Ask Lemmy

When I can argue with someone rational who is willing to change their mind or has a reason for disagreeing with my or the foundations of my argument such that they can explain where I’ve made a mistake, I like arguing.

It’s even fun when you argue with rational people about irrational things for the fun of just pushing the limits of understanding. Like trying to debate ontological nihilism purely for the pain of trying to understand it.

However, I do not like arguing with people who are irrational, because there’s no point, and I know it, but I really feel like maybe if I just said something right they’d start believing in evidence.

It is also just very difficult to explain certain things to people who don’t understand the foundations of your reasoning.

There’s a saying that to a mathematician there are only two kinds of problems: impossible and trivial. When you’ve thought a lot about something, many foundational concepts seem trivial to you but not to outsiders. It’s very difficult to branch this gap in knowledge.

For example I had an argument about how the undecidability of the busy beaver numbers seem to disprove solipsism because something had to do the work to find them but it wasn’t me, so something other than me must exist for those few numbers we’ve calculated so far to be at my fingertips.

This argument means nothing to people who don’t know what undecidability means, and it is incredibly difficult (for me at least) to try and defend that proving something is “undecidable” in the first place is even possible to someone who’s never seen/done a formal math proof.