The rise of the Internet broadened our intellectual horizons. We got access to a whole new world of people with totally different standards, norms, and ideologies opposed to our own. When the Internet was small and confined to an optimistic group of technophile intellectuals, this spawned Early Internet Argument Culture, where we tried to iron out our differences through Reason. We hoped that the new world the Web revealed to us could be managed in the same friendly way we managed differences with our crazy uncle or the next-door neighbor.
As friendly debate started feeling more and more inadequate, and as newer and less nerdy people started taking over the Internet, this dream receded. In its place, we were left with an intolerable truth: a lot of people seem really horrible, and refuse to stop being horrible even when we ask them nicely. They seem to believe awful things. They seem to act in awful ways. When we tell them the obviously correct reasons they should be more like us, they refuse to listen to them, and instead spout insane moon gibberish about how they are right and we are wrong.
Most or even all of the arguments you’re bringing up, DirectedEvolution, are true as far as they go. But a few of them (other than the 4th bullet point) seem to me to miss the forest for the trees because they focus narrowly on New Atheism as a topic. By contrast, I don’t believe there was anything special about the way atheism debates changed (as opposed to how other debates changed); I instead think it’s almost all just selection effects on the pool of debaters.
Put simply, the Internet used to be primarily made up of nerds that would constantly debate the minutia of the evidence both sides were bringing up. Nowadays, the Internet is primarily made up of normies who just don’t care about that too much, because the social experience is more important.
It seems to me there is plenty of lively debate on topics related to politics, economics, and technology issues in the same nerd niches that used to debate atheism. I really do think that debate about new atheism has declined far more than debate around these other topics.
Do you have examples? I do think much of the time such debates come down to name-calling & ganging up on the one person in the server/forum who has different beliefs than everyone else. This seems in contrast to (what I remember of) religious debates, where you were much less likely to just be written off as eg a heartless asshole or naive no-nothing. I think nowadays people take it more personally when you don’t immediately change your mind in light of their arguments too.
I also haven’t heard of any large argument trees (like what existed for religion) people can use to fight about eg capitalism vs communism. These seemed silly to me at the time, but in retrospect I think they were very useful for having conversations between the two sides building on top of each other, instead of constantly starting at square one.
I am vibing this, but I feel like the only guy keeping it alive at this point is unironically jordan peterson— the final postmodernist boss— who’s declining as other parts of political right ascend to power, yet he manages to go viral from time to time thanks to his idiosyncratic use of language . The other new atheist tubers have mostly receded into doing general political commentary or philosophy, maybe few of them are still doing full time anti-theism, but what do I know, I am not part of the generation which got to experience new atheism first hand.
See also: New Atheism: The Godlessness that Failed. Relevant quote:
Most or even all of the arguments you’re bringing up, DirectedEvolution, are true as far as they go. But a few of them (other than the 4th bullet point) seem to me to miss the forest for the trees because they focus narrowly on New Atheism as a topic. By contrast, I don’t believe there was anything special about the way atheism debates changed (as opposed to how other debates changed); I instead think it’s almost all just selection effects on the pool of debaters.
Put simply, the Internet used to be primarily made up of nerds that would constantly debate the minutia of the evidence both sides were bringing up. Nowadays, the Internet is primarily made up of normies who just don’t care about that too much, because the social experience is more important.
It seems to me there is plenty of lively debate on topics related to politics, economics, and technology issues in the same nerd niches that used to debate atheism. I really do think that debate about new atheism has declined far more than debate around these other topics.
Do you have examples? I do think much of the time such debates come down to name-calling & ganging up on the one person in the server/forum who has different beliefs than everyone else. This seems in contrast to (what I remember of) religious debates, where you were much less likely to just be written off as eg a heartless asshole or naive no-nothing. I think nowadays people take it more personally when you don’t immediately change your mind in light of their arguments too.
I also haven’t heard of any large argument trees (like what existed for religion) people can use to fight about eg capitalism vs communism. These seemed silly to me at the time, but in retrospect I think they were very useful for having conversations between the two sides building on top of each other, instead of constantly starting at square one.
I am vibing this, but I feel like the only guy keeping it alive at this point is unironically jordan peterson— the final postmodernist boss— who’s declining as other parts of political right ascend to power, yet he manages to go viral from time to time thanks to his idiosyncratic use of language . The other new atheist tubers have mostly receded into doing general political commentary or philosophy, maybe few of them are still doing full time anti-theism, but what do I know, I am not part of the generation which got to experience new atheism first hand.