Perhaps a slight reframing of the proposal might make it more compelling?
Imagine you make a fantastic point in a debate and you get three responses:
One agrees with you completely, one makes a really strong counter-point and the other makes a pathetic argument.
To which should you respond?
Most of us would focus on demolishing the weaker argument because it makes us feel powerful. I think Richard is asking us to engage with the stronger argument because it moves the debate forward.
Attacking the weaker opponent fights localized ignorance but engaging the stronger argument might reveal a new insight and actually create new wisdom and strategically advance the battle against ignorance.
In other words, my charitable reading of Richard’s guidelines is that he wants us to think carefully about who we respond to rather than blindly forbid you from engaging the ignorant.
Another of the guidelines invites us to assume that our opponents misstatements are honest mistakes instead of attempts to deceive.
If your opponent says something that seems to have absurd consequences, a charitable interpretation is that either he made a mistake or, more likely, you are missing a piece of information.
Appreciative enquiry can help find out which and correct the misundertanding more quickly.
And I don’t deny that the latter assertion has merit, but the former one has no merit. It simply creates a false dichotomy because it’s not a binary state.
It’s entirely possible to refute both positions. The problem is that reasonable people are more easily persuaded by, well, good reasoning and evidence which back up a claim. The idiots of the world require more work to educate. But it is by no means the case that refuting a weak argument of wrongness precludes dealing with other arguments as well. Indeed, I usually respond to any arguments (in subjects I care about) which run contrary to reality. Moreover, I’d submit that it’s the rare case when someone is wrong a little bit. In most situations, one is either wrong or right. I don’t care how far from right someone is, poor reasoning is still poor reasoning no matter how ridiculous it may be.
It might indeed. But so too might refuting the weaker argument. For all we know, arguing against some really silly idea on things might progress things forward as well. That’s the trouble with this sort of thing, none of is privy to the future. It’s also worth noting that to combat ignorance, it’s necessary to do it locally. You can’t combat it everywhere at once.
And I allowed for that. As I said, some of us either don’t respond to something because we agree with it, or because the reasoning is fucked up that there’s no real jumping off point without having to cover the topic in far more depth than most of us likely have time for.
But that doesn’t mean we should marginalize people who are quite wayward in their thinking by just ignoring them; it’s rude. They might have a genuine interest in learning, but have had the unfortunate circumstances to get a line of some really fucked up information. To know that, we’re left with really one option: test their arguments to if they’re being wrong just to be contrary, or not.
And, after all, it is great debates, on a site specifically created for the purpose of fighting ignorance. I find it a little odd on such a site to exclude from consideration of debate the people who most require it.
But we won’t know that stuff until we engage said person. So, if person comes in with totally fucked up argument a, we can’t find out what it’s based on, or what we’re not getting without addressing their arguments.
In op’s rules, these people would be summarily excluded from the conversation. I just disagree that that is a good way to deal with them. If they prove themselves to be a troll, we’ll catch on soon enough and that’ll be that. To be truly charitable to them would be to assume that they just got hold of some bad information and have a genuine interest in learning. To just exclude them per force because their first assertion is totally outlandish, to my mind, is quite rude.
A strict reading of Richard’s guidelines would probably lead to that unfortunate consequence. Is there another interpretation of his guidelines that would have a more positive outcome?
Knowing that Richard’s intentions were good, I choose to go with the charitable interpretation …and suddenly… the consequence that you are afraid of no longer seems likely.
If I am unable to find a charitable interpretation that makes sense to me I would - again, presuming good intentions on Richard’s part - ask him for help to understand rather than dismiss his points out of hand.
I’m not saying that someone with clearly mistaken facts or a weak argument should be ignored. The only posters who should be ignored, in my view, are those you believe to be wholly immune to reason or acting in bad faith.
I am saying that, as a matter of focus, we should try to spend the balance of our time hashing out the good arguments, not the weak ones. As I said earlier, I don’t think threadspace and attention are unlimited resources. There is a trade-off between educating one person with an opinion that is unlikely to be shared by others or the refutation of which is unlikely to advance the debate, and grappling with the truly interesting and difficult questions that go to the heart of the OP.
kevlaw, thanks for the demonstration of interpretive charity.
I rebutt the third with an expansive response that feilds as much relevent and non-stupid information as seems fitting, I rebut the second as best I can with my limited mental capacity, and I forget to acknowledge the first because I’m a thoughtless dork.
There is one contingent who believe that all ignorance must be met at the barricades and thrust back with the utmost vehemence to prevent the unwary onlookers from being sucked in to error.
