I usually avoid doing it with politics since it's pointless to argue about people's religious beliefs. I'm still easily drawn into long arguments with idiots though. The main reason is it bothers me that they're misleading other people. It doesn't happen in a private message.
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right. my view here is: changing minds of people in public (where many people may read what you're saying and be affected by it) is essentially propaganda, because none of us are driven purely by logical inference. so you essentially want to do counterpropaganda. /
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is arguing with an idiot in a public forum an *effective* way to do counterpropaganda? sometimes it actually is, so sure, why not. but usually it isn't, and your time would be more productively spent doing something else.
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I can resist doing it when it's about politics but when it's a topic where I'm actually an expert it's hard to resist. The strong compulsion to do it goes away as it becomes clearer no one sane is going to read that deeply into the thread, or it's already effectively settled.
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is there any real difference beteen propaganda on political or technical topics? I feel like you'd be the person to know it works basically the same, cf. your recent thread on Firefox's approach to privacy. Or maybe you do and I misunderstand you.
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The best recent example would be B_r_e_n_d_a_n_E_i_c_h showing up and throwing a fit over me having an issue with B_r_a_v_e using SafetyNet. There wasn't any possibility of actually spending my time on a debate since he flipped out whenever I tried to elaborate on my thoughts.
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It's not really a rational thing. I have some level of OCD and for whatever reason this is something where I feel a compulsion to set something right. Maybe I should just massively abuse the misfeature of letting Canadians hide replies to their tweets.
blog.twitter.com/official/en_us
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I'm thankful Twitter doesn't have an edit button. I would waste so much time editing my tweets like I do with my comments elsewhere.
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To be fair though, I did enjoy B_r_e_n_d_a_n_E_i_c_h being so unbelievably pissed at me and throwing a fit whenever I tried to elaborate on anything by replying to myself. I already had a pretty low opinion on him for being enough of a homophobe to dedicate money to that cause.
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Thinking back on it, he was also around when I contributing to Rust and I got a bad impression of him then too. I vaguely remember him being part of the crowd that just didn't get it and wanted to ruin it with class inheritance for usage in Servo which I fought against.
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Not very fun contributing to an open source project where you aren't an equal because you don't work for the company and people with no involvement in the project can come exercise massive influence on it based on being in a management position without even knowing the language.