Sealioning | Hacker News Reader

Sealioning

en.wikipedia.org

31 pointsforgingahead25 comments

Here is the origin of the term:

http://wondermark.com/c/2014-09-19-1062sea.png

I remember being very confused by the reaction to this when it first appeared. My initial reading was that the first line is meant to be analogical with racism, since the speaker holds an irrational prejudice against a particular biological category. When questioned on it, they refuse to explain or apologise! It took me a while to grasp the alternate reading in which the sea lion is more like a subculture, such as "gamers" or "Bernie bros" or whatever.

It's intellectual violence which consumes the time of people of good intent by insisting that they do significant labor to support elements and details of an argument that are generally held to be self evident and true. Things like racism are included - for example "the KKK is a terrible organisation that hurt many people"... "have you got personal experience of this?".."how many KKK attacks have there been in Suffolk England this year?".."what percentage of KKK members have participates in racial murders".."are you sure that the murders are all actually terrible - maybe there were reasons - afterall we weren't there"... and so on and so on and so on...

Renaming disagreement, even in bad faith, as "violence" is unnecessarily tendentious and weakens the concept of actual violence. It colors and lessens the effect of the rest of what you said, which is all just fine. I find that a far more bad-faith technique of discussion than sealioning.

To call it intellectual violence tends to justify the use of force to oppose it. And it softens the definition of violence by inappropriate analogy. Even in the extreme case you describe, and even assuming that such questions are insincere (which I don't), it's still only rude and annoying behavior, far from violence.

I've never been a fan of the term sea lioning precisely because of that characteristic of the comic.

People who expect to go through the world declaring strong opinions and then immediately refusing to explain it or engage with counterarguments are pretty annoying too.

Imagine this conversation:

A: "Ruby has better performance than Node.js!"

B: "I hadn't heard that, can you provide some evidence of this claim?"

A: "Shoo, troll! Being asked to provide evidence is harrassment! Stop sea lioning me!"

A bit of a caricature, but I've seen plenty of conversations that follow that basic structure. In that case, person A is the troll, not person B.

The original comic is pretty clear that it's the repeated attempts to engage with someone clearly uninterested in debate "Aha! A whole day has passed and you have provided no evidence of the superior performance of Ruby on the other thread." that marks the sealions out. The other side to the comic is that the original throwaway remark sounds a bit hard to justify, until we see the sealions. Anybody who's ever made a throwaway remark about how X is like a cult or Y has obsessive fanboys and got bogged down in replies from people politely insisting actually we're completely normal, now please refute all 27 points about why X and Y are better can relate...

Also its a Godwin-law type internet regularity, not a cast iron behavioural rule. Sometimes making comparisons to Nazis or calling out serial posters of provocative statements is actually appropriate

Your comment is delicious. You notice yourself it wouldn't be such a nice comment if it where made about a group you want to protect but it's perfectly fine if it is made about a group you dislike. Proving, again, "no bad tactics, only bad targets".

My comment says nothing about who I personally want to protect or dislike. I only describe my failure to guess how other people would react to the comic.

I highly recommend wondermark in general.

The “Sick Elephant” running gag in 2019 was a stroke of genius: http://wondermark.com/c1414/

And “in which there is quite the selection” runs through my head every time i go to the nice packie and try to buy a beer http://wondermark.com/515/

Sick Elephant was one of those that was funny for a bit, then became unfunny, then became so surreally persistent that it was hard not to laugh at the sheer stubborn audacity of it.

But, yes, it's not too many relatively obscure webcomics that get to contribute a term to the popular discourse like that, and I think that the Wondermark archives will repay the examination.

I was fully converted to “oh this is great” around about the Chekov iteration.

I don't doubt that this is an actual thing. It also sounds like a thought-terminating cliche, useful when the accused won't let you off the hook for saying something wrong, but it is too painful to admit it.

It's both. Ultimately, the Internet has no arbitrator to enforce the rules of argumentation. By the time you're reduced to arguing about the rules, no progress is going to be made.

