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0 pointsnefitty4y ago0 comments

To overextend the metaphor, I try to see all the little systems of the world as incubator babies. Some of them are worsening, we may lose some, some are near perfect health... We can celebrate the improvements while simultaneously mourning the losses.

Sometimes you'll hear that a person is "complicated". Our emotional world can be layers of many tones, textures, timbres. I think that when we invite the emotional correlate of abstract visual art, it gives us an intellectual advantage. In terms of being able to mentally simulate multiple contrasting perspectives in parallel, it almost guarantees we'll land closer toward truthiness. The basic emotions are like representational art. Easier to digest, easier to understand, easier to handle... Cotton candy for your guts.

Suffice to say, we're richly rewarded when we couple intellectual understanding with emotional resonance.

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prox4y ago· 3 in thread

What are your thoughts on engaging in social media (say this comment thread), it is so easy to forget there is (probably!) a living and breathing person on the other end. I made friends in gaming who have different worldviews and sometimes debates came up (say covid and vaccins) and the debates really changed attitudes and understanding. It has been such a difference than many debates here or on worse on reddit, or anywhere else.

nefittyOP4y ago

It seems like people that are highly engaged in online conversations do so because they, consciously or not, think their contributions will pull the universe toward some goal. That goal might be "truth", "freedom", "absurdity", etc. (Uncovering those goals sounds like a really fun project.)

I think some of it also comes from status needs. Specifically, dominance.

I don't understand the lurker mindset whatsoever. It has to be how most people interact with the internet though, otherwise there would be 10's of thousands of comments on every post here. Ever since I started using the internet as a little kid I've felt the need to toss my thoughts into the cyber stream. I think all the word games I've played with other people online have truly made me a multitude.

All that is opposed to real life interactions. In real life, people sometimes just sit next to each other and occasionally share thoughts. It's a lot more like chat rooms instead of like social media. In a chat room, the facets of an individual are more prominent, meaning, as the chat continues, you witness how a person reasons through their ideas and feelings. Maybe he's a climate skeptic but oh hey, you love my favorite band, what!

The above multi-facetedness of irl and chat interaction is in contrast to this, what we're engaging in now. This comment I'm writing is an expression of a microscopic slice of time in my life and thoughts in my brain. But it's now reified. People can come back to it 10 years from now and play with it in their heads. I might be dead by then, or I might be a fascist or I might have become a Zen monk. The new eyes sipping my words have no clue, little context, of who I was an hour or a day ago, let alone a decade since.

No wonder we stumble into toxicity on social media. Not only are we probably trying to prove or achieve something, but its asynchronous nature causes weird second-order effects. Millions of people can read a Facebook post written in a fit of rage and fear with a migraine ripping through the body of the author at 3 in the morning, but suddenly, that psychologically, philosophically, sociologically, cosmically absolutely insignificant moment could cause ripples throughout the entire world. We're built by evolution to play joyous semantic games with each other. With social media we're trying to do the same, except our innocent flourishes are all punctuated with grenades and nuclear bombs.

Anyways, those are my thoughts on that. I'm very happy to hear that you found good people to share your esteem and friendship with. That's the dopest shit.

bulochka4y ago

> I don't understand the lurker mindset whatsoever. It has to be how most people interact with the internet though, otherwise there would be 10's of thousands of comments on every post here.

I, for example, simply did not have any interesting thoughts to share most of the time and didn't bother commenting when I did have some. But you just changed my attitude towards that. Thanks! I even created an account here :)

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prox4y ago

Thanks for those insights, you raise some good points and food for thought.

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