The trouble is that there are people here who aren’t dedicated to fighting ignorance but to fighting against any challenge to their ideological position to such an extent they act like shills.
As is any thread that dares point out the absolute, as obvious as the sun in they sky, fact that the Bush and Blair administrations deliberately lied us into a war. They will parse the word ‘lie’, stand on narrow definitions, refuse to see the clear subtext in reports that are the necessary product of consensus, flat out refuse to believe the repentant words of those involved, deny the provenance of information, weasel any word etc etc. Same with some posters in climate change threads forcing the regurgitation of the same evidence they have been presented time after time after time to derail threads or cite the same old discredited denial nonsense time after time.
And there are the people who parse words out of the context of either the rest of the surrounding sentences or the subject of the thread to come up with some blatantly ridiculous accusation or interpretation.
These are forms of trolling, they are deliberate tactical attempts to deflect threads and I’m afraid I’ve gotten sick of people acting like every day is Debate Like a Frigging Nine Year Old Day and can’t stop the snark sometimes.
There are good arguments against being overly confrontational in debate (such as the one Zoe makes), but this isn’t one of them. I can’t say I’ve ever noticed a particularly strong correlation here.
I do not agree that ‘fighing ignorance’ necessarily equates to ‘fighting with ignorant people’. The former is an effort to educate; the latter is an effort to bolster one’s own ego while humiliating someone else. The former serves to reduce the amount of ignorance in the world, the latter serves to entrench it. It’s interesting the way that supposedly “smart” people can be so ignorant when it comes to fighting ignorance.
Ultimately, I think “Fighting Ignorance” makes great copy, but not the greatest approach in the real world. You can only fight ignorance insofar as the person you are talking to is willing to listen, so if you are unnecessarily confrontational it can cancel out what you’re doing or even be counterproductive. People who write Cecil, usually, are willing to listen to what he has to say. The guy who emails you the Loose Change link might listen to you if you point out what’s wrong with his theory, but even if you’re polite the odds aren’t in your favor. That’s a case where being confrontational probably won’t work. I won’t say it’ll never work.
Maybe we need to separate “Fighting Ignorance” into two categories: informing people, which is best done in a non-confrontational way but is often improved by some humor, which Cecil has done again and again; and stemming the spread of aggressive ignorance, where you can start off non-confrontational but pretty quickly you’re likely to bring out the big guns and end up in a stalemate at best.
There is no reason to confront anyone with your truth. There are as many different belief systems in the world as there are people. The more confrontational you are the least likely the person will listen to you. It comes under the law of diminishing return.
First, listen to what the other person has to say and be sure you understand the position taken before offering any counter thought.
About people hurting themselves with what they believe. Hey, it happens all the time, and to you also. During the dark ages they burned people at the stake in order to save them. Will you brush a fly from another’s brow with an axe.
On the board I see people frothing at the mouth with anger because someone doesn’t believe as they do. Who do you think that hurts, yes, the angry person is killing themselves while the other could care less.
One last thing, no one has the power to change the beliefs of anyone else, so don’t try.
Actually, if my rule was specifically about rudeness, it would only require responses to the rudest poster (or, by another interpretation, the rudest post) be dragged down to the lowest level. If you have a mix of people debating politely and a scattering of belligerent a-holes, then your mix of responses would, presumably have a similar range of vitriol levels.
However, the question wasn’t actually about rudeness, it was about ‘confrontationalaty’. Given a continuum between “not letting someone get away with outlandish claims” and “slapping someone down needlessly out of some sense of intellectual superiority” (that’s from the OP), it really has nothing to do with rudeness. It’s entirely about how strongly and firmly you argue your point, politely or not. In the referenced thread, you basically had a “I have a ghost friend, I’m not trying to convince anyone, take it or leave it” being met with very enthusiastic and vehement opposition - to me anyway that looked rather disbalanced. Whereas my enthusiastic attack on their errors was (IMHO) quite justified by their behavior. That’s the sort of ‘respond in kind’ I’m talking about - not matching curse for curse and insult for insult.
Anyone who thinks that belittling or mocking does the double duty of fulfilling whatever enjoyment they get out of it and being helpful is kidding themselves, and I say that as a person who falls into mockery far too often even for my liking. You can’t do one and the other. Calling someone an idiot, or whatever fun insult you can think up, can be great should you want to sit and wallow in a sense of your own wit over beating another person. But if you give in to that over reasonability, you haven’t mastered them. You haven’t even mastered yourself.
No person is insulted and thinks “Ah, of course, this makes me think differently!”. A valid point can even be accepted but the accepter may see the insult bundled along with it and choose not to cave out of sheer cussedness. The whole use of confrontational tactics as a sucess or failure hinges on one thing; it indicates the one confronted as the enemy. A person pegged as an enemy full stop is going to be pretty pissed, but in association with ignorance? It’s the antithesis of conducive to debate.
And anyone who defines being reasonable as “they should listen because they’re wrong” has entirely missed the point. They think they’re right too, they expect the same of you. The one piece of advice that I find pretty much works for anything works here too; be an example.
Actually, mockery can be a pretty effective rhetorical technique.
That said, I maintain that confrontation is correlated with self-gratifying ego-stroking, which tends to cloud one’s judgment, making one see only part of the grand picture. So I agree with Scylla.
Furthermore, the best missives anticipate the arguments of their opponents and pre-empt them. To do so requires some empathy, which can be repressed by bombast.
DtC provides good examples: his better posts are more cool-headed, ya?
I like the guidelines of GD. You’re expected to back up your assertions and even your opinions if you can. If you can’t that says quite a bit in itself. I can be sarcastic at times but I’m trying to stay away from it in GD. If someone dishes it out they’d better be prepared to take it as well but that usually signals the end of any meaningful exchange.
So, I confront people by asking them to back up their statements or at least to explain in more detail. If they can’t then further confrontation seems pointless. They have an opinion they can’t support with facts. Great! Me too sometimes. What more is there to discuss or debate?
I tend to tell confrontational posters that provide no facts that we’re done talking and why.
Can’t be helped. The process of demonstrating someone’s ignorance to them inherently implies calling them ignorant. That is inevitably going to be seen as confrontational. There is no polite way to do it.
In teaching, the student generally goes in *already *with an awareness of his ignorance of the subject matter. The process of *first *making your interlocutor aware of his ignorance, or of him doing it to you, is what is being discussed here.
You might want to rethink that. Surely, there are more and less confrontational ways to present your POV. Indeed, there are experts in the fine art of diplomatic rhetoric: among those methods are repetition, humor, diversion and explicit consideration of opposing view- seeing and describing both sides of an issue.
Following Revenant Threshold, one should guard against, or at least be aware of, the self-indulgent pleasures of a more dominant approach, if one is to persuade. Then again, higher rhetorical intensity can certainly have its place from time to time.
So it doesn’t matter whether the student is aware of their own ignorance or not. The teacher still has to demonstrate that ignorance. That’s what teaching is, right? “Here is some information that you did not have before.” This inherently implies that the student is ignorant, which (according to you) is inevitably received as confrontational. And yet it isn’t. Not outside the SDMB, anyway.
There’s no correlation between calling someone ignorant and actually making them aware of their ignorance.
Wasn’t there a time when high-handed, belittling methods of teaching were regarded less as a personal indulgence than as a way of reinforcing authority, tradition, and the elite nature of academia, back when it was a lot whiter and more male?