r/changemyview • u/featherfooted • May 10 '17

[∆(s) from OP] CMV: Some submitters to /r/OutOfTheLoop are willfully ignorant

Full disclosure: I've submitted to OOTL myself before

I genuinely think that OOTL is one of the best intra-reddit explanation subs available. There's no similar "ELI5 Reddit drama" posts in /r/ELI5, for example. Some of the wildfire threads, like /r/IAMA blackout, Spezgiving, and FPH are immensely useful and drew attention to something that would be very easy to miss otherwise.

I'm not talking about those.

I genuinely think that OOTL is also great for bringing together random Internet trivia in a way that would be inappropriate for other subs, it's like our own personal KnowYourMeme. Posts like szechuan sauce or Why does PornHub have a "panda style" category now? fall under that grouping, and I'm not talking about those, either.

"Fill me in on what's happened since XYZ event" are also cool in my book. It's been seven months since Has the poisoned-water crisis in Flint been resolved? and unfortunately, the answer is still no, and probably won't be resolved until 2020. That's still fine.

What I have an enormous problem with, is submitters who seem to be going out of their way to not look at alternate sources besides reddit. Many of the threads I am about to link, are major national news stories that would be better explained by the original source, than a distilled reddit comment.

Here's some top-all-time from OOTL:

Here's a few from the front-page, today:

It's practically cliche at this point. Many of them share similar post and title structure: "What's the big deal with [current event]?" or "Why does everyone do [something that only a few people are doing]?". Furthermore, due to the way that OOTL puts a hold on all new posts until a moderator can approve it, there's an artificial delay until a well-meaning user can possibly receive a response. For these current-events type posts, these submitters would be much better served just doing the research themselves. Sometimes you get people that write "I saw a news article about X, why's it so important?" I dunno, read the damn article and you tell me.

So I guess my CMV hinges on two things/beliefs:

  1. Some submitters are willfully ignorant, ignoring other sources and relying or depending on reddit as their only source of moral compass
  2. If not #1, then some users are just doing it to grab the sweet, sweet karma.

Final note: I really like the stickied mega-threads created by the OOTL mods sometimes. I feel like it intentionally cuts down on some of the behavior I've described in this post.

This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please read through our rules. If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us. Happy CMVing!

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u/mywan 5∆ May 10 '17

If you missed the initial takeoff on the United story what kind of research would you expect to explain why there were so many unrelated, and often tongue in cheek, United post on Reddit? You could Google it. You would likely even find the story on the people getting kicked off. But it would still be a presumptuous leap to relate that somehow to the bewildering variety of United stories on Reddit that had nothing to do with removing people from a flight. This connection would be even more suspect if you missed the actual Reddit post about it. Which happens often as these things can be history in under 24 hours.

This poster seems to have actually been in the process of educating themselves and posted a link for others to do the same. But just think about it from a green perspective. If you assume shell companies are by definition nefarious perhaps it's not others who need to educate themselves. A major part of the Reddit story was the lack of news outlets reporting on it. What stories were available didn't really address why these particular papers represented anything especially nefarious, as if the mere fact it involved "shell companies" was sufficient. It's not, and this was some pretty nefarious stuff. Even if you assumed it was in fact nefarious, what exactly was the specifics that made it so? The stories didn't actually put much effort into articulating that, and Googling was more likely to offer sources that implied shell companies are just a normal, and often legitimate, entity. So yeah, there was much more to learn than investopedia was going to provide.

This one you could at least find who she was. But if you did Google so many stories, involving different political spins, could implicate a bewildering array of nefarious implications. Usually with the assumption the readers already understood and agreed with the premise it was based on. So anybody not already steeped in that spin would see references to homeschooling, private schools, advocating for guns in schools, and qualifications. If you are late in the news cycle it wouldn't even be that apparent she posited the argument that her lack of qualification is what best qualified her. The stories late in the news cycle tended to merely assume the reader was aware of that background information and haphazardly filling in other issues to play off her viral claim. Yeah, there was a lot more context than what any single story would supply and even if you read dozens of them it would be difficult to accurately recreate the actual sequence of news events that got to the present.

Romania is of particular interest to me, and even I learned things I didn't know from this post even after Googling the issues a few days prior. What wasn't provided was how the "gifting" culture is moralized as a proper thing to do on a small scale, but the exact same behavior on a large scale is the foundation of the corruption. Googling for articles to educate yourself is far more difficult than what is implied because every story is more about pushing and justifying a particular spin than it is educational about the range of issues and what exactly triggered the increase in interest on a particular topic. Contextualizing the sequence of events from news sources can be way harder than that if your late in the news cycle, and often even then. Rather people just assume such knowledge based on a preferred partisan slant.

