How to Disagree

'If you can't find an actual quote to disagree with, you may be arguing with a straw man.'

That isn't true. Using analog-situation arguments and reductions to absurdity to point out the fallacies of a point is a long-used, valid practice. The central point of their writing seems to be that addressing substance using reason is the most effective way of arguing. They write:

"The force of a refutation depends on what you refute. The most powerful form of disagreement is to refute someone's central point."

and point out that refutation is the strongest from of argument against some other point, Well, "strongest" is a subjective evaluation and I would like to point out that in the history of argument and in particular political discourse, usually it is the loudest, angriest, and downright scariest people in the argument who win; for example, look at the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s So these people have it just plain all wrong.

There, now, did I miss anything? =)

Great piece, really, I loved it. Thanks for putting it out there!

Question is - what are you (and now, we) really trying to accomplish here - the issue/concern disagreeing?

As Well: What's the context (purpose) for all this disagreeing you talk about? For bringing this subject up for view, in the first place?

   Is it to be right (a bit of arrogance) and try to make the other guy wrong? 
   Is it to get to what works - to learn to say or do something better together (personally or professionally)

John McLaughlin, Day Traders - Consultant / Coach www.DayTradersWin.com

This is a legitimate problem, and ironically it is a symptom that a news concentrator is becoming a victim of its own success. As the signal-to-noise ratio attracts a progressively larger crowd, the types of information that are viewed as 'signal' broaden to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It's similar to hiring in a small company -- but at least in that situation you have control over the purse strings. (Even the trolls get dumber as time goes by and a site grows more popular.) Thus the comments on an arbitrary story suffer, and it requires more work to pick through them. However, if you 'listen' to subcommunities (eg. economics, programming, math on reddit) you find that (unsurprisingly) the baseline rises again. If you have no interest in those subsets, however, you're kind of out of luck. (But if you're here you already knew that)

You could probably model this as a logistic process, provided that you account for renormalizations (such as the literal renormalization that took place on reddit recently).

but also tons of users who upmod them.

This part (or at least its independent, non-interaction effect) is irrelevant; if you focus solely on people who have strong and demonstrated critical thinking skills, you can learn a great deal, and also gain a different perspective. Their input is much more harmful when it comes to filtering in or out the news to be concentrated.

Most of the interesting threads in which I have participated eventually lost the interest of the masses because they had descended into minutiae. But that's where the interesting bits lay, so that's where they went.

Ignore the riffraff. Lord knows they'll usually ignore you if you're presenting anything challenging. Even in a swamp like Slashdot, there is occasionally a perspective-changing comment that is worth reading.

If you want to expose yourself to a wide variety of opinions, you have to be willing to do a bit of work yourself, and determine which ones hold merit. It's a two-way street, in many respects, and your priorities (in addition to your time pressures) will determine how far you are willing to take it.

It appears to me that the 'social news' sites on the Web are simply recapitulating the arc of the special-interest BBS nodes and Usenet cliques of years past. Everything old is new again.