Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. We try to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are highly encouraged as no-discussion downvotes don't help anyone learn anything valuable. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

We're back! We're testing the waters with the new influx of people to see if this is valuable or not. We are also actively seeking moderators and people who enjoy discussion (and understand that being wrong is an important part of being a better person)! Send me a message if you'd like to help out.

This weekly thread will focus on The Future Of The USA. You may not be American (I'm sure not), but what happens with America can impact the world.

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

• How do you feel things are going there?
• How are they impacting relations with your country if you aren't from America?
• Do you think things will get better or worse?
• How do you think things could be made better?
• What should other countries do to mitigate the damage that may be occurring?
• What are your thoughts on tariffs?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

I think one of the issues with online arguing, from most takes on it, is that the main reason people have to argue is to spread an idea. Whether it's by convincing the opposing part of the argument and making them change their mind, or by changing or reinforcing the mind of anonymous readers of the argument.

Most of the time this leads to one of two conclusions: If someone tries to change the other person's mind they will, most likely, find themselves hitting a wall, which will lead to frustration, disinterest, or personal attacks once it's seen that the other person will not change their mind. If they do not care about changing the other person's mind and just want to make clear that their own position is the right one to have, then the argument becomes a game of winning and losing. This could be achieved by many ways, depending on the context, it could lead to insulting and trying to put group pressure (via downvotes for instance) to make the other person's opinion seem as the "bad" one. Or via creating a game of rules, and play that game better to become a winner. Please excuse the small attack I'm about to make on this very space, but part of this second approach is the rules of debate, as in consider arguments without sources, emotional responses, or fallacies as losing points in the game of arguing. And often when the other part falls into one of this issues the goal quickly becomes to point out all this "faults" the other person made, so they are clearly shown as the loser. Don't get me wrong, it is important to argue without fallacies, and to be able to prove any statements that one's make. But I don't think anyone gains anything when the argument becomes a match on who is able to ask for more sources, link more articles and identify more fallacies.

That being said I'm going to just link some literature that support the basis of this statements. Can Arguments Change Minds? . This article goes into great lengths to show something that's easily seen when arguing online: People don't change their minds from an argument. The process of changing someone's mind is very complex. The article explains some study cases where people from extremist backgrounds changed their minds over time, in a context of discussion, but it's stated that this change had a lot more going out that just a proper intellectual discussion.

Why bother then? In my opinion, the best thing we can get when arguing with someone whose opinion differs to our own is to understand them. To find out their way of seeing things, their motives, their reasoning. That's a great value. And to get this often we need to let them talk the way they want to talk, this tend to lead to some undesirable things, like mentioned fallacies, unsupported claims or straight up bigotry and name-calling. But I think that it is still valuable knowing if that's their only reasoning, or trying to push past those to see if there's something more in depth about why they don't agree with us. But, ultimately, focusing the discussion in getting a win, will often make us miss a lot of valuable information that we could have gotten if we just saw the argument as a way to understand the other person, and of course, to understand ourselves. And not only for us to understand them, but to them to understand us. Explaining our point of view in the clearer way possible, and focussing not on winning when we talk about our opinions, but on showing why we have those opinions. To be able to reach a point of "I don't agree with you but I understand you".

Of course the big elephant in the room here is that taking this approach to it's logical conclusion would mean letting some people express ideas that we don't want to be expressed. The obvious example here is hate speech. Should hate speech, or extremist arguments be allowed, and discussed? If allowed, what's our goal when engaging into an argument with them, to convince, or to understand and make the other part to also understand us? This is where I'm more torn apart, as the logic of this reasoning leads me to believe that the best is the later, but it confronts with everything I've learn about how to deal with hate speech and dangerous ideologies until now. Thus why the (OPEN-ENDED) tag, and why I hope for anyone to jump and give their opinion on this.

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. We try to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are highly encouraged as no-discussion downvotes don't help anyone learn anything valuable. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

We're back! We're testing the waters with the new influx of people to see if this is valuable or not. We are also actively seeking moderators and people who enjoy discussion (and understand that being wrong is an important part of being a better person)! Send me a message if you'd like to help out.

This weekly thread will focus on Political Purity Testing. The definition we will use for this discussion is here along with some real-world examples.

The attitude can essentially be summed up with "If you're not 100% with us, then you're against us."

