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Comment by xscott | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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