The mental frame I’ve found myself getting into when interacting with conflict practitioners is treating them not as defecting against me, but against everyone. Even if I agree with someone’s position, I will give a pretty scathing reply or employ the dark arts even harder to make them look stupid. Why? Well, in adversarial games, there is nothing to gain from honesty, so the only reason they are using words at all is to manipulate people. The only way to have an honest discussion on the topic is to get them to stop playing adversarial games around it. If I guess they’re just too stupid to realize what they’re doing (as in, they sound like they’re just repeating memes instead of carefully picking their words), I think it’s a better idea to break them out of the adversarial game by forcing them to actually think (by being very precise in pointing out the issue with their rhetoric). But if they know what they’re doing? Better to take them out of the game.
My guess is most people in America’s political climate are conflict practitioners. I do not know if this was the case 50 years ago, but I suspect it was not so, and it is merely an issue with democracy where infecting the populace with adversarial memes is a great way to get elected so after time (and especially the internet) the populace is more and more disease-ridden. If everyone were smarter, they would be more immune to banal manipulation, but I think the memes would also just be more adversarially selected.
The mental frame I’ve found myself getting into when interacting with conflict practitioners is treating them not as defecting against me, but against everyone. Even if I agree with someone’s position, I will give a pretty scathing reply or employ the dark arts even harder to make them look stupid. Why? Well, in adversarial games, there is nothing to gain from honesty, so the only reason they are using words at all is to manipulate people. The only way to have an honest discussion on the topic is to get them to stop playing adversarial games around it. If I guess they’re just too stupid to realize what they’re doing (as in, they sound like they’re just repeating memes instead of carefully picking their words), I think it’s a better idea to break them out of the adversarial game by forcing them to actually think (by being very precise in pointing out the issue with their rhetoric). But if they know what they’re doing? Better to take them out of the game.
My guess is most people in America’s political climate are conflict practitioners. I do not know if this was the case 50 years ago, but I suspect it was not so, and it is merely an issue with democracy where infecting the populace with adversarial memes is a great way to get elected so after time (and especially the internet) the populace is more and more disease-ridden. If everyone were smarter, they would be more immune to banal manipulation, but I think the memes would also just be more adversarially selected.