this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
575 points (94.2% liked)

You Should Know

32600 readers
1 users here now

YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.

All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.



Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:

**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.



Partnered Communities:

You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.

Community Moderation

For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.

Credits

Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

EDIT: TL;DR: don't do this if you're trying to convince irrational people; pull their emotional strings instead. And for rational people, focus on logic reasoning and consistency with the observed results.

For rational people*, a better way to handle this would be:

  1. Showing logical flaws in their reasoning;
  2. Showing that their reasoning conflicts with the observed results;
  3. Showing that your own reasoning is logically neater;
  4. Showing that your reasoning fits the observed results.

Most [all?] things outside those four points are fallacious mush, making shit up, etc.

For points #1 and #3, it's damn useful to know basic informal fallacies. Things like appeal to authority, false dichotomy, non sequitur, etc. You don't even need to remember their names, as long as you can spot them in an argument (including yours, before you utter it) and say "wait a minute this is wrong".

Now. When dealing with irrational people, you're probably better off sticking to the middle of that pyramid, because even if you refute the central point... guess what, the moron will put it back in place using some insane [lack of] logic. In special, fallacies like appeal to emotion, appeal to consequences, ad hominem (more on that later), genetic fallacy (pretending that shit becomes truer/falser or more/less moral depending on who says it) is damn effective to convince those people, even if logically unsound.

Regarding ad hominem. A lot of people confuse it with insults, when both things are completely orthogonal. Ad hominem boils down to "this is false because of the person saying it"; you can do it in a non-insulting way, and you can insult without using ad hominem. (For example: "Alice, you think that the Sun is green? Goddammit you're fucking stupid, here, LOOK AT THE FUCKING SUN! And here's a spectrogram of the Sun's radiation! The only green thing here is your green-stained arse, you fucking cattle" is not ad hominem, even if rather colourful with the insults.)

*"[ir]rational people" in this context should be seen as solely shorthands for "people behaving [ir]rationally towards the subject being discussed". Those are not true categories of people, just a convenient abstraction.

[–] stevep@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mind you, regarding the sun being green, it's worth noting this observation from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wien%27s_displacement_law

The effective temperature of the Sun is 5778 Kelvin. Using Wien's law, one finds a peak emission per nanometer (of wavelength) at a wavelength of about 500 nm, in the green portion of the spectrum near the peak sensitivity of the human eye.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The Sun does emit a lot of cyanish green light, but the overall colour from the space is white, as it emits comparable amounts of light in the rest of the visible spectrum:

And, if talking about the colour of the sun as seen from Earth, it should be a yellowish orange (as the atmospheres filters some higher frequency light).

I could've used purple in the example too. Dunno why I decided for green.

[–] b3nsn0w@pricefield.org 2 points 1 year ago

so the sun is purple but our eyes are flawed and therefore we see it as white when directly watching it and yellow when we look at it through the atmosphere

[–] Brochetudo@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Che, es verdad, pero ya ya resuelvo esto con un TL;DR. (edit: hecho)