Social Dynamics Of Criticism

I’ve recently received some constructive criticism from someone new about the ideas I’ve espoused with regards to philosophy. While I won’t go into the specifics, it did make me think about the nature of that kind of criticism and how those interactions go. In particular, there was a dynamic that I picked up on that I thought was quite interesting. When she gave me criticism, she spoke to me in a respectful and friendly manner, so I have no complaints there. However, it did make me realize that nowadays, it’s quite rare for me to receive that kind of criticism, which I do mind. I talk frequently with one of my friends about political philosophy where we often disagree, but I realized that outside of the context of close friends, these fundamental disagreements don’t occur often.

When I talked to her, I felt an intense pressure to agree with at least some of what she was saying. I wouldn’t feel that pressure if someone was talking to me in a more harsh and condescending manner. I actually think that the less aggressive way she presented her ideas put more pressure on me to agree in some respect, because otherwise I convey the message that she wasted her time talking to me. However, I think this is a very dangerous way for discussions to go, because agreeing for that reason would essentially be conformity to please someone else, and if that’s why you change your mind, I think it’s hard to argue that you’ve learned anything, since that pressure exists completely separately from the argument being made.

When I talked with her, I said that I agreed with some of her criticism, but when I thought about it on my own, I realized that I really don’t agree! Again, the specifics are not that important, but I do think I was motivated to agree by social pressure despite the kind presentation. I think this is a danger with all but close friends, because with close friends, I’m not worried that I’m wasting their time by disagreeing with them. It seems there are many human mechanisms that try to obscure our path to knowledge!

I’ve talked already about the fallibility of our senses, so I won’t go into that again. But I do think that one of the reasons that I felt that pressure to agree was that these kinds of conversations do not occur often anymore. Political polarization comes to mind, but I think this sort of exclusion can come with many different opinions, as long as people place value on them. People have the opportunity to hear from an innumerable number of perspectives through the internet and social media, but I’m not so sure that people are designed to experience that many opinions. Many refer to social media as an echo chamber, and it certainly can be, but it is often also a place of furious argumentation! I think these constant arguments and discussion wars wear people down, and it really doesn’t help that most social media is designed in a way that favors unintellectual and fallacious arguments. A simple example is the character limit, making it so that long and complicated arguments are very difficult to present.

I think that this confusing mix of reasonable and unreasonable arguments might be too complicated for some people to handle, so they try to make the situation easier to process by putting everyone on teams and dismissing or approving based on which team someone is on. This is where social media truly becomes an echo chamber, when people voluntarily and instantaneously dismiss arguments that they perceive as being from a different team or find a way to block all of those people from their feed. Somewhere along the process, they also become incredibly sensitive and cannot handle having their opinions violated.

Thinking of people as being part of groups is certainly a simpler way of identifying people, but personally, I think that we should do our absolute best to think of people as individuals when we have the chance. If we do, we can embrace the fact that each one of us is very complicated, and we can’t be summarized through allegiance to one, or even a few groups. It seems I’ve run out of space, so I’ll be sure to talk about this more in the future.