Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> "I have no position!" he cried. "If you have a position, it is always something screwed down." He twisted an invisible screwdriver into the table. "I have opinions that I defend rather vigorously, and then I find out how silly they are, and I give them up!"

By modern social convention this is "trolling".

> If he was not anti-science, I asked, what did he mean by his statement in Who's Who that intellectuals are criminals? "I thought so for a long time," Feyerabend said, "but last year I crossed it out, because there are lots of good intellectuals."

This was more or less the justification used in the Cultural Revolution or "Year Zero" for murdering "intellectuals".

In the end he has a bunch of valid criticisms, but I suspect his overall outlook is, like that of a lot of people, rooted in the trauma of his time. In this case WW2, which was an extremely "scientific" war, containing both the "race science" of the Nazis plus the development of weapons of mass destruction and the use of scientific methods to maximise lethality.

> > "I have no position!" he cried. "If you have a position, it is always something screwed down." He twisted an invisible screwdriver into the table. "I have opinions that I defend rather vigorously, and then I find out how silly they are, and I give them up!"

> By modern social convention this is "trolling".

Can you expand on this? That hardly sounds like trolling and more like "Strong opinions loosely held" which is an admirable intellectual stance to take in my opinion.

See my reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22127853

I like pjc50's answer, but here's an alternative take: it's a matter of intention. Trolling involves making people angry because making them angry is fun. It's not any kind of intellectual stance.

The alternative is a method of teaching or learning, where unpopular opinions are as something between a counterfactual for exploration and the best way of getting a question answered on the internet: by asserting a wrong answer.

"Strong opinions loosely held" requires the opinions to actually be loosely held. You have to admit there are other options and you have to let go when yours are shown to be silly.

On the other hand, keep in mind that intent is impossible to judge from the outside.

If you read the introduction to "Against Method", it's clear that he's trolling. He says that he was writing a wicked book, and that Lakatos was supposed to write an even-more wicked refutation of the book before he passed away.

This has helped me understand why folks think that I'm so often trolling: I wish for my opinion to be shown silly, because I'm so confident that it is a stupid opinion, because all of my opinions are stupid silly opinions.

I would much rather have everything laid out, examined, and shown not to be what it is not, than to suffer under political rhetoric. It is possible to be intellectually curious and also not a tankie.

If you want a less risible formulation of this sort of mindset, rewatch "Dogma" and listen to Rufus' outlook on life.

> His only real beef with mankind is the shit that gets carried out in His name. Wars. Bigotry. Televangelism. The big one though, is the factioning of the religions. He said, "Mankind got it all wrong by takin' a good idea and building a belief structure out of it."

> This has helped me understand why folks think that I'm so often trolling: I wish for my opinion to be shown silly, because I'm so confident that it is a stupid opinion, because all of my opinions are stupid silly opinions.

If you're not telling people that this is your purpose, then you are not arguing in good faith. If you're playing devil's advocate, you should say so.

There's a big difference between, for example, arguing with someone that the earth is flat, and saying something like: "I'm going to pretend I think the world is flat, and I'd like you to try and convince me that it is not." That gives someone the opportunity to either play your game or not play your game. Otherwise, you're in danger of convincing people you're an idiot, rather than someone who simply likes to argue unusual positions.

Alright, let's take this for a test drive, then: I don't really think that good-faith argument exists, in general.

The idea of good faith is old and important in law; without good faith, it would be hard to enter into contracts. The underlying emotional content that we are reaching for when we try to embrace good faith is the emotion of authenticity.

However, I don't think that people are capable of being authentic. In order to be authentic, people must intend what they are saying and doing, and I am not sure that people can have internal worlds which are rich enough to enable authenticity. I certainly believe that people believe that they are acting in good faith, when they claim it, but I cannot verify that people are indeed good-faith actors.

In the olden days, good faith was achieved with a token, a bonafides of some sort. This is because, even in the olden days, it was well-understood that one cannot simply take people at their word when people say that they are arguing in good faith. This suggests that people have known and understood for a long time that good faith doesn't really exist.

Further, I think that when the rules say, "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith," they mean that we must construct steelmen before commenting. After all, giving good-faith assumptions to bad-faith arguments would be a waste of effort.

For your edification, you should know that I don't like to argue my positions.

Nice try, but we're not falling for it now.

What were you falling for before?

There's a lot to be said for the benefits of dialectic, but there's also a time and a place for it and the participants need to be on the same page and not threatened by it. You shouldn't take the "I'd just like to know what's so silly about race science of Aryanism" position with a Jewish person, for example, because they're going to interpret it as a death threat.

Less importantly (but still a matter of social grace) you need to know whether your interlocutor gets this all the time. Failing to do basic research will get your question closed on stackoverflow; engaging in dialectic to go over "settled" questions again and again is frustrating, and many of the people on the other side have got fed up with insincere timewasters.

> It is possible to be intellectually curious and also not a tankie.

To me those are mutually exclusive - "tankies" (and many other ideological factions) are people who've become tidally locked to a position and are no longer intellectually curious, but only interested in shooting down other ideological positions.

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