There’s no hope in changing the mind of every fanatic you come across.
But we generally don’t have internet debates in DMs, we do it in public forums. The goal isn’t to sway the fanatics, it’s to publicly quash their arguments. To sway curious onlookers away from fanaticism before they become fanatics themselves.
People always forget about the lurkers. Most people with less-informed, more impressionable views on a given topic aren’t posting and debating, they’re reading and learning (despite the unfortunate exceptions). Seeing some wacko extremist nonsense or voter suppression tactic go unchallenged by a more reasonable argument may be enough to sway a not-yet-fanatic in the wrong direction.
The goal isn’t to sway the fanatics, it’s to publicly quash their arguments. To sway curious onlookers away from fanaticism before they become fanatics themselves.
As I’ve said in another comment, this is return to Middle Ages. Debating skills have not much in common with reasoning skills.
For my argument it’s sufficient that they are very much not the same.
This is similar to saying that a big company leading in some area can be benevolent and do good things. Yes, it can, like DEC, Sun, at some point even IBM. Doesn’t prove the statement that every social institution and mechanism out there must be replaced by markets.
You’re the only one making that argument, and it doesn’t follow from my initial point. I’m not even really sure what point you’re trying to make.
How does anything you’re saying negate the fact that people make bad but persuasive points online, and gullible people fall for that persuasion? Or that those gullible people lack the entrenchment of the bad actors, and can be redirected from those bad points to better ones if persuasive arguments are presented directly in response to the bad ones?
he goal isn’t to sway the fanatics, it’s to publicly quash their arguments. To sway curious onlookers away from fanaticism before they become fanatics themselves.
Friendly reminder that the above is what I answered first.
Sorry, but this is a load of bollocks. It’s you putting yourself above some “gullible people” and still using debate skills to deceive them, just in some “good” direction. Maybe you are really right, but they believe you for the wrong reasons, and the process itself doesn’t reinforce that you are right in any way.
If they’re already going to believe the wrong things for the wrong reasons, why not present the right things for the wrong reasons? Those who need the right reasons to change their mind are beyond the scope of this approach.
This is outreach to the gullible for harm reduction when they might otherwise filter themselves into a dangerous pipeline. This isn’t using debate skills to deceive, it’s using them to counter those who do use their debate skills to deceive. Even if the content may possibly be wrong, by presenting it in contrast to preceding content it necessarily widens the debate-space from an unopposed confident statement to a dialogue that the onlooker can take into consideration while making their own decision.
it necessarily widens the debate-space from an unopposed confident statement to a dialogue that the onlooker can take into consideration while making their own decision.
That part would be right if we weren’t talking about social media, which are designed to neuter this effect.
You aren’t going to kill an idea with name calling online either. You’ll, hopefully, be rightfully called out for using pointless ad hominem attacks and be shot down on the spot, pushing people to the fanatic you’re arguing against.
Unless we’re talking about Twitter, then yeah, louder idiot wins.
Posting “posting isn’t praxis” isn’t praxis either. But like, there is value in theory, and you must believe that or else you would’ve believed it was pointless to post “posting isn’t praxis”.
I very much do believe it was pointless. I believe it’s impossible to make someone who believes anyone in an argument online is not tailoring their argument to the amount of upvotes or downvotes they receive understand anything. I believe the infinite recursion you try to trap truth in has in fact trapped you. I don’t mean this in a hostile way, but I do mean it.
Tell me you aren’t going to post another form of “no u” because you interpret what I’m saying as “touch grass”. There is no way to have a good faith discussion with someone who replies like I did, or like you did to me. Which is to say, the internet is no place to spend any amount of time, which invalidates my typing this comment, which makes it pointless.
The inevitability of me having to type this renders it meaningless. The idea that I am trying to do what you are is both true and false, so I find myself in a position where I can explain how we got here but cannot prescribe a solution because there isn’t one. And what I mean by that is, my position forces me to perform an act of hypocrisy (one that I’m painfully aware of). People don’t like hypocrisy, so you can say something true like “this comment won’t change anyone’s mind”, and get smoked for posting by people who believe posting is praxis.
