Anatomy of an internet argument | Hacker News Reader

Anatomy of an internet argument

defenderofthebasic.substack.com

181 pointsnkurz115 comments

I think the approach the author is suggesting is the right one but for abdifferent reason.

The most important person in an internet argument is the uninvolved passer-by, at least in those cases that make me argue publicly at length with strangers.

I might never be able to convince the person I am discussing with, but I might convince the audience.

Interesting. In that case offering a submissive message may mollify the interlocutor in exchange for a response, but at the cost of signalling to other readers that their position is sensible.

My grandma used to say that arguing something is the greatest concession.

Consider A:

-Earth is flat

- it is not, earth is round

- ya it is, john doe proved it

- ok sorry for not understanding could you please explain what john doe said?

Or B:

- earth is flat

- yo momma's butt is flat

Yes B, loses the battle for the one mind, but when you consider the readers, you are simply avoiding platforming an idiot and playing a dumb strawman to boot.

I guess it all comes down to whether you view the internet as the greek agora or the roman circus.

All of this rational debate and usage of latin phrases for fallacies brings back memories of teenage years of online debating. I get that it's election time at the homeland and some people are campaigning, but you get more votes making a strawman of your opponent and making a thread viral than going one by one changing minds. Who here thinks twitter is a platform for rational discourse? Ha!

I see your point, on the other hand I see that people have been ridiculing and insulting alt-right content a for years and that method did not work.

In the contrary, deplattforming, doxxing and all the things people came up with are now an integral part of the rights toolkit.

Point is: when I talk to people on the street I get the impression Thant what most of them desire is just boring politics by upstanding people.

Maybe it’s time to change the way we discuss.

> Maybe it’s time to change the way we discuss.

My takeaway from your comment is not so much that we need to change the way we discuss, but that we more regularly need to remind ourselves that computers and people are not the same thing. As you suggest, when people have discussions it usually goes well, with all parties more or less wanting "boring" discussion that goes somewhere meaningful. It is when people have discussions with computers but confuse them as being people when it all goes off the rails.

are you a computer?

What do your eyes indicate? Do I look more like a person or more like a computer?

You look like qualia to me

Yo momma experiences qualia

> Who here thinks twitter is a platform for rational discourse?

That's the elephant in the room here. The site formerly known as Twitter is optimised to maximise engagement, and conflict typically generates much more engagement than co-operation. It'd be like trying to have a friendly discussion to work out your differences with your opponent in a boxing ring, surrounded by large crowd who have been whipped up by the venue into baying for a fight. I sometimes wonder if it is even possible to build a sustainable internet platform which somehow rewards cordial good faith discourse and penalises the mean and intolerant (and by sustainable I mean immune to the tendency for these platforms to eventually pivot to maximising profits above all else).

I've noticed that certain Twitter behaviours are popping up on Bluesky. It's being fought against by the early adopters, but fundamentally, the mechanics of a platform are going to massively influence how arguments happen. It still allows replies and quote-reposts to divorce a comment from its context. It's still global and public by default so users are always in performance mode. What it doesn't have yet, that Twitter does, is sorting of comments by engagement. That always had the effect of presenting responses to an argument with the most inflammatory takes first.

Reddit where upvotes are weighted by your similarity or difference to the target uploader or commenter. People who have different sentiments, identities, writing styles, etc. will boost your post faster than people who are similar. Downvotes count for less, in the same vein. Discourse approaches a mean of respectability and sentiment. A few years down the road, sell analysis of users' corpus as de facto background checks.

Something something LinkedIn.

I suppose both approaches have their own problems.

Shiri's Scissor https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Sort-By-Controversial

It's possible to build the platform you describe but not possible to make significant progress. Joe User won't visit that site, boring! They'll visit the exciting dramasite for all the sweet gossip.

These site - twitter, facebook, etc... they aren't dividing humans per se by way of intent. They are black mirrors to human nature. The algorithms say, "human, what entices your attention?" "Drama!" "Fights" "Polarizing topics that people 50/50 disagree/agree on" . And so the algorithms delivered what the humans attention recommends - polarizing topics. And so we are now more polarized.

Because this is rooted in human nature, and you can't change human nature, the solution is something needs to be legislated. You can't ban free speech. You can't ban how long people spend online, also freedom, any more than you can ban gambling or alcohol or drug addiction. So then it comes down to something like recommendation algorithm ethics (hah! can you imagine? But why is that not a thing?!? we have an intense AI ethics community but that other AI that is the recommendation AIs that powers sites, it's all crickets as far as rules and ethics). Well, we all know why, money. But "medical ethics" while being a field is also legislated as to unethical medical practices lead to severe consequences, perhaps a "tech ethics" type field would help improve such algorithms, or "tethics" for short. Congress grilled Mark Cuckerburg for all the suicides his tech stack causing, I figure if we're talking literal deaths here maybe have a bit more regulation>?

> it all comes down to whether you view the internet as the greek agora or the roman circus.

