I know, I know, this is the internet and that’s not how it works. However, I’m weary of attempting to have a serious discussion only to be met with unserious and intellectually dishonest replies. For example, asking a specific and nuanced question and only getting replies that ignore the details or the question entirely.
Are there any communities where people make an honest effort to have real discussions? Where we take each others points seriously, demonstrate we understand them, and then address them?
There must be some communities like this, right?
Edit: I need to clarify that I am not criticizing or complaining about THIS community! I’m looking for communities focused on specific topics that have this attitude.
Yes, there are communities like that. I know of two or three, like you said, focused on specific topics.
But the key to joining a community like that is to demonstrate elsewhere that you are already someone who will participate seriously and civilly in discussion. There’s no shortcut for this. Everyone wants to be listened to, but not everyone wants to listen. The people curating these spaces are only looking to add new users who are proven qualities.
They mostly just want people to bias confirm them. Like everyone else.
I was in academia for 10 years. One reason I left was the deeper I got the more depressed I was how most of them where anti-intellectual. They were only pro-intellectual for ideas that supported their pre-existing worldview and biases. They often labeled anything outside of that worldview, as hostile and stupid and awful and impermissible.
I remember once in a political theory class I dared to suggest that maybe the uneducated Amish and other such religion folks were not ignorant racist pathetic fools. Holy shit, the blowback I got. I had people come up to me and go ‘you can’t be serious that you’d actually think those people are anyway equal to educated atheistic science following people like us’.
Wowzers. And when I followed up my mentioning to this person, that while I was not Amish, my upbringing involve some similarities, and yet here I was. They never spoke to me again, because I was a dirty ignorant peasant to them.
many people use ‘intellect’ as a way to conceal their incredibly social biases, as in, you can’t be a real intellectual or on ‘their level’ if you weren’t born that way, or have a certain level of degree. As if say, community college professors can’t ever be intellectuals, because they are too lowly in status and if they were intellectuals, they most certainly would have jobs at more prestigious places.