Honestly, if you want to get really weird with it, believing that someone being exposed to an idea renders them helpless to disbelieve it is extremely similar to believing drag queen story hour will turn your child gay.
So now you’re in a bind. You either believe you have to disprove me and in the process invalidate what you actually believe by contesting the last paragraph, or you say nothing and let it look like I’ve changed a mind.
This is unbelievably convoluted. You’ve talked yourself in knots but also somehow believe that your argument is so airtight that any attempt to refute it only invalidates my beliefs.
Your argument is circular, self-defeating and also missing some really obvious things, one of which I already pointed out.
The only thing left to do is to ask if you’re actually curious to understand what I mean.
So to be clear, you’re not curious to understand because you believe you can read my mind and understand the secret motivations behind my words that renders them invalid?
You laid out your motivations already. You believe posting changes minds, then you treated a long post I made that spells out how my mind works and attempts to put into an understandable format how I feel as if I was posting the same way you do (for upvotes for your idea, downvotes for mine). If you can’t see how your behavior isn’t a real discussion I don’t want to have one.
If you can’t see how your behavior isn’t a real discussion I don’t want to have one.
You literally said it’s impossible to have a real discussion online, and now you’re criticising someone for not engaging you in the way you want to have a “real discussion”?
I very much didn’t lay out my motivations, I think you may have me confused for someone else.
But again, you’re not curious to understand because you think you already know everything you need to know about me.
For what it’s worth, I am actually curious to understand what you mean, but I’m struggling to for reasons I’ve laid out. Your reasoning is very circular and self-contradictory and also a lot of the sentences are very hard to parse out.
I am asking about whether you are curious to understand because I would like to have a real discussion, and I want to know if you are willing to also have one. So far you seem so convinced I would never actually listen to you that you therefore won’t listen to me. Unless and until that changes I don’t see this particular conversation achieving much.
There’s no hope in changing the mind of every fanatic you come across.
But we generally don’t have internet debates in DMs, we do it in public forums. The goal isn’t to sway the fanatics, it’s to publicly quash their arguments. To sway curious onlookers away from fanaticism before they become fanatics themselves.
People always forget about the lurkers. Most people with less-informed, more impressionable views on a given topic aren’t posting and debating, they’re reading and learning (despite the unfortunate exceptions). Seeing some wacko extremist nonsense or voter suppression tactic go unchallenged by a more reasonable argument may be enough to sway a not-yet-fanatic in the wrong direction.
As I’ve said in another comment, this is return to Middle Ages. Debating skills have not much in common with reasoning skills.
Nor are they mutually exclusive. A competent debater can intertwine rhetoric with logic to make a compelling argument for a well-reasoned position.
For my argument it’s sufficient that they are very much not the same.
This is similar to saying that a big company leading in some area can be benevolent and do good things. Yes, it can, like DEC, Sun, at some point even IBM. Doesn’t prove the statement that every social institution and mechanism out there must be replaced by markets.
You’re the only one making that argument, and it doesn’t follow from my initial point. I’m not even really sure what point you’re trying to make.
How does anything you’re saying negate the fact that people make bad but persuasive points online, and gullible people fall for that persuasion? Or that those gullible people lack the entrenchment of the bad actors, and can be redirected from those bad points to better ones if persuasive arguments are presented directly in response to the bad ones?
Friendly reminder that the above is what I answered first.
Sorry, but this is a load of bollocks. It’s you putting yourself above some “gullible people” and still using debate skills to deceive them, just in some “good” direction. Maybe you are really right, but they believe you for the wrong reasons, and the process itself doesn’t reinforce that you are right in any way.
If they’re already going to believe the wrong things for the wrong reasons, why not present the right things for the wrong reasons? Those who need the right reasons to change their mind are beyond the scope of this approach.
