> On the occasion he made a very poor analysis of political and social situation of an African country
Cultural sidenote:
I do the same (although in personal conversation; I would obviously never do that on Youtube). I am very happy to espouse on topics I have little knowledge of, as did most of the community I spent time in when I was in grad school. This is looked down upon in most mainstream cultures, but it's actually very helpful. If I espouse something incorrect, someone can correct me. I learn something. It's a form of constructive / interactive learning which I find hyper-productive, and we did that all the time.
It's also helpful in social situations. The point isn't to convince you of something, so much as to communicate the state of my brain to you. That makes it much easier for us to debug who is wrong where.
Of course, that's completely incompatible with:
> he got very angry at me
Conversations got heated but never angry. There's a distinction:
What I struggle with is that in mainstream Western culture, this mode of communication comes off as arrogant, and conveys many subtexts which I don't want to convey. Part of that is that we expressed too much confidence when making those statements, but that's maybe 10% of the problem; even expressed with modesty, it mostly breaks in mainstream Western culture (and 90% of the other cultures I've been in; parts of Eastern Europe tolerate this a little bit better).
The problem with this approach, which yes can be productive, relies on cases of extremely high complexity. I had a friend who acted this way all the time, but sometimes all I could answer was "You need to read a few books", and then he thought I was the arrogant one, didn't read any book, and continued promoting his false, absurd and nazi-friendly ideas. Not a friend anymore...
When it came with specific book recommendations, it was extremely helpful in some cases (and in a few others, I didn't have time to read the books, so I shut up until such time will come).
yeah, i agree that that's a very productive mode. if i'm wrong about something, i'd much rather be corrected because i said what i thought instead of remaining wrong because i kept my mouth shut. it's embarrassing but worthwhile to realize how wrong i was
a big part of the problem is the nature of the youtube medium, which is effectively a 10-minute monologue desperately begging for mass attention. if it turns out something you said was wrong, you can't go back later and add a correction in the middle of the video. the best you can do is add a pinned comment or delete the erroneous video. people correcting you in the comments will only ever be seen by a tiny fraction of viewers. previously there was an option to add a "card" that overlaid the video at a given timepoint with text, but youtube removed that some years ago
Cultural sidenote:
I do the same (although in personal conversation; I would obviously never do that on Youtube). I am very happy to espouse on topics I have little knowledge of, as did most of the community I spent time in when I was in grad school. This is looked down upon in most mainstream cultures, but it's actually very helpful. If I espouse something incorrect, someone can correct me. I learn something. It's a form of constructive / interactive learning which I find hyper-productive, and we did that all the time.
It's also helpful in social situations. The point isn't to convince you of something, so much as to communicate the state of my brain to you. That makes it much easier for us to debug who is wrong where.
Of course, that's completely incompatible with:
> he got very angry at me
Conversations got heated but never angry. There's a distinction:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/opinion/sunday/kids-would...
What I struggle with is that in mainstream Western culture, this mode of communication comes off as arrogant, and conveys many subtexts which I don't want to convey. Part of that is that we expressed too much confidence when making those statements, but that's maybe 10% of the problem; even expressed with modesty, it mostly breaks in mainstream Western culture (and 90% of the other cultures I've been in; parts of Eastern Europe tolerate this a little bit better).