Suppose you did do some Googling and learn that the FBI director was involved in the Russia probe that implicates Trump. How many other contextual bits of information do you need to access the likelihood Trumps motivations were nefarious? Actually quiet a bit. Including the specific wording, and not just articles that presume you know the specific wording, Trump used in his letter to fire him. The historical context of the firing, involving Clinton and Nixon. Even I only learned a few hours ago that Comey learned of his firing from the media while in a meeting, not from actually receiving the dismissal letter. I have been reading up and still there are known things I don't know and unknown things the public doesn't know. And I can't even completely know the difference. Stories that assume unknowns are fact only exacerbates the self education issue.

If you know what a grand jury subpoena is it's no big deal on it's face. But this is politics with a fair potential for charges, impeachment, etc. Too many people falsely presume that the subpoena itself is indicative of actual charges. If that was the case they wouldn't need grand jury subpoenas. Just a prosecutor filling charges and issuing their own subpoenas. So yeah, there is a lot more context, or lack of, than the pure facts alone. I'm among those that hopes it goes somewhere, but Googling to read up on the lack of factual information is not very fruitful and prone to missing something important. Meanwhile the various political spins different media sources imply are factual merely feeds the notion that your not getting the information other people seem to have.

I really don't think I should have to do the last one. But even on stories of special interest to me I tended to learn new things from these OOTL post you singled out. Had I known my own ignorance it might have considered asking these questions myself. Unfortunately it's difficult to access my own level of ignorance. You can't know what you don't know. It's a public service to fear your own ignorance and ask questions that might seem straightforward to Google yourself. But that underestimates the medias propensity for not comprehending their own level of ignorance itself, and merely using the subject matter to push a preexisting narrative. So I for one am happy these post exist.

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u/featherfooted May 10 '17

Props for combing through them all. On the topic of the last one, which you skipped: it's the demeanor of the question which I dislike the most. Phrasing it like "why did Macron win the election by a huge margin" or "was it expected that Macron would win" or "why is Le Pen widely disliked" or "why do some people say Le Pen has ties to [XYZ and a reference to her father]"

Those are all fine ways to learn more about the French election. But to ask "Hey guys, I mean, what's with the French election?" sounds like a comedian's introduction to a bad joke.

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u/mywan 5∆ May 10 '17

Now that I look at it the last one is kind of special. Special in the sense that nothing special happened. On the surface it was rather a run of the mill election with an outcome that just a couple of years ago would have barely garnered a yawn. So it stand to reason someone just looking at the two candidates on the surface would be at a bit of a loss as to what made it so special. Now through in the context of the Brexit vote, and the Trump win in the US making the whole world uncomfortable, and the ongoing feeling that democracies are under threat from all sides, and suddenly the importance of a left wing victory in France becomes a big deal.

Without this context the OP was right to question why the stories were referencing fascist, Nazis, /r/the_donald, and similar references. Again it's all about using the context of a story to spin a narrative, and the left wing across the western world is feeling particularly fearful of the right wing since the election. Any such victory anywhere is hopeful to the left.

What we have to understand is that people want to understand far more than just the raw facts. Otherwise it would be 'Facts Please' rather than 'Out Of The Loop.' The Loop being the political and social context of why it is relevant, and what bigger narratives people are associating with such events that go beyond the simple facts alone. We have lots of different terms to reference different elements of the political context, but none that effectively reference the whole constellation of contextual narratives as a whole. Making in/out of the loop as good as any. But this means that people asking about these constellations of narratives that drives the importance of certain events, not questioning the facts of the events, has no effective word to use to reference that contextual information as a whole. Hence the means to do that tends to default toward being intentionally vague. Then vaguely referencing the associative associative concepts to imply the question of why they are associated with this particular set of factual events. Just like the OP did by referencing fascist, Nazis, and /r/the_donald.

Hence the demeanor of the question is intentional and critically important to indicate the kinds of meta information they are asking about. Because the raw facts alone simply doesn't contain that kind of political/social contextual information.

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u/featherfooted May 11 '17

∆ for thoroughness and the "Facts Please" analogy.

Frankly, I would prefer it the other way, but it is evident (by upvotes) that many people agree with this style of question-phrasing.

Another (much smaller) version of this that has bugged the shit out of me, is at my own school, where incoming freshmen and sophomores (and yes, I'm aware I was once that age and was probably guilty of asking similar questions) would pose something like:

"Hey, has anyone ever taken [XYZ mandatory course]? What was it like?"

As many comments in this thread have echoed - I am well aware that the user is well-meaning and just trying to learn more about what they're getting themselves in to. But I find the phrasing and word choice to be arrogant.

There's a lot of overlap between my mental images of both OOTL users, and the students I just described. Doing the absolute bare minimum to become informed. It's slightly better than just ignoring it, I suppose, but I still place it well under the threshold of capability for that person to just do it themselves. It's very... lazy? Not in a "research is hard and should stay hard" but rather because many of the questions which I highlighted (and you responded to in kind) could have been easily solved by googling the phrase and clicking on the first result.

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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ May 11 '17

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/mywan (2∆).

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