this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
320 points (96.5% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35719 readers
910 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

A few year back, there was a Netflix documentary about flat earther. They've done a couple of experiment to prove that the earth is flat which (Spoiler alert) demonstrated that the earth is round.

So now that these persons have demonstrated scientifically that the earth is round. How are they doing ? Still flat-earther ? or did they give up with the amount of evidence they collected ?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Have you considered that there is actually more virtue in containing stupid than trying to rescue it. The audience for such communication is rarely the person afflicted because its almost impossible to convince such folks its the folks at the margins who might be convinced either way.

Consider an imaginary belief say 0.5% of the population believes that flu can be treated by shoving pancakes up your ass. If ridicule keeps the percentage at 0.5% instead of growing to 1% its incredibly virtuous whereas more respectful treatment of the belief might help you convince 0.01% to stop shoving starch in their rectum while allowing the mental virus to spread to far more people.

This theory is applicable everywhere. Every time you engage with a crazy person or a nazi imagine your audience is the other folks reading the discussion not the person you are engaging.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If ridicule keeps the percentage at 0.5% instead of growing to 1% its incredibly virtuous

That if is doing a lot of lifting. One of the points of the movie is that people and media was laughing off the flat earthers and they grew in strength to have a national movement.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

One of the indications the signals we perceive automatically regarding whether an idea is "truthy" is that something is either prevalent, common, worthy of considerations (2 sides), laughable, stupid, immoral.

Balkanized feed driven experience can help expose people to erroneous signals eg seeing pro flat earth things constantly because it was selected to be like previously engaging content and confusing that with it being commonly believed.

Treating an idea seriously in other venues only makes this signal problem worse not better. If they were capable of reasoned argument they wouldn't be flat earthers to start with the only thing between them metaphorically or perhaps literally shoving pancakes up their ass is the type of social signals they are getting. I believe that ridicule is a net positive in deterring stupid beliefs because it deters SOME folks from believing whereas respectful argument is virtually worthless again when dealing with such folks.

Consider the same flat earther is all over the net speaking the same nonsense hundreds of times per year. Nonsense and ridicule is seen by hundred or thousands of folks whereas everyone is still talking to the one asshole. It's pretty easy to see why it ought to be a net positive.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Hey now, don't kink shame. I'd be fine with people shoving pancakes up their ass. It's better than the bleach some of them drank to try and kill coronavirus.