I also think there’s an art to deescalation and discussing ideas or persuading someone you disagree with to see an alternative view (and then giving them space to change their mind).

Productive discussion isn’t possible with everyone or even one individual depending on where they are in their life, but I’ve generally found it works better than expected when you can remove your own identity and feelings from it.

It’s rarely in the spotlight though because it doesn’t get retweeted or shared as much as combative arguing that’s more a performance from each side (with likes and cheering on the sidelines).

Guess, it sounds bit like a tin hats theory but I can imagine the above is the happening at the moment.

Generalist subs/topics collect junk. Directed subs have more focus and are healthier in defending crap.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming

This doesn't really work with core views like politics. Some of the most polarizing topics are not because the opposite side can't see your view, it's because you fundamentally disagree on priorities.

Examples:

Anti-abortion people aren't going to be persuaded by yet another view on women's rights. They think you're arguing to murder babies. The plight of a woman in poverty is not going to suddenly make them go, "oh, well then I guess a litte murder is okay."

A libertarian isn't going to be swayed to suddenly think a planned economy is a better approach even when presented with spectacular market failures. They completely understand the failures suck and understand the alternative views just fine. Another anecdote is not realistically going to alter a belief that central planning is worse overall.

Abortion is tricky because once you recognize the life of the embryo as a value to protect it's difficult to have it come as less compelling than a right to bodily autonomy. Still, most anti-abortion people would still carve out a lot of exceptions (rape, genetic problems, danger to the mother's life and so on). Most people recognize that the even right to life is not absolute (another example: they would agree it would be unlawful to refuse to obey an order in time of war that would almost certainly result in a soldier's death).

I think part of the problem with abortion is the left argues that "it is not a life" which is generally a weak argument. It's better to accept/concede that you are ending life, but doing so without suffering before there's a neural net that can recognize anything - I think that's the important bit (and why third trimester abortions are banned anyway).

The push back then tends to be that life itself is sacred and can never be ended (suffering is not relevant), but this is generally not truly believed by the people making the argument so it's easy to point out their contradictory support for the death penalty. They then usually say there's a difference between innocent life and people who've committed crimes at which point you're back to negotiating conditions and suffering seems like a pretty good condition to use.

[Edit] It's also a messier issue because I think a component of the debate is shaming women for sex. That they should be forced to have their baby as some sort of penance for having sex. Obviously this is largely unsaid in favor of more palatable arguments, but if it's the true driver then it's hard to even start because you're not addressing the true motivation (which may not even be fully realized by the person arguing).

First, this assumes that such a "neural net" is required for suffering. I personally don't have a problem with that, but making an ironclad scientific case for it is going to be very difficult, since we don't understand how "neural nets" actually produce suffering even in the case of humans with fully developed brains.

Second, by this criterion, it's not just third trimester abortions that should be banned, but abortions at any time after the "neural net" develops. That's a lot earlier than our current jurisprudence draws the line (neural activity can be detected in the brain of a fetus at about six weeks, vs. viability at roughly 24 weeks as more or less the current jurisprudence line), which means that our current jurisprudence is allowing a lot of suffering by this criterion.

So I'm not sure this framing actually makes the argument any easier.

I had some time to think, I think you're right and at some point it becomes a utilitarian trade-off where there is no obvious answer, but a lot of factors that can help support/determine what the best policy is.

I think the suffering framing does move the needle away from the 'life is sacred argument' to something more actionable and specific (also honest/consistent with other beliefs often held by that crowd like the death penalty). There is a baked in assumption here that everyone is arguing in good faith though which I don't think is necessarily true (see the edit on my initial comment).

I don't think this is accurate. Getting a typical pro-choice person to discuss the fetus at all, much less whether it can be called alive, takes some serious cornering (I am pro-choice, to be clear).

There are a lot of good reasons other than this one to support pro-choice, but those reasons will be irrelevant to someone who views 'abortion as murder'. You have to put yourself in their position and reason about it like they would, then think about what is the best argument from their position.

