
When Having Friends Is More Alluring Than Being Right - imartin2k
https://www.theferrett.com/2019/07/29/when-having-friends-is-more-alluring-than-being-right/
======
RickS
I lost my dad to this. So far, nothing helps. I have no idea what the solution
is. It only works when THEY want out.

But why would they?

We're brutally, brutally mean to people like this.

Every time somebody dunks on a flat earther or their ilk, puts somebody down
to defend the superiority of their own worldview, they've added a brick to the
wall that keeps these people from feeling like they can rejoin society.

The first time they pop out of the cave, feeble amateurs in the world of
normies, they slip up just a tiny bit and get their head bitten off. There is
nobody there to to say "if you tried, we'd have you". For most of us, it isn't
true.

It seems like few people realize that this is part of the residue we
unwittingly leave on the world. That the cost of performative intellectual
superiority, even if you're actually right, is the burning of rungs on their
ladder back up.

Needlessly dunking on misguided people worsens a world that we ourselves are
stuck with.

Be nice.

~~~
phil248
It can't always just be about being nice, unfortunately. Parents who choose
not to vaccinate their children could get us all killed. It's a serious
threat.

If being nice turns out to be the best strategy for curbing this movement,
then I am all for it. If screaming in their faces about it turns out to be
more effective, then we have to do that.

I would love for everyone to be able to "rejoin society" but at a certain
point we also have to defend society against those who reject it in harmful
ways. Not every illogical cult-like community is as harmless as flat-Earthers.

~~~
gdhbcc
Humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years with no vaccines. Let's
not be needlessly fearmongering when it comes to their necessity.

In this day and age, given the quality of medical treatment available to most
of the population, any outbreak of diseases can be handled in a much better
way, and with less comparative casualties than ever before, regardless of the
use o vaccines.

Vaccines are useful, there is no doubt about that, but they are in no way a
necessity without which we cannot live.

~~~
ken
We also have unprecedented population density. 10,000 years ago I wouldn’t
have walked within sneezing distance of 1,000 people before lunchtime.

Just because something wasn’t needed before doesn’t mean it isn’t needed now
that circumstances have changed. We also existed for hundreds of thousands of
years without seatbelts.

------
DoreenMichele
It's not merely "lonely being wrong." It's lonely _and_ you face a wall of
open hatred and abuse for merely disagreeing or even wondering out loud if
maybe the dominant view isn't 100% right and might have some holes in it.

That's completely unnecessary and also often openly breaks a lot of social
rules, but people will justify their terrible behavior, the majority will have
their back and tell the target of the abuse that they deserve it, it's their
fault and the abuse will promptly stop if they will just "stop spouting
nonsense."

Only it probably won't. Caving to the demand to pretend to agree will probably
be permission to continue to be awful perpetually to someone who once openly
disagreed.

The most abusive people typically claim they are _being scientific,_ only they
aren't. Because actual science is founded on the idea that we can't really
prove anything. We can only disprove things and our current science is all the
stuff we have some degree of confidence in because it has yet to be disproven
and overturned by something better.

A good example of this is Bigfoot. There are people who believe strongly that
Bigfoot absolutely doesn't exist and anyone who allows for the possibility
that Bigfoot might be real gets treated like an idiot and a lunatic, never
mind that you cannot prove a species absolutely doesn't exist and new species
get discovered all the time.

Bigfoot Anti-Believers are typically far more fanatical than Bigfoot
Believers, far less rational and far more out of line with scientific
principles, yet will justify their terrible treatment of Bigfoot Believers --
or even people who say "I dunno. Could be." \-- with claims that anti-belief
is _scientific._

~~~
jhbadger
But anti-belief _is_ scientific if the belief for something requires a
complete overturning of scientific principles. It's not just an absence of
evidence for something. It isn't "open minded" to say "could be..." to
Bigfoot, Nessie, or the like -- it's closed minded because to even consider
the idea seriously is to think that ecologists and population geneticists have
no idea what the minimum habitat of a large animal is or of the minimum viable
population size is.

~~~
brighter2morrow
>But anti-belief is scientific if the belief for something requires a complete
overturning of scientific principles. It's not just an absence of evidence for
something. It isn't "open minded" to say "could be..." to Bigfoot, Nessie, or
the like -- it's closed minded because to even consider the idea seriously is
to think that ecologists and population geneticists have no idea what the
minimum habitat of a large animal is or of the minimum viable population size
is.

That doesn't make sense. What you're saying is that "It's closed minded not to
have blind faith in a faceless group of people who get to dictate what you can
and cannot say."

