There is a book called “On Being Certain”, by Robert A Burton who’s a neurologist, discussing how we know what we know. He postulates that the sense of “conviction” has less to do with objective reality and far more to do with “a feeling of knowing.” He also suggests that we are far less self-aware than we think we are.
People see a different viewpoint and their body reactively brings up all the conditioning received from popular advice. Instinctively, they hit the downvote button, thinking that they are rightfully decreasing the noise of a dangerous idea and protecting the less aware.
Most people aren’t interested in debate nor challenging the reality they find themselves in, or even the framing and interpretation of that reality.
Is lemmy supposed to be better then other social media?
How do we make lemmy a more thoughtful place? Or how do we create meaningful spaces on lemmy for thoughtful discussion of opposing views?
I subscribed to this community because of this post. I’m very interested in which rules would actually promote an online forum where people can express their views most effectively. I’ve recently been reading about the Paradox of Tolerance in online discussion forums and I’m super interested in that phenomenon, but you raise another interesting question. Are down votes useful information? Is there some other voting method that would better encourage actual dialog?
I think you touch upon a great area: There are many ways to express agreement and disagreement, but downvotes being used as a form of suppression are neither.
In the before times slashdot had a metamoderation system where users were randomly assigned a few votes they could apply, the rarity and distribution made for a reasonable approximation of a fair moderation. However, lemmy differs from slashdot in that there are many different unaligned communities on lemmy where slashdot (and hacker news, and lobsters) are basically a single community with very clear unified interests.
The keys for high quality discussion (not agreement) in a community would be (best guess):
I suppose what I’m describing is the framework for a debate society or even toastmasters.
This is a bit of a bug bear with me, I think the concept of the paradox of tolerance is often misapplied as a leaver for broad censorship and not its more nuanced original usage in the book. I actually printed out the book to figure out the full context of the original usage, and in that context it makes perfect sense.
Modern usage I’ve seen to justify
What are your thoughts on the modern usage of the Paradox of Tolerance?