Inheriting their worldview from consensus or comfort, never having to earn it through actual thought.
It’s the MAGA slogan: Don’t bother me with facts, my mind is made up.
People who reject challenging ideas as stupid without engagement are like intellectual nepobabies
Submitted 21 hours ago by SenK@lemmy.ca to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Comments
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 10 hours ago
Whitebrow@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Made up as in nonexistent, yes?
roundup5381@sh.itjust.works 19 hours ago
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
Limerance@piefed.social 13 hours ago
If someone brings evidence, ban them for reasons of wrongspeak.
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
That’s like 95% of humanity
Pinetten@pawb.social 20 hours ago
Yep. It’s especially cringe when people ignore centuries of philosophical discussion. Often smugly.
Great example is when people refer to Richard Dawkins’ books as proof that there is no god. Nothing like a Reddit atheist to make me embarrassed to not believe in god.
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 20 hours ago
I’ve never witnessed an atheist making such an argument. Usually it’s the theists getting hung up on him because they are used to appealing to authority figures and project.
SenK@lemmy.ca 20 hours ago
I unironically think the braindead atheism online greatly contributed to the rise of Christian nationalism we’ve been seeing in the past decade…
Limerance@piefed.social 13 hours ago
There are also many definitions of god, and Dawkins engages with all of them. Dawkins is much more strongly opposed do theism, than deism for example. He engages with philosophical ideas about god.
Dawkins argues that we don’t need god to explain the universe, life, or anything else. He further goes on to argue that religious belief in god trains people to be irrational fanatics, which damages society, progress, science. In the end Dawkins says, there’s no proof for the existence of god, and that we would all be better off without religion. However IIRC Dawkins recognizes that religious belief can have positive psychological effects.
The new atheists have become their own subculture with its own values. The online new atheist scene also attracts people who love to argue, provoke, and pick fights. Contrarians and skeptics are not the same, but can overlap.
There‘s also a pipeline that goes like this: new atheism > anti religion > anti islam > white nationalism
The issue here is that the left has abandoned its opposition to religion, especially regarding Islam, in the name of anti-racism and intersectional identity politics. So these people are rejected by the left and driven to the right.
BobbleBubble@retrolemmy.com 20 hours ago
Isn’t it? I mean I haven’t read his stuff or otherwise cared that much but I thought that was the point.
I really don’t know.
In general I don’t quite understand the point of OP. How do you learn without learning?
db2@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Great example is when people refer to Richard Dawkins’ books as proof that there is no god
As was said earlier by someone else, that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
NoTagBacks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
I’ve found that I generally don’t look down on anyone pretty much ever. I don’t get it when someone lacks intellectual curiosity, but I never look down on them for it since it’s just not everyone’s cup of tea. However, when someone has disdain or actively rejects deeper inquiry, hoo boy, I can’t help but suddenly feel a pretty aggressive anger as if they not only choose to be stupid, but are trying to socially pressure everyone else to choose to be stupid. That’s just not acceptable.
Limerance@piefed.social 12 hours ago
Totally. Especially today people hole up in their tiny bubbles and echo chambers. Any challenges to their worldview and beliefs are rejected as woke, cultural Marxist, far left, fascist, racist, bigotry, etc. Being able to endure and process the emotions that come up, when you’re challenged is a skill people across the political spectrum have less and less. Emotions are endlessly validated regardless of facts, to the detriment of society and everyone’s wellbeing at large. The celebration of victimhood is toxic for everyone and keep them disempowered. It’s not just the left. The right has its whole „white genocide“ myth, and endless conspiracy theories about powerful evil elites.
It’s extremely prevalent here on Lemmy/Piefed as well. Actual discussion between opposing viewpoints is rare, and usually cut short by mods.
People should just talk to and more importantly listen to each other.
real_squids@sopuli.xyz 20 hours ago
I watched a video of a guy complaining about something something similar and it ended with a really good phrase: don’t even bother engaging with non-apple rotators
NoTagBacks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
What are non-apple rotators?
