221–230 of 374 posts
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So the only wining move is not to play?
No, if you dont play, then your opponent point of view is the only one out there. People will move their opinions to match your opponents more.
My online posting life got a lot less stressful once I realized that the world will be exactly the same if I neglect to rebut some twitter user's bad/uninformed point of view.
Maybe you have a ton more social clout than I do, though :P
I am a pretty big advocate for good faith communication and think the article is right that it is necessary. The thing that disheartens me though, is the asymmetric nature of the problem: good faith communication is hard. It takes time and patience. Bad faith communication is easy. You can write 20 bad faith drive by comments in the time it takes to post one thoughtful reply. And due to the wide open nature of most o…
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I agree with this, but in spaces where bad faith is the predominant form of communication, you'll probably be accused of being a centrist for not falling exactly in line.
Nah, you'll be accused of being the opposite of what you are. See Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi.
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I think some other responders have touched lightly on this but I feel it should be explicitly said that sometimes engaging in conversation is not actually what the other party is doing, even though it might look like it. Sometimes they are not speaking to you at all, but rather to your listeners. And the larger your pool of listeners the more likely you'll encounter arguments in bad faith because it turns out that if…
> if the goal is persuasion then good-faith arguments don't scale That phrase helps crystalize the concept very nicely.
Here's an alternative ending: what if good faith communication was superior to bad faith in a systemic way ? Clues: - at a personal level: have you ever tried to put in practice "highly skilled, non-naive good faith communication" ? If you did, you've probably noted that more often than not, it doesn't make you weaker. It increases your value, your status, even your financial success. So maybe this could also be a co…
While it won him lots of supporters it ultimately resulted in his downfall as he refused to use underhanded rhetorical attacks of any kind, even when the ends clearly justified the means.
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Greenwald (and Tulsi Gabbard) quoted Nuland directly, who admitted that there were biological research labs. Greenwald had previously worked on the Anthrax story of 2001, where a couple of high profile people got sent a sophisticated Anthrax variant in the mail. It was supposed to be foreign terrorism at first, later it was found that the strain came from a U.S. research facility . Biological weapons aren't allowed b…
It's totally normal and expected for biological research labs to have biological samples with which to do research. What is being described is beyond that, with thinly veiled suggestions of covert maliciousness sprinkled in.
In Ukraine, matters are exacerbated by the fact that these research facilities, according to the left wing newspaper The Guardian, were U.S. funded:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/11/russia-biologi...
Ukraine does operate biological laboratories that receive US funding. The US undersecretary of state Victoria Nuland affirmed those facts in a Senate foreign relations committee hearing this week, in which the Republican senator Marco Rubio asked directly if Ukraine had biological weapons.
Given the politically unstable situation in February 2022 and earlier, people like Greenwald and Gabbard simply point out that Putin will view this as a provocation, same as the Nuland/Graham involvement in the revolution in 2014.
Most people who are called Putin apologists are simply doing one thing: They know that Putin is a bully with 6,000 nuclear weapons, so they try to understand his thinking and possible reactions. As we see now, they were right in many ways.
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Addressing your opponent position lets them pick what the topic is. They are picking a topic their position is strong at. Therefore addressing your opponent position in limited-attention setting (aka publicly) is simply a losing move.
So the only wining move is not to play?
I get involved in conversations, but not in heated debates. I don't even dignify bad faith responses with an answer.
Participation is optional. If it's pointless and unpleasant, I don't bother anymore.
I have realized when browsing some twitter culture war exchanges that people almost never respond to the opposing party's arguments. They imagine a set of arguments that uses some of the same words and then argue with that. This type of exchange never results in agreement -- or even the exchange of information! It's unhinged from any communicative act. It's merely inflammatory. I do think this is extremely problemati…
It goes far beyond twitter culture. Even in daily conversation there are people who only open out port and close in port. One signal is that whenever you bring up a perspective (either in support/disagreement) this person gonna continue his speech and make the conversation expereince like attending a lecture.
One of the most important parts of the article is a footnote: NOTE: All signs of good faith communication can be "faked" in bad faith. Basically, in modern online mob communication, the winning side defines what "good faith" and "bad faith" are. The winning side defines a vague code of conduct, cloaks themselves in "goodness" and then openly uses the "bad faith" slander against anyone who disagrees on any issue (even…
Rather, I consider vaguer rules like "don't be a jerk" to be a feature, and one can use context clues to see what the community considers jerkiness