You know what I absolutely fucking hate? The use of specific tools like Occam’s Razor outside the very limited scope they were intended for. When it comes to people, Kant had it right:
“The variety of beings should not rashly be diminished”
Stupid is a thing. Troll is a thing.
Stupid and troll is absolutely a thing. A most common thing on the internet.
You can’t really troll people that don’t actually post here.
What’s “very limited” about a principle that says that the simplest explanation for a phenomenon, requiring the fewest assumptions, is usually most likely to be correct? It seems to have pretty broad applicability across the fields of science, logic, and philosophy. So does the related maxim “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” (Hanlon’s razor) which I’ve long found to be an invaluable guiding principle for assessing human behaviour.
All of this is pertinent to my personal opinion of the subject of this thread. I think he’s basically a dumbass who considers himself an authority on virtually anything and everything, and is not shy about sharing his deep knowledge with us. I think he’s also a natural contrarian, so if his learned views are at odds with the consensus of most Dopers, to him that’s a bonus. That’s somewhat troll-adjacent but I don’t think he’s really a classic troll, just a run-of-the-mill dumbass. As a bonus, as noted earlier, he also appears to be a right-wing nutjob and bigot.
I concur with your Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, but it affects different people in radically different ways. Stupidity tends to make one especially vulnerable to the influence of anonymity + audience, which tends to affect the stupid like a powerful drug, the distinguished subject of this thread being a case in point. But that’s not the same as being a classic troll, even if the effect is similar.
Fields where it has been demonstrated to maybe be a reasonable place to start, but totally wrong.
People are not ‘phenomena’, they’re complicated systems. Applying philosophical shortcuts to them just doesn’t work well. Ask the economists…
Also, Occam’s Razor is a heuristic, not a final arbiter.
And Hanlon’s is just dumb. There are a lot more malicious people than it supposes. Like - most of humanity.
Exactly. Whether sincere or insincere, the core element of trolling is that the troll is trying to get a rise out of people. It’s frankly bizarre to suggest that a community that is sarcastic and mocking with one another against an outside target is somehow trolling themselves.
Economics isn’t about “people” at all as individuals. It’s a kind of pseudo-science that can only be understood with a good dose of chaos theory and the tragedy of the commons thrown in.
Of course it’s a heuristic. But like all useful heuristics, it persists because of its fundamental utility as a general truth.
That’s a depressingly pessimistic view of humanity. Not that I’m all that inclined to put enormous faith in hairless apes with vestigial reptilian brains, but if your pessimism were literally true, we surely would have a lot more crime, and in particular, a lot more crime like vandalism that lacks tangible rewards. For a far more optimistic and charitable view, I refer you to Steven Pinker’s important book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Think, for instance, of dealing with the customer service of your various utility providers. Do they hate you, or is what you’re experiencing just the consequence of the stupidity of the agents and their managers (and, I’d say, overwhelmingly due to the stupidity of the managers who dictate things like training and empowerment).
Anyway, getting back to the subject, I maintain that Magiver is just a common run-of-the-mill dumbass (or “smartass” with the understanding that “smart” is ironic) who greatly enjoys being contrarian. Whether that’s a “troll” or not is a matter of interpretation, but it appears not to have risen to the standard of this board’s threshold for moderation. In fact, as much as he often annoys me, I think his contrarianism is usually well below the board’s standard for trolling.
One of the hallmarks of a classic troll is that they find a community’s sensitive spot or spots, and drill down. Whether it’s political, social, or personal, the troll delights in mashing that button.
Magiver, by contrast, stubbornly goes on for pages and pages about the right way to beat up a chimpanzee. I simply can’t see that as trolling, because nobody here cares about imagining a martial-arts fight against an ape. It’s not button-pushing. That, to me, is just pure, arrogant stupidity.
So is the kind of pop psychology you’re basing your argument on.
That is so missing what makes a heuristic a heuristic and not a rule. Heuristics are about both expediency and about reducing cognitive load. But that only works when the actual outcome is agreeable to most. And letting a trolling cockgoblin get away with it because of expediency is the very opposite of agreeable. Whereas swift justice would satisfy a lot more people (not you, obviously, but that’s an allowable margin AFAIAC)
Yet all of this bears it out <points to all of human history>
We do have a lot of crime, and a lot of petty vandalism. Is there no tagging in your city? And us not having more is easily explained by humans not only being vicious little shits, but cowardly vicious little shits.
