The Notion of “Trolling” in Ancient Sanskrit

If I may add to this, the vāda usually composes of 3 parts. 1. Purva paksha. 2. Khandana 3. Uttara paksha.

Purva paksha which literally translates prior view is when the debater should talk from the opponent's perspective. This has to be confirmed by the opponent, which proves that the debater has understood the opponent's view point.

Then comes khandana, which is the actual opposing view point that the debater puts forward refuting the view point of the opponent.

The last is Uttara paksha, the opinion of the debater. (Or siddhānta as mentioned in this article)

I agree with the assessment but I never connected trolling and trauma, because my personal concept of trolling is essentially a continual escalation of reductio ad absurdum. In that sense it's not really trolling or sarcasm, it's more of a way of livening up overly-serious conversations.

I should probably not refer to that as trolling as the intention isn't to fuck people off, gaslight them, traumatise them...but to soften the mood.

Sure, he gets people RAGEing like a great troll, but at least ostensibly he’s doing more the 2nd type of argument described in the article, but with kind of a backdrop that precise intellectual beliefs are really hard to specify or maintain. It’s like dialectic but it’s not Hegelian; he wants to return to some central question and doesn’t necessarily see that thesis/antithesis climb as crucial, he just finds problems with the premises and wants to find better ones (Hegel’s whole thing was a bit more nuanced than that).

Re: article, trolling initially meant trying to get a rise out of people. It’s not so much you won’t admit you’re wrong or you’re eristically tearing everything down, it’s that you’re pretending to play the argument game (or some other game, like “art criticism” or “testimonial”) but in fact you’re fucking with people of varying levels of specificity.

The first type I called "obstructors". If I (our my department) proposed something, the obstructors always had a dozen or more compelling reasons why the proposal was impractical, infeasible , or otherwise without merit.

The other type, I called them "enablers" might have some initial objections, but they would typically work with me (or us) to overcome the objections so that we could get what we wanted.

In the second case, it was "Vada". After a while I learned that the best way to achieve an outcome was simply to avoid ever engaging with the people whose style was "Vitanda".

Of course at the time (1980's and 90's) I did not think of them as Trolls - just as jerks who didn't want to do anything that created work for themselves.