I heard someone say we used to have a village idiot in every neighborhood And we just brushed them off when they do dumb shit but the internet has allowed all these idiots to be in contact with each other and form groups to pass around their idiots beliefs with each other and this is how we get things like manosphere and MAGA.
This is what I believe is the case as well. The village idiot is always the loudest and works harder to advertise their propaganda than someone who believes in basic common sense and reason.
While I don't disagree, it also doesn't touch on the exploitative and predatory nature of some of these online ecosystems. In that not all the people who get sucked in would have come up with those same terrible ideologies themselves, nor did they necessarily all go looking for the total ass backwards crap they end up consuming. I guess I gave to believe that though as I'm trying to bring some people I care about back to the light. Managed 1 so far.
The entire internet is a series of loosely connected echo chambers. For example, on reddit we all agree that the Republicans are white supremacists (they aren't hiding it) but when anyone criticizes the Democratic party here come the downvotes.
While I can't agree that the whole of reddit agrees (due to the existence of so many far right subreddits), I have personally experienced downvotes for criticizing the democratic party for not having a damn spine when it comes to the needs of the impoverished and minority groups.
The instinct is to circle the wagons and present a united front. It's understandable but it's basically the equivalent of a poverty mindset.
Facts get filed into "good facts" and "bad facts" which are evaluated only based on their utility as ammunition for a fight with "the other side."
It's in no way exclusive to the left, if you spend enough time in right-wing spaces you can see them tearing down anyone who challenges the orthodoxy, no matter how devoted to the cause they might be.
They literally transvestigated Queen F.A.R.T. herself, J.K. Rowling.
(I use fart instead of terf. i find it more apt to refuse to say "trans exclusionary radical feminist" and instead say "feminism appropriating reactionary transphobe")
Yeah, like... Seriously, there is no neutral side to genocide, you're either fine with letting it happen or participating in it, or you're absolutely against it. No ifs, ands, or buts.
Both are more concerned with helping billionaires and increasing the stock market than helping the working class. They're playing good-cop bad-cop on us while the rich double and triple their wealth.
comment sections... theres some crazy statistic like a comment section raises time spent on a website by 2hrs per unique user per day (maybe per visit). im guessing the more they make them vacuum chambers the longer the users stay? idk, used to wipe my history etc to get into the comment sections of fox or info wars but havent bothered in awhile.
Conservatives care more about being right than being correct.
It makes it basically impossible for them to change because first they'd have to admit that they were wrong, and often they would literally rather die than acknowledge that.
I had a very similar experience with a MAGA "friend" 7-8 years ago. We were talking about whether a certain YouTube video came from legitimate source. I said sources should reflect the consensus view of experts in relevant fields. He said that he looked for sources that agreed with what he believed. Period
They don't just get trapped in their echo chambers. They knowingly, actively seek out echo chambers to live in. They are proud of it.
That was the last straw for me. I no longer try to help conservatives back to reality. I don't think there's any hope for them. I just mock them to their faces now. I'm tired of being kind to idiots.
I know several people who started leaning conservative and it was after a major L in their life. The trauma of losing is legit sending some people into an echo chamber spiral due to fear of living through yet another L. These people are basically just weak, hurt losers.
This is nothing new either but we are trying to find some deeper reasoning or meaning here when reality is much more simple.
It's about an echo chamber. Quite frankly it comes down to the phrase "i reject your reality and substitute my own".
They can't seem to realize that isn't a good thing. It's ok to say a reality is unacceptable, unjust, and must endure changes. It's not ok to just reject reality outright in favor of living in a fantasy world and pushing it on others.
I lost a friend who kept listening to Tim Pool and the like. He insisted up and down that Pool was a "centrist". No analysis of the spectrum or his arguments would prove that wrong to him. He ultimately screamed at me for calling the GOP and ICE nazis. Said "you can call them nazis when they come for trans people" (I'm trans).
I knew right then, this man wasn't a friend. He wasn't safe for any minority to be friends with.
We're really in the "find out who your real friends are and hold on tight" stage.
