Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
view the rest of the comments
"Sincere" doesnt seem right or relevant. and "counter argument" is a bit too adversarial for me. You'll get sucked into bad-faith tennis matches with flat earthers; which is just a waste of time.
So +1 unpopular - but it's not far off.
If you'd said . . . "you should consider a range of different hypotheses, grant them equal respect and try to gather (and assess) evidence in a way that is not biased for or against any of the hypotheses. You should then see which of the hypotheses seems most likely given the evidence."
Then i'd agree. And I'm not sure how unpopular it'd be. Science vs not-Science.
But if your hypotheses are: H0: A is true. H1: A is false. Then I don't see how you can be "sincere" about both if you literally believe A in the first place.
You probably do have to be open to the possibility of being wrong - so maybe the tough part is actually being a little insincere about H0. It's the evidence that should decide afterall.
The point I'm trying to get at is that if you can't lay out the counter-argument your opponent would make against your view in a way that they would agree with (steelmanning) then you're not debating in good-faith. It doesn't automatically mean you're wrong - it's possible to be right by accident or intuition too, but it does cast doubt on the quality of one's reasoning.
This thread is a good example of that. "I believe the sun will rise tomorrow" and "I need to breathe oxygen" are not good-faith counters to my argument. They're the opposite of that; strawmans. I'm perfectly willing to admit there are edge cases where this way of reasoning falls short (rocks are hard, fire is hot, water is wet ..) but I don't feel like that in any way refutes what is the essence of what I'm saying.
Personally I don't like the idea of debate as in words vs words, i prefer empiricism - set out theories and test against observable evidence. It's hard to do that in this case though.
But I must admit I do find the "sun will rise" argument hilarious as I think it is a very limited description of the relative movements of the sun and earth - and a clear example of personal bias vs considering alternatives impacting peoples ability to make a better description of what is going on. So yeah maybe it really does make your point.