~~~
jhbadger
No. No "blind faith" needed. Non-scientists can, and some do, learn about
fields that interest them, sometimes even to a level that lets them
participate in the scientific process. There have been new species of insects
and new asteroids discovered by amateurs, for example. But to do so, they have
to understand where and what types of animal or object are there for the
discovery.

~~~
brighter2morrow
It's blind faith if its only presentation is snarky commentary.

------
neom
As an egocentric self-righteous narcissist who spent their 20s making friends
by being "right", I'm slowly starting to learn that isn't a fun way to live. I
think it's the same thing as when someone you care about is "complaining", you
don't _always_ have to help them solve the problem, sometimes they just want
to talk.

~~~
hackits
There is a fine line as most people don't have very good conversation skill's
and will use you as a surrogate to a psychologist. You have to pull them in
line with eye contact and silence and then giving them the benefit of the
doubt, and finally have to say they're in a conversation/discussion. If that
all else fails then you leave the conversation.

~~~
neom
I totally agree. I also think there is a huge selfishness in allowing yourself
to be used as a surrogate to a psychologist. Just because you are lonely due
to not figuring out the other things yourself, doesn't mean you should play
doctor to feel fulfilled.

~~~
hackits
Do you mean selfishness or low self-wroth? Selfishness is that you're doing it
because you only care about yourself and not the other person (In that case
you would be talking about yourself). Low self-worth is where you believe
you're view point and genuine experiences are lesser than the other person.

------
jdoliner
This article gets close to the heart of flat-earthism, bad sadly doesn't quite
take the plunge over the edge. The origin of flat-eartherism is people like
this author, and his wife's need to convince others that they are wrong in
their beliefs and get them in line with the correct beliefs. It's hard to
remember at this point, but think back to about 15 years ago, the idea of a
flat-earth was held up as the shining example of how clueless people in the
past used to be and how far we've come. That story was fake by the way, people
have known the earth was round since ancient Greece, in fact they even had a
pretty accurate measure of the earth's circumference. In between there were
surely less knowledgeable groups of people, but it's hard to find any concrete
cases of large scale belief that the earth was flat, rather than people not
really understanding what was meant by "the earth" on a planetary scale, vs.
their local perception of the earth around them which did indeed appear to be
fairly flat. Except for today of course, where each passing year we hit a new
watermark of belief in a flat-earth. How did we get here? Like I said,
articles like this give you a good insight into that path, when you're
constantly barraged with articles whose entire point is to define a group of
people and call them dumb it repels people, and some small number of people
get caught up in that repelling force, they start to wonder if maybe this
barrage of meanness is actually hiding some deeper truth. Over time these
people form into their own group and settle into a symbiotic relationship with
the first group. As the group gains steam there's more and more evidence that
people are dumb, and need to be called out as such, giving the author of this
article and others more ammo, which in turn repels more people into joining
the group. And around, and around they go, where it stops I have no idea.

Edit: I should add, this article is among the most civil and charitable
articles of its type. I don't mean to pick on this author in particular.

~~~
xvfz
You might like:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc)

It makes life a lot more pleasant when you realize that most upsetting things
you see online are just a meme symbiotic system with a lot of sound and fury
signifying nothing.

------
blackflame7000
I think oftentimes in human interaction you can either be right or be liked.
It might seem like a great injustice but oftentimes, being right comes at the
expense of another being wrong. The problem is that there is nothing wrong
with being wrong and yet a lot of us still take this very personally. Everyone
is wrong until someone tells them what is right.

~~~
ziddoap
> _[...]being right comes at the expense of another being wrong. The problem
> is that there is nothing wrong with being wrong[...]_

I think this hits the nail on the head, completely.

I think a large part of it, for me at least, was that school taught me that
wrong is bad. Not knowing an answer is bad. Failure. It took many years after
school to correct that belief - and I'm much happier for it.