Basically steel-manning their side and then tackling the best argument head on.

I think this is where really interesting discussions happen and where minds can change, otherwise you end up just discussing the same tired points without making any progress.

Really? I think it becomes much more difficult. It invites arguments for infanticide (see the 2013 Giubilini paper on after-birth abortion for a famous example of this). The same arguments concerning a woman who is not able to take care of a child apply equally well after birth if suffering is the only consideration, because it's entirely possible to end the life of the baby in a painless manner. As someone who is pro-life, I've generally found the suffering angle to be the least compelling of the pro-choice counterarguments.

I think it's a mixture of suffering and having a neural network formed enough for ...something? I have an intuitive feeling that it's wrong to kill infants before they're self-aware even if 'done painlessly', but I don't feel that way about a blastocyst or a fetus without a sufficiently formed neural network that can suffer.

I recognize this isn't perfectly consistent though and I don't have a great answer for why.

#repealthe8th

The GP is not talking about prejudice; he's talking about a genuine difference in priorities. Calling that "prejudice" implies that one of those choices of priorities is simply wrong; it ignores the possibility that there is no one "right" choice of priorities.

Basically, a technique that works to convince people away from prejudice over and above what presenting them with truth does should be applicable to any belief.

The fact that I'm tall is proof that people can be tall. But not that you can become tall.

In general people have the opinions they need to have to feel good about themselves. That's hard to change.

Regarding feeling good: yeah, that's a problem, and that makes it harder, no argument from me. The point I thought GGP was making (likely incorrectly; see my response to their response) was that you can't persuade people out of "genuine differences in priorities", which I think is untrue.

The book that gave me much of my cynicism on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...

Yes, it does, because the post I originally responded to said "persuading people out of" these beliefs. How is that justified if the beliefs are not known to be wrong? "Prejudice" implies that the beliefs are known to be wrong, so it's justified to try to persuade people out of them. "Strongly held beliefs" does not carry the same implication.

My bad, I thought you were arguing that "prejudice" is something that can be argued-out-of, whereas a "genuine difference in priority" cannot. If you're arguing persuading people is unethical, then…I disagree incredibly vehemently. Like, that's what a peaceful society is built on; I'm not sure what other method of change you imagine would take its place?

It depends on what you mean by "persuade". Trying to convince people to change their minds about something, and understanding that a lot of times you'll fail and accepting that, is one thing. Trying to force them to change their minds, or at least to act as though their strongly held beliefs were simply wrong and yours were right, for example by using the power of the law, is another.

> that's what a peaceful society is built on

A peaceful society is built on trying to convince other people, but accepting that a lot of times you'll fail, and accepting that when you fail, the law should not take either side. In other words, the force of law should only be used if there is a very strong consensus on a policy, to the point where the only people who don't agree with it are obvious outliers. It should not be used if there is just a 51% majority that favors a policy.

The problem that I have, though, is that I don't believe that many pro-life advocates look at it that way; instead of thinking about what's best for the people around the potential baby, they resort to religious or strictly emotional arguments in support of their views[0], which I will never consider persuasive.

The cut-off point is entirely up to society's consensus. You could go to the extreme and say that vasectomies (or even male masturbation) and tubal ligations are murder, because they destroy germ cells that could turn into children eventually. Some religions prohibit birth control of any kind. Many people aren't comfortable with the morning-after pill. Some people are fine with an abortion up to N weeks, but not after.

And that's what I find sad about arguments on this topic: people have drawn their line in the sand, and they believe that they are right, any other option is wrong, and that they must impose their rightness on everyone else, regardless of any disagreement in beliefs.

As a result, I just tend to not get into arguments about this, as I don't think it's worth the blood-pressure increase to engage a pro-life advocate in discussion.

