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How to Disagree

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Disagree

#191

Post by ProkofyNeva »

I couldn't disagree more. This cultivated and mannered ideal that you espouse is rarely practiced on any real blog or forum with a passionate community, or an intelligent community versed in the issues, and that's ok. And your effort to put this out here like the 10 Commandments is just a typical male, geeky bloggy power play. And there, that may be an intolerable insult; it may even be incorrect! but it's not an ad hominem attack, what would be an hominem is to say that your argument is discredited because your name is Paul or you are white. Geeks and males and bloggers need to be characterized, judged, and condemned where necessary, without fear of favour.

It's all about trying to control other people when you put up one of these classic manipulative blog how-tos deliberately in a format to guarantee constant Google-fetching and repasting. These various Internet memes like "OMG don't have a flamewar!" OR "OMG don't feed the trolls" -- these are just tribalist imperatives that lead to horridly dull conformity and spread an awful pall over most social media. Argument is very, very important, and if it gets heated, and sparks fly, good! It's real!

Times vs. Sullivan, the landmark Supreme Court case that is a keystone of a lot of media freedom in the US, says basically it is ok to call someone a name. It's ok. It is allowed speech. And that's the sort of robust speech that occurs in a democracy.

It's very important to respond instantly to tone. Tone is what people think they can smuggle in, often, in the emotional medium of forums and blogs, and imagine they can get away with leaving these emotional trapdoors around for people to respond to instinctively, and it's good to bring it to light. They need to be called on it. Instantly. And fiercely sometimes. The tone you are taking here is preachy and hortatory. But one can only say, oh, stop it. Are you smug about all the fanboyz below, about all the people who will cut and paste your link like some latter-day Dear Abby?

Neuralgic types often imagine there is an ad hominem attack, when in fact there's a quite unbiased report. And they often call "ad hominem" something that is a much needed judgement about a person that really needs to be made.

Gregfjohnson is good to remember Aquinas here. But Aquinas also conceived of a number of ways for virtuous men to reach Heaven even if they were not believers or baptised or following the scriptures; had the different categories of those "saved" met each other and converse, the one might be astounded at the heresy and dissent of the other!

Re-stating people's arguments often infuriates them precisely because they don't want to be summarized and fed back in stark form, or take consequence for the tone and the hidden agendas they try to smuggle into forums and blogs. So it's not a magic bullet.

The surest way for a forums discussion to go downhill is for some smug nit to go and pull up some "rules of rhetoric" and beginning banging on somebody's head that they are breaking some arcane "law of logic". Oh, do stop it. People need to express themselves. They know exactly what they are hearing in tone and implication, and they are right to respond to it.

Re: How to Disagree

#192

Post by ix »

An interesting article, expanding from means of disagreeing to methods used I'd add a few observations. There's the shotgun refutation where a poster quotes almost every part of a post with a weak disagreement making responding to every point almost impossible and there's the essayist who writes a needlessly long response making finding and responding to their central point much harder. Essayists often use deliberately ambiguous passages so they can claim you don't understand rather than explaining clearly.

Another internet or more general debate strategy is to refer to the voluminous works of others as if you've read them and behave as if your opponent cannot respond until they've read every last page, often with little attempt to explain or apply the supposed arguments and facts that come from those sources.

Most internet posters are unable to state things clearly, partly because people are taught to obfuscate and because they're embarassed to put their points in view so nakedly.

Re: How to Disagree

#194

Post by heteronymous »

I definitely appreciated this articulate and concise article.

I feel quite strongly that what you've described about "the web" is in fact symptomatic (probably not causal, however) of what ails communication as a whole, in this country - with regard to coherent dialog & debate, or lack thereof.

Re: How to Disagree

#195

Post by Rcomian »

This is a good basic model and reminds me somewhat of the levels used in spiral-dynamics and similar systems, see the table in: http://www.spiraldynamics.org/aboutsd_overview.htm

However, only levels DH3 and upwards follow the model of including the previous levels and adding enhancements, the first 2 levels are another mini-hierarchy, and DH2 is almost a category on it's own. Perhaps this might be modelled better with a dimension-level mapping. This also follows the ethos, pathos and logos.