The best summary I've ever read about the internet

I've often suspected internet arguers of being agoraphobic.

given AI bots and their increasing capacity for shaping consensus, I think something closer a church choir

I feel reminded of Mark Twain:

“Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”

The only sensible approach.

Of course on the Internet, no one ever thinks themselves an idiot, no matter how ridiculous their position is.

I like the variations too (no idea if the attributions are correct):

> "Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it" - George Bernard Shaw

> “Arguing with idiots is like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good you are, the bird is going to shit on the board and strut around like it won anyway.” - Shannon L. Alder

> Who here thinks twitter is a platform for rational discourse?

When considered in its entirety? No. Not at all. Within the curated segment of Twitter I have established? Yes! It is probably the most rational place on the internet that I know of. Those within that curated circle seem to genuinely want to share information in a productive manner without the silly vitriol.

That's the beauty of "the algorithm", I suppose. You can tune it to leave the garbage out.

> I might never be able to convince the person I am discussing with, but I might convince the audience.

Reading the comments around this blogpost here on in other places, I feel like I'm almost alone in not trying to convince anyone when I argue with strangers online (most of the times), neither the other person I'm discussing with, or others who might be reading.

I mostly reply because there are unanswered questions that if answered, might teach me something new. Most of the times I'm just seeking understanding from both sides, not convincing the other.

Do most people argue on the internet with strangers in order to convince others of something? If so, how does your success rate look like? I probably feel like aiming for that would be futile at best.

There are many forms (styles) of discourse, no?

Rhetoric, dialectic, sophistry, trolling, slap fights, agitprop.

To the OC's point, while the affordances of hot mediums like social media and message boards tend towards juicing dopamine, with some investment they can also be used for discourse. As OC Defender advocates. As moderators like u/dang facilitate.

My meager "yes and" contributions to Defender's post are...

> how to make the world a better place

Since at least Socrates, humans have been arguing about what it means to be a good person, how to live a good life, what is true and beautiful. aka moral philosophy. I praise and appreciate Defender for continuing this distinctly human tradition.

> This shows a genuine interest in understanding because it cannot be faked.

TMI: Maybe 6-7 years ago, I heard the advice

  "When something (or someone) doesn't make sense to you, get curious."

By fits and starts, but mostly backsliding, I've been trying to embrace this advice. Hard as it is, doing so has helped, a lot.

> Yes, this is a lot of work.

True.

PS: affordances in the Donald Norman sense; hot/cold mediums in the Marshall McLuhan sense.

> The most important person in an internet argument is the uninvolved passer-by

Exactly.

Correia’s Law: "Internet arguing is a spectator sport. You argue to convince the undecided and give ammo to those on your side. Do not expect to change your opponent’s mind as you cannot sway the willfully ignorant. Internet arguing is only worth it when there is an audience. The contestants do not get a vote, the audience decides who wins."

however, there are a lot of degenerate behaviors that stem from arguing for an audience opposed to the opponent.

I dont think it is possible to have a debate in good faith without putting the opponent first.

It's easy to see that in this case, if your audience is also willfully ignorant, you will end up in a downward spiral where you just try to destroy your opponent's credibility and reputation in a shouting match, regardless of what the factual reality is.

You may have convinced the audience, but you ended up with a solution that doesn't work and is divorced from the real world.

Is it worth it in the end?

> The most important person in an internet argument is the uninvolved passer-by, at least in those cases that make me argue publicly at length with strangers.

This also applies to any _public_ offline argument, doesn't it?

So much negativity in the comments. I think this concept of how to have a conversation on the internet, and how to understand someone’s point, and how to maybe even convince someone successfully is extremely important. Much more important than what ever is in vogue right now as the hot topic politically issues of today.

I have a minor gripe though, there’s a contradiction in the writing. “ There’s a misconception that good faith discussion only happens in close-knit…”

And then just a few paragraphs later

“If you’re not willing to do this, then you’re not arguing in good faith in my book.“ but this is generally the default behaviour of people on the internet and the article is trying to convince you, and teach you how not to be like that. So I think indeed, good faith arguments pretty much don’t happen on the internet with rare exceptions. It’s not a misconception unless the misconception is taken as good faith arguments literally never happen except in close knit communities, but who believes that?

Back in my Reddit days, I learned it was also hard to have an honest discussion because people are suspicious of your motives. I would comment something like "I'd like to understand more about why you think X," and ask for clarification. These were met either with radio silence or very caged answers that just reiterated their point instead of explaining it further. IRL, people tend to become extremely guarded when someone questions their statements or beliefs (guilty, myself) because they automatically assume the person asking is trying to change their mind as opposed to make an effort to understand them.

In the end, I think everyone just wants to feel heard. It's difficult to remember that sometimes online, easy to forget there is a person behind the keyboard who came to think differently because of their experiences and exposures.

> because they automatically assume the person asking is trying to change their mind as opposed to make an effort to understand them.

That's a pretty negative view of something I think is much simpler: Most people, on most topics, remember the conclusions (opinions) formed when learning about the topic, but either don't remember how they got there or only vaguely remember the details.