[0] I may be wrong about this; I frankly do not have many (any?) pro-choice friends, so I only know what I read, and that may be a case of me just hearing the loudest voices, not the most representative ones.

Did you mean to say "pro-life" here?

Like, for example: politician X is corrupt, he was caught taking bribes. Counter: everyone is stealing, at least his party gives our group more benefits than the other party.

I think people understand that at a very base level, and that's why online arguments are often really more of a performance to score points with your side, or to take shots at the other side. Rarely is anyone actually attempting to convince or learn, they're just playing out some weird tribal warfare ritual and dressing it up as debate.

As the larger thread here suggests, the best move in this game is simply not to play it.

You're right that a core belief tied into someone's identity is not going to be changed by new evidence, unless you can get people to value trying to figure out what's true and updating on evidence itself (rather than having an 'answer' already and just using motivated reasoning to come up with arguments that support their 'answer'). This is hard.

I know I've personally gone from someone who made these kind of bad reasoning mistakes - the smarter you are the more insidious they can be because you're better at being a clever arguer and coming up with plausible sounding reasons while ignoring or rationalizing contradicting evidence. I've worked hard to get better at it (and I still am, it's an ongoing process). Yes, this is only a sample size of one, but I think it's possible.

I have an optimistic view of the capacity for a person to learn how to think better, while simultaneously having a pessimistic view of the general public's current ability to think rationally. This may seem like a conflict, but really it just means that I think it's possible for us to be a lot better than we are, while recognizing it's a bigger project than just stating the specific evidence available for any specific argument.

People have to be willing to consider why they believe what they believe, and be honest about the potential to change their mind based on new information that contradicts what they believe to be true.

I think that's the goal we have to work toward first.

What evidence could you give to disprove the belief that abortion is murder? The belief is not a claim about evidence; it's a claim about priorities, as the GP said. Or, if you like, about what actions count as belonging to what categories.

Of course there is an underlying difference of opinion, and of course it matters to those on both sides.

But it matters because the media have done an exceptionally good job of herding people into different camps - by focusing on a small and standardised collection of divisive issues and amplifying the rhetoric around them.

Does someone benefit from these divisions, and from the loss of civility and civic cohesion they create, and perhaps also from the implied promotion of violent oppositional defiant subjectivity over rational argument that powers them?

I think a factor here is that the US pushes the boundaries of what it really takes to have a free country with a diverse population more than other countries do.

Other countries--or at least other developed countries--have a more homogeneous population than the US has, and also do not have the same tradition of skepticism about and distrust of government that the US has. Also other countries do not have quite the same Constitutional provision for the free exercise of religion that the US has.

A less homogeneous population means there is a wider range of traditions that people are brought up with. That creates a lack of common ground about a lot of things. For example, I'm not aware of any other developed country that has a significant population of young earth creationists.

A tradition of skepticism about and distrust of government means that people are less willing to accept a legal rule that conflicts with their personal convictions, and more willing to complain about it publicly (or indeed to take even more drastic action). Note that this applies to both sides of the abortion debate: to extreme pro-lifers who feel that any abortion at all is wrong, and to extreme pro-choicers who feel that any restriction on abortion at all is wrong. Current US law and jurisprudence is actually not close to either of those extremes, so both extremes have plenty of reason, in their view, to complain.

The Constitutional protection of free exercise of religion means that "personal convictions", if they are backed by a religious tradition, carry a lot more weight. This is most obvious in the US on the anti-abortion side of the debate.

> Does someone benefit from these divisions

I think someone taking political advantage of divisions within the population can happen in any country, but it might well be true that the US, for the reasons I described above, presents more opportunities for it to happen.

Sure, there are exceptions, and some people can be dispassionate enough to weigh evidence and change their minds, but that is definitely not the norm.

[0] I read a fantastic article on this a year or two ago, but can't find it now; will update with an edit if I find it before the edit window expires.

Woah!

