My personal irritation is having to put up with people who are buried in so many layers of cognitive dissonance that it is impossible to reason with them
People are people. Everyone is trapped in their own flesh prisons, a floating neural net supported by sugars and chemicals and amino acids. Their net is trained on the constant data of their lives, the lives of the people arounds them and the culture they are inculcated to. In short everyone's experience and knowledge of the world is different in mind boggling ways.
On top of that, everyone has a
schema, an ideological framework that sets how they interpret the world around them (
Robert Anton Wilson called these
Reality Tunnels) - it consists of a series of
heuristics - models that encapsulate something about reality that enable us to operate within the world. Because reality is enormously complex, those heuristics are often reduced down to rough approximations - predictions of how people will react in a given situation. Often, these are incorrect. These heuristics are informed by the training data of your life - your early experiences, the information you get from your environment.
Schema, also includes your moral foundations - that is often the kinds of moral ideology that you were conditioned on by your parents or caregivers and the location of your birth - but it also seems to have a genetic component, so that people's political allegiances can be predicted with some accuracy given only your genome. [In case you think I'm going on a tangent here - stick with me - I'm going somewhere].
Whenever you talk to someone, the words you use, the context in which they meet your words, the things going on in their heads is different, which means they will always connote different things. Every word you speak has a connotation - a set of inferences that will spark meanings and associations in your mind.
All of this means that communication is incredibly hard. Most of what you say will never be fully understood by the person you're talking to, as you mean it. It will also be filtered through these layers of schema that lie between your understanding and theirs.
Most often, people are talking past each other. Their starting points so far apart it means they are unable to inhabit the same mental space as the person you're talking to. If you want to see a great demonstration of this, look on Youtube for a video of Noam Chomsky in conversation with Michel Foucault - both of these highly intelligent men's starting points are so far apart that it makes substantive conversation very difficult because they cannot agree on even the most basic frame of reference.
Many times people cannot even see that the words they use mean different things, or that they are not talking with each other about the same thing.
and they always turn the conversation into an arguments that have nothing to do with the original discussion. I don't mean something simple like you saying something and then someone not understanding what you mean which could be solved with a simple explanation to help them understand.
Often, people try to use analogies in order to express their thoughts, and tangents arise because the other participant in the conversation cannot understand the analogy, or fails to engage in the spirit of the conversation.
I mean people whos only goal is to mindlessly judge you and your work with no proper knowledge of what you're talking about.
It's easy to misinterpret something, or assume a motive of the person you're talking to, or take or give offence to someone. People project their own fears and prejudices on other people, especially if they disagree. Usually disagreement is taken to mean other person belongs to "the other tribe" - the type of people your schema defines as "the bad people".
Things like tone also don't translate to the written word so well. Sometimes people can come across as rude or brusque or condescending if they use too many words, or too few, or they try and demonstrate their mental workings.
It always went like this: I said something that I thought about and asked for peoples thoughts, people got the wrong idea and very condescendingly said I'm not smart enough to talk about those things. I tell them that what their judging is not what I meant and that they should stop judging with no proper knowledge of what I mean. After that they get really defensive and flat-out admit they didn't even know what I was talking about and that I need to be a nicer person and not lash out to peoples criticisms. I then explained to them that they are not criticizing properly which they responded by treating me like a joke who just doesn't want people to critize his stuff.
Part of this is learning how to talk to other people, putting aside assertions, stop trying to control the direction of conversation and start asking questions and trying to understand others, rather than asking people to understand only you.
If you invest your ego in being right, it will upset you when people think you're wrong. Conversation can be a status game. It doesn't have to be.
I am not lying when I say some writing communities are filled with these clowns are they are some of the most annoying experiences I've ever had. They were so bad in-fact that they almost made me quit writing because at the time I thought every one trying to learn how to write was this cognitively dissonant. Just talking about these annoying experiences is making me irrationally upset.
In pretty much all internet communities you'll encounter differing opinions. Flame wars existed since the start of the internet. It's nothing to be afraid of. I used to hang around a great music community, years ago and there were enormous barnies - but once in a while really good things would emerge from them. Learning different people's perspectives, approaching quite contentious topics with an open mind - sometimes even changing your mind about stuff.
