this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
240 points (95.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43138 readers
1521 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"I'm just asking questions." Could be a child, could be a moon-landing conspiracy person.
Could be someone who's genuinely trying to understand someone's viewpoint, but it reveals inconsistencies in the other person's logic, so they get irritated.
I'm autistic. This is the story of my life.
Ever since getting into arguments with strangers online stopped being fun for me, I try to be extremely polite to people when Iβm asking a probably confrontational question.
On the internet, a good amount of time people asking questions in comments sections are often just trying to show others how much they know about something in the most passive aggressively way possible, so it better to always be extra clear that youβre trying to engage on a healthy discussion.
Politeness online can go a very long way. Once you realise this, it honestly starts to become a bit cringe how many people are stomping around online being rude and just generally, IMO/IME, stressing everyone else out and bringing down the vibes of the place.
Eh, if it's coming from an adult who should know better, I wouldn't say it's being misinterpreted as a sign of being an asshole.
E.g. Tucker Carlson is just asking questions so that he can supply his own answers to them, that he doesn't want to suffer the obvious consequences for stating.
I think the big deciding factor is how they're approaching the questions and what the questions are. Like, if someone is "just asking questions" where the questions just so happen to be a common bad faith talking point, yeah, I'm gonna assume they're also acting in bad faith.
Eg, leading questions are a particularly common example here. The amount of lean towards their already-decided viewpoint can vary. They might word their question to be convinced away from their viewpoint as the default ("why isn't the moon landing fake?"), or maybe they'll provide a statement that obviously gives more weight to their side ("the government is so untrustworthy, so how can we trust the moon landing was real?").
But often, they even do word the questions in a perfectly valid way, because they're not trying to get an answer. They're not gonna be convinced and they're trying to get an answer. What they want to do is make someone else mistake being stumped for "this person might be right". Eg, if someone asks you "is the moon landing real?" and you don't actually know how to prove that it's real, that can make you think that perhaps it wasn't real. After all, you can't explain how it is. But that's a fallacy. You not being able to explain it has nothing to do with whether or not it's real. Asking questions is cheap and easy. It takes no time investment compared to answering or understanding an answer. That makes it effective for planting seeds of doubt. And of course, people should think critically, but many folks aren't going to or aren't don't have the time. So they'll retain this low effort seed of doubt and that's it.
Plus of course, searching for these questions, especially leading ones, can get you to fall into conspiracy theory or alt right echo chambers, which will have the leading question included in multiple times and technically is a better match from a pure SEO point of view. Search engines do try and train themselves against the common leading questions, but they often have to do that explicitly. This is actually an area where search engines like DuckDuckGo do worse at. You're more likely to have a leading question in the top results because, again, it really is the most accurate match for that question. Should search engines direct you to the correct results or should they direct you to the results that are most accurate for what you searched for? Nobody really agrees and it'll be criticized either way (personally, I think that correctness is far more important because otherwise the search engines propagates misinformation).
I usually find the best argument against "is the moon landing fake" or equivalent stuff to be the fact that the Soviet Union stated it was real, when they would have benefited a lot more from denying it and/or proving it to be fake. When your enemy supports your argument then it's more probable that it's true.