This will allow analysis and levelling of each form of argument: DH0 -> DE:0 DH1 -> DE:1 DH2 -> DP:0 DH3 -> DL:0 DH4 -> DL:1 DH5 -> DL:2 DH6 -> DL:3

I also like the concept of DH7 which explicitly argues against the strongest form of the statement. DH7 -> DL:4

Re: How to Disagree

#196

Post by Rcomian »

ProkofyNeva wrote: post #191

I couldn't disagree more. This cultivated and mannered ideal that you espouse is rarely practiced on any real blog or forum with a passionate community, or an intelligent community versed in the issues, and that's ok . And your effort to put this out here like the 10 Commandments is just a typical male, geeky bloggy power play. And there, that may be an intolerable insult; it may even be incorrect! but it's not an ad…

I think you might be on to something, if you're saying that a personal or tonal response might be necessary to certain articles. Someone earlier mentioned the Ethos, Pathos and Logos vectors for disagreement, which I love. I read what you're saying as that just because an attack is on the person, doesn't mean it's irrelevant, which I think might be true. This means that there's different targets here and qualities of argument on each target. I've got a comment somewhere on adding dimensions to these levels and splitting them out, although the examples I gave can be improved on I'm sure. I think it's fair to say that most name calling on the internet is of a low level variety, hence why it might get munged into a single list like this and placed at a low level, however a personal attack may take a higher and more-legitimate form, although I've not come to any examples of that. There is a question on the legitimacy of arguing against anything other than the actual logic of the argument - I'll leave that to others to work out, I'm happy to say that there are different lines to attack on, and different qualities of attack on each level. I'll assume that the relevant line is dependant on the post and the respondent. What I think is worth taking away from this is that the level of argument raised in the response should be as high as possible.

Re: How to Disagree

#197

Post by cabalamat »

kerrynitz wrote: post #171
cabalamat wrote: post #131

As well as having a hierarchy of disagreement it seems to me useful to have a categorisation of statements (both in original essays, and disagreements with those essays). Such a categorisation might include: * [1] statements of how the world is. These are statements that can in principle be tested by experiment. e.g. "broken glass is good to eat" * [2] statements of how one would like the world to be. These obviously…

In economics they call type [1] positive and type [2] normative - the implication being that economics only deals with positive questions and tells us nothing about normative questions (how should the world be). When I studied a bit of sociology they took an approach borrowed from philosophy in categorising methods (and effectively split up type [1]): they were interested in how the theory (substitute argument here)…

kerrynitz: but the problem lies when they are dropped from the sentence - eg cabalamat's example becomes "Everyone likes cats"

Or even better a statement like "all decent people like cats". This has the form of a type [1] statement but the meaning of a type [2] statement.

Re: How to Disagree

#198

Post by cabalamat »

ix wrote: post #192

An interesting article, expanding from means of disagreeing to methods used I'd add a few observations. There's the shotgun refutation where a poster quotes almost every part of a post with a weak disagreement making responding to every point almost impossible and there's the essayist who writes a needlessly long response making finding and responding to their central point much harder. Essayists often use deliberate…

ix: "Most internet posters are unable to state things clearly [...] because they're embarassed to put their points in view so nakedly."

This is even more true of politicians. From Orwell's Politics and the English Language:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.

Re: How to Disagree

#199

Post by scrathberry »

Rcomian wrote: post #196
ProkofyNeva wrote: post #191

I couldn't disagree more. This cultivated and mannered ideal that you espouse is rarely practiced on any real blog or forum with a passionate community, or an intelligent community versed in the issues, and that's ok . And your effort to put this out here like the 10 Commandments is just a typical male, geeky bloggy power play. And there, that may be an intolerable insult; it may even be incorrect! but it's not an ad…

I think you might be on to something, if you're saying that a personal or tonal response might be necessary to certain articles. Someone earlier mentioned the Ethos, Pathos and Logos vectors for disagreement, which I love. I read what you're saying as that just because an attack is on the person, doesn't mean it's irrelevant, which I think might be true. This means that there's different targets here and qualities of…

u r a fag

Re: How to Disagree

#200

Post by vishu »

JesseAldridge wrote: post #39

On my to-do someday list is a site for recording and organizing debates. Arguments would appear as boxes of text, organized into a tree structure. Opposing arguments could be added as children to a parent node. Arguments could be filtered by up/down voting or some other system. Debate trees could be searched. Etc... Somebody really should make this. I remember messing with some Flash site somewhere that did something…

My partner and I have been working on something similar at thinklinkr.com. We are currently (3/31/08) showing our crude version to friends and iterating rapidly. Drop me a line at vishu at thinklinkr.com and I'll send you an invitation.
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