"Incidentally, Lemmy would have had this comment removed by a moderator because “no politics.”
And people actually think that’s great because they don’t want to deal with the unpleasantness of reality; they just want to be entertained - see here."
The first sentence is false, because your comment is on Lemmy and not removed.
The second sentence is false, because people on Lemmy do want to deal with unpleasantness, and don’t just want to be entertained - as proven by the engagement in this post and many others.
The claim “The ‘no politics’ rule is too arbitrary” is only hinted at in your comment - if you had instead commented this sentence initially, you probably wouldn’t be downvoted as much. Although it would be a totally off-topic comment for this post. If this is what you intended to communicate, you did not communicate it well.
So now that I know what you’re trying to communicate, I can say that yes, I agree with you that “no politics” is a very arbitrary rule. However, that does not automatically make your other claims true (which we can tell by the fact that your other claims are demonstrably false).
Is it maybe possible that you don’t understand how federation works? And possibly that you’re posting these comments from a non-Lemmy service, which is cross-posting to Lemmy without you realizing it? This might explain the confusion.
So you’re saying that it’s great that athletes are banned from the Olympics if they dare to make a political statement? That the Fediverse should give its moderators the same power as the IOC to protect unpopular opinions from being spread too widely - on the grounds that it should only be fun and games?
No, I am saying nothing about the Olympics and its stance on political statements. I am completely uninterested in anything about the Olympics right now. I am interested only in your wrong statement, and in helping you to see how your belief is wrong.
All of my claims pertain exactly to one specific thing: your claim that “people don’t want to deal with the unpleasantness of reality, they just want to be entertained”, specifically that you seem to say this is prominent on Lemmy.
That claim, you must now admit, for the reasons I have previously explained, is wrong. Don’t you agree?
Because all over Lemmy, I see posts about unpleasant political realities. Genocide, child abuse, political murders, corruption. These are some of the most popular and discussed things on Lemmy.
Yes, there are a few small communities where politics is forbidden, but to say that this is the general case for Lemmy is clearly inaccurate, don’t you think?
My statement refers to the fact that the Lemmy post I linked to has a lot of upvotes by Lemmy standards. From this, I conclude that the statement “no politics in all major comms is a good thing” is a popular opinion around these parts. Well, I disagree, because I am a fan of how this Swiss television commentator so courageously shows people how absurd such a rule is. This guy is going to lose his livelihood for this.
So I think it’s worth a few downvotes to point out to people here how fatal it is to believe that applying the same “no politics” rule would lead to a different outcome than what the Olympic Committee is doing when they campaign to get this heroic Swiss commentator fired.
I can’t understand how someone can have so little capacity for abstraction that they can’t comprehend this.
Okay, I understand what you’re saying, and the funny thing is that I totally agree with you on your opinion about no politics rules. I think no politics rules are silly and too broad, too.
So, knowing that we agree on that, let’s try to be precise here, because I think you still have some misguided views. Particularly :
“From this, I conclude that the statement “no politics in all major comms is a good thing” is a popular opinion around these parts.”
From what I can tell, you’re drawing that conclusion based on one post you saw with about 300 upvotes. This is a really flawed line of reasoning. Have you ever studied statistics or cognitive biases? I would really recommend it, because both of these areas show how easily the human mind can look at one recent or mentally prominent data point and fallaciously extrapolate a too-general conclusion from it. Lemmy has many users with many contradicting views, because we are all different people. Yes, there is a group of Lemmy users that wants to see less politics. But for you to conclude from the existence of that group that it is a dominant, or even popular opinion, is a really serious logical error. In fact, it is an issue with abstraction, exactly like you said. You need to be able to conceive of the community in the abstract, not from one single concrete post before your eyes.
Let’s look at an actual sample of meaningful, multiple data points: the top posts of the last year.
Of the 22 posts on this page, 13 (more than half) of them are political, and many of them deal with unpleasant realities. The other posts are largely about the growth of the Fediverse, which is itself a politically charged topic to most users. From this, it seems clear to me that Lemmy is generally a highly political environment that actually enjoys talking about unpleasant realities.
I know that you had a few direct personal experiences that say otherwise, but this is why the capacity for abstraction aided by statistical thinking is so important.
I don’t think we really have anything to discuss. But it’s remarkable how hard you’re trying to stick to your point of view. Still, this is getting us nowhere.
I’m just trying to help you out, you have a misunderstanding that is causing you frustration, and in fact that frustration is not based in reality. It’s sad to see someone be upset about Lemmy being against being political, when Lemmy is extremely in favor of being political. You do inhabit the kind of community you seek, but your cognitive bias is preventing you from seeing that, and so you are upset for no reason.
I’ll just try one more thing. If you look at the top 10 communities, https://discuss.tchncs.de/communities?listingType=All&sort=TopMonth&page=1, you’ll see that only 3 of them have rules against politics. This means that of those user activity counts, 67.7% of all activity has been in communities with zero rules against politics.
I know you want to be upset about this, and I know it’s tempting to wallow in righteous indignation. You need to decide if you’d rather do that or open your eyes to the fact that you’re already in a community which agrees with your stance on no politics rules. I am presenting solid reasoning with multiple data points comprising a hundred thousand users worth of activity, all you do is trot out the same post with 300 upvotes. Take a step back from your righteous indignation for a moment and consider that you may be wrong, and if you really want what you say you do, you should actually be happy at the prospect of that.
I say that it could hardly be more arbitrary than “no politics.” Nothing else.
