Tag: reality

Why You Can’t Win That Internet Argument (And Shouldn’t Try)

~ cafebedouin ~ Leave a comment

We have all been there. You are in a comment section or a group chat. Someone says something that isn’t just wrong—it’s fundamentally confused.

Maybe they think an AI chatbot is a conscious person because it said “I’m sad.”

Maybe they think they understand war because they play Call of Duty.

Maybe they think running a business is easy because they managed a guild in World of Warcraft.

You type out a reply. You explain the facts. They reply back, digging in deeper. You reply again. Three hours later, you are exhausted, angry, and you have convinced absolutely no one.

Why does this happen?

It’s not because you aren’t smart enough. It’s not because they are stubborn.

It’s because you made a mistake the moment you hit “Reply.” You thought you were having a debate. But you were actually negotiating reality.

The Price of Being Wrong

To understand why these arguments fail, you have to understand one simple concept: The Price of Entry.

In the real world, true understanding comes from risk.

  • If a pilot makes a mistake, the plane crashes.
  • If a business owner makes a mistake, they lose their home.
  • If a parent makes a mistake, their child suffers.

This is called a Formation Cost. It is the price you pay for being wrong. This risk is what shapes us. It forces us to be careful, to be humble, and to respect reality. It “forms” us into experts.

The Simulation Trap

The problem with the internet is that it is full of people who want the status of expertise without the cost.

The person arguing that AI is “alive” hasn’t spent years studying neuroscience or computer architecture. They have no “skin in the game.” If they are wrong, nothing happens. No one dies. No money is lost. They just close the browser tab.

They are playing a video game. You are flying a plane.

When you argue with them, you are trying to use Pilot Logic to convince someone using Gamer Logic.

  • You say: “This is dangerous because if X happens, people get hurt.” (Reality)
  • They say: “But if we just reprogram the code, X won’t happen!” (Simulation)

You aren’t debating facts. You are debating consequences. You live in a world where consequences hurt. They live in a world where you can just hit “Restart.”

You cannot negotiate reality with someone who pays no price for being wrong.

The Solution: The “Truth Marker”

So, what should you do? Let them be wrong?

Yes and no. If you stay silent, it looks like you agree. But if you argue, you validate their fantasy.

The solution is the Third Way. It borrows wisdom from the oldest, smartest communities on the internet—like open-source coders and fanfiction archivists—who learned long ago how to survive the noise.

Here is the protocol:

1. Lurk and Assess (The Reality Check)

Before you type, ask one question: “Has this person paid any price for their opinion?”

If they are wrong, will they suffer? If the answer is No, stop. You are not talking to a peer. You are talking to a tourist. Do not engage deeply. You cannot explain turbulence to someone in a flight simulator.

2. Talk to the Room, Not the Person

Realize that for every one person commenting, there are 100 people silently reading. They are your real audience. They are the ones trying to figure out what is true.

3. Place Your “Truth Marker”

Write one clear comment. State the reality. Keep it short.

Old-school hacker communities (like OpenBSD) have a rule: Trim the Noise. Don’t write a wall of text. Don’t quote their whole argument back to them. Just state the boundary.

  • “You can’t program ‘pain’ into a computer. Without a body that can die, an AI is just doing math. It doesn’t care if it’s right or wrong. We do.”

4. The “Opt-Out” (Drop the Mic)

This is the hardest part. Do not reply to their response.

Fanfiction communities (AO3) live by the motto: “Don’t like? Don’t read.” It’s a boundary. Once you have placed your marker, you scroll past.

  • When you reply back and forth, you make it look like a tennis match—two equals battling it out.
  • When you say one true thing and walk away, you make it look like a Lesson.

Warning: Don’t Become the Simulation

There is one danger to this method. If you always place markers and never listen, you might start believing you are always right. You risk building your own “Echo Chamber”—a simulation where your ideas are never challenged.

To avoid this, use a Self-Check:

  • Ask yourself: “If I am wrong here, what do I lose?”
  • If the answer is “nothing,” be careful. You might be drifting into Gamer Logic yourself.
  • The Fix: Occasionally invite someone you disagree with to challenge you—but do it on your terms, in a space where you are listening, not fighting.

