Congratulations on passing the summit of the Dunning-Krueger arc! Now everything comes with a fun little shadow of doubt! Say goodbye to absolute certainty!
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KindnessIsPunk@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Honestly, it’s exhausting on the ego, though, because I constantly question myself and I’m aware of how much I don’t know. From the outside, that does make me seem deficient.
I think that’s partly why the debate bro energy caught on, you don’t actually need to know anything. You just need to project strength.
The irony is that real knowledge feeds more doubt, not less. The more you learn, the more you see the edges of your own ignorance.
JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Full agreement. I think another reason the debate bro caught on was that it makes for better content, even before the modern content economy.
Back in the day when the archetypal internet debates were atheists and science educators vs creationists, you could see it just as effectively. Nobody wanted to watch someone on their side go in with an open mind, open to being convinced and for both sides to come to a position entirely based on the evidence. Hell, I still don’t like that because one side has reproducible evidence and the other failed to indoctrinate me as a teenager.
A lot of modern bad faith debate tactics come back to creationists, with the infamous Gish gallop named after a creationist. And from there the opposition had to learn to play the game. Debate, not as a neutral shared pursuit of truth, the clash of thesis, antithesis, and evidence to distill an agreeable and defensible synthesis, but rather as a verbal gladiatorial contest.
The pro evolution side split with the death of new atheism, they’re on all sides now. A lot of the more committed debaters went right for varied reasons, and we wound up in a position where we needed stuff like the alt right playbook to teach how to argue against the dishonest.
And on the other side of the equation you have the internet rationalist movement, who are infamously bad at the “this sounds like bullshit” test among other flaws. They strive to accept any debate with an open mind, and find themselves a good example of why you need to keep some biases that while you’re open to changing, you’re gonna need strong evidence for.
ContriteErudite@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I chose my username because when I was young I desperately wanted to be the smartest person in the room. While I did devour knowledge (encyclopedias were bedtime reading; thank you, undiagnosed autism), I was stubborn, overly certain of myself, and far less self-aware than I believed.
Getting older humbled me. I began to see how small and defensive my certainty really was, and I made a conscious effort to grow beyond it. Real knowledge, as you said, breeds doubt rather than arrogance. Learning to be more intellectual is learning to live comfortably beside what we do not know, to accept being wrong as an invitation to learn, and to not take criticism personally.
I am still working on that last one. Criticism is easier to learn from when it is not passive-aggressive, but that seems to be most people’s preferred communication style.
Feathercrown@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I do think learning to use people’s attacks against you as an opportunity to reflect on any possible real flaws they’ve picked up on is a valuable skill. Someone can be a dick to you while still having a different perspective you can wring learning from given enough effort.