This is outreach to the gullible for harm reduction when they might otherwise filter themselves into a dangerous pipeline. This isn’t using debate skills to deceive, it’s using them to counter those who do use their debate skills to deceive. Even if the content may possibly be wrong, by presenting it in contrast to preceding content it necessarily widens the debate-space from an unopposed confident statement to a dialogue that the onlooker can take into consideration while making their own decision.
That part would be right if we weren’t talking about social media, which are designed to neuter this effect.
All the better to counter-act that neutralizing force at every potent opportunity.
posting isn’t praxis
You aren’t going to kill an idea with name calling online either. You’ll, hopefully, be rightfully called out for using pointless ad hominem attacks and be shot down on the spot, pushing people to the fanatic you’re arguing against.
Unless we’re talking about Twitter, then yeah, louder idiot wins.
Posting “posting isn’t praxis” isn’t praxis either. But like, there is value in theory, and you must believe that or else you would’ve believed it was pointless to post “posting isn’t praxis”.
I very much do believe it was pointless. I believe it’s impossible to make someone who believes anyone in an argument online is not tailoring their argument to the amount of upvotes or downvotes they receive understand anything. I believe the infinite recursion you try to trap truth in has in fact trapped you. I don’t mean this in a hostile way, but I do mean it.
Tell me you aren’t going to post another form of “no u” because you interpret what I’m saying as “touch grass”. There is no way to have a good faith discussion with someone who replies like I did, or like you did to me. Which is to say, the internet is no place to spend any amount of time, which invalidates my typing this comment, which makes it pointless.
The inevitability of me having to type this renders it meaningless. The idea that I am trying to do what you are is both true and false, so I find myself in a position where I can explain how we got here but cannot prescribe a solution because there isn’t one. And what I mean by that is, my position forces me to perform an act of hypocrisy (one that I’m painfully aware of). People don’t like hypocrisy, so you can say something true like “this comment won’t change anyone’s mind”, and get smoked for posting by people who believe posting is praxis.
Honestly, if you want to get really weird with it, believing that someone being exposed to an idea renders them helpless to disbelieve it is extremely similar to believing drag queen story hour will turn your child gay.
So now you’re in a bind. You either believe you have to disprove me and in the process invalidate what you actually believe by contesting the last paragraph, or you say nothing and let it look like I’ve changed a mind.
This is unbelievably convoluted. You’ve talked yourself in knots but also somehow believe that your argument is so airtight that any attempt to refute it only invalidates my beliefs.
Your argument is circular, self-defeating and also missing some really obvious things, one of which I already pointed out.
The only thing left to do is to ask if you’re actually curious to understand what I mean.
This is the same as not replying.
You said nothing, alluded to work you didn’t do, and then asked a question I answered when I said I don’t believe posting can change minds.
Like, read what you wrote and tell me it’s not designed to get an upvote? What is the substance? I should stop arguing with AI online.
So to be clear, you’re not curious to understand because you believe you can read my mind and understand the secret motivations behind my words that renders them invalid?
You laid out your motivations already. You believe posting changes minds, then you treated a long post I made that spells out how my mind works and attempts to put into an understandable format how I feel as if I was posting the same way you do (for upvotes for your idea, downvotes for mine). If you can’t see how your behavior isn’t a real discussion I don’t want to have one.
You literally said it’s impossible to have a real discussion online, and now you’re criticising someone for not engaging you in the way you want to have a “real discussion”?
I very much didn’t lay out my motivations, I think you may have me confused for someone else.
But again, you’re not curious to understand because you think you already know everything you need to know about me.
For what it’s worth, I am actually curious to understand what you mean, but I’m struggling to for reasons I’ve laid out. Your reasoning is very circular and self-contradictory and also a lot of the sentences are very hard to parse out.
I am asking about whether you are curious to understand because I would like to have a real discussion, and I want to know if you are willing to also have one. So far you seem so convinced I would never actually listen to you that you therefore won’t listen to me. Unless and until that changes I don’t see this particular conversation achieving much.