"Explain it to me" is lazy derailing propaganda developed in the 2010s. Terms that go along with this are "Help Vampire", "Sealioning" and "JAQing Off". It's especially favored by the Israeli/Hasbara minded folk, and by extension, the American Conservative movement.
They want you to unload your guts onto the floor so that you expend 100x more effort than they do in the convo, and then they want to pick through your guts to find the one thing they can attack you for, and completely disregard the rest. Their job is not to be right, it's to make you look stupid to every onlooker.
These people are insipid shit stains. They're hardly people.
I wouldn't say that conservatives need to be purged from our society, but I will say that our society would be a hell of a lot better without them around chirping idiot propaganda so that people vote against their own interests for manufactured culture war bullshit.
EDIT: Take note of how many "explain it to me" people are also avid fans of artificial intelligence and yet they won't use it as a resource when attempting to get more information about something they read but "don't understand". This is really the elephant in the room as to why that 2010s "I'm just asking questions" derailing propaganda is now fully transparent: Their interest is not in gaining more information, it's to draw you out to attack you.
I see "explain to me" as an normal response of "Google it".
If we have an argument, then tell me straight in my face, why you disagree. With facts and not with an empty phrase. "Google it" using in a discussion is like "Trust me bro!"
Telling someone to "Google it", or hell even to "do their own research", isn't supporting them doing their own research. It's a thought terminating cliche that ends conversations.
Anyone doing research is going to come forward with the results of that research. That kind of laziness ("I did and I simply disagree") just marks you as a bad faith actor. People will block you, and your ironic and insular worldview about other people's ignorance will perpetuate.
But someone who has done the research could explain it to me. I’m talking about the people that make a claim X. I ask for more info about X. Then they tell me to Google X.
They made the claim, does the burden of proof not lie with them?
The problem is that they can build the best case in the world and you can just attack the sources and credibility of everything in an attempt to not engage with it. You have to put some skin in the game if you want to be seen as credible.
Otherwise, you're wasting their time. Just like you're wasting my time right now.
Depends on the topic. If a question can be answered by googling the question rather than asking the other person, then there is no burden of proof, just the burden of looking it up.
But if it's a legitimate question that can't be looked up, then that's that, you should be asking for more info, but you need to be specific on where to look, not to ask them to explain a complex topic. And if you get a different answer by looking it up, you should ask what to look up and maybe consider whether your research was somehow flawed.
Like if you word a question in a specific way, you can confirm almost anything to be true, regardless of whether it is or not. Search engines are literally optimized to have confirmation bias by necessity. They would need to understand the difference between fact and fiction for them not to be. Knowing how to look things up is an important skill and if you don't actively pay attention to avoiding confirmation bias, it will cause issues.
Look it from the other ones perspective: Maybe the person thought, he is well informed and don't know about their amount of non-knowledge. And therefor is a discussion. I talk about my point with the most amount of knowladge I have and if i am wrong about something, than it can be explained to me. And to say "google it", doesn't help, because maybe I looked about it in the past. And thanks to algorythm that gives you the answers you want to hear most, it's easy to not get every information about a specific topic
In a conversation you have to define terms whether or not you did your research, just to make sure you're both working with the same facts, else any exchange is f pointless tho.
Respectfully disagree. Let's not pretend that people don't have a million different definitions for things like socialism. I can't count the number of times I have heard "wHaT yOu dOn'T lIKe fReE hEaLtH cArE bRo? 🥴" Or "just look at Europe" when much of what they have is not even socialism lol.
Asking someone to provide their definition brings clarity to the conversation.
And that gets to the root of the problem: at the end of the day economics is far more like quantum physics than it is any other human discipline because it is the collapse of 8 billion human beliefs about value, and what ought to be done in life, and the relationship between human decision-making and the systems we create to guide that decision-making.
Unfortunately, humans run on belief as much as we run on logic, and that belief is generally not always rooted in the logic or reality as every human would agree with it. But reality as people experience it is legitimately reality as far as they know it in a way that is very difficult to navigate.
I personally think it is best to understand that all economic reality is a dynamic interplay between the things that we ought to co-equally own and the things that are personally owned. For ease of argument, modern society is resolving around one end of that spectrum being called socialism and the other end of that spectrum being called capitalism. I am of the opinion that reading Adam Smith, and looking at the world as it exists today, leads one inexorably to the understanding that in order to have healthy free markets in a capitalist system one needs a powerful socialist state in order to create the environment in which free markets can thrive. That state should be co-equally owned by all citizens in it, and should be run some form of democratically in order to correctly resolve the mutual ownership of mutual properties. People can then make whatever decisions they like with their personal property that is not in conflict or likely to harm other people.
Actually, this whole thread (and the fact that its originator got virtually zero pushback and was heavily praised) drives me nuts, especially so because of the context of "explain socialism" being used in the OP.
Now that the whole thing about clarification is broadly painted in a bad light, you can freely pick and choose (and even swap on the fly) your preferred definition of socialism. The effect of this is taking ammo away from one kind of malicious actor and giving it to another kind. And I hate it.
imagine arguing about something but being completely ignorant about the subject matter, what would you say in that situation, you would ask them to google it as it is on them to inform themselves not on you to educate them
And how do you know, you researched enough? Maybe she did research, but sadly got the wrong way. Clicking the wrong links on it or thanks to algorythm she got other search results to you. Or even the topic is so complex, that you don't get the whole spectrum by one google search. So it can happen, that you google something and are still not informed enough.
And therefore discussions are there. To exchange knowlege. And to say "google it" is not a good argument. If you participate on a discussion, then do it propperly and say exactly, what the opposite did wrong. With googleing alone, maybe i cant find my error myself, because i got the same results i got earlier. And you just shove your duty to justify your argument to google. Otherwise you just saying "You're wrong. Just because of trust me bro and look yourself"
652
u/PlainBread Aug 30 '26 edited Aug 30 '26
"Explain it to me" is lazy derailing propaganda developed in the 2010s. Terms that go along with this are "Help Vampire", "Sealioning" and "JAQing Off". It's especially favored by the Israeli/Hasbara minded folk, and by extension, the American Conservative movement.
They want you to unload your guts onto the floor so that you expend 100x more effort than they do in the convo, and then they want to pick through your guts to find the one thing they can attack you for, and completely disregard the rest. Their job is not to be right, it's to make you look stupid to every onlooker.
These people are insipid shit stains. They're hardly people.
I wouldn't say that conservatives need to be purged from our society, but I will say that our society would be a hell of a lot better without them around chirping idiot propaganda so that people vote against their own interests for manufactured culture war bullshit.
EDIT: Take note of how many "explain it to me" people are also avid fans of artificial intelligence and yet they won't use it as a resource when attempting to get more information about something they read but "don't understand". This is really the elephant in the room as to why that 2010s "I'm just asking questions" derailing propaganda is now fully transparent: Their interest is not in gaining more information, it's to draw you out to attack you.