part in. In fact, it's easier to sway third parties, because they don't have to worry about their ego the way an interlocutor does.
Yeah, that's why I sometimes in engage in online discussion when I don't want to because I can see that if it's only a certain type of comment then people reading could think there's a consensus.
Overall, I honestly think engaging in the atheism discussion was important because it allowed me to learn about religion more and what they believe in ... and in contrastI don't believe in it at all. It also made me discover parts I do like about religion like community and such.
If I'm being honest, I've never argued much about religion because I've long known that you can't reason about it. Religion not being real is a basic truth to me, just like free will not existing or absolute certainly being impossible. The fact that "God" is fake is less interesting to me than how and why people believe in him.
I liked the bit in the 3001 space Odyssey (the one where they unfreeze Frank and his lack of a foreskin gets him ghosted)
"Nowadays everyone's either a deist or a theist. The theists believe there's at least one god and the deists believe there's less than or exactly one god."
idk, I think if any kind of deity does exist, there are probably multiple of them and that they're probably closer to eldritch beings than the gods people workship
The annoying thing about reddit/lemmy atheists is all they talk about is church and god.
Yeah, never liked the online communities. Like, they're good when people can ask there for advice, in case they're stuck in some ultra-religious family or village. But most of the time, they just devolve into anti-theism, because "religion bad" is sure to get you upvotes...
It's really easy to pump up Islamophobia, too. All you have to do is ask them why they never attack Islam, and imply it's because they're afraid. When Gaza was in the news, I would see a spike in anti-Muslim posts in the atheism subreddits. It's embarrassing how long it took me to realize that the anti-Muslim stuff wasn't there to attack ISIS or al-Qaeda. It was there to justify what was happening in Gaza.
There was even an atheist group I was a part of that had several speakers come to tell us about how horrible Muslims were, how they abused women, etc. Oh, and then we had a Jewish lady come and talk to us about how open-minded and rational Judaism is.
Not enough about someone banging their dad
It's why despite being definitionally anti-theist, I almost never talk about it. I didn't even intend for this post to be about religion, but about moving past the urge to be an annoying debate lord. Once you realize that the winning strategy for debates is to have a troll mindset, you waste a lot less time on fruitless conversations.
A troll doesn’t win the debate, trolls kill debates
On the other hand sometimes killing a "debate" is the best outcome.
How many times has some far right chud dropped of the radar after being absolutely humiliated?
Sure but you cant win a debate with someone who has the power of blind faith and confirmation bias, they will never question their beliefs and look for ways to justify them.
No, the annoying thing is that they all talk about religion as if all religion is evangelical Christianity. They think that it makes them look impartial or something, but it just makes them look ignorant.
"People are getting killed by AIDS! We need to do something about this!"
"Actually most of them just have HIV, which on its own kills nobody."
I love it when they consider themselves instantly smarter than anyone else solely because they're an atheist. I love it when they call themselves free thinkers yet they all share the same 7 talking points as to why. And they lose their shit if you challenge any of them.
"No, you're dumb. I refuse to elaborate" is my go-to when someone tries to impose their faith onto me now.
If they really insist and I want to lose some time, I tell them I believe Goku is god and make them dismount my argument. Then I use their own points to dismount their god and they usually get pissed because "it's not the same thing".
Torvalds of Film vibes.
The universe was created when Goku wished for it with the dragon balls. The sole purpose of the universe is to create a champion strong enough to give Goku a decent fight.
Calling a monkey King figure a god isn't as outlandish as you may think.
I prefer to cultivate an actively painful to read style and just inflict that on them you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themsrlvesinto
username checks out
But dies the way I write that's what matters
I’ve found that distancing yourself from the debate emotionally and being playful about it (like in op pic) works best. If you feel like there’s a lot riding on it, you’ll lose yourself in the debate.
If you approach it like it doesn’t matter (because guess what, in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t) you’re free as a bird to make a case and move on.
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