Sometimes I do hit the Reply button though. I still have room for self-improvement. :-)

My new mantra is the saying, "not my circus, not my monkeys".

1. Slowly improving in checking for typos

2. Reading something after a break helps framing my point better and helps remove the heated emotion from the text

3. I also don't save the comment, so I have to spend time searching for it. This further helps in filtering the topics that I don't care about

4. Using services while not logged in, basically be a lurker

For about 6 months after, I thought I would reactivate and jump back in but it's been years now and I'm 100% sure it was a life improvement.

Improvement takes time.

We certainly need more and better role models.

I say that in the past tense just because it makes in terms of what I'm trying to convey but it still routinely happens too, and will continue to happen.

This is perhaps a form of "folk activism" [1]:

> In early human tribes, there were few enough people in each social structure such that anyone could change policy. If you didn’t like how the buffalo meat got divvied up, you could propose an alternative, build a coalition around it, and actually make it happen. Success required the agreement of tens of allies — yet those same instincts now drive our actions when success requires the agreement of tens of millions. When we read in the evening paper that we’re footing the bill for another bailout, we react by complaining to our friends, suggesting alternatives, and trying to build coalitions for reform. This primal behavior is as good a guide for how to effectively reform modern political systems as our instinctive taste for sugar and fat is for how to eat nutritiously.

Facebook is a collection of your friends or your "tribe", so repeated arguments with your tribe members is what our unconscious brain pushes us towards. That coupled with the dopamine hit of validation via likes (which is common to other online discussion platforms).

[1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/06/patri-friedman/beyon... I don't agree with a lot said here. Only linking the definition of folk activism

They made a choice to throw gasoline on the flames of these aspects of human behavior. Few people seem to realize that Facebook could have been a force for good, if they had made different choices or had more integrity when it comes to the design and vision of their platform.

The way that things happened is not they only possible way they could have happened, and resigning to the current state as "inevitable", to me, reeks of an incredible lack of imagination.

Force for good. I do not want to sound like this, but how, in your vision, that would look like? This is a real question.

You can make money by making people feel good instead of bad. You can be rotten.com, or you can be Pixar. You have a choice. An organization with integrity will look at not just how much money they're immediately making, but whether they're pushing the world towards better or worse. A hands-off attitude of "it's not my problem that people like this sh*t" is not integrity, it's a rationalization for greed.

You can make choices that result in making less than the absolute maximum amount of cash you can get your hands on, in service of building a product/experience/brand with value and goodwill of its own. There are countless examples of this in other places— just look at any company that builds its reputation based on quality. Each of these brands could make their products for cheaper and lower quality, and make more immediate profit, at the (much larger) long-term cost of destroying the brand, the customer goodwill, and the market advantage. Defending against such short-term greediness is uphill work, but it's both the enlightened and profitable thing to do.

Instead of actively amplifying memes and misinformation, they could have chosen to build features supporting community and/or expert moderation. They built an algorithm that optimizes purely for attention, but they could have made something that accounts for quality; paying attention to patterns in good and bad sources of information, and reliable/unreliable discriminating tastes in the community. The emphasis on quality and reliability of content was the pitch for Quora, for example, and they did much better at that task than Facebook. Which is not surprising, because Facebook seems to clearly not be trying to optimize for this at all. Wikipedia and StackOverflow are also two huge success stories of community/expert moderation. It works if you actually prioritize it.

They could have chosen to hire journalists, editors, and artists to produce and vet high-quality content to drive people to the platform, and step responsibly and effectively into the media void that was created when newspapers began to collapse. An analogy for this would be the way that Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and friends have created a new boom and golden age of content creation to fill the void left by the dying medium of broadcast TV. There could have been something like this for print, and Facebook was well positioned for it.

[Jaron Lanier](https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake...) has lots of ideas about how to make an internet that isn't hostile toward its own users. One of his revolutionary ideas: Charge people money for services instead of siphoning their data and their attention in ways that hurt them.