Being wrong is great, in a way. Of course I'd like to be right about
everything all the time but I know that's not possible. Being wrong lets me
know that I have an opportunity to learn what _is_ right.

~~~
jdietrich
I think that a great many of the world's problems could be ameliorated if
teachers felt comfortable saying "I don't know, but we can find out after
class".

------
lopmotr
This goes way beyond flat earth and the other beliefs he listed. People will
laugh at you if you claim that rocks grow out of dead birds, but almost no-one
really convinced themselves of where rocks come from or where dead birds go
and that it's not the same place. We trust authorities but we don't think it
through or investigate it for ourselves. It's much easier to trust authorities
because that's what everyone else is trusting too so you get automatic
agreement and friends without having to think for yourself. We also have no
idea that the Earth isn't flat except from trust in authorities.

What is kind of strange is that even though some wrong beliefs are mocked by
people who don't agree (eg flat-earth, Scientology), others are put on a kind
of pedestal of respect, such as Islam and native rituals. The justification I
can think of is "Let those poor savages have their special beliefs because
they're weaker than us and maybe that's all they have to cling onto so we
shouldn't hold them to the same high standards that we hold ourselves to."
Scientologists and Christians are part of us and have no excuse for being
"wrong" so we're more openly critical of them.

------
daenz
I think this article indirectly highlights why mob rule and direct democracies
are so potentially dangerous: people need to feel accepted, and will take many
ideas on faith, even dangerous ones, than to risk having an opinion that
causes them to feel the scorn of their peers.

~~~
phil248
That may miss the point slightly. These are people who are on the receiving
end of scorn, and their decisions to dive deeper into fringe communities only
opens them up to further scorn! The very opposite of the issue you are
describing, which is a situation in which people conform en masse in order to
avoid scorn.

~~~
daenz
It's just the other side of the coin. The key is the need for acceptance in
what you believe. The groups in the article find it by seeking a communities
that align with their beliefs, while the groups I am describing find it by
conforming their beliefs to the group. The end result is acceptance in what
they believe, and an avoidance of scorn.

------
adamwong246
Sadly, being wrong DOES affect others. My fellow citizens vote and I am
compelled by the laws they enact. Every friendly attempt to alter their
worldview is ignored and every unfriendly attempt drives them further into a
rabbit-hole of unreason. I'm left with only one choice- to isolate myself from
the consequences of their actions, either forcing them out of my world, or
leaving them in theirs.

and that's why I don't speak with my extended family anymore.

~~~
lopmotr
How do you know it's not you who's wrong? Do you have access to secret
information that they don't? Do you have superior intellect that enables you
to understand what they can't? Or did you just happen to be exposed to
different influences during your life that led your beliefs in a different
arbitrary direction?

------
diminoten
It wouldn't be such a big deal if these "wrong" communities didn't seem to be
so outrage driven, but they tend to be more about the anger than pursuing
their "truth".

Acts of "proving" oneself to the community gain a person favor, which ends up
being the stuff that effects us "normies", rather than their mere existence.

~~~
rubinelli
I wouldn't single out those communities. Take the top 20 subreddits, and
you'll see the ones that aren't just meme feeds are driven by outrage.

------
slowhadoken
I don’t like this false dichotomy. It’s a truism “you can be right or you can
be happy”. You can be right and happy. In my experience yes-men are often sad
and keep shallow company. If you’re getting a lot of pushback from the group
you’re in you might be in the wrong group.

------
tomkat0789
This was a fun read (until the grim conclusion I guess), but what is the word
for this phenomena? Tribalism? Religion?

Be sure to stop and consider: would YOU give up all your friends in search of
the truth?

~~~
chantelles
"I believe too much in truth not to suppose that there are different truths
and different ways of speaking the truth." -Foucault

------
baron816
I’ve been thinking of starting a cult. Not a real cult. It would explicitly be
a fake cult, and it would have rules to prevent all the evil stuff cults do.
But there’s a reason that people join and become very committed to them (or
religions). They provide a community, a sense of common purpose, and a support
network. Artificially replicating that while cutting out the bad stuff, and
scaling that to the level of the Catholic Church or Islam would be the biggest
thing one could do to improve human happiness in developed countries in my
opinion.

~~~
jdietrich
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius)

------
david38
The author appears to lump anyone of opposing views together.

Flat earth - trivial to disprove, ok Anti-vacation - not trivial, but a huge
amount of work has been done to show anyone who isn’t totally shut down the
glaring before/after situation of vaccines, so ok

Men’s Rights? Seriously? Is the author saying men have no rights? Some of the
things that fall under the men’s rights umbrella are the draft, lack of help
for homeless men vs women, biased family court, little recognition when a
victim of domestic violence (interestingly the CDC recognizes that), biased
prison sentences, vastly higher rates of on the job injuries, etc.

So is the author saying anything that happens to a man his own fault?

Is there a specific men’s rights subgroup the author is referring to that’s
very loud and just goes around saying men never do anything bad?

This is like saying “civil rights” people are a bunch of angry people with no
reason to be angry.

