(epistemic status: I am 100% projecting here. Maybe I'm broadly right though)
A person with an iron deficiency, will often have an urge to chew ice [1]. Ice does not have iron or help you absorb iron -- but brains are weird.
There are an awful lot of people who are lonely and want the sort of emotional and intellectual connection that they'd normally get comes from sitting by a fireside doing chores for hours. It takes effort and vulnerability to make friends with whom you can have 2-hours-long chats. It requires planning and intentionally-directing attention to maintain those relationships. Those who fail to plan and execute those actions will reach out in weird ways to try to meet that need. These will disproportionately be people who:
A. Struggle to sustain attention long enough to plan and execute what they really intend.
B. Fear that interactions with new people will end up with them assaulted, infected, or dead.
C. Feel trapped in some situation and unable to plan a way out.
D. Struggle to form an intellectual connection during opportunities for deep social interaction.
E. Have been in a situation where A-D was true and are falling into old habits.
I posit that the intellectual masturbation of people on twitter or other forums is a symptom of an unmet hunger for real intellectual connection with other humans.
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/iron-deficien...
As far as I can see, there's no indication on this page as to how frequently iron deficiency leads to ice chewing.
Huh? Are you saying that my source claims that chewing ice causes anemia?
So from that source you can't conclude that anemia "often" leads to chewing ice, it may very well be quite rare.
Abstractly, "A is often a consequence B" does not logically goes to "B often leads to A".
To use an extreme exemple, crossing paths with polar bears (chewing ice) is generally linked with dieing (anemia), but death is quite rarely caused by crossing paths with polar bears.
It also seems to miss the central point of my metaphor.
And yes, I am claiming that a lot of feminist twitter is in column B. They themselves have been quite explicit about that.
This is natural if you follow the amount of effort required. Effort to comment ~ close to zero. Effort to go through an article worth several pages (or worse, a paper!) without dropping off is much, much higher.