The Takeaway

Stop trying to invite people into reality who haven’t paid the entry fee.

State the truth. Set the boundary. Save your energy for the people who are actually flying the plane.

Imagined Realities, Evidence & The Singular

~ cafebedouin

“An ‘imagined reality’ is an addictive mental drug that humans are infatuated with. It cures the frustration brought about by the constraints of the actual reality. Like a physical drug, it could cure pain and make life in prison more tolerable, but it could also take away life if used excessively. It brings communities with a shared spiritual belief together but it can also lead to terrorism and hatred…

…Imagined realities can consume the oxygen in the room. Galileo was put in house arrest when the imagined reality of a geocentric world flattered the egos of the dominant forces in society. The lesson is not to promote hypothetical entities, like extra dimensions or wormholes, as the centerpiece of the mainstream of theoretical physics for half a century without a shred of experimental test for their existence. The best way to maintain a sanity balance is to adhere to experimental tests as our guide, first and foremost in physics. Physics is a learning experience, a dialogue with nature rather than a monologue. Our love of nature is not abstract or platonic, but based on a direct physical interaction with it.

-Avi Loeb, “For the Love of Evidence.” medium.com. October 30, 2022

“Patapsychology begins from Murphy’s Law, as Finnegan called the First Axiom, adopted from Sean Murphy. This says,and I quote, “The normal does not exist. The average does not exist. We know only a very large but probably finite phalanx of discrete space-time events encountered and endured.” In less technical language, the Board of the College of Patapsychology offers one million Irish punds [around $700,000 American] to any “normalist” who can exhibit “a normal sunset, an average Beethoven sonata, an ordinary Playmate of the Month, or any thing or event in space-time that qualifies as normal, average or ordinary.”

In a world where no two fingerprints appear identical, and no two brains appear identical, and an electron does not even seem identical to itself from one nanosecond to another, patapsychology seems on safe ground here.

No normalist has yet produced even a totally normal dog, an average cat, or even an ordinary chickadee. Attempts to find an average Bird of Paradise, an ordinary haiku or even a normal cardiologist have floundered pathetically. The normal, the average, the ordinary, even the typical, exist only in statistics, i.e. the human mathematical mindscape. They never appear in external space-time, which consists only and always of nonnormal events in nonnormal series.”

-Robert Anton Wilson, “Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal.” theanarchistlibrary.org. February 20, 2011

There’s an interesting tension between these two views. Yes, having beliefs based on evidence is a good idea. However, evidence supports generalizations that do not tend to be true, it the absolute sense that Avi Loeb wishes to establish his views.

So, we need a healthy bit of skeptism. Some ideas are useful for living our lives. But, the trick is to reimagine them and discard ideas when they are no longer useful. We aren’t terribly good at letting ideas go, particularly when we have spent so much effort believing in them.

Perhaps the solution is to keep our imagined realities and identities small, and take care to be able to walk away from them when they no longer serve us well.

Cargo Cult X

~ cafebedouin

“Good listeners do often reflect words back—but not because they read it in a book somewhere. Rather, it’s cargo cult advice: it teaches you to imitate the surface appearance of good listening, but misses what’s actually important, the thing that’s generating that surface appearance.

The generator is curiosity.

When I’ve listened the most effectively to people, it’s because I was intensely curious—I was trying to build a detailed, precise understanding of what was going on in their head. When a friend says, “I’m furious with my husband. He’s never around when I need him,” that one sentence has a huge amount underneath. How often does she need him? What does she need him for? Why isn’t he around? Have they talked about it? If so, what did he say? If not, why not?

It turns out that reality has a surprising amount of detail, and those details can matter a lot to figuring out what the root problem or best solution is. So if I want to help, I can’t treat those details as a black box: I need to open it up and see the gears inside. Otherwise, anything I suggest will be wrong—or even if it’s right, I won’t have enough “shared language” with my friend for it to land correctly.”

-Ben Kuhn, “To listen well, get curious.” benkuhn.net. December 2020.

I liked this notion of cargo cult as an adjective. I was trying to think of other types of cargo cult advice. Most self-help is cargo cult advice. There is rarely one right way to be in the world, and as the rest of this text suggests, perhaps all advice given without understanding the context a person lives in has the potential to be cargo cult advice.