I consider that primarily a reason to cease engaging entirely. When you believe you're being sea-lioned, you don't really need to call it out. People who do are hoping for some sort of closure, but they aren't going to get it. You may be correct, or you may be merely trying your own dishonest means to win, but either way nothing productive is going to happen.

The best you can do is remind yourself that nobody actually cares. That's really hard to remember when somebody declares: "You've failed to supply the evidence therefore I win by default". Troll tactics rely on you feeling bad about losing in public, and believing that your side has lost adherents. Effectively, they've won before you've even started when you believe that the only way to win is for them to concede that you've supported yours side sufficiently. They will always be able to simply declare that you lost, one way or another.

The only way to avoid that is to not play at all. And the realization of sea-lioning is useful in that. It doesn't win an argument. Rather, it's your self-recognition that you will lose if you say anything else, and it's not worth your time. The sooner you forget about it, the faster you regain equilibrium. Even stopping to declare "No thanks, sea lion" doesn't really help unless you have the ability to shut down replies.

That can also be used badly, to be sure. It can be a troll tactic, and you deal as you would with other trolls. And it can be used to fool yourself; in the absence of an arbitrator you can't really know when you're missing a sincere argument. But I'd advise erring on the side of abandoning any arguments early, since it's never as important as you imagine it is. Even if you've failed to recognize a serious critique, you'll hear it again some day, probably soon. Sincere self reflection, offline, will bring you good answers faster than bashing yourself out against an army of trolls.

When everyone starts avoiding answering challenges to their opinion we end up in a highly divided society, where there is no understanding for the other points of view and no common ground. I think this is visible already in our world. There's a fine blurry line between challenges that address essential aspects of an idea and those that divert attention to minute details or go on tangents. I would say the ideal attitude would be to try and answer a couple of such "attacks" or explaining why they are besides the point.

How does this differ from robust lines of question in political reporting?

If you're asking relevant questions, of a person who is plausibly responsible for or has special knowledge of the situation being questioned, it's not sealioning.
If you are asking questions which have had books written about them, and/or of a person who is clearly not specifically responsible for the situation and has no special knowledge of the situation... and you won't stop, it's sealioning.

If you are asking irrelevant or strawman questions of a person who nevertheless might be responsible for or have special knowledge of the situation, it's badgering, not sealioning.

> How does this differ from robust lines of question in political reporting?

There is a difference between politicians, whose chosen place in the spotlight correctly subjects them to heightened scrutiny of their decisions and actions, and everyday people being questioned about their determination that, say, racism is wrong, even if they have not personally been subject to it that day. I think sealioning is meant to describe persistent questioning of everyday interlocutors, not of politicians.

Good faith.

Which is often dependent on interpretation, which helps explain the polarization of this discussion. Faced with a given discussion, it's likely that people who are ideologically aligned with the questioner will see it as valid, and those aligned with the one being questioned will see sealioning. I've found it a good thing to keep in mind when I evaluate my own online behavior, but not so useful when evaluating others'.

Dogpiling, gaslighting, sealioning, just a few of the made up words with a vague enough definition to be used in claiming harassment in any situation.

PS: if you disagree with me you're duckfencing!

The problem is that if someone is acting in bad faith, it is almost impossible to answer every single challenge that a truly bad faith actor might bring up.

And even if you answer 99 challenges correctly, but you instead make a single small mistake, or you mispeak, or the other person intentionally misinterprets what you are saying, then the bad faith actor can declare victory and "win" the debate, because of a single, irrelevant, or minuscule mistake.

If someone is not acting in bad faith, it is almost impossible to not lose to them.

Indeed. Just classifying and dismissing arguments based on these memetic argumentation taxonomies has become a debating strategy unto itself.

It's kind of like people who hear a real-world argument, and dismiss it by naming a logical fallacy, e.g. "Straw man!" They fail to recognize that an argument may not be strictly valid as proof, but still carries some weight when evaluated in light of observation.

For example, "I don't believe chemtrails are a thing, because my friend is an aircraft mechanic, and he's never seen any sign of equipment to spray mind-altering chemicals from commercial planes." "Appeal to authority!"

My brain like your brain. Who need word when smaller word do trick. Double plus agree.

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