Good faith discussions are happening all the time on the internet, in machine readable proofs for formal verifiers.

I think the author meant (but is I agree not saying it clearly in those quotes) that while good-faith arguments are rare, there's a misconception they can only happen in close-knit communities, but in fact if one party, you the reader, engages using the methods I discuss here, you can create many good-faith arguments on the general internet, not just in close-knit communities.

The first example is basically saying you have to insult yourself first to prevent the other side from insulting you further. I won't call this good faith, let alone a productive discussion.

The second example is just wishful thinking. I bet even if KJ had responded with the author's way, axial would have still blocked them after several exchanges.

Of course I might be wrong. Perhaps I'm just not as good at argumenting as the author.

I see the first example as self-deprecating humor.

It felt a bit two faced, like making fun of OP for being pretentious, but playing the fool so they won't notice

I feel the same way, replying "I'm too dumb!" to being essentially asked "Are you dumb?" is not even having a discussion anymore

The second example is just a guy moving the goalpost, he went from "Where's the money?" to "Ok, that's where the money is, but are they using it?", and then gets mad when someone answered with sources. But according to the author KJ completely misunderstood the goalposts.

You can’t generally de-escalate without doing some over-conceding. Giving the other side more space to change their stance than they strictly need has a way higher chance of them actually doing it. If you focus on keeping score, it’s less likely to work out.

I don't think over-conceding achieves anything on the Internet though. You might get a polite message back from the other side, but that's it. It seems like more validation seeking than convincing or trying to figure out the truth.

> The second example is just wishful thinking. I bet even if KJ had responded with the author's way, axial would have still blocked them after several exchanges.

Not true! I'm trying to collect "success stories" here because I've done this dozens of times, even with the most troll-like internet strangers. It's very consistent. Nobody believes that it generalizes. What I'm working on now is writing down these techniques so that people can empirically try it for themselves. I want people to challenge this, prove me wrong. Because the techniques get more robust with every challenge.

https://github.com/DefenderOfBasic/in-good-faith-handbook/is...

Have you thought about training a language model with these kinds of examples and then use a bot farm to win arguments?

Ideas and attitude from original post reminds of Street Epistemology discussion techniques but adapted to internet discussion.

Have you seen SE method? Do you use it as inspiration?

This approach seems to presume you're not trying to talk to a programmed bot whose job is to amplify a prepared set of talking points (an approach pioneered by I believe the Edelman PR firm in the 1990s internet era, when all the bots were human).

If someone's willing to pay a PR firm to run a bot farm of any kind, this has to be taken into account. Such issues include fossil-fueled global warming, the efficacy of the latest patented FDA-approved pharmaceutical product, the role of virological gain-of-function research in the origins of the Covid pandemic, the necessity of government funding budgets for various purposes from public health to the provision of weapons to European and Middle Eastern conflicts, desirability of regulation of financial institutions (Glass-Steagall etc.), and possibly most relevant to HN, the wisdom of running Linux vs. Windows vs. Apple operating systems to meet your personal, business, and other computing needs.

How would one respond in such cases? "Well, I understand that your job requires you to amplify a certain set of talking points and play down others, and I sympathize with your need to earn a living by doing so, so have a nice day?"

Of course a bot will never admit to being a bot - but even if you're dealing with a good faith actor, there's also the issue of whether or not you have a shared information base, e.g. attempts to discuss evolutionary theory with someone who believes the universe was created 6000 years ago probably won't go well.

This is a legit concern, even if the propagandists are human rather than bots.

To be fair, though, online debates may have value for the readers even if they never convince the original poster. Since most users in a forum are lurkers[1] it's very hard to measure how effective is an argument and what extent is a particular debate even worth it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

How do you even measure the effectiveness towards the original poster? Logically, you are going to spend more time 'arguing' for what you don't believe in as a validation that you truly understand what you do believe in, so what onlookers read is not even a reflection of reality.

I think a lot about, maybe it was "Fall, or Dodge in Hell," or some other Stephenson book, but a plot point was someone open-sourcing a method of releasing millions of low-resource-consumption high-efficacy bots that could take a topic and disseminate several gigabytes of misinformation about that topic across every platform. The system was effective enough to make it virtually impossible to know whether some random town in iirc Ohio got nuked, creating a q-anon cult around that. Then once the bots were released en mass by whoever wants to use them, the internet became indecipherable.

Regarding this topic of people believing wrong and harmful things on the internet and spreading it around (mixed in with the 999 bots is 1 person's great aunt exposing her brain to unfiltered bot noise), I wonder, would the better solution be like the one from the novel, to completely annihilate the trustworthiness of the unfiltered internet, or, perhaps there's some other solution that counters the Oil and Gas bots, perhaps even following a strategy like in the OP article, politely Dale Carnegieing every single point with boundless energy, enthusiasm, politeness, and good faith?

I'm personally motivated by this because my belief system rests on a belief that power and knowledge should be freely distributed among humans equally, alongside responsibility, but for this to work we'd need a method for individuals to resist a much easier to produce tide of bullshit.