There are a zillion directions they could have gone.

Until we figure out how to properly channel that very human tendency, the choice you suggest is theoretical. And I am saying this while agreeing with the various oughts listed.

Companies have to make money to exist and survive— but optimizing for money above literally all else is a choice. Again, the word for that is "greed", and it's optional. The leaders of a company can steer towards it or away from it; the company will follow where they lead, raise or lower itself to the standards that they (fail to) set. I worked for 10 years at a successful, well-known company which emphasizes quality over easy money, and it's maddening to see people claiming that such a thing is impossible. It's really not.

This is the exact perspective that I'm talking about. It's the perspective of the GM manager in the 1980s who'd insist— despite all the evidence to the contrary— that Toyota's worker-positive, lean production strategy is impossible. Not only is he wrong, but he'd be losing money because of his lack of imagination and his unwillingness to raise the bar out of the dirt.

It's the attitude of officials in second- and third-world countries, who see corruption, fraud, and abuse— the bottom of the moral barrel— and shrug their shoulders; they justify it to themselves, to others, to the public under the mantra "it can't be helped; the bar cannot possibly be any higher. It's too much to ask". Lo and behold, those countries are economically irrelevant, while countries with higher institutional integrity exist and dominate all around them. Lowering the bar doesn't help them.

Given all the examples available, "a company with high standards" is not "theoretical" at all. Saying so is but an excuse to insist on a pitifully low bar. And it's disappointing to me to encounter the perspective that "behaving with integrity" is beyond conceivable.

I think everyone has a natural human need to feel that they have agency in their community. The need to feel that they participate in the culture that surrounds them and that they can have some affect on the groups that they are members in. The alternative is being a powerless pawn subject to the whims of the herd.

In the US, I think most people lost this feeling with the rise of suburbia, broadcast television, and consumer culture. There are almost no public spheres in the US, no real commons where people come together and participate. The only groups many people are "part" of are really just shows and products that they consume.

Social media tapped into that void. It gave them a place to not just hear but to speak. Or, at least, it gave them the illusion of it. But, really, since everyone wants to feel they have more agency, everyone is trying to change everyone else but no one wants to be changed. And all of this is mostly decoupled from any real mechanism for actual societal change, so it's become just angry shouting into the void.

People have been doing this forever, and even on the Web much, much longer than Facebook has existed.

Now that said, they know what they have on their hands and how it makes them the money. They aren’t going to fix it. It is a big feature of their product.

Facebook could make it harder to post content, but I doubt that would make much of a difference

I think that’s literally true. They told their algorithm “maximise the time people spend on Facebook” and it discovered for itself that sowing strife and discord did that.

Facebook’s crime is that when this became obvious they doubled down on it, because ads.

I don't agree with that. I very strongly think that Facebook did invent a lot of this.

> They just built the biggest mainstream distribution channel to do so

Scale does matter though. There is a lot in life that is legal or moral at small scale but illegal or immoral at large scale. Doing things at scale does change the nature of what you are doing. There's no 'just' to be had there.

> Nothing they ever did in terms of facilitating pointless arguments has been all that original either.

I don't agree with that either. They have even published scientific papers, peer-reviewed, to explain their new and novel methods of creating emotionally manipulative content and algorithms.

> People have been doing this forever, and even on the Web much, much longer than Facebook has existed.

I also don't agree with this. Facebook has spent 10+ years inventing new ways to rile people up. This stuff is new. Yes I know newspapers publish things that are twisted up etc, but that's different, clearly. The readers of the paper are not shouting at each other as they read it.

I think it's super dangerous to take this new kind of mass-surveillance and mass-scale manipulation and say, welp, nothing new here, who cares? I think that's extremely dangerous. It opens populations to apathy and lets corporations do illegal and immoral things to gain unfair and illegal power.

Facebook should not be legally allowed to do all the things they are doing. It's invasive, immoral, and novel, the way they deceive and manipulate society at large.

