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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29816 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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The ability to discern between reality and fiction is important and people don't come to worldviews solely from statistics.

Yeah, it matters.

The ability to discern between reality and fiction is important

Yes, generally, but your ability to discern fact from fiction isn't put at risk just because you think the veracity or lack thereof of an online story is inconsequential.

In fact, a well written story could be more important than a true account from somewhere like /r/amiwrong for the debate it sparks up and the shared frustrations it articulates, even if everyone were aware that it is a story.

The ability to discern between reality and fiction is important and people don't come to worldviews solely from statistics.

Yeah, it matters.

But this isn't, "I gave birth to a Bat Boy."

It's just some random person alleging they got more matches on a dating website because they have a nice job title. I've never used Hinge. I'm not a venture capitalist. It seems perfectly reasonable to me this guy might have significantly more matches than he had before if he's living in a bigger city and using a more appealing job title.

It's like if someone posted, "I used to be ugly and scrawny. Then I hit the gym and got swole, and now all my platonic women friends suddenly want to date me," and we were asked to decide if it was real or not. Why couldn't that be real? It might not be. It could be. It's not a science fiction story.

How much somebody saying "some unlikely shit happened once to one person our of 9 billion people" should cause you to update your worldviews? Not an easy question, I think.

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