Sharpe's Opinion
Monday, 9th Feb, 2009
I’ve been thinking along these lines recently, but Paul Graham says it better than me:
Which topics engage people’s identity depends on the people, not the topic. For example, a discussion about a battle that included citizens of one or more of the countries involved would probably degenerate into a political argument. But a discussion today about a battle that took place in the Bronze Age probably wouldn’t. No one would know what side to be on. So it’s not politics that’s the source of the trouble, but identity. When people say a discussion has degenerated into a religious war, what they really mean is that it has started to be driven mostly by people’s identities.
I wouldn’t so much use the term ‘identity’ as emotional investment. We become emotionally invested in our arguments and then we lose the ability to change our minds if the situation demands it. Religion is the ultimate emotional investment – once a person has dedicated years of their lives to a faith, they are emotionally invested in it and have no reason to eject it based on the ramblings of a random person on the internet. Such arguments online tend to be entirely pointless. Same goes for Mac/PC, Socialist/Capitalist, or Perl/Python (ask a geek)
Of course, any reason to link to xkcd is a good one…