This right here… it really hits home and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. It’s such a painful example of social bubbles.
In my professional environment and with the friends I’ve made since Uni ppl are invested in the truth. Their careers, reputation and livelihood depend on performance, so there’s a kind of evolutionary pressure driving that objectivity. They admit what they don’t know, express genuine desire to learn, are grateful for advice, and try to be as truthful and objective as they can when themselves teaching others… because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have their jobs or careers much longer.
But the further back I go into my childhood friends and family, the less advanced their jobs and the less background they have in academia, the further away ppl tend to move from that standard. The less truth or performance matters, the more room there is for opinions, feelings and personal bias. These people tend to not want to learn bc they don’t have to. After all, it takes real effort to learn, but it takes no effort at all to just pick something you like and stick with that instead.
Obviously there are exceptions in each group and generalizations like above are dangerous. Still, that’s the gist of it.
Ppl in online forums & social media tend to behave a lot like the worst examples of the latter group. Tho I’m not sure how much of it is genuine ignorance vs. anonymity just having a similar effect. Either way, if you’re not genuinely interested in the objective reality or self improvement and you don’t have accountability, then the truth has very little value.
Which is why so many “discussions” here aren’t really discussions at all. Just people talking right past each other over and over. It also acts as a great, if sad, example of why the things that are wrong with our world are the way they are.