this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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Fuck AI
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Are people expected not to follow anyone they disagree with?
Reading other opinions? On my echo chamber platform of choice?! /s
Follow to expose yourself to different perspectives? Sure.
But it sounds like the users in question are following with the intent to reply “you’re wrong” to everything the OP puts out.
Which… I do, sadly, expect. But I wouldn’t wish for it.
Well deserved. The OOP is wrong, and it sounds like they know it and are just trolling.
Why would you follow someone you disagree with?
Edit: I'm convinced, guys. I should follow racist, Nazi, psychopaths because even if I disagree their words hold value.
I'm not saying that we should rage-follow but it's also unreasonable to believe it's possible to agree with every single opinion of another person let alone another community as a whole.
AI is whatever, but man, has social media been mind poison.
I say we burn it all down, honestly. Including this place.
I tend to agree. Mass social media was a mistake. I had way better conversations and learned way more shit from random people when I was posting on a niche metal band's fan-run message board back in the 00's. Now it's all just who can post the fastest bullshit to get the most views and clicks.
Talk about AI dumbing people down, but at least it has the ability to teach you what you want to know, if you tell it to. Social media, especially with the TikTok style of content being pushed everywhere else, is just 90% pure brain rot.
Get rid of votes and worthless Internet Points and a lot of that would vanish. Of all the things to copy from Reddit and Twitter and their ilk, voting was the dumbest thing that Lemmy copied.
Yes, that's well said. I'd also take ai over social media any day.
A while ago someone launched a social media where all the people except the user are ai. I thought it was stupid when I heard of it (still do, I wouldn't use it), but people who have, have noted how different it was because "people" on it were not mainly assholes like on normal social media. The difference shows how toxic social media is.
Occasional disagreement isn’t a bad thing. Provided that the opinions expressed aren’t toxic or dangerous, what’s wrong with hearing an opinion that differs from your own? You don’t have to endorse it, share it, or even comment about it.
No two people are going to agree 100% on everything. Listening to those who disagree with you means having opportunities to learn something new, and to maybe even improve yourself based on new information.
keeps you informed, and it shows open-mindedness
False equivalency and strawman, nice
You follow them because you're interested in their posts and you generally agree on most things. If I follow someone and they start saying FF14 is a good game im not going to unfollow just because I disagree.
Rule thinkers in, not out.
The problem mister Alexander here makes is to assume geniuses exist, or that original ideas are rare. They don't and they are not. Spend more than 15 minutes with any toddler and you'll easily reach those 100 new original ideas. Humans are new ideas machines, it's what we do. It is spontaneous, not extraneous, to us. To assume otherwise is very cynical and disingenuous. Every person has the capability to be a genius, because genius is just a social label granted to extremely narrow interpretations and projections of an individuals abilities in an extremely concrete set of skills or topic. For example, re-contextualize with a diagnosis of autism and now suddenly they are not a genius, they have an hyper-fixation.
Also, the premise that every idea, specially brand new, can be judged and ruled as good or bad in a vacuum, right out of the gate, is also very stupid. The category of genius is a very recent concoction, stemming from the halls of Victorian moral presumptions and the newly developed habit of nobility of worshiping the writings they didn't understand of people they had never met. This is what motivates the myth that genius whatever is always positive, in the popular mind. But, Goebbels was a genius at propaganda, everything that we do today in publishing is based on stuff he invented. That doesn't mean all his ideas were worth listening to, and were he alive and you followed him on Twitter (lets be honest, he would have a Twitter), that would shed a rather poor light on you.
Because, and this is the important part, humans are not a loose collection of isolated ideas. We are not modular, freely separable and reconfigurable beings. We are holistic, evolutive and integral. Sure, we might be different things to different people (privately) and audiences (publicly) at different points in time, but our own sense of identity and being is not divisible. Steven Pinker is perfectly capable of simultaneously being a liberal, atheist and intelligent linguist; a mediocre intrusionists psychologist who forgot how history works; and a stupid mysoginist and racist. All at the same time, and never stop being a single integral person. It doesn't require an imaginary score of good to bad takes ratio. That's a stupid premise. You don't keep a broken clock around in the off chance it might be right twice a day. Use a more holistic sense.
Remember, what's behind the user name is (still more often than not) a full person, not a black box (except if it is a bot, of course).
I understand and see why he didn't touched the moral aspect of his own argument. It is because any moral analysis completely dismantles his premises. Morality is the most important thing separating humans from animals and machines. Of course if someone is an evil POS it you should block and cancel their ass. It's Karl Popper all over again, if we don't rule out bad takes in the off chance there will be a good take, we end up with a Nazi bar.
pinker is a very bad guy and we should not be lionizing him for any reason
This is a very weird way to look at people.
Anyone can have an original idea, not just "genuises". I don't understand outsourcing your thinking, creativity, and your right to free association because some guy had a good idea once.
(And I don't think my dad, the inventor of toasters strudle, would approve of this)
I have simpler policies. If someone I'm listening to is annoying and wrong more often than not, then I stop fucking listening to them.
I'm not sure when people started to think that they had to go about life listening to stupid opinions of annoying fuck wads they disagree with. But you absolutely do not have to live life that way.
Yes. And. The worst-case scenario is: the black box is creating arguments deliberately designed to make you believe false things. 100% of the arguments coming out of it are false - either containing explicit falsehoods, or presenting true facts in such a way as to draw a false conclusion. If you, personally, cannot reject one of its arguments is false, it's because you lack the knowledge rhetorical skill to see how it is false.
I'm sure you can think of individuals and groups whom this applies to.
(And there's the opposite issue. An argument that is correct, but that looks incorrect to you, because your understanding of the issue is limited or incorrect already.)
The way to avoid this is to assess the trustworthiness and credibility of the black box - in other words, how much respect to give it - before assessing its arguments. Because if your black box is producing biased and manipulative arguments, assessing those arguments on their own merits, and assuming you'll be able to spot any factual inaccuracies and illogical arguments, isn't objectivity. It's arrogance.
why would you follow someone you agree with?
if you want to learn, you search discord.
Searching Discord is precisely the opposite of learning. You lose knowledge every second spent on Discord.
~/~ ~s~
:) i can't know, i'm not a discord user. Apparently i prefer "losing knowledge" on lemmy
They meant
Here, I was keeping it in a drawer because I thought I wouldn't need it, but obviously I did.
I couldn't take the statement itself as sarcasm because you're not wrong lol. It would have been more obvious if you glazed Discord instead I guess.
I thought my use of capitalized Discord would be subtle but noticeable that it was a joke. I guess I was too subtle.
This is why when learning guitar I looked up guitar lessons and then looked for people who didn't believe learning to play guitar was possible at all and the abilities instead were based upon innate talent and genetics! /s
Seriously, if learning was done by discord, then US politics (and cable news viewers) would be full of absolute scholars, instead of, you know, the exact fucking opposite of that.
guitar example does not work :/
politicians are not genuine in their discourses. Most are there for profit and they say things that even they don't believe in 🤷
Why would listening to two sides of this help you learn anything? Hearing double the lies will teach you nothing.
after your comment, i went back to the top of this post and started reading all the comnents. It's very interesting to read the arguments from many sides and see the nuances some people bring to the conversation.
That isn't all discord.
Relatedly, if you think social media threads are a great way to learn stuff I don't know what to tell you other than maybe try picking up a book and see if there's a difference there.
too many assumptions, but thank you anyway
This was pretty discordant, you learn anything from this exchange? 😆