I think there's a continuum of good versus bad faith motivation in any discussion anywhere. The problem on social media I think is twofold: first, you often don't know where on that continuum things are because you might not know enough about who you are interacting with or why, and second, when you do know who you're interacting with, the public nature of the discussion incentivizes performative aims with regard to other possible readers, rather than working through some argument with you and the other person in particular.

Any argument has some aim I think, and it's often implicit. It may be to achieve some aim that depends on the other person, or it may be to repair a relationship, or it might be to inflict some outcome in an organizational setting, it may be to work out something in your head, or it may be to convince bystanders of a position.

Sometimes you end up with bots, sometimes you end up with PR people, sometimes you end up with highly politically motivated people, sometimes you end up with people who are trying to sell their own book or paper or whatever. You just don't know and even though I do think a lot of people — maybe most — are acting in very good faith, some of them are not, and it varies in degree.

I also think social media systems are fundamentally broken at the moment, and ideally we should be moving to highly decentralized and/or federated platforms. That's a slightly different issue probably but maybe not — I think the subtle aims of platforms tend to trickle down into this too, and nudge different types of behaviors. In any given case it might be a tiny effect, but it accumulates I think.

The question is whether it's worth the time. If you know someone face to face and plan to interact with them in the future. Then you must be able to continue conversing with them. So the time investment to have a decent conversation is necessary.

Is online the same? It's possible to talk to someone new every time. Will this long process happen for each person?

There's a reason why first impressions matter. Yes, someone who left a bad first impression could be a diamond in the rough. Except, why not just chat with the other diamonds instead?

I agree that it's important to filter your conversations on the internet (for that exact reason - it might be a waste of time for no gain), but I think this blog post is more about how to approach it once you've already decided to engage. Arguing in bad faith is a great way to guarantee you're going to waste your time and emotional energy, at least if you're genuinely interested in the topic.

i thought it was

    - INSULT
    - RETORT
    - COUNTER-RETORT
    - RIPOSTE
    - COUNTER-RIPOSTE
    - NONSENSICAL STATEMENT INVOLVING PLANKTON
    - RESPONSE TO RANDOM STATEMENT AND THREAT TO BAN OPPOSING SIDES
    - WORDS OF PRAISE FOR FISHFOOD
    - ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AND ACCEPTENCE OF TERMS

I miss bash.org so much

thooose were thaa daaaaays

irc died and was replaced with nothing

irc isn't dead, come join us on Libera! (and there's tons of other networks too, i just feel disingenuous inviting you to ones im not on)

Last time I checked it was just idle bots (or idle clients). Is it still this way nowadays?

What did you check? I'm in some channels like #postgresql or the channel of a hackerspace I'm part of and it's always active.

Isn't discord this generation's IRC?

Kind of. IRC had a culture of its own.

Also yungins might be surprised to learn that we had a distributed, open source communication network, where basically any dipshit with a static IP and a Pentium could start an IRC server and maybe get added to the network if they were reliable enough (I was one such dipshit).

discord is this generation's yahoo groups.

Not really, the company can unilaterally ban someone or a server. With IRC you can start a private server and you are not at the mercy of anybody else. And you are not nagged all the time to guilt your users into boosting the server so they can use more features. Your users don't have to pay if they want to have different profiles on different servers. Your users can use any interface they want to access the service...

So you are right in a sense that discord replace IRC as a means of communication for the majority, but in term of freedom it is a regression. If IRC had supported offline history keeping things could have been different, but for the people I know it was a major blocker for adoption. They didn't want to have to setup a server to bounce from or keep something running all the time.

It was replaced by group chats, Discord servers, Telegram groups etc.

it is not dead, just that the masses have their shiny full of gifs and spread in 50 channels per topic alternatives now.

IRC isn't dead.

Individual channels are dead, sure. 15 years ago, EFnet's #wow was quite busy and frequently had over 100 people in it. Now, it's down to just 20, with at least 7 of them being bots, the rest are idle. We went two weeks without a single message. I even unbanned the trolls just to get some excitement back, but they went silent (though didn't leave) once they realized the channel is indeed dead.

But EFnet's #geekissues is still very active.

Have fun: https://bash-org-archive.com/

This is a great way to win battles and lose wars.

I came to this realization after getting good at climate science arguments. I could take a denialist "did you consider" argument, go to the IPCC reports, find labs, find papers, and return with summaries and citations in relatively short order, and after delivering them with kid gloves I could move people off one denialist argument... and onto another. If I repeated the exercise, there would be a third in line.

Bad arguments take 1 unit of effort to generate and 1000 to refute. If you don't have a strategy for handling that asymmetry, you're toast, and the strategies for handling it do not involve kid gloves. Gish gallopers are gonna Gish gallop, and no amount of good faith is going to stop them if they don't want to stop. At some point you have to give up on the unbounded cost of good faith and call out the bad faith arguments. If you put them on blast, you might persuade spectators and that's about the best you can hope for on a finite budget.

And your goal is to win the war instead of having a good faith discussion?