There is another continent who believe that most onlookers will be sufficiently bright that a simple, (if informed), dismissal will be apprehended by those onlookers and that continuing to engage the silly or ill-informed gives them more exposure and more credibility.
Unfortunately, there is not a clean way to decide this issue. Those who believe that a single brief refutation of nonsense, followed by a knowing silence directed toward the ignorant, will always be obscured by those who believe that ignorance must be fought to a standstill or crushed. The single quiet refutation looks, in fact, just like it is part of the pile-on that greets ignorance, as the posters reading the comments see only that one more poster has joined the chorus. (And, this crowd being who they are, even those who believe in a single, quiet refutation believe that their single quiet refutation will best make the point, so several of them will also post, adding to the clamor.)
Regardless which side is right in addressing ignorance, one point is clear–when multiple posters addres the same issue, their posts are going to overwhelm any other discussions on a thread, so that the poster with the weakest argument or least information winds up attracting the most attention, drowning out serious discussion of more interesting points.
For anyone who believes that the Mods should simply step in and call off the hunt, (to the outrage of those who believe in wrestling ignorance to a standstill), just remember that it could be your post that triggers the Mods’ actions, since we cannot tell that your post was not going to be followed up by one more.
Agreed. modding is too blunt an instrument to be effective. I rather like the light modding that Tomnco provide.
I think a critical mass of peer pressure might do it though. Apart from the handful of posters from the pugilistic school of debating, I expect most dopers would like to be thought of as charitable and, when they transgress, they do so unwittingly. A gentle nudge from a peer (Easy there! No need to pile on!) might be all it takes for most people.
I think a critical mass of civil posters would change the overall tone significantly. Maybe we could get a secret handshake or a silver ring to indicate that we pledge to debate in a civil and charitable fashion?
I am willing to bet that there is a large contingent of lurkers who would contribute more if the overall tone were more civil.
To be fair to people of my camp, that a person is espousing such views implies that at least some onlookers do get sucked into errant thinking.
Despite reality, they hold this position. We live in a culture where repetition and popular approval are the arbiters of truth. I find this unacceptable. I do understand his point though, but in a practical way it requires us to marginalize people on the board. I would suggest this is anathema to his grandiose plans to make the place a more civil place to discuss ideas. Excluding people because their arguments don’t meet some arbitrary minimum level of admission is snobbish, which doesn’t engender a civil tone.
And who gets to decide which points are too poorly thought out to not warrant response? What thought police are in on this such that some determination can be made that x argument, while completely wrong, isn’t wrong enough to get ignored, but y argument is just too utterly wrong be bothered.
I’d suggest the more quantity of infirm reasoning an argument has, the more pressing it is to resolve that. I’m not sure I accept the binary condition that we have to ignore the somewhat reasonable, yet wrong, opinions to deal with the completely batshit crazy ones. For my part, I’m fully capable of dealing with both.
The one thing missing, I think, from your analysis is that the people who are quite reasonable, yet just errant on some topic, will be more readily persuaded by a good argument refuting their claims. This is why, in my view, threads aren’t whiled away dealing with them because there’s really no point in continuing a debate if someone accepts your arguments. In topics where neither side will change, it’s often because of reasons which are beyond logic and reality: like religion and morality. The Jesus-freaks want to convert people. The atheists don’t want to be converted. There really isn’t a great deal of middle ground except the profoundly dimwitted claim that the opposing sides “agree to disagree”.
That they’re arguing various points and are intransigent from the outset requires they’ve already agreed to disagree. For the reasonable minds, good arguments and evidence are persuasive. For the less reasonable minds, there’s no amount of information which would make them change their views. But that doesn’t mean there’s no reason to flesh it out and see what type you have on your hands.
The idiots of the world require more care to cure their idiocy.
Again, who decides which is what though? I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but I’m not seeing a reasonably objective set of criteria to decide which is what. And who gets to be the arbiter of what is interesting? Surely, the person with the least knowledge would, I assume, have more interest in the topic because the majority of it isn’t known to them. Of course, that presumes that people want to actually learn. As I mentioned earlier, the ones who are immune from such don’t take a great deal of time to identify and people will on their own either simply ignore them, or just start pitting them.
It’s bound to be the case that if we have some subjective criteria by which to judge who is worthy of condescending to address, some people will be wrongly marginalized. I guess I’d have to see some proposal as to how to determine who’s in charge of decided what degree of information is required before one merits a response. If it’s a matter of being wrong, then no wrong conclusion should be refuted because, after all, if one is wrong then there is something fundamentally flawed with their reasoning. So might one not just decide altogether that if they lack the ability to reason out x topic, then they probably are beyond hope. I’m more charitable than that. I have confidence in the power of the rational mind, the many counterexamples notwithstanding.
