Hacker News Reader

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.)

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.

"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.

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.

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!

> 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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.