Thank you for your service

Sometimes someone says something awful, and I just go the fuck off on them. Paragraphs of refutal, logic argument, citations. And I let it sit for a minute, and go back and delete it because I just don’t like my vibe and honestly what difference will it make?

But then I get upvotes because some users can see deleted comments, and it makes me feel pretty good

Totally agree but being critical is kinda loaded. Like we really aren’t taught to be critical thinkers, we are taught to receive info and accept it on the legitimacy of authority. So if we go to actually be critical there’s a bunch of little traps we gotta watch out for.

The way a concept is framed can drastically alter emotional response or bias toward it. If a million people consume a product and 1000 get sick from it, if its framed like “0.1% of users experienced adverse effects” its like oh that’s nbd, when actually that’s a lot of people, and “adverse effects” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Pro life activists frame their issue as “baby killing” which is effective messaging for people who are outraged by the idea of killing babies. Attempts at trying to inject nuance into the issue can be framed as baby killing apologia, and trying to muddy the water.

Those are pretty easy to understand examples. We say, “ah but those wouldn’t work on me, I have an education”. But Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics for his decades of experiments showing that the people most likely to fall for “framing bias” are actually experts in the fields in which the biased or confusing framing is expressed.

Lots of people think looking at both sides, or opposing views is 1:1 with thinking critically. But structural realities like hegemony, which is like the way that ruling classes exercise soft power to coerce consent from the masses, have drastic effects on the way we think about things. There are absolutely certain philosophical frameworks that we are by default bought into and use to interpret reality that are very difficult to understand that it might even be a bias.

Even if we know about them, the fact that we have thought that way our entire lives, means that it takes sometimes immense effort to disconnect the bias toward “learned” thinking from critical thinking. Some concepts like mind/body dualism, rationalism, categorical impetative, positivist objectivity, etc., actually have drastic influence over the way we understand our experiences of reality. And thats before diving into other ontologies like religious belief, etc.

Its easy to he skeptical of ideas that don’t fit our learned framing of concepts. It is extremely difficult to criticize not just our own thinking, but like the framework with which we criticize. Especially since we are basically left to our own devices. Novel criticism of one or the other “camp” is often met with support and encouragement from our own camp, but the moment we criticize our own campist tendencies we become an object of suspicion, if not a total pariah – at best we might be sort of a tolerated crank. So there’s not even any real incentive to think critically. You have to be really committed to something that essentially isolates us.

This isn’t to say, “don’t think critically” but in my experience the further one ventures into critical thinking, the more isolating it feels. Critical thinkers don’t enjoy being criticized by others, and eventually settle into our own uncritical biases.

Same lol