I think this sums up my above point in a reasonable way.
So, instead, we lionize the few and send the many running from this forum as nasty and boring.
You seem to have not actually read any examples of this issue. Civility is never a trait that can be ascribed to such threads.
And this is the reason that those manning the barricades always win this discussion. I will not take it upon myself to decide that an argument within a particular thread is too stupid to be pursued, (with one or two extremely rare cases as exceptions), so there is no final judge declaring an argument invalid and excluding the poster advancing it. With only the posters’ own senses of decorum as a brake, such threads tend to become runaways.
Thus missing the point that a poster holding forth with “infirm reasoning” is incapable of seeing his or her own illogic, meaning that they will pursue their point until the trainwreck gets closed.
They are not the posters under discussion. A reasonable poster, even one holding an incorrect position, will create a more interesting thread by either working toward a consensus or by working around the question from every angle until both sides recognize an impasse and agree to disagree.
The situation tends to arise when, (creating an imaginary example), in a lively discussion of Wilson’s “selfish gene,” some poster stumbles in with a claim that Intelligent Design is the best explanation for some stray point. Suddenly, all the good defenses and criticisms of Wilson’s thesis and those of his followers get lost, first in the original pile-on to dismiss the ID proponent, and then as the whole thread goes off the rails as the ID poster continues to assert his position while the majority of posters hammer on his unswerving theology and the actual scientific discussion is abandoned.
Perhaps the rallying cry of “fighting ignorance” is justified in such a case, but I wonder how much wonderful information and how many beautiful insights are never aired for the majority of readers as they are forced to re-read the same hackneyed ID claims along with the same time-worn airings of the same rebuttals. (Snce the ID poster has an extremely limited selection of flawed arguments on which to rely, the rebuttals are, by necessity, going to be all too familiar to most posters.)
With regard to letting some poor arguments go, it’s worth remembering that there is a large audience for many of these threads. Some threads have view-to-post ratios of 20-1 or 30-1 or higher (that’s page views vs posts). Most are at least 10-1. The audience may not know which arguments are ludicrous and which aren’t. And they’re the ones you have a chance of reaching, if you care about that sort of thing. You aren’t going to change your opponent’s mind, but you might change some others.
Maybe that’s a good rule to follow: Remember that there’s an audience, and that you are trying to represent your point of view in a way that has the best chance to be persuasive to that audience. If you think everyone reading a thread will know that an argument is ridiculous, by all means ignore it. If you’re thinking of being snotty to someone, think about how the audience will respond. A charge of hypocrisy may be personally satisfying, but the audience doesn’t necessarily care about the personalities, and accusations of hypocrisy do not change the argument.
If all you’re trying to do is play ‘gotcha’ with your opponent for your own satisfaction, the debate is likely to be pretty boring for everyone else.
I’m sympathetic to this critique, given your caveat of assuming a reasonably objective audience. But I think there are ways to deal with this problem of the lay audience, while still capturing the advantages of focusing on the core reasonable debate. One way is to establish your credibility with the audience by offering well-supported and reasonable arguments, and then swiftly dismiss the unreasonable arguments. This works especially well if both sides of the reasonable debate will remark that the unreasonable argument really is missing the point.
Imagine there’s an active thread about Sotomayor (as I expect there will be, come Monday). Bricker is arguing with Hamlet over whether Sotomayor’s occasionally improper review of evidence at the appellate stage means she might not be a qualified candidate. Each poster is making reasonable, well-supported arguments. Then PartisanPants wanders in and says Sotomayor should be rejected because the rate at which she’s overturned by the Supreme Court is 60% and because she likes to eat Puerto Rican food.
This post by PartisanPants has definite potential to hijack the thread away from the interesting debate, where the audience is learning about appellate procedure. So, in my mind, how should the debaters respond? I think a paragraph response to the 60% argument is called for (e.g. that is the typical rate of being overturned on appeal to SCOTUS, the same as any other circuit judge), and a sentence rejecting the reasonableness of the food critique. And, this is key, then move on. PartisanPants may come back and argue that all circuit judges are wild activists, or something, but at that point you’ve clarified the issue to the watching audience and we can get back to the meat of the debate. Similarly, the one-line dismissal of the food argument–if even that much is necessary–should be sufficient.
Finally, I don’t agree that the watching audience is the only persuadable party. I have been persuaded by threads in which I’m engaged, as I expect many are. And in threads in which I’m not persuaded, if they are good, I’m often at least educated. But to go back to my example, while I might be both persuaded and educated by the hypothetical debate between Bricker and Hamlet, I’m unlikely to see any benefit from watching PartisanPants be debated.