Maybe you didn't read the article. They didn't suggest putting on kids gloves and siting your references. In fact, that was explicitly rejected as a good approach X) "Telling them their wrong" and X) "Telling them not to be rude".

So here I am, telling you you're wrong and that you're rude. The irony isn't lost on me, but I really don't have any idea how I'm supposed to "signal that I'm genuinely interested" in your argument here.

> There’s a misconception that good faith discussion only happens in close-knit communities like LessWrong or HackerNews.

I'll have to look at LessWrong, but I think it's a misconception that good faith discussion is common on Hacker News... Many (most?) comments here seem to be about inflating ones ego by showing how smart or virtuous one is.

> And your goal is to win the war instead of having a good faith discussion?

I'd hope so? If the war is some subject worth arguing about, anyway. The fetish people have for polite discourse is itself bad-faith.

Whatever war is worth fighting, I sincerely doubt it will be won on an internet forum. In fact you'll just make your enemy more resolved to oppose you.

> The fetish people have for polite discourse is itself bad-faith.

Ok then, here goes: Your opinion on this is fucking childish. How'd I do?

If there’s a point to Internet arguments, convincing the person you’re arguing with isn’t it.

That's absolutely right.

The point of winning internet arguments isn't to convince the person you're arguing with, it's to convince the people who are watching.

It's just ice cream politics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuaHRN7UhRo

That's a brilliant scene. However, I suspect most people aren't trying to convince/persuade/change the crowd either. Instead I think they're seeking approval from the subset of the crowd that already prefers vanilla. It's a pretty rare type of whore to be an effective lobbyist like that.

If one really did want to change the crowd for some polarizing current topic, I wonder how to go about it. It'd be easy to substitute Vi and Emacs for chocolate and vanilla, but I'm not seeing how to apply it for climate change, guns, abortion, free speech, the middle east, or really anything that people actually fight about.

People in general don't really want to be convinced. The default is to communicate your POV, and maybe listen to the story the other person is telling. But thats about it. The case where you end up thinking "This guy is right, I was always wrong these many years, I need to rethink my approach" is the exception, not the norm. Nobody wants to realize they have been deceived, either by themselves or by others. Given that, arguments are doomed to be non-productive most of the time.

Nah. Those who have settled on some kind of final truth stop talking about it. Topics become boring once you are sure there is nothing left to be convinced of. If someone is wanting to talk about a subject, they are in a state of being unsure and are looking to be convinced of something other than what they are currently thinking.

But rarely is a topic so simple that "X is Y"; "no X is Z" provides enough information to move someone forward towards establishing a final truth. Even if "X is Z" is a true statement, it almost always lacks necessary context to fully satisfy what the other is in need of. It is hard for us to understand where the other person is coming from.

Furthermore, if you do end up truly convincing someone of something, the topic then becomes boring and they'll just stop engaging, so how do you even know whether the argument was 'productive' or if the other just ran out of free time? Of course, it doesn't actually matter, so...

I clearly perceive the world differently from you. Sure, once an argument is over, its boring to continue, thats pretty much a no-brainer. But to my experience, people discuss topics not because they are unsure, but because they basically do virtue-signalling by stating their position on the topic. But almost nobody is interested to actually change their position or, heaven forbid, learn something.

Virtue signal to whom, exactly? If nobody is interested in learning of or changing their opinion of your virtue...

> "I was always wrong these many years, I need to rethink my approach" is the exception, not the norm

Indeed, however the exception among a huge audience is a fair amount of people. Who, in turn, may convince other (cascading effect).

Moreover by debating one solidify his arguments and prepares re-usable answers (as a sort of FAQ), thus alleviating Brandolini's law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law ).

If you can create an impression that a lot of people believe in the thing you're arguing for, you can create a cult and influence real world events, such as with qanon.

You can also cause enough psychic damage to eventually activate someone mentally unstable into doing something like bringing a gun to a pizza shop and threatening to kill people there.

Idk if polite conversation has a purpose on the internet, but seeding the internet with information can certainly serve a purpose. Idk if it's served good purposes yet. Specifically in terms of textual content and arguing. Images and video obviously had impact in revolutions.

You are never going to win the war.

But should we even fight the war?

A war that can be avoided by clicking an X. No don't fight it!

Can you even win a war without winning some battles? I joke there… but keys assume you have the research on the topic, then how do you answer if you want to fight a battle and give out an answer?

The way I read the article it doesn’t talk about producing a better argument. It talks about being a better listener/reader such that the other party is more killed to listen to the argument you already have.

I do see it worth spending the 1000x effort at times, but not to convince someone else about topic A. I would spend that if I’m unsure of my standing on topic A.

It’s a bit annoying to have to point this out, because it - the issue you have raised is of more pressing interest to me.

The article presupposes interpersonal discussions, and assume possibility of good faith. It’s hard to make a case online, which covers all bases.

——-

To your point = YES!

It is INCREDIBLY frustrating and difficult to talk about this unless you are in some specific circles.

The best analogy currently I have is between Individual recycling vs company scale environmental harm.

