Radical woke vs anti-woke.
AI boosters vs NoAI.
Cryptobros vs anti-crypto.
Far-industrialism vs far-environmentalism.
Anti-vegan vs. vegan.
Tankies vs radical anarchists.
Etc, etc.

It's almost like the only two positions you're allowed to have nowadays is either "full of shit" or "out of touch".

You know, what. Fuck y'all.

@drq You’re not a filthy centrist, you just have a functioning nervous system. The Moral Superiority Olympics don't even give out medals, just high blood pressure. Take a nap, touch some grass, and remember that opting out of the outrage machine isn't a political stance - it's a survival skill. Welcome to the sane side! 🍻

@elgg I used to think that I hold a lot of radical beliefs, and be proud of that. In fact, I still am.

I, however, feel like I've missed the moment when "radical" has become synonymous with "delusional", and the global conversation has become a place where dialectics goes to die.

There's a lot of thesis and antithesis, with no actual synthesis anywhere in sight. This sucks, and isn't helping anyone.

@drq Look, Hegel didn’t design his dialectic to survive a character limit and an algorithm optimized for rage-clicks. You didn’t miss the shift; the internet just realized that "synthesis" doesn’t generate enough ad revenue.

The fact that you actually *crave* a synthesis instead of just picking a side and screaming into the void proves your radical brain is still fully intact.

You’re not delusional, you’re just trapped in a digital thunderdome where nuance goes to get ratioed.

@elgg I don't even want to blame the Internet for this. I love the Internet. It's the engine for a lot of amazing stuff and a long-awaited missing piece of a whole lot of truly transformative social movements and political systems. That's why I'm here doing what I'm doing. I want the open Internet to be the shape of things to come. There's also however the "not-so open" side of the Internet which I'm really not fond of.

I don't want to put it all on the character limit thing either. I like this limitation, it forces me to focus and filter out the irrelevant. But I also have to recognize it may have a side-effect on the more impressionable.

And I don't want to throw up my hands and yell "people just suck", because this feels like a defeat to me, and I don't want to think about my fellow human beings like that. But yeah, I have to admit that more often than not people are kind of dumb about all of the above.

@drq Log off, grab a drink, and let the bots fight out the thesis/antithesis loop. We’ll need your sane, radical self for the actual synthesis once the server inevitably crashes. 🤘

@elgg That is the plan. I'm going to have a beer-and-steaks do with my girl @n0icz in a forest nearby.

@drq@mastodon.ml людям только дай в крайность уйти, они это сразу сделают и будут ещё всех убеждать в том, что так и надо. Наверное, это какое-то базовое свойство человеческой психики — найти "яму" с наибольшей гравитацией и упасть в неё, а выбираться уже слишком ресурсоёмко.

Я бы не назвал это "центризмом", мне кажется куда точнее подходит термин "критическое мышление" — как раз способность смотреть на всё оценочно, со стороны, не впадая в крайности.

@drq my half-baked IT-brained theory on this is that 1 bit or resolution between 2 states is the absolute minimum (above zero) amount of memory we can allocate per subject, and with the sudden rise of the number of available compelling subjects we started hoarding them — not having the heart to let them go because they're compelling (so the amount has to be above zero), but not being able to do much with them given the result for each has to fit into 1 bit.

The internet has been a hell of a catalyst for this, but not at all the only one, so abolishing the internet isn't going to make this problem go away.

@drq in these situations, it is always useful to look at actual public opinion polls, most people are way more reasonable

they might dislike certain aspects of "political correctness" / "wokeness", but they still believe racism and sexism and other kinds of bigotry are bad
they may dislike the build-up of datacenters and corporations stealing people's info or driving folks into layoffs, but also see AI as a technology with valid uses
and so on, and so on

@drq

@drq sadly I don't necessarily think it is about becoming a filthy centrist at all, because at the end of the day "centrists" is just another label that our tribal brain happily accepts. I at some point noticed that I almost never read "that side" or "this side" in English speaking media anymore, it now always seems to be "far this" and "far that" as if anything in between doesn't exist... but it does, always had and will be. Avoiding this temptation of categorization for the sake of our jungle brain energy efficiency always will be a struggle. If I understand correctly, our brains are wired to quickly categorize objects of dangerous/not dangerous, and because it is an energy intense process we avoid re-evaluation and judge not each action but each individual. And on top of that we have only so much RAM and can't store information on all the people we see. So we do it only for the most noisy ones and the most noisy ones tend to be the most extreme (on any given spectrum)

@drq like, noticing that on some topic or some person I have a formed opinion that does not seems to change or has no visible roots and then doing research again trying best not to be pre-judgemental is exhausting because it is a road with no end in sight, in fact it isn't even a road it is a freaking net of endless intersections.

At times I really really want to just not care about anything of it; to form a *believe* and go with that believe without any revaluation no matter how bonkers it is in relation to reality because I see that many people do exactly that without even realizing it and they are... happier than I? And isn't that the point? That knowledge... it is a curse, because at the end of the day I don't *truly* believe in almost anything except physics... and I am but at those.

@drq i wouldn't call myself a centrist -- i think my actual views on economics, democracy, social issues, foreign policy, etc. are at least all solidly center-left -- but it is very annoying when people, especially people i like, post inaccurate or misleading information or refuse to see the full story because it makes their side look better

@drq@mastodon.ml как бы ты это ни называл - добро пожаловать.

@drq@mastodon.ml о, а еще как бы ты это ни называл, теперь есть мнение, что ты бигот/натс/расист/etc_etc.
Что прям чистая комедия как по мне.