Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

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A few years ago I really enjoyed arguing politics on the internet. Not trolling, but legitimately arguing. I ran into several people who would just link-bomb the conversation.

So one day, when I had a couple of hours free I sat down and read every single link. All of them.

The lack of substance beyond an opening paragraph that claimed a point was appalling. When it was brought to the attention of those link-bombers, they actually agreed that there was no substance and that they hadn't read those links at all. I was really proud of my friend and thought we had actually resolved a political disagreement on Facebook.

Then I saw them dropping the exact same links in another conversation within a couple of days.

Facts without context don't prove anything. Some of the facts but not all of them just frame the story in a particular light.

After years of this stuff, it becomes clear that nobody has time to become an expert on every subject just to be able to identify the critical details that people are leaving out.

Eventually, you just research your positions on the subjects that matter to you and vote accordingly. Now, if something doesn't make logical or mathematical sense, I oppose it. If there's no logic or math involved, I generally take no position at all.

That's called the Gish Gallop and for whatever reason is the mode de jure for winning an Internet argument now.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

> winning an Internet argument now.

and before! The prevalence of dumb things to link and dumb people to link them is a bit higher now but the Gish Gallop isn't new on the internet.

I am really souring on such conversations because of the tremendous number of bad-faith arguing tactics people use -- willfully misconstruing your point, racing as quickly as possible to a glib dismissal without really understanding what you said, or, like you said, link-bombing. Another failure mode I find extremely frustrating is failure to understand analogies. For instance, if I were having a discussion about whether potatoes are healthy it might go like this:

A: Of course potatoes are healthy! They're natural!

B: If everything natural were healthy it'd be healthy to eat hemlock.

A: Potatoes aren't hemlock and it's really offensive you'd make that comparison.

I think people instinctively refuse to parse analogies because it's too much work for too little reward. Practically every time somebody starts to use an anology it becomes an anology battle because of course it wasn't perfect. Secondly it's like trying to prove a point by introducing a bunch of weird mental tricks. Yeah you might have a point there but it's rude to expect me to parse all this extra made up stuff you just throw at me. If you have a point, you can make it without an anology.

I have the same opinion on fallacies, practically every single time somebody says "wait, you just used a fallacy" it's wrong, it doesn't matter or he himself just used five fallacies by pointing that out. It's an endless battle over magic words that have so much social weight behind them that using them should be forbidden in any serious debate. That's my personal, very unpopular opinion.

If you don't want to do work understanding someone's argument then I'd suggest not participating in a debate; there is no way to present an argument that makes consuming it completely mindless. And really, it doesn't take that much work to understand "if we really believed that principle was true for ANY political philosophy then it'd be just as true for the Nazis as it is for whatever group you're supporting."

As far as logical fallacies go: I don't like the Internet style of just rattling off a bunch of logical fallacies to dismiss an argument, but I think it's fair to say "this argument is such-and-such a fallacy because of X, Y, and Z."

If we took your suggestions I don't know how anyone would have a substantive debate at all.

In most cases the problem with link bombs is that the stated conclusions don't fit the linked facts, and people can't separate the verifiable fact from their conclusion.

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