pyrrhicwren wrote:
I completely understand where you're coming from on this one techstep.
Selective confirmation bias with an aim at influencing the crowd to adopt the same belief? Info filtering when presenting a question which is not intended to dialogue but a form of soliliquy aka a lecture with the appearance of reasoning. Or like Kraftie said, a troll.
That's fair.
A good way to phrase the problem perhaps as well - maybe not most people this days but a lot of people have the sense that if someone's given authority that they need to earn that authority with some degree of competence, and they get irritated when they see that authority being abused. Sometimes that anger can be sheer territoriality, like some biologist not liking it when an organic chemist invades their turf too much or a psychologist not living evolutionary psych if game theory is threatening to their camp but at other times people genuinely are speaking or dismissing from ignorance and it's overextension of what might be real qualifications in a narrow domain and the topic being then discussed with strong opinion isn't one where they seem to really know what they're talking about but they're bringing their authority badge in regardless.
If you see someone that does seem to have encyclopedic knowledge of something fall face first into that knowledge as well and then seem to speak with authority on other domains as if their domain eradicates the existence of conflicting domains of knowledge - I suppose there's enough plausible deniability they can use that they have blinders or tunnel-vision on because their attention and knowledge base has been hypersaturated in a particular manner, but I think that's only forgivable if that's actually open to correction (or if the other person's wrong actually being able to articulate why without hand-waving or social status tactics) and if they continue on with every conversation as if they're right and the only way you can differ with them and have them register the words as having been spoken or written is differing with them by either telling them that their right or presenting the most dumbed-down, caricatured, or effete version of another side's case and they filter all else out and persistently do so - you have to gather that what they're up to is more Darwinian than truth-seeking or fact-finding.
I could give public figure examples but I almost feel like it's better to keep this content neutral because I don't think the 'Ah - that's someone you're putting in this category because they disagree with you!' is valid but it tends to be quite powerful for derailing topics and making them vanish down the memory hole. What I would say is that what's far more interesting to me than the specifics of what a person beliefs and doesn't believe at a given time is how they go about communication and discourse with people whom they disagree with - ie. their style of communication, their efforts or lack thereof to unpack other people's points in full fidelity, we tend to be highly forgiving of failings in this area - that's okay unless you're both investing someone with social authority and consequence AND forgiving them so many communicative and analytical failings that their granted power is twisting the landscape. For example - the moment people are afraid to say things that most people in a room know are true around a person (good example might be a political ideologue in a board room), if everyone cowers from the potential fallout of that person realizing someone both disagrees with them and is willing to disagree in their presence - societal collapse seems like made of thousands of such abdications, conveniences, paths of least resistance, etc..
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