~~~
happytoexplain
>Is there a specific men’s rights subgroup the author is referring to that’s
very loud

Yes, and, as usual with loud, antagonistic subgroups, they look from the
outside like part of the larger group's definition. But that's not an excuse -
I wish people like the author would be more generous when talking about the
larger groups. Men's rights are particularly affected by this, because it's a
topic with both a lot of legitimate grievances and illegitimate hatred among
its ranks.

------
weddpros
Are we witnessing the birth of a new idea, something like "there is no right
or wrong if it hurts people's feelings"? will "non binary truth" emerge as
law?

You have the right to say anything that's wrong, and nobody can say it's wrong
because that would be discriminatory, but if you say something that's right,
nobody should say it's right because it would be binary thinking and
discriminating? yet you can say it's wrong, because it's hurting your
feelings.

Let's try to abolish logic! It will surely lead to immense happiness.

We're at the tipping point where Idiocracy becomes real
([https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/))

~~~
antisthenes
If this happens, I'm seriously going to consider suicide.

I don't want to live in a world where I have to live in a constant state of
doublethink in order to avoid offending some rare snowflake.

~~~
weddpros
Hint: it's not happening everywhere in the world, it's a western world thing.

------
bobharris
I thought of tweleve step programs reading this article.

Things get culty. But what community doesn’t look inclusive and strange to an
outsider? Sports? Reps/Dems? Any system not your own?

I think its a lovely article. Spurs up alot of thoughts. Especially when being
wrong is considered so bad in the US.

------
gorzynsk
That's why education is so important. If as kinds those people would analyze
the evidences of both - flat and sphere earth they would be immune to flat-
earth nonsense.

After kinds lose their natural curiosity and gain political views it's nearly
impossible to convince them to something different than they believe.

------
kromem
How about agree with them? And connect with them?

I don't necessarily mean to agree that the Earth is flat.

But maybe if you think that we don't know all the answers and finding out
things we don't know is fun, you could find common ground even with flat-
earthers.

Probably 99% of humanity has one element of common ground: we all want to be
happy.

So start from there and work outwards. How does believing the Earth is flat
make them happier? As you discover the answer to that (one of which is
certainly community as the OP points out), maybe there's other shared common
ground.

This could apply to almost anything. Even racists want to be happy. They think
that they'll be more happy by holding people different from themselves back,
but likely part of this is they hold a relative sense of success (are they
better off than their neighbors) than an absolute sense (are they better off
than they could be). Maybe compare those two pictures of success, and show
that even if someone different from them gets successful by getting a good
education and curing cancer, they will directly benefit by not needing to
worry about cancer.

And connection matters a lot too. Pretty much every instance I've seen of
racists dropping their racism was a direct result of direct interactions with
people they demonized that they realized they had more in common with than
they'd believed (and in some cases more than their racist buddies).

To me the saddest part of the movie was the cross cuts between the science
meetup and the flat-earth meetup. Those two groups would actually have got
along pretty well, if they focused on shared passion for the unknown and not
their differences.

Besides - with everything we are learning about how consensus across entangled
observers may be deterministic of the resulting reality (quantum Darwinism,
which is supported by recent experiments but not yet proven), perhaps flat-
earthers, by abandoning recognition of a shared consensus of the rest of the
world, have in fact created a mostly overlapping Venn-diagram sort of pocket
reality where the Earth being flat is as real as the notion it is not for the
rest of us. And if we adopt that belief we can enter into that reality, and if
they adopt the scientific method's application to their premise they'd
necessitate returning to ours (perhaps the scientific method is exactly that -
a process to evaluate disparate realities and converge to a norm).