Denialist arguments, misinformation campaigns - these are not conversations. These are campaigns. Someone wants to enact political change, influence the Overton window and drive votes or citizen behavior.

It’s absurd - and any intervention to stop this, will be branded as censorship. Then the usual solutions get pulled out; fact-checking, more free speech. All of which buys more space for the malignant campaigns.

Currently, misinformation research is specifically being targeted, which has incredible parallels to environmental research in the 80s/90s. You had cranks brought onto Fox and treated as experts. This created bills to thwart pro environment efforts. When scientists went onto Fox to debate, they were fed to the lions for spectacle.

The facts of online ecosystems end up being loaded - misinfo campaigns focus mostly on right and conservative groups. This leads to emotional responses and dismissals from people who aren’t steeped in this nonsense. You get arguments of both sides, or solutions that assume equal levels of harm and exposure.

Any actual effort to bring light to this is attacked. See what happened with the SIO. Right now the Censorship, and the censorship industrial complex are the terms being used.

It’s.. incredibly frustrating.

> Gish gallopers are gonna Gish gallop, and no amount of good faith is going to stop them if they don't want to stop.

The rhetorical flourish "it's not my job to educate you" gets overused, and misused as the first fortified position someone retreats to when they're contradicted.

However, there is a place for it, and it's probably worth asking after the second objection presented by a denialist "how many of your assertions am I going to have to prove wrong before you find some dignity, and use the methods I just showed you on the rest of your own claims?"

How do "kid gloves" and "in good faith" fit into one paragraph? To me, your tone sounds quite condescending. No surprise you were not convincing.

This only matters if it's important to you that everybody believe the same truths, which I would suggest shouldn't be important to you. Some people will believe one thing, another group will believe a different thing, and those disagreements can't always be reasoned away. Which should be a perfectly fine outcome, it shouldn't cause you any distress that people believe things that you think aren't true, and vice versa.

Trying to boil this down to the quality of the faith is also a rather immature response. To frame things this way isn't to accept that there are different viewpoints other than your own, it's just to assert a claim that your viewpoints are correct, and that while other view points might exist, they are wrong. Your assessment of what is a good faith or what is a bad faith argument likely has little to do with the quality of the arguments involved, and instead will somehow miraculously align with your own world view at a rather implausible rate.

If you want to argue with people in public, the only thing you should really be concerned about is stating your best case. If you do that then you've achieved the only mature goals that you could possibly attach to public arguing, and whether people are convinced by it or not is up to them.

The key is to not try and convince the person about the issue at hand, but instead add to their toolbox methods for finding out things themselves. Introducing ideas like the importance of thinking of information chain of custody to avoid games of telephone, considering sampling bias and the importance of context.

"Bad arguments take 1 unit of effort to generate and 1000 to refute. If you don't have a strategy for handling that asymmetry"

Hitchen's Razor is a great defense for these amplified DoS attacks:

"what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence"

I still contend that the "yo momma's butt is flat" defense against flat earth claims is the Game Theory Optimal play

You don't have to reply!

Best retort of them all: own the platform, make the rules, permaban.

As a friend said many years ago: you don't have to attend every fight you're invited to.

"Pick your battles" is another phrasing of it.

As I've gotten older, I've come to realise that there are people (including offline, including close friends and/or family) with whom discussions simply turn into arguments ... and there's no logic that will prevail.

Increasingly I set boundaries, both for myself, and with those others. I've also realised that some things don't need to be arguments. I'll state my terms, request, proposal, plans, whatever (and even that only if necessary or plausibly considerate), and if there's some antagonistic response ... I ignore it.

If the person actively thwarts my doing something (often to help them, and why people get so combative about assistance I can't even begin to understand...), I'll simply lay down tools. "You don't want me to do X ..." or "You're going to make it more unpleasant / inconvenient for me to do X ... then you can do it yourself."

It's much easier to do this if you can walk (or otherwise) get away. A space you can control (walls, locking doors, or exit from location) helps tremendously.

Some of this transfers to online discussion. Mostly I communicate to share my own knowledge/experience, or to try to understand others. Rarely to convince. Occasionally to refute or show the inherent paradox or inconsistency of a statement, though that's usually aimed at other readers.

(The lurking audience is almost always far larger than the participating one.)

I disagree. I think it's a tall order but it should always be the ideal. Trying to justify shitty behavior in the name of greater good is just another way to lose. Instead, I admire people who go far and beyond for the lesser good.

I think the key point in this post is actually right at the end where the author states that their goal is always to understand the other person.

If that's your goal, I agree it's usually pretty easy to avoid flame wars and get people to talk in respectful ways.

For me it often isn't worth it to spend time trying to build understanding of anonymous actors online. But, I think some of these recommendations carry into IRL discussions too. The central question for me is typically not "how can I make this civil" but rather "how much effort do I want to put into this argument?"

"Seek first to understand, then to be understood."

Why does winning matter? Isn’t it emotionally more work and less gratifying than insulting? I think that’s why things are the way they are. People know this stuff, they just choose to press the insult button.

Your honesty is refreshing, but the result is depressing.