real_squids@sopuli.xyz 19 hours ago
People who can’t rotate an apple in their head. In the context of the video - people who don’t interact with abstract arguments and think you’re talking about specific things or people instead
hakase@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
Lol, the irony of this being so highly upvoted on Lemmy, of all places.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Intellectual nepobabies? I don’t know what that means! These words challenge me, and I want no part of that! Nooooope! I will not think about such things! I mean really! What even is “nepobabies”? Did you mean “muppet babies”? Because they stopped making that show a while ago…
chux@feddit.org 19 hours ago
Not necessarily. There are discussions in which I dont engage with certain ‘challanging ideas’ or rather walls of statements that need to be evaluated and put into context. If i know already that i this discussion is not important enough for me and the points provided are not promising enough, aka stupid on first glance, to later invest the time to revisit those ideas, research, evaluate and putting them into context, which no one can do for me, than i may not bother with those points to begin with. Afterall one cant be bothered with all stupid ideas about something that exists. Written forms of auch discussions are there more productive since one can do the research etc. in the moment. Allthough that to takes time.
In short no one has the time to truly interlectually and honestly engage all ‘challanging ideas’ there are. One must always make a certain preselections, with very shallow engagement.
jafra@slrpnk.net 17 hours ago
This ist very true. Maybe the proposed challenging Idea ist Not as Genius AS you think or you weren’t able to communicate it’s advantages good enough. Additionally If a Individuum regularly has 9/10 haywire ideas maybe the 1/10 genius Idea gets guilty of association (sry, but people are people).
FishFace@piefed.social 13 hours ago
@mindbleach@sh.itjust.works remind you of anyone?
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 19 hours ago
They’re called realists and they’re everything wrong with society. We need to kill the idea of objective reality and to push everyone to choose their subjective worldview based on their own wants and needs, not society’s.
Limerance@piefed.social 12 hours ago
Yours is the most challenging and interesting reply to this post. Of course it‘s downvoted by the intellectual nepotism babies.
Could you elaborate a bit or share links for some reading?
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 12 hours ago
Thank you! And very interesting, from My end it’s showing 4 upvotes and 4 downvotes. From your end is it showing a negative score? If so, I bet those votes come from instances we’ve defederated, because we don’t federate with realist instances like lemmy.ml. Those people over there are really big on objective reality, and we aren’t interested in arguing with them.
Anyway, sure thing! I wrote an antirealist manifesto which you can read at https://soulism.net. But here’s the elevator pitch: You’re not a body, you’re a mind. You’re made of information, and so are your perceptions. So is the world you inhabit. Your subjective view of the world is a reconstruction, created from raw data by your brain. Babies don’t know how to do that, they have no idea what’s going on, they just see colours and shapes. You had to learn how to see objects, how to see a world. So what if you learned differently? What if you took the time to examine the way your perceptions are formed, and made conscious choices about how to do it? That is a thing that can be done, and the colloquial term for such is… magic. Rewriting reality through belief and perception. I would argue that we have an ethical duty to use magic to ensure we are perceiving the world in a way that is just. We need to be active agents in our subjective universe so that we can’t be manipulated into doing harm.
SenK@lemmy.ca 15 hours ago
Wow, that’s… not quite what I meant. The goal isn’t to reject objective reality, it’s to question how we define it and who gets to decide what counts as “real.” Pushing people to explore their own perspectives is one thing, but encouraging pure solipsism just replaces one dogma with another. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater, yeah?
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 15 hours ago
There is no compromising with an ideology that is inherently uncompromising in nature. It’s the paradox of tolerance. Realists will never make room for experiences that defy their idea of objective reality. If they did, they wouldn’t be realists. That’s why in order to create room for everyone’s experiences and freedom, we must destroy consensus reality. We need to kill objectivism in order to have a subjective multiverse with free exchange of ideas. Realists violate that social contract.
muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com 20 hours ago
U might get banned from lemmy for saying this its all hivemind here.
HubertManne@piefed.social 11 hours ago
Hard disagree. Cimate denial, vaccine denial, list goes on of weekly world news level of bs. At one point I was young enough with enough time on my hands to argue these things but nope. Not at this point. If have to be talking about something credible now for me to engage.
SenK@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
You personally don’t have to engage at all. In fact with the way algorithms work, very specifically do NOT engage if you’re not ready to go all in. But be aware that there are plenty of people out there ready to fill the information void with whatever nonsense that benefits them.
Nobody has to be a crusader against misinformation, but I’d strongly caution against thinking that just ignoring the problem will make it go away.
