Someone once posted a video by Jonathan Bi, a lecture on Rousseau and his views that intellectuals with large egos eventually play contrarian positions just to have a chance to argue and prove how smart they are; Rousseau’s opinion was that the democratization of knowledge, the printing press at the time as he couldn’t foresee the internet, would amplify this phenomenon until society would lose itself arguing about pretty much everything, and people would delight being contrarian even about the most mundane of things.

https://youtu.be/C8ucJ29O1kM?feature=shared

I have watched that lecture 6 months ago and I haven’t been able to read any forum, HN included, without being reminded of Rousseau’s discourse. The Internet and social media is a cacophony of skeptics and big brains that, if you were to tell water is wet, would earnestly open a debate on why that is not the case. It’s endless churning around the obvious, as everyone’s opinion is valid however idiotic and off-topic it is, there’s no foundation to build an intelligent argument before Johnny Anonymous comes to sidetrack it either with intentional trolling or just pedantic nonsense.

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griffzhowl 3 days ago | parent [-]

> The Internet and social media is a cacophony of skeptics and big brains that, if you were to tell water is wet, would earnestly open a debate on why that is not the case.

Sounds like the ancient Greeks or scholastic philosophers...

But I agree social media has also made this dynamic more pervasive as well as distorted it in many ways

	▲	lo_zamoyski 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Sounds like the ancient Greeks or scholastic philosophers... I don't see how you can make this claim. Putting aside the fact that these two groups were diverse, contrarian they were not. (Socrates, known for posing questions to fellow Athenians and his students, wasn't a contrarian. He was interested in arriving at the truth and challenging the Sophists, the quintessential bullshitters, who were interested in power.) If anything, modernism tends to be more contrarian, and even when not by intention, then at least by construction. Think of the philosophical positions that fall under this label. Skeptical denial and making weird assumptions is sort of characteristic.