Comment on Suggestions
Wilzax@lemmy.world 1 month agoWe’re not saying we should ban it, we’re saying we should discredit these publications because they are willingly giving a platform to extremist rhetoric. Nobody is saying this should be illegal, we’re saying “Stop reading the New York Times, they’ve gone full accelerationist”
WoahWoah@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The suggestion to discredit publications like The New York Times because they “platform disagreeable opinions” misses the point entirely. The goal of engaging with diverse viewpoints is not to validate every perspective but to understand them, deconstruct them, and refine our own positions through the process of critical reasoning. If we retreat into echo chambers that reinforce our pre-existing beliefs, we’re not just hiding from ideas we find distasteful—we’re deliberately choosing intellectual cowardice. It’s akin to thinking that if you simply close your eyes, the problem ceases to exist.
This approach is not only self-defeating but fundamentally immature. Refusing to engage with what you perceive as “extremist rhetoric” doesn’t reduce its presence; it only blinds you to its evolution, making it easier for such rhetoric to gain traction unchallenged. To use a crude analogy, it’s like seeing blood from a wound, covering your eyes, and believing the wound is healed. Refusing to look at the problem—or pretending it doesn’t exist—does nothing to solve it.
The notion that simply discrediting entire publications based on a few disagreeable viewpoints will somehow rid the world of those opinions is laughably naïve. In reality, it reveals a shallow understanding of how discourse works. Ideas don’t just vanish because you’ve decided not to look at them; they fester and grow stronger in the dark. This strategy isn’t just ineffective—it’s actively harmful, promoting a kind of self-imposed intellectual infantilism where one’s worldview is limited to only those thoughts deemed “safe.”
The suggestion to stop reading publications like The New York Times because they platform a range of opinions assumes that people are incapable of discerning between well-reasoned arguments and extremist drivel. This assumption is not only insulting but speaks to a profound lack of faith in people’s ability to engage with, analyze, and refute arguments on their own merits. It’s this very stunted intellectual development—the notion that the world will be better if you downvote things you don’t like and only read things that already agree with you—that cultivates ignorance, rather than addressing it. In short, refusing to engage with challenging or disagreeable views is the hallmark of a mind that fears it might not have the reasoning capacity to withstand genuine debate.
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Neat, which LLM did you get to write this?
WoahWoah@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Accusing someone of using an LLM just because they presented a well-articulated and thought-provoking response is a sad reflection on the critic, not the writer. I wrote that using a keyboard, not some gimmick; I also have advanced degrees and can draft out my thoughts in Microsoft Word without relying on AI tools. It’s really telling that you think any robust, complex response must be “fake news” or generated by a bot. Just because a response isn’t reduced to shallow platitudes or memes doesn’t mean it’s not genuine.
Frankly, that comment took less than five minutes to compose. Maybe it’s time to re-evaluate your assumptions about what people are capable of when they’re not locked into oversimplified, knee-jerk responses.
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 1 month ago
If advanced degrees make you a good writer, I think everyone I work with (and myself) have probably been doing it wrong the whole time.
Listen, maybe I’m wrong here. But I don’t believe that you because you penned that comment eight minutes after you wrote another 4 paragraph reply, with a very similar word count, which you wrote in most eleven minutes. I’m more impressed with the lemmy.world admins for improving the time new comments take to propagate, since as recently as last week it was taking a reliable 4 minutes for them to register across the desktop interface. But hey, I might be wrong, I can’t prove this.
WoahWoah@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Also, I usually comment from my phone, but I switch to a laptop for more detailed responses. I actually found parts of that comment a bit repetitive, but I didn’t feel like spending the extra time revising it. I imagine if I were using an LLM, it would have produced something with better flow and polish.