It sure would be nice to have a place where you could discuss ideas without it being an argument, or to offer helpful suggestions to people without them treating it like you insulted their intelligence.

> It sure would be nice to have a place where you could discuss ideas without it being an argument

100%

Arguments result in walking away, the relationship ends before hardly any information is exchanged. If either side wants an argument, it can be difficult to avoid. If both sides are seeking understanding, it becomes very easy to exchange a lot of information and for all to learn a great deal, even as they still disagree.

I would very much like to find (or create) forum(s) for discussions seeking understanding instead of arguments seeking to “win” wars or battles.

My own attempts have shown the potential audience is small to non existent, at least with the combinations of words I’ve tried.

> I would very much like to find (or create) forum(s) for discussions seeking understanding instead of arguments seeking to “win” wars or battles.

The users on chatgpt.com are quite good at staying cordial and come off as if they want to seek a genuine understanding. Granted, its UI is a little different from the traditional forum, only occasionally seeing additional users reply but being mostly geared to one-on-one interaction. That said, most discussions on more traditional forums like this one end up branching off into one-on-one discussions anyway, so I am not sure that is a terribly meaningful difference at the end of the day.

> My own attempts have shown the potential audience is small to non existent

Said discussion community has quite possibly become the most popular place for online discussion, so I am not sure about that. Understandably bootstrapping such a service is hard, though. "If you build it, they will come" only happens in the movies.

"Be careful of what you wish for", though. While what you describe sounds nice in theory, it ends up feeling rather sterile when you don't have all the quirkiness of the so-called battles. That's what brings me back here, and deep down that is probably why you are here too.

There is a thing I am looking for.

I frequent here (and chatgpt.com) because it is the closest I have found to what I am looking for.

I have paid enough people to visit my attempts that I think I have a decent sense of how a large number of people will react to what I have tried.

My intuition is that my language to describe what I am looking for is insufficient to convey the idea to others (including the venerable responder at chatgpt.com).

Winning against the other person doesn't matter. But sometimes it does matter what onlookers perceive (of course, when you're in the middle of an internet argument it's hard to correctly determine that - most people who engage in arguments do it far too often).

What makes you think 'winning' matters? What matters is that you are being entertained. Otherwise, why bother? And, if we are being honest, what is most entertaining on a message forum is getting a reaction. People would simply write in their private journal if they weren't looking for a reaction.

But that means that the content will be tuned to what the author thinks will most likely produce a reaction. Some audiences respond well to insults, others not so much.

Good faith arguments are wasted on those operating in bad faith, and bad currency drives out good.

I sort of worked this out posting on 4chan a long time ago, and could actually get a decent conversation going there believe it or not. Not everyone is worth it though, unless you're using the like a matador to impress upon the lurkers. This is the best way to argue against Christianity I've found.

He should talk to my family who is alt-right “they are clearly a different species” to see how much he would understand the other side.

Well, some people are so much emotionally invested in a certain point of view that challenging it even a bit becomes detrimental to their core psyche.

We have seen that during COVID and now we see that even more in those russians who are in favour of the war.

I'd say that some techniques to argue with people on the far side do exist, but it takes time and a lot of effort.

this post came at a good time for me (just lost an internet argument). same author has an interesting post about building mental models https://defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/geoffrey-hinton-on...

The two example only show how the others win.

Is there an example for the gold medal and still getting a "wow, a civil interaction, how rare!"?

BTW a public discussion most of the time isn't about the people discussing but about the audience.

It's rare to change someone's opinion but you can easier help create one in the undecided.

>The reality I’m looking at here is that ~everyone on the internet is rational AND is arguing in good faith

Absolutely not, there are trolls and people who make a living from arguing in bad faith.

In the example axial's perspective is just an assumption, could actually really be in bad faith.

6 months practice, indeed. I don't argue online to change the minds of "opponents." Decades ago I saw how everything I wrote online would be used to train some future AI, and so I developed a cognitive style designed to disrupt ideological passivity. that is people iterating the logic of ideas they have accepted passively.

I've found different attitudes to truth. a distant nebulous ideal to orient and navigate with and hand to mouth political survival each create cognitive species so separate we wouldn't really miss each other if we were gone.

I don't really care about someone's specific opinions enough to make them "wrong," I'm usually only talking to them to find out if they have any interesting axioms of existence.

what I've noticed is that many arguments have little to do with you, the "opponent", or the topic argued about or even which of you is right.

it's more about the arguer re-enforcing their beliefs of being correct, and therefore morally righteous and powerful, to themselves. If you can argue your point successfully or at least cause your opponent to secede or give up and ragequit or block you, you won, because it isn't about correctness but power to remove or eliminate their influence from the argument, and if taken to the farthest conclusion, society at large.

you begin noticing that all these conversations are about power over the opponent and if they could humiliate them enough- either with numbers by ratioing them with chatgpt bot replies or reddit downvotes or whatever- they will be silenced and you can pretend it was your power that did it.