"Quantity has a quality of its own"

If that's the outcome you're concerned about I think it's legitimate. I don't think it's parent's intention to encourage apathy though.

However even if unintended, it's a good reminder that we should all watch out to not fall into that apathy trap.

> some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect

I've said it before, I'll probably say it again: this place is chock full of people just itching to tell you you're wrong and why. Don't get me wrong: obviously there's also a hell of a lot of great discussion and insightful technical knowhow being shared by real experts — but in my experience I also do have to wade through quite a lot of what feels like knee-jerk pedantry and point-scoring.

When I'm wrong I want it explained to me why. Even when I'm right about something controversial, I want to see the best arguments to the contrary.

I don't want people to be less argumentative. I just want a higher intellectual caliber than what's generally available on facebook or twitter, and HN fits the bill reasonably well.

Or, get your fuck-you billions and people will start agreeing with you a lot. :-)

One time I made a comment about how dividends affect stock price and someone spent like 2 hours writing a program in R to do some analysis just to prove me wrong.

Extremely true, also relevant for work disagreements between people who have existing positive relationships. A surprising number of disagreements disappear if left on their own for a time.

I find that many people with engineering backgrounds (myself included) can struggle letting conflicts sit unresolved. I suspect that instincts learned debugging code get ported over to interpersonal issues, as code bugs almost never disappear if simply left to rest.

I first purged everyone that posted that stuff from my feed, and then eventually quite facebook altogether.

Hidden human need/instinct to argue, period. These arguments aren't intellectual debates, it's people getting pissed off at something, and venting their rage towards the other side.

It's odd how addictive rage can be. But that's not a new phenomenon. Tabloids have been exploiting this for decades before Facebook.

Most of my facebook feed is just memes and selfies.

(I'm venezuelan)

When facebook as new/trending up years ago there were some political discussions but people quickly figured out it was worthless, how come USAians haven't?

Maybe FB do it better, but it is the same in every online "forum" where you get notifications about comments.

Facebook influences what you see to a far greater extent than a tradition forum did.

Facebook managed to get this just right: lightweight, sexy (in the sense of attractive), easy to believe, easy to understand, easy to spread. The word "true" is completely absent on the above statement. That generates clicks. That keeps users logged in more. That increases "engagement". That increases as revenue. Game over.

The masterminds/communications brilliant minds could never get so many eyeballs and ears tuned-in with such a low cost before.

I've mentioned before that FB = cancer It gives 1 (ability to communicate) and it takes 100.

We didn't evolve as a species to process this much information, or as Yuval Noah Harari calls it in Sapiens, gossip.

Then the terrorists win.

That used to be the conventional wisdom on trolls, but there are now so many of them. Worse, about half are bots.[1] (Both NPR and Fox News have that story, so it's probably correct.)

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/carnegie-mellon-covid-19-twit...

It's not just that they tapped into it, it's the entire mission statement in a sense. 'to connect the world' if you want to treat it like a sort of network science basically means to lower the distance between individuals so much that you've reduced the whole world to a small world network. There's no inhibition in this system, it's like an organism on every stimulant you can imagine.

Everything spreads too fast and there's no authority to shut anything down that breaks, so the result is pretty much unmitigated chaos.

The vaccine is the thing people complain about all the time, the much maligned 'filter bubbles', which is really just to say splitting these networks into groups that can actually work productively together and keeping them away from others that make them want to bash their heads in.

Face to face with people I know or at least recognize as human, not a bot, educated or at least not cartoon-hick-personality - Arguments can be great, because of the ability to see when to pull back and stop something from escalating. We are all human after all.

In internet-powered discussion, where numbers of people observing can be huge, and every username can feel inhuman or maybe even just trolling in an attempt to create a stupid argument - that Argument gets painful. But the dopamine hit is still there...

What would that look like?