Then, it occurred to me that cargo cult can have more expanded use as an adjective. Facebook friends might be cargo cult friends.

Belief systems around romantic relationships and “finding the one” might be another. Doesn’t make more sense to think about relationships as a skill, and it is possible to have meaningful relationships with many “the ones”, if we could only learn those skills?

When you start thinking about it, much of what is going on in our culture is cargo cult culture. There are many people, following the same paths, subscribing to the same ideas, and it gives them a sense of belonging to a group, which helps them form their identity. But, much of it is a display that denies our experience and requires us to gaslight ourselves and deny our lived experience.

There’s to lot to unpack in this idea. Perhaps something to think on further and write a longer essay about.

The Dreamer & The Judge

~ cafebedouin

The dreamer is in no position to judge what is real or who is awake. The first task of the dreamer is to awaken and of the judge is to make sure the evidence is admissible. Everything else is a kangaroo court of suffering.

Don’t Mistake Theater for Your Reality

~ cafebedouin

I, too, have been called names. I have found myself sharing the living and thinking space of people with Cluster B personality disorders. I have seen them conjure worlds, hammer manacles, and shape the world with their words and beliefs. And while their tutelage was hard, I learned a great lesson, which I will share: Don’t mistake theater for your reality. The actors are playing a part, the play is an entertainment, of sorts, and you get to decide when and how far to suspend your disbelief. We, the audience and the actors, are the magicians. We make the rain, the good weather, and the fruit, and we are free to poison them in the interest of a better story.

I will cast my spells, act the role I have chosen, and say my lines. In the end, when the play is over, my only sincere wish is that it has all, at least, been entertaining. If they call me the fool, the villain, or even the hero during the play, have I not succeeded? People don’t want truth. They want to care about something. In a world where meaning is hard to find, we all most want, more than anything, to matter. The Matrix is both metaphor and the unvarnished truth of our times.

There’s More in the Mortar Than the Pestle

~ cafebedouin 
Mazeways, reality range and glowing red                                                                            
 rat cunning, invention of engines, fuels,                                                                          
 tanks full of the stored fat of bloodshed,                                                                         
 machine-shaped, faceted 3D printed jewels.
                                                                         
 Factories of fascism, launching rockets                                                                            
 on the ecliptic, living within the lie,                                                                            
 full manifests of memes and dockets,                                                                               
 launch determines orbit, STANDBY.                                                                                  

 Red glare, the bombs bursting in air                                                                               
 48 hour screams, a pounding earthshake,                                                                            
 an evil tongue commentariat billionaire                                                                            
 declares, "All news I don't like is fake."                                                                          

 Idemopotence: same action, same result.                                                                            
 Nesting doll of lost futures, a relic                                                                              
 of an afterlife and the future cult,                                                                               
 merely breathing in the psychedelic.                                                                            

 There's more in the mortar                                                                                        
 than the pestle will say,                                                                                          
 what's real, what's fake,                                                                                          
 what's in-between in the grey.

Information Realism

~ cafebedouin

“…the universe is a mental construct displayed on the screen of perception.”

—Bernardo Kastrup, “Physics Is Pointing Inexorably to Mind.” Scientific American. March 25, 2019.

Said better by Spoon Boy, in The Matrix:

“Do not try and bend the spoon, that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth…there is no spoon. Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”

Thinking Itself Is Dangerous – Los Angeles Review of Books

~ cafebedouin

“Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them, for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

Ideological thinking forecloses our ability to discern by flattening the plurality of the human condition, destroying our ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, right and wrong.”

—Samantha Hill, “Thinking Itself is Dangerous.” Los Angeles Review of Books. October 22, 2018.

Review of Hannah Arendt’s Thinking Without a Bannister. The idea for the title is quoted within the article:

“I have a metaphor which is not quite that cruel, and which I never published but kept for myself. I call it thinking without a banister. In German, “Denken ohne Geländer.” That is, as you go up and down the stairs you can always hold on to the banister so that you don’t fall down. But we have lost this banister. That is the way I tell it to myself. And this is indeed what I try to do.”

—Hannah Arendt, quoted in ibid.