HubertManne@piefed.social 11 hours ago
I would also caution against thinking that you can just screem yourself horse about stuff and it will make it go away. I have to deal with my life and I will engage in stuff when I have the will and time. My wife was bringing me all sorts of crap from youtube and I had to continually tell her to stop doing it. Yes I can debunk it but it can take anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours to debunk it and a well done and quality debunk takes the hours while the 10 min is just yeah you can basically see this is nonsense. But you could see its nonsense from the get go sometimes with just a bit of basic logic. Unfortunately she has not had an elementary logic class and when people do not have experience in it or appropriate education backgrounds to fully utilize it (math and science but sometimes it needs law or humanities) for many things and of course if you don’t do things like suduko or clues by sam (which is amazing) you won’t be able to do it as quickly. Those bubbles do not collapse because some folks stop by and write a paragraph debunking their claim especially when evidence is internet links. Real life I will though as those people can’t just log off or let others fill them with bunk while we are conversing. They will have to defend their position on the merits they are aware of in real time without doing web searches.
Chippys_mittens@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Yeah, but, what if your thought produces something that the consensus disagrees with? Then you’re an evil person.
Little8Lost@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
It sounds like it implies the parents being smart which varies a lot. Like it varies if children listen to their parents.
Also it can vary on mood, energy and personal feelings a lot if someone is open to (for them) difficult concepts
SpiffyPotato@feddit.uk 19 hours ago
Whilst this statement has some merit, its problem is that you’re setting up a precursor to a straw-man argument. This is because who defines “challenging ideas”. This allows anyone to come up with a supposed challenging idea, then call anyone who doesn’t engage in it “an intellectual nepobaby”.
For example, should I engage in the “challenging idea” that the world is run by lizard people?
What about the “challenging idea” that throwing bricks in peoples faces will fix their teeth?
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 hour ago
You just don’t want to engage the challenging idea of defining “challenging ideas.”
faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 5 hours ago
As a counterpoint, you likely have. You’re aware of the position, aware of the proposed evidence, and determined the evidence falls short of proof, which means you’ve engaged with their thinking before rejecting it.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Confirmation bias is an incredibly stubborn human trait (and a near universal one at that). The particular issue this post is engaging with is called attitude polarization: two groups of people diverging more and more in their opinions despite being presented with the same evidence.
Why are humans like this? I think it’s a survival trait that people conform to the opinions of their in-group and are reluctant to let go of opinions that are most central to their world-view. They’ve already invested a lot in both their in-group and their world-view, so rejecting all that is more costly to them than rejecting the truth about some particular fact (that they may not even care about that much).
When you consider that beliefs and openly held opinions have different costs and different benefits depending on which group you belong to, it becomes a lot less obvious that abandoning a position is the right move.
SpiffyPotato@feddit.uk 4 hours ago
It’s a good counterpoint. In my first example I definitely have thought about it previously.
In my second example it’s clearly stupid so I’m not going to engage with it. I haven’t thought about it previously (I have now !), but I don’t think that makes me an intellectual nepobaby.
mycodesucks@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
This is the same good faith argument that cultists, religious recruiters, libertarians, and racists use.
You don’t have to engage with morally abhorrent arguments out of loyalty to some platonic ideal of intellectualism. You’re allowed to tell people to fuck off.
3abas@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
You tell them to fuck off because you engaged with it and found it completely meritless/abhorrent, not because you’re above engaging with it. If they present new evidence for lizard people, you should skeptically examine the evidence and tell them to fuck off when it doesn’t hold up.
You don’t have to engage with them and waste your time debating them, but you absolutely should be open to challenge your own positions.
SenK@lemmy.ca 15 hours ago
I get what you’re saying, but you’re kind of setting up a strawman yourself here here. Not every idea deserves endless debate, sure, it’s about the habit of dismissing things as “stupid” without even considering them. Sure, lizard people and bricks fixing teeth are absurd. But those examples are extreme on purpose, and they don’t really address the core of people rejecting ideas out of hand just because they’re unfamiliar or uncomfortable. If an idea is actually bad, it will fall apart under scrutiny. But if the default response is just “that’s dumb,” we’re not thinking critically, we’re just avoiding the work, and worse, we are participating in a culture where it’s okay to do so. Which is exactly what leads to people getting (and abusing) terrible ideas.
SpiffyPotato@feddit.uk 15 hours ago
Yes they were! And you’re right, we need to allow ourselves to be challenged, to consider ideas outside of our comfort zone, but we also need to able to reject ideas that are not being posited in good faith.
This is the joy of debate, to question statements and receive nuanced answers in reply.