In fact, maybe that's what cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias really
are -- a desire to stabilize our version of reality by way of consensus.
Almost like a psychological gravity both of an equal but unobservable
entanglement.

So it stands to reason the only way to get a fringe reality to reconnect with
the rest of the herd is to start from consensus and work to re-entangle the
detached observations from there.

~~~
UnFleshedOne
"Observation" in quantum mechanics is not "people looking at stuff" though.

Here is a good video on quantum misconceptions [1]. Just ignore the part about
the boxes. "Nobody understands the Alice and Bob analogy" (Richard Feynman)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7v5NtV8v6I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7v5NtV8v6I)

------
arisAlexis
all of this said can also be true for any kind of community, even extrapolated
to religion, leftist ideas, fascism, fad diets.

There is nothing inherent in flat earthers, most communities outside of
academia (and sometimes inside it) that is not about the feeling of belonging
somewhere. It is stronger than truth and facts. Always.

------
haberman
[I'm deleting this, I don't think it is spurring constructive conversation]

~~~
danharaj
It's not a wicked problem. It takes very little effort to research and
conclude that the empirically established standard of medical care for
transgender people is to allow them to transition and allow them to integrate
into society as the gender they tell you they are. It takes very little effort
to discover that gender has not been and is not a binary in every single human
culture, either.

They are different. For a different reason. Flat earthers don't hurt people by
having a very wrong belief. TERFs want to deny transgender people their basic
human rights and largely succeeded for a great long time. That's injustice.

------
Maximus9000
> "And if it was just flat-earthers, I’d say fine, it’s harmless. But you’ve
> got anti-vaxxers and Men’s Rights Advocates and anti-global warming folks
> and TERFs and incels out there, all fueled by one central pivot point of
> humanity – namely, that it’s lonely being wrong."

It seems quite odd that he lumps "Mens rights advocates" in there. Are they
crazy?

~~~
phil248
Are you familiar with the men's rights movement? The term or concept of "men's
rights" could certainly be discussed in a neutral, non-crazy way. But the
actual movement as it exists today and the logic that commonly defines it is
absolutely as detached from reality as any of those other cult-like
ideologies.

~~~
leereeves
Do you have any specific examples of what you mean?

Because being angry that Cardi B is still welcome among the Hollywood and
Washington elite after admitting to drugging and robbing people (men,
specifically) doesn't seem crazy at all.

Nor does concern for child grooms (boys forced into marriage at 12 years old).

Or a divorced father upset that his children are being taken away by the
mother in violation of the custody agreement.

(Those are the top posts of r/mensrights right now.)

~~~
poloniculmov
You can see that they're always bashing women and feminism as the cause for
these problems, instead of actually trying to fix the issues.

The main difference between feminists and MRAs, is that feminists actually are
trying to solve their issues and MRAs bitch on the internet that women are
bad. They're doing absolutely nothing to solve the real issues that men are
suffering from.

~~~
leereeves
The second top post on r/feminism right now says:

"I was just going off on my mom about how all men are horrible"

~~~
poloniculmov
Did you actually read it? They're complaining about double standards in how
boys and girls are raised and how "boys will be boys" is shit.

~~~
leereeves
And "bitching on the internet that men are bad".

And you're excusing that behavior from feminists. There's a double standard
for you.

~~~
poloniculmov
Feminists actually do things to solve issues, they're not just bitching on the
internet.

All these "meninists" like /r/mensrights or AVoiceForMen and other toxic
communities only make it harder for men. Women are not the enemy.

~~~
leereeves
MRAs do things to solve issues too.

For example, when the Department of Education rescinded the guilty until
proven innocent policy. That was the work of men's rights groups.

But feminists fight everything MRAs try to do to solve these issues. They
complained when that policy changed. When MRAs tried to bring attention to
male victims of domestic violence, feminists claimed they were distracting
from female victims.

And you're absolutely right, women aren't the enemy. There are plenty of women
who support men's rights.

But there are also women who claim that men sitting comfortably are
"manspreading", that men speaking are "mansplaining", and who presume that
every man accused of sexual assault is guilty.

------
draw_down
The internet allows misfits to find a place where they can feel accepted. This
is the other side of the coin.

On a different note, being right is overrated anyway. Being wrong is a great
way to learn... if you're willing to accept it, of course.