Please don’t. Not if you want me to take anything you say seriously. Try Hans Rosling instead, he at least brought the receipts..
And even then, I’m not convinced. Graeber said it better than I could, though.
I think this thread is plain evidence that it isn’t.
This makes the big difference between average Dopers and the few that really annoy me.
Everyone says stupid things sometimes, but the question is if you can recognize it’s stupid and drop it or not.
I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t cut off my quotes to remove context. You actually cut this one off in mid-word! I don’t claim that Steven Pinker is the ultimate arbiter of everything. What I actually said was:
For a far more optimistic and charitable view, I refer you to Steven Pinker’s important book The Better Angels of Our Nature . Think, for instance, of dealing with the customer service of your various utility providers. Do they hate you, or is what you’re experiencing just the consequence of the stupidity of the agents and their managers (and, I’d say, overwhelmingly due to the stupidity of the managers who dictate things like training and empowerment).
As for Graeber, if you want to put David Graeber up against Steven Pinker, that’s on you. Good luck with that.
The fuck, now
? There’s a motherfucking expand-arrow to all the context right in my post.
Not that I needed more context for what I wanted to say - I wasn’t talking about what you had to say about Pinker, I was talking about the fact you were citing Pinker at all. My first version of that post had just the words “Stephen Pinker”, in fact. Boy, if this bunched your pants this much, that would have given you testicular torsion.
Although this is clearly all performative, so go ahead.
And I didn’t claim you claimed that, so…
Don’t need luck, their respective bodies of work speak for themselves.
Although it also helps just a tiny bit that Graeber isn’t known for travelling on Epstein’s Lolita Express Airlines and denying the association. Because lying is always a good look for public intellectuals.
Pinker is a piece of shit who appears on Nazi-adjacent podcasts: @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social on Bluesky
In this post I attempted to get Magiver to actually engage with the arguments of his opponents.
Anyone who is engaging in a debate in good faith can attempt to understand the arguments of their opponents and engage with them. You can think your opponents are totally wrong, and even totally evil, and yet still understand and address the argument they’re attempting to make.
Magiver does not do this. He decides his position is correct and doesn’t even bother to try to understand how anyone else might think differently or what they’re trying to argue. It doesn’t matter how many times you demonstrate him to be wrong or have a flaw in his logic, it won’t change his mind to slightest bit. His purpose is to just beat you over the head with what he thinks is correct over and over again, never gaining any understanding, insight, or value at all from the conversation.
So my post was basically to say “hey, here’s the argument we’re making. It’s a competing explanation for what has happened to yours. Can you acknowledge you understand it? Can you acknowledge that it’s a valid interpretation of events even if it contradicts your preferred beliefs?” – anyone engaging in good faith could look at my post and say “yes, I understand what you’re saying, but here’s why I think my explanation makes more sense” – he didn’t even try that. He replied to my post but not with any substance, he skipped out on the issue entirely.
Is he a troll? My gut says probably not. There are plenty of stupid, hard-headed people in the world who believe their preferred beliefs are always correct and can hear contradictory things without ever considering them. There’s no reason to think he’s not one of them. He doesn’t seem smart enough to actually be a troll.
And the thing is - trolling usually involves faking being an idiot exactly like the sort of idiot he is. Does it even matter if he’s a troll? He doesn’t operate in good faith, he doesn’t actually engage in debate, he’s not an asset to any debate.
I read that post of yours. It was thoughtful and rational. Apart from that, you used quite a few fairly big words and constructed complete and coherent sentences.
That was your first mistake 
Yanno, if indeed our guest of honor is a malicious actor = troll, he’s surely loving the ill-tempered convo some of us are having now, all catalyzed by his mere existence.
He doesn’t even need to be here to create controversy and anger amongst us. Meta-troll FTW?
Some posters need little encouragement.
Which is more likely if the purpose is create a negative reaction:
I had much more to say on the Pinker sidetrack, but I resisted, because it could not possibly go to a productive place. Let’s just say that anyone who regards Steven Pinker and this anarchistic asshole as intellectual peers is a fucking moron.
Pinker is a piece of shit who lends legitimacy to Nazis.