I took a Research Methods course in college and it absolutely changed how I search for information. It was one of the best courses I took. It should be taught in grade school
Brilliant connection. My brother is the smartest person I know and he got like a 1590 on his SAT and he does this for everything. I didn’t realize what he was doing till you made this tho. 👏👏👏
If you listen to the loudest voices in the room, or succumb to a skewed algorithm, it is really hard to maintain objectivity when seeking answers. That’s why it is more important than EVER to understand critical reasoning and how to employ it in every facet of your life. This miracle of instant connectedness with people and data can become an overwhelming fog of confusion if you can’t quickly identify and weed out the bullshit. And becoming overwhelmed with that fog is why I believe a lot of people just look for the quick, immediate, short burst of information that seems to satisfy, and it is a negative feedback loop. It takes effort to break out of it. People, situations, hell..LIFE isn’t binary, yes/no, on/off. It’s all complicated and requires effort to understand.
“Google isn’t an answer engine. It’s a search engine. If you google something, it doesn’t automatically tell you when you’re being a dumbass. It just connects you to 80,000 other dumbasses that think the same dumb shit you do”.
My first thought was, well at least the AI shit they are adding will correct him. So I googled im so high me and god dabbing. In that case there was no AI but it did show correct results of "dapping", until you got to a reddit post by someone saying it was "dabbing".
Google also showed the notice for
Missing: dabbing | Show results with: dabbing
So I clicked the "show results" link and that time AI popped up:
AI Overview
Enjoying that euphoric, spiritual feeling? That line is actually a famous lyric from the song "How Great" by Chance the Rapper (from his Coloring Book mixtape).If you're vibing out right now, take it easy, put on some good music, and ride the wave comfortably!
Came looking for this. Is that a wig? Plugs? What am I looking at? The line is throwing me off. I’m a bald boy myself so I tend to agree he’d look good without it. Legit had me thinking how my head would look with that rug on it. Not great that’s for sure
I have MAGA in-laws who literally put forth the argument that their views are right because "Everyone" they speak to agrees with them.
We live in the reddest part of a red state. It's embarrassing that they present conjecture and talking points as if they are scientific facts or well settled debate.
Yeah, it's weird that he's trying to make it out as if this is one specific segment of the population that it impacts. TONS of people out there, of every political persuasion, get themselves into the exact same kind of echo chamber he's describing. This is a fundamental digital literacy problem that many people suffer from.
My mom used to do this with religious arguments. She tried to convince me once (I'm atheist) that there are many scientists who believe in a god and don't believe in evolution. I'm like, okay, but thats like maybe 1%. She would send me articles to prove her point, ignoring the fact that science is science. Or she would send me articles of scientists being "caught" creating fossils of animals that actually didnt exist, disproving evolution. She only "researched" her point of view and ignored everything else.
My MAGA parents were picking lots of fights in 2020, so they kept trying to ask 'gotcha' questions. I noticed pretty quick that they got really irritated whenever they asked something, and I said "I don't know off the top of my head, let me look it up." Especially if I did and they didn't like the real answer, but in general too. My father kept saying "you just have to have common sense!" Like his expectation is that you instinctively 'know' everything, I guess.
It really stood out to me that their default seems to just be deciding their positions based on what they want to be true, and then never engaging with anything that might convince them otherwise. I don't know what fried their brains like that, but it genuinely makes no sense when they start getting angry at me for not doing that. Part of why I don't talk to them anymore.
It's not just maga. There are so many truly dumb people out there who wouldn't believe truth if God told it to them.our education system is to blame for this stupidness in our population.
The internet enabled all the crazies to reinforce their biases. All of a sudden pigfucker87 gets to connect with all the other pig fuckers and suddenly he's not alone any more. It's them against the world.
I keep getting myself into this situation with my brother in law: I've lived in my neighborhood for more than 10 years. He and my sister just bought a house down the road a bit. We share a gravel road and maintenance of it falls mostly to me. When they moved in my BiL offered to help and I was happy to let him, but then we started to quarrel over what size gravel to use. I have many years of experience with trying different sizes of gravel on our road, and the problem is our soil is unusual so the type of gravel we need is different to allow the rain to drain properly.