No, you say
"Incidentally, Lemmy would have had this comment removed by a moderator because “no politics.”
And people actually think that’s great because they don’t want to deal with the unpleasantness of reality; they just want to be entertained - see here."
The first sentence is false, because your comment is on Lemmy and not removed.
The second sentence is false, because people on Lemmy do want to deal with unpleasantness, and don’t just want to be entertained - as proven by the engagement in this post and many others.
The claim “The ‘no politics’ rule is too arbitrary” is only hinted at in your comment - if you had instead commented this sentence initially, you probably wouldn’t be downvoted as much. Although it would be a totally off-topic comment for this post. If this is what you intended to communicate, you did not communicate it well.
So now that I know what you’re trying to communicate, I can say that yes, I agree with you that “no politics” is a very arbitrary rule. However, that does not automatically make your other claims true (which we can tell by the fact that your other claims are demonstrably false).
Is it maybe possible that you don’t understand how federation works? And possibly that you’re posting these comments from a non-Lemmy service, which is cross-posting to Lemmy without you realizing it? This might explain the confusion.
So you’re saying that it’s great that athletes are banned from the Olympics if they dare to make a political statement? That the Fediverse should give its moderators the same power as the IOC to protect unpopular opinions from being spread too widely - on the grounds that it should only be fun and games?
No, I am saying nothing about the Olympics and its stance on political statements. I am completely uninterested in anything about the Olympics right now. I am interested only in your wrong statement, and in helping you to see how your belief is wrong.
All of my claims pertain exactly to one specific thing: your claim that “people don’t want to deal with the unpleasantness of reality, they just want to be entertained”, specifically that you seem to say this is prominent on Lemmy.
That claim, you must now admit, for the reasons I have previously explained, is wrong. Don’t you agree?
Because all over Lemmy, I see posts about unpleasant political realities. Genocide, child abuse, political murders, corruption. These are some of the most popular and discussed things on Lemmy.
Yes, there are a few small communities where politics is forbidden, but to say that this is the general case for Lemmy is clearly inaccurate, don’t you think?
My statement refers to the fact that the Lemmy post I linked to has a lot of upvotes by Lemmy standards. From this, I conclude that the statement “no politics in all major comms is a good thing” is a popular opinion around these parts. Well, I disagree, because I am a fan of how this Swiss television commentator so courageously shows people how absurd such a rule is. This guy is going to lose his livelihood for this.
So I think it’s worth a few downvotes to point out to people here how fatal it is to believe that applying the same “no politics” rule would lead to a different outcome than what the Olympic Committee is doing when they campaign to get this heroic Swiss commentator fired.
I can’t understand how someone can have so little capacity for abstraction that they can’t comprehend this.
Okay, I understand what you’re saying, and the funny thing is that I totally agree with you on your opinion about no politics rules. I think no politics rules are silly and too broad, too.
So, knowing that we agree on that, let’s try to be precise here, because I think you still have some misguided views. Particularly :
“From this, I conclude that the statement “no politics in all major comms is a good thing” is a popular opinion around these parts.”
From what I can tell, you’re drawing that conclusion based on one post you saw with about 300 upvotes. This is a really flawed line of reasoning. Have you ever studied statistics or cognitive biases? I would really recommend it, because both of these areas show how easily the human mind can look at one recent or mentally prominent data point and fallaciously extrapolate a too-general conclusion from it. Lemmy has many users with many contradicting views, because we are all different people. Yes, there is a group of Lemmy users that wants to see less politics. But for you to conclude from the existence of that group that it is a dominant, or even popular opinion, is a really serious logical error. In fact, it is an issue with abstraction, exactly like you said. You need to be able to conceive of the community in the abstract, not from one single concrete post before your eyes.
Let’s look at an actual sample of meaningful, multiple data points: the top posts of the last year.
https://discuss.tchncs.de/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&sort=TopYear
Of the 22 posts on this page, 13 (more than half) of them are political, and many of them deal with unpleasant realities. The other posts are largely about the growth of the Fediverse, which is itself a politically charged topic to most users. From this, it seems clear to me that Lemmy is generally a highly political environment that actually enjoys talking about unpleasant realities.
I know that you had a few direct personal experiences that say otherwise, but this is why the capacity for abstraction aided by statistical thinking is so important.
I don’t think we really have anything to discuss. But it’s remarkable how hard you’re trying to stick to your point of view. Still, this is getting us nowhere.
I’m just trying to help you out, you have a misunderstanding that is causing you frustration, and in fact that frustration is not based in reality. It’s sad to see someone be upset about Lemmy being against being political, when Lemmy is extremely in favor of being political. You do inhabit the kind of community you seek, but your cognitive bias is preventing you from seeing that, and so you are upset for no reason.
I’ll just try one more thing. If you look at the top 10 communities, https://discuss.tchncs.de/communities?listingType=All&sort=TopMonth&page=1, you’ll see that only 3 of them have rules against politics. This means that of those user activity counts, 67.7% of all activity has been in communities with zero rules against politics.
I know you want to be upset about this, and I know it’s tempting to wallow in righteous indignation. You need to decide if you’d rather do that or open your eyes to the fact that you’re already in a community which agrees with your stance on no politics rules. I am presenting solid reasoning with multiple data points comprising a hundred thousand users worth of activity, all you do is trot out the same post with 300 upvotes. Take a step back from your righteous indignation for a moment and consider that you may be wrong, and if you really want what you say you do, you should actually be happy at the prospect of that.