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avhception 4 days ago

It's like watching the public discourse devolve into ever more screaming and posturing. The only winning move is not to play.

Sometimes I find myself thinking about that experiment with the perfect rat paradise. The overpopulation got so bad, the normal social functions of the rats started to break down and the rats started acting like sociopaths. Sometimes, I think that's what we're doing to ourselves by exposing the average human to millions of voices through the internet.

Of course, ironically, I'm ignoring my own advice and still engage with the Internet. Though I mostly keep to HN and some IRC.

NavinF 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The mouse utopia experiment is mostly fake and researchers who reproduced the experiment didn't see any of those behaviors: https://gwern.net/mouse-utopia

It was just as wrong as predictions about human overpopulation like Malthusianism

avhception 4 days ago | parent [-]

Oh thanks, I didn't know that! TIL!

heavyset_go 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion/comments/q4k07...

XorNot 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

But you're doing more then that: even in what you call a crisis you are refusing to engage with specific issues, resorting still to generalities and calls about "both sides".

Like there are any number of extremely specific issues which are not "screaming and posturing" unless you're dead set on not talking about them.

avhception 4 days ago | parent [-]

Huh? "Both" sides? I didn't even think about any sides, much less specifically two of them. My comment wasn't even necessarily about online discussions concerning politics. It was just as much about, for example, the way people show off their fake-successful influencer-lifestyle or something like that. The ways that social media causes bad feelings like jealousy, for example.