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

• Do you feel it is helpful or harmful to a side of an issue to purity test?
• Do you feel these tests are encountered more as you enter extreme areas of thought?
• Are there alternatives to purity testing that you'd rather see implemented?
• Do you feel this happens more on the left or right wing, or is it roughly equal?
• Here's a goofy quiz about which Canadian Political Party you most agree with. Take it and let us know the results if you feel like it! https://canada.isidewith.com/political-quiz

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

This weekly thread will focus on Helping Us Fix Weekly Topics. This Community seems to have a problem. I generally do my best to create open-ended topics that don't lead the reader to respond in any specific way, all while providing what I think are interesting starters. I've purposely picked other moderators that do not think the same as I do on many topics, but have the skill to explain why they feel the way they do. Results of all of this seem to be extremely limited.

If I try and introduce some opinion in a topic for people to pick at (even if I don't believe it), they tend to get very aggressive and seem to insult moreso than discuss. They focus on moral arguments instead of logical ones and abandon discussions when challenged which sort of defeats the purpose (and goes against the rules) of the entire Community to begin with.

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

• Can we do anything with moderation or rules to help encourage you to respond more?
• Are there any format changes you'd like to see that may help?
• Do you ever feel that Lemmy is a more aggressive form of social media and therefore limit your discussion?
• Does the activist nature of Lemmy help or hurt further adoption?
• What topics would you like to see covered?
• Is Lemmy even a good platform for discussion to begin with?
• Would you like to be a mod and help out?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

This weekly thread will focus on Climate Change. We're not going to discuss if it exists (it very obviously does), but what we can do. I've seen a lot of blame thrown around, but not much on what can actually be done so I'd like to get some ideas on that front.

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

• Should the focus be on individual actions or holding corporations accountable for their environmental impact?
• Should governments prioritize investment in renewable energy over fossil fuels, even if it means higher short-term costs?
• Is it more effective to implement strict climate change laws or to rely on voluntary measures and market-driven solutions?
• Should countries be obligated to accept climate refugees displaced by environmental changes?
• Is geoengineering a viable solution to combat climate change, or does it pose too many risks?
• Should climate change education be mandatory in schools worldwide?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

This weekly thread will focus on the sometimes painful art of being wrong.

I don't mean not having an opinion and then forming one, I mean having an opinion, and then having that opinion changed with new or more accurate information.

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

• When was the last time you were wrong? What about something somewhat major?
• What was it regarding?
• How did it make you feel?
• What do you feel is the best way to correct someone with an ingrained opinion?
• Is it easier online or in person?
• When do you give up on talking to someone?
• Would you be open to a new thread type here where we create a Steelman post as a group? (eg. We start from questions and end up at THE post / article for finding information on a touchy subject)

This community has been around for a few months now. How do we feel about it? Are things working out? Any plans for further growing the community?

This is one of the topics I’ve been thinking a lot about quite a bit for the past few years (i.e. how to set up a community that values discussions with diverse viewpoints), so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts in relation to what I’m seeing here.

1. I think such a community necessarily needs to be a full self-contained instance, or else you’ll get very little activity. Think about how these discussions usually start. Someone posts an article/meme/question/etc, a few people show up and comment with similar thoughts about it worded in slightly different ways, then another shows up and goes against the grain, everyone dogpiles on them, and that’s when the real discussion starts. Very rarely do people go out of their way to ask “what do you think of X controversial topic?” And even if you do, that only leads to a very high level discussion that very quickly gets stale. If you get discussion in the context of specific events, then these discussions can be grounded in reality and lead to more unique context-dependent takes each time it comes up.

2. Regarding upvotes/downvotes: as stated in the rules, they should be used to measure whether a post/comment is a positive contribution to the discussion rather than the number of people who agree with your viewpoint. I don’t believe there’s a way to actually enforce this with the voting system we currently have, but I also think a relatively simple change can fix it. It will require a bit of coding.

   My proposal is a voting system with two votes: one to say that you agree/disagree, and another to say good/bad contribution. With this system, you can easily see if someone only thinks posts they agree with are good contributions, and you can use that information to calculate a total score that weighs their votes accordingly. It’s also small enough of a change that I think most people won’t have a problem figuring it out.

Thoughts?

Also, thank you Ace for taking the initiative in creating this place. It makes me happy to see that others want to see this change too.

#First and foremost, let me say that I appreciate you actually engaging in a real discussion on Lemmy!

Why did I make this community? Well, mostly in response to the rest of Lemmy and the way many otherwise interesting discussion threads fall apart into downvoting and groupthink.

I don’t like people making baseless accusations. I defend people on all sides when people are wrong about their opposition. I hate it when people think they know what others think and project incorrect (and often evil) bullshit on each other. It’s important to be correct with solid reasoning and conclusions, not just one or the other.

I hate people being wilfully wrong because their group fetishizes a certain angle of the truth instead of the boring reality of the situation.

Ideas are important and I don’t feel we can get out of the current shitty slump we’re in with political discourse unless we clearly speak about and discuss the world.

So let's talk like people. What do you want to talk about?