One of the things the internet seems to be doing is a sort of Peter Principle sorting for attention grabbing arguments. People are finding the level of discourse that they feel they can contribute to. This form of arguing winds up higher in the perceived/tacit cost:benefit tradeoff than most productive activity because of the perfect tuning of the difficulty curve, like video games.
Seems like a cool insight here, but I've not quite managed to parse it. Best guess at what's meant: the more at stake / more people care about some issue, the more skilled the arguers that people pay attention to in that space. This is painful because arguing right at the frontier of your ability does not often give cathartic opinion shifts
I mean that the reason people find internet arguments compelling is partially that they don't notice how they are being filtered towards exactly the level of discourse that hooks into their brain. Simply, people who want to argue about a particular aspect of politics unsurprisingly wind up on forums and groups dedicated to that. That mind sound so mundane as to be pointless, but the perncious aspect is not in any particular instance but on how this shaped perception over time. We like things we feel we are good at,... (read more)