It reminds me of catcalling on the street. The guy catcalling a girl knows very well they won't turn her on, she isn't going to be receptive, she isn't going to fuck him. She might just shoot him an angry look. But it doesn't matter because that wasn't the goal, the goal was to get a temporary sexual power trip- you just made that girl think about you against her will!! you were powerful enough to occupy her mind for that moment. You win!

you also see it in the sort of cultish thinking of all kinds of ideological things like wild flat earthers or MRAs or pickup artists or pizzagaters or whatever stupid shit. It's never about the thing they say they're all about, they don't really care about the earth being flat, or men's rights, or manipulating girls, or child abuse- they care about feeling like heroes to themselves and their peers- culturally righteous and powerful.

I think the people propogating the talking points that these people are mindlessly spouting are doing a much better job in achieving their goals.

The guy who says climate change is a Chinese Hoax is 50/50 for President as a result.

So the answer seems to be a decades long campaign of misinformation to achieve power to get money to fund another decade of misinformation.

Yes, the duped marks you recruit into this will become pitiful shells of their former selves, paranoid losers abandoned by any educated member of their family who watch in horror as their loving father descends into hateful insanity.

Yes, the only people you'll be able to find to carry out this work will be sociopaths, leaving a trail of sexual and physical abuse behind them, as they help you destroy the country.

But you have to admit it's effective.

Lot of good points in there, and I really appreciate the author's aspired outlook on the world. However, I disagree with some of the core tenets involved.

> There’s a misconception that good faith discussion only happens in close-knit communities like LessWrong or HackerNews.

In my experience, discussions about more controversial topics here are exactly as disgusting as they are on any other forum. Which makes sense, because technologically, this place is exactly like any other forum.

> The reality I’m looking at here is that ~everyone on the internet is rational AND is arguing in good faith. (...) "people suck/are bad/evil/stupid" (...) is a very difficult way to live life, it’s also just flat out false.

The approach I'm going to use for debuking this is going to be semantics-play and claiming that your examples are cherry-picked. I'll paraphrase 2 X (formerly Twitter) conversations for this that I just hit recently. I'm paraphrasing because I lost the links. You'll unfortunately just have to take my word for this.

Conversation #1:

OP: You should drink alcohol! When are you going to drink alcohol if not now? 18-29 are your prime drinking years, your body is made to process alcohol at this age. You should never abstinate. You should take at least 12 shots every week."

Apart from being blatantly terrible health advice, this is also logically unsound. The OP very clearly cannot prove or demonstrate that the body is made to process alcohol in this age range. What he could prove/demonstrate is that in this age range, the body handles it best, which is a very different thing.

Commenter 1: I disagree, it's really bad for your body, blah blah blah.

OP: You're a loser, and look at me I'm more fit than you (posts unsavory picture of commenter 1, and a "good" one of themselves).

Commenter 1: posts picture of themselves being visibly more fit than OP.

OP: <i don't remember, probably something asinine>

Commenter 2: yeah but you're a loser

If this article's author's takeaway from this is that Commenter 1 didn't try to argue in a good manner, that is profoundly depressing. Very clearly OP and Commenter 2 had zero intention in making a good faith argument, or recognizing themselves in the wrong. They were deliberately acting like "cool" assholes.

Conversation #2:

OP: post about Apple and privacy

Commenter 1: whenever I talk about <things> I get recommended them in ads immediately after. How can Apple have top notch privacy if this happens?

Commenter 2: argues that Commenter 1 searched for said <things> and just doesn't realize, therefore he's dumb, therefore Apple good

Once again, there was no attempt at a good faith conversation. Possibly from either of them. Join in, and you'll have to fend off two immature idiots instead of one.

What I'm trying to get at here is that regardless of whether these people are actual assholes or are just acting like one, it doesn't really matter. I'll go on these platforms and be hit with their misery regardless. Them being actually goody two shoes is unimportant, if all I can ever interact with is their asshole selves. Either the platform (X, formerly Twitter) gets this kind of behavior out of people, or being on the internet in general does. Regardless, these people are not worth anyone's time.

Despite this, I will say that I do highly agree that this view is on its own extremely miserable as well. I've been having an extreme difficulty connecting with people due to the many years of insufferable conversations like this, and have abandoned most platforms by this point also. Inviting me to put in even more effort isn't super tantalizing either.

I really don't think this is just a "language" thing people can or should just figure out. It's a bit like thinking that you can do hard drugs if you just control yourself - ignoring of course that controlling yourself is the very thing the more serious substances gradually disintegrate. Is it true that you can be super into, idk, heroin, if you just pay attention? Sure I guess. Is it what's overwhelmingly likely to happen? No. And it has very little to do with you the "person" inside. It's biochemistry.

> In my experience, discussions about more controversial topics here are exactly as disgusting as they are on any other forum. Which makes sense, because technologically, this place is exactly like any other forum.

I don't know - in my experience Hackernews seems most best faith I've seen anywhere. If I have controversial opinions on Reddit I easily get downvoted hard (even though it's against the Reddiquette), but here I might even get few plus points and a civil non hivemind response.

Glad to hear.

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