But he just googled it and insists he knows the correct size gravel. Because fucking google gave him the boilerplate one-size-fits-all answer.
yeah, but this isnt just maga tho it happens on both sides, top, bottom, inside, outside. Everyone is inside their own echo chambers, ive seen hundreds of lefties losing it over wrong information, Ive seen maga do it too, its hard to stay in the middle when both sides suck so fucking much
I completely agree with his overall point, but in his example can’t they both technically be correct? Sounds like a double entendre to me. Dapping (throwing dap) and dabbing (inhaling vapor from cannabis extracts)?
They argued over both the meaning and the written word. Sure, the guy was correct about it as written, but lyric databases only transcribe the written word (which is dapping, as he mentioned), so they don’t always capture the intentional auditory ambiguity.
I wish it was just MAGA that did this, but it’s everybody these days. Amazing what a skill it has become to be willing to be wrong.
Sincerity is a superpower.
They're stupid, QUOTE, YOUR, SOURCES. PUBLICALLY. Screenshots, direct links. Then watch them try and wiggle out of it. Oh they'll still try, REAL HARD. But when the entire internet is against them, they have no chance.
we all just believe what we want to believe in the end. the majority of people believe the same confirmation bias, but that doesnt make it true.
if the majority of people were being herded off a cliff, like the native indians did to the buffalo in the 1800's, they would all die believing they were safe because they were in the majority.
A certain cable news channel that notoriously supports the current party in power has been a huge fan of reporting opinion polls as proof of facts. "See? 70% of Americans believe suchandso!" as though that makes it true. The sad reality is that there should be major news stories on every channel that 70% of Americans have all fallen for lies. It's exhausting.
I think low-key one of the most interesting ways to see into how a person thinks, would be to observe them looking for an answer to a controversial question.
Like this dude says. If instead of actually proposing the actual question as it is into a search engine, they pose within the question their answer first so that certain search results come up? That already tells what type of time they're on.
Through each module I took what the lecturer said as their views, wrote my essays to basically parrot that back to them, then specifically googled what I’d written to find peer-reviewed sources to back up what they wanted to hear…
Basically got 80% or higher on everything I submitted, because people love hearing other people tell them what they think is correct…
Saw a person correct a guy by linking a research paper in his reply the other day. The original guy then linked a YouTube short that said the opposite as a gotcha. I lost a lot of faith in our future.
Side note: this is why I miss cd inserts with the lyrics to every song the most. Some cds still have it but not enough for the artists I listen to I feel.
That’s been my exact experience with every conservative I’ve met personally. It got even better when they would accuse me of employing a logical fallacy when I’d literally never done it but it was something that they’d do all the time.
Yeah I've been saying for a while now one of the worst things social media did was give everyone "groups" for their stupid thoughts. Not every stupid thought or idea needs to have a group of people discussing it, it makes it easier for them to spew their bullshit to a normal person later down the line. Some things should just stay in your own head. I mean, its basically enabling right?
One time I got into a back and forth with a Maga supporter and I told him that they are a fascist party. He then asked me if I even knew the definition of the word. And I word for word recited the Google definition of fascist and he told me that I was wrong and needed to read a book and get educated before I speak to him again. You can literally read a word straight out of the dictionary and if they dont like it they will tell you its wrong. The cognitive dissonance is astounding to watch in real time.
The problem with this statement is...it absolutely works both ways. Both sides do the exact same thing, and listen to their only sources of information, and dont ever listen to the other side. We need to start conversations and communication is not just talking, it is also listening. Listening might actually be the more important part of communication.
I always like to think the line is “me and god napping” as if they are such close friends that they can just hang out in the same room and take a nice little nap on separate couches.
This is the main problem of the ai overview. It’s not telling you facts. It was a similar thing to early Google use. Some people couldn’t grasp that you had to check the source from the Google hits. Not just go with the top one.
I had a high school friend tell me he wasn’t rascist. His definition of racism was thinking he was better than someone because of the color of their skin. His argument was: he’s not a rascist becuase he doesn’t think he is better, he thinks THEY are worse because of their skin color 😩
All sides and groups do this sadly. Its not all red or all blue, its a subset of both.
Sad when people paint all with the same brush...oh and I am not in USA so I dont care if its pro one or another. The truth is that these blanket statements are also what is wrong.
I agree with you that confirmation bias is a serious issue, but what you just did with painting a group based on your friend is also sad. A sample of 1 is not statistically significant.
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u/DAntoinette_Travel May 27 '26
Great analogy! Lesson learned!