Given our current (social) media ecosystem, converting outrage into profit (per Chomsky, McLuhan, Postman, and many, many others), what does a non-outrage maximizing strategy look like?

I currently favor a slower, calmer discourse. A la both Kahnemann's thinking fast vs slow, and McLuhan's hot vs cold metaphors.

That means breaking or slowing the feedback loops, removing some of the urgency and heat of convos.

Some possible implementation details:

- emphasis on manual moderation, like metafilter, and dang here on HN

- waiting periods for replies. or continuing allowing the submissions but delay their publication. or treat all posts as drafts with a hold period. or HN style throttling. or...?

- only friends can reply publicly.

- hide "likes"

- do something about bots. allow aliases, but all accounts need verified real names or ownership.

Sorry, these are just some of misc the proposals I remember. I should probably have been cataloguing them.

I'm very curious about niche networks. I have hunch that ravelry.com has something to teach us. I bookmark any niche networks I hear about, like pray.com. Hope to someday do a survey, feature comparison, and whatnot.

I hosted a very niche BBS network. Think The Well for CAD and computer graphics. True, there was no business model, but it was awesome and fairly long-lived.

Facebook is now fairly long-lived. All of its predecessors eventually perished. Some day Facebook will too. I'm curious what the successors will look like.

That worked great for a couple of weeks, but now I log on Twitter and half of my feed is tweets of people I don't know or follow, with the worst, most infuriatingly stupid hot takes. No wonder they have literally hundreds of thousands of likes. The platform is built around this "content".

Funny, years ago, around the Aurora shooting in Colorado, it was Facebook that made me recognize this behaviour in myself.

It's why I left the platform.

Also, obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/386/

Could this be part of the solution? If a discussion is getting particularly heated, put responses on a time delay. Maybe even put the account on a general delay for engaging with heated subjects, so the outrage doesn't crop up elsewhere.

Of course this would decreased engagement. It might even push users to more permissive platforms.

If you realize it’s a dumpster fire then delete your account and move on with life. If that line of thinking is a challenge in absolutely any way the problem is addiction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction

Kill it with fire! The only advice I have about the company and it's products.

You can even see in the memes. It's the right that loves "trolling libs," and the left that's taking the bait. I think it's telling that the stereotype hardly ever seems to go the other way; you almost never see people talk about liberals "trolling reps."

You really don't need to engage with everything in order to be a good activist. In fact, I believe taking time and emotional energy to do so is actually being a bad activist. You're just wasting effort, nothing you say or do will change anyone's minds because mostly, the whole reason they're saying whatever it is is specifically to make you upset. To trap you into unwinnable arguments just to laugh at how heated you get.

Really we all need to be better at just walking away from crazy, whatever side of whatever spectrum we find it. By regularly surrounding yourself with such conflicts and by regularly basting yourself in such a soup of intense negativity, you are quite literally doing nothing more than causing physical harm to your body and mind via the morass of cortisol, etc. you are unleashing. You are accomplishing nothing.

I agree that Facebook makes this painfully easy, although Twitter and Reddit are right there as well.

"There is no vaccine yet for this."

There may not be any vaccine, but there may be a cure. If we change the language used to communicate within a setting/platform such as Facebook, possibly by using a subset of the language previously used or by adopting a more Formal construct.

But Facebook is a virtual neighborhood, with greatly increased bandwidth and range. It is difficult or impossible to achieve it in their settings.

(Personally I get too wound up in internet arguments and it's just not a healthy space for my head to be in)

The point of my question is that activists tend to talk about things, so "shutting up about an issue and not discussing it is the best thing for a group to do." won't ever actually happen.

There are plenty of vaccines for this, but not in the sense that you can apply it to people by force, like you can apply a vaccine to babies. Meditation, yoga, religions, sports - there are many ways to calm the mind.

There is a fair amount of anecdotal evidence suggesting that psychedelics can have a significant impact when used correctly.