I’ve personally spent a decent amount of time in vegan and vegan debate subreddits, so I could probably offer a bit of insight. My general approach goal was to be helpful and non-judgemental as possible, but to also be assertive. There are a few caveats in no particular order:
If a post hits r/all, you get a lot of mean and rude people, as well as trolls. Suffering them gets draining. It’s basically the cashier “it’s not ringing up so it’s free?” joke equivalent, but worse since it’s not even in good faith. There’s only so many times you can read “loll bacon” without getting a little depressed about humanity.
For those that aren’t trolling, many are highly misinformed. It can be challenging to manage their experience and present information in a way that doesn’t bruise their ego a little. I’ve slowly learned to get better at this, but it’s a process.
Both people who were helpful and those who were rude helped me transition to veganism. The “rude” vegans often raised cognitive dissonance the most and really forced me to think things through myself. I’m sure there are plenty of people who might not respond in this way, but it did help me, and a lot of other vegans have said the same.
Being vegan can be kinda depressing. When the large majority of society performs actions that you believe to be immoral, and you still have to integrate, it starts to tear at you a little. Sometimes it’s just too much to put up with, and a mean little joke at someone else’s expense slips out. That’s why we had places specifically for that sort of venting. But then people (usually with an agenda) would point to those places, and use them as examples, and you get the MEAN VEGAN stereotype.
I find the best way is to have an ongoing list of recommendations that people make. I just write whatever the suggestion was down real quick on my phone, then every now and again I’ll look them all up to see if there’s anything I think I’ll enjoy.
So Instead, one person picks 1000 apples, gives them all to the property owner, and then receives enough money to buy 50 apples, yet you’d prefer that over having to split the 1000 apples evenly.
I think there’s also an element of the hit tracks often being a bit more formulaic. There’s a big component of familiarity in music that makes it appealing, so people might not appreciate the more experimental tracks on an album until they’ve heard them a few times.
You can have a rational basis for a belief without empirical evidence (Russell’s teapot, for example). The reason you’d want to do that is to simplify the model of reality you’re working with in order to reduce the number of contingencies you need to account for.
Right, but lacking any physical evidence in either direction, is it not reasonable to then turn to purely rational explanations if we want to arrive at some sort of belief?
Sure, but the compatibilist view is, in my understanding, that determinism is true, but we still have free will. The mind is so complex its deterministic function can’t be fully predicted, so the outcome of particular inputs over any meaningful duration cannot be computed. Thus actual free will and the illusion of free are essentially functionally identical.
Any claim can be inverted, so lacking evidence in either direction, this applies to the inverse as well.
I personally prefer more psychologically rooted arguments that lean towards at least compatibilism. If a belief in free will, regardless of the actual fact, is sufficient to affect one’s actions, is that not evidence against hard determinism?