How to have better arguments online

> In a 1921 essay marking the Manchester Guardian's centenary (at which time he had served nearly fifty years as editor), Scott put down his opinions on the role of the newspaper. He argued that the "primary office" of a newspaper is accurate news reporting, saying "comment is free, but facts are sacred". Even editorial comment has its responsibilities: "It is well to be frank; it is even better to be fair".

Now, why doesn't this work? Well, this could work if people's opinions were static and perfectly stated on the first try. But in practice, and even under an ideal setup, people will be changing opinions too fast to ever be able to reach an equilibrium. They might realize that what they previously stated doesn't really match what they believe, or they didn't consider certain things that, when revealed, will now be considered important.

And even more, this is if they were actively trying to reach a consensus while being patient, listening carefully, properly considering other people thoughts, expressing their own in a very precise and faithful way and being able to keep all that information in their heads and prioritize without bias. Which is not realistic.

At this point, we might as well say that the problem is that the more people and points of view you introduce in a discussion, the more precise the consensus needs to be, and precise consensus is unachievable in a continually changing scenario. So, when we believe there's consensus on something, then it must be because either the problem is simple or vague enough, or the consensus itself is vague and imprecise. Which is fine too: vague consensus is not useless, nor it does make sense to reach perfect consensus for everything each time, but that's what we would be lead towards if we all tried to have "better arguments online"... which is never reached anyway at a big enough scale due to the issues previously described.

(yeah, we don't need arguments to reach consensus, you can learn from what others say without agreeing with them, but... I don't even agree with myself, I'm gonna delete th-

If you state your opinion in a virtual "room" with 300 million other people, the chance that at least 1 of those people vehemently disagrees with your opinion is a certainty.

Conflict is almost unavoidable on mass "social networks". Some people claim that you shouldn't live in an online "bubble", but I, uh, vehemently disagree. The only way to keep your sanity online is to live in a bubble, just as you do in real life, self-selecting which people to congregate with in rooms.

You may ask, having said that, why am I here in the HN comments? That's a good question, and the answer is obviously that I'm insane.

Does anyone find it weird that the author of the article claims that we actually need online arguments to "hone our thinking" or some such nonsense, but then immediately goes into an extended analogy about hostage negotiations? I don't know why we all need to become online hostage negotiators. If you want to learn something useful from a different perspective, go offline and read a good book.

The author says, "Taking a disagreement offline can work, but it should only ever be seen as a second-best option." Why???? Everything else the author said suggests it's actually the best option. I really don't see the point in online arguments. Do they ever get resolved? Not in my experience. In fact I fully expect the same (non-)outcome in any replies to my comment.