5 ms·

This is logically false -- it implies that no action, even deliberately undertaken can be called trolling -- which is just a ridiculous fluff claim. It's akin

This is logically false -- it implies that no action, even deliberately undertaken can be called trolling -- which is just a ridiculous fluff claim. It's akin to saying "you can't talk about beauty because it doesn't exist". At the very least, we can objectively define trolling when both the poster and at least one responder think a post is trolling. Reality actually allows far less strict definitions and there is nothing at all that prevents real empirical analysis to be performed on those concepts. Your narrow logic is without merit and carries no ability to advance any communication on the topic at all.

khedoros1 10y ago
> This is logically false -- it implies that no action, even deliberately undertaken can be called trolling I took it more as an expression of something like Poe's Law. If someone says something inflammatory, is it a troll, or is it an honest expression of opinion? You can theorize about the author's mental state, but you can't know what they're thinking. Without extra information, the difference rests in the reader's perception.
- breatheoften 10y ago
  With respect to any particular objective definition of trolling, there may exist perfect snowflake comments that are not trolling but are identified as such by the definition. There exist plenty of definitions that can be imagined which make the above snowflakes very rare in practice. If the beholder argument is that the existence of a single such snowflake invalidates the possibility that useful objectivity can be used to study the concept of trolling -- then the claim is ludicrous. We can study the notion of trolling without getting every single label right every time.
  - khedoros1 10y ago
    > If the beholder argument is that the existence of a single such snowflake invalidates the possibility that useful objectivity can be used to study the concept of trolling -- then the claim is ludicrous. Agreed, but I don't think we're talking about snowflakes. I think we're talking about a significant portion of the communication out there that might be identified by some as "trolling". And I guess I'm less interested in an objective definition of trolling than I am in an objective determination of whether some particular post or group of posts is intended as a troll. On top of that, I don't think it's a binary determination. There's such a thing as a 100% troll post or a 100% innocent post, but there's also everything in between.
    - breatheoften 10y ago
      I'm more interested in the side of the spectrum containing the posts that are the most clearly likely to be agreed upon as examples of trolling. It's my opinion that way too many of this variety of trolling voice (augmented by bots) has been shouting trolling messages at groups of people in a way that discourages real attempts at communication. I see this kind of messaging as a way of isolating communities from each other and blocking avenues of communication between perspectives that would otherwise evolve organically.
ouid 10y ago
Calling something logically false, usually indicates that you have some sort of proof. Instead you've provided an inference without any supplementary reasoning, which yields a result which I think YOU think is a contradiction, but is not. Ie it would not be logically false to insist that no action, even deliberately undertaken, can objectively be called trolling. Presumably, in an effort to remedy this, you attempt a construction, which fails in two ways. First that is the skeeviest use of the word objective if I've ever seen. An objective definition is one which does not depend on the observer. To get around this, you have simply fixed two observers, thereby demonstrating the one to one correspondence of subjective statements and objective statements as follows: I believe X is so -> X' is so if I believe X is so. This doesn't really count, I think, partly because of the second way the argument fails which is that your construction uses no properties OTHER than what these two observers think. In particular, the definition of troll, is formally equivalent to the following definition of ice cream. "if the poster, and at least one responder think it is ice cream then it is ice cream". So before you invoke things phrases like "logically false" and "narrow logic", I think you should take a good hard look inward, and I mean this, of course, objectively.
- breatheoften 10y ago
  We are discussing trolling in the context of communication between groups of humans. "Trolling is in the eye of the beholder" -- the intuitive basis for this claim is that there cannot be a method for establishing agreement about what is and is not trolling. I offered a minimal definition of trolling for which constructing agreement is clearly possible. My toy example is just to illustrate that there exist ways to construct or approximate agreement on what trolling is -- there are in fact many ways to construct such agreement. Pretending like such agreement is impossible is a strategy to empower trolls. I'll partially accept your pedantic criticism over my use of the phrase "logically false" -- but your attempt to disparage my use of the word Objective is welcome to go sit alone with you in a motionless universe for the rest of eternity.
  - ouid 10y ago
    Let me put it another way. In your construction, if I make a post, and someone makes a comment on a post which a responder then describes as trolling, How may I objectively determine whether or not that comment qualified as trolling? Since I am the poster, and at least one responder has called it trolling, it is now trolling if and only if I say it is trolling. In this case, I have no objective definition to look to. This is both a real world case, and a case where your definition is degenerate, which I would call a critical failure of your definition.

khedoros1 10y ago

> This is logically false -- it implies that no action, even deliberately undertaken can be called trolling I took it more as an expression of something like Poe's Law. If someone says something inflammatory, is it a troll, or is it an honest expression of opinion? You can theorize about the author's mental state, but you can't know what they're thinking. Without extra information, the difference rests in the reader's perception.

breatheoften 10y ago
With respect to any particular objective definition of trolling, there may exist perfect snowflake comments that are not trolling but are identified as such by the definition. There exist plenty of definitions that can be imagined which make the above snowflakes very rare in practice. If the beholder argument is that the existence of a single such snowflake invalidates the possibility that useful objectivity can be used to study the concept of trolling -- then the claim is ludicrous. We can study the notion of trolling without getting every single label right every time.
- khedoros1 10y ago
  > If the beholder argument is that the existence of a single such snowflake invalidates the possibility that useful objectivity can be used to study the concept of trolling -- then the claim is ludicrous. Agreed, but I don't think we're talking about snowflakes. I think we're talking about a significant portion of the communication out there that might be identified by some as "trolling". And I guess I'm less interested in an objective definition of trolling than I am in an objective determination of whether some particular post or group of posts is intended as a troll. On top of that, I don't think it's a binary determination. There's such a thing as a 100% troll post or a 100% innocent post, but there's also everything in between.
  - breatheoften 10y ago
    I'm more interested in the side of the spectrum containing the posts that are the most clearly likely to be agreed upon as examples of trolling. It's my opinion that way too many of this variety of trolling voice (augmented by bots) has been shouting trolling messages at groups of people in a way that discourages real attempts at communication. I see this kind of messaging as a way of isolating communities from each other and blocking avenues of communication between perspectives that would otherwise evolve organically.

ouid 10y ago

Calling something logically false, usually indicates that you have some sort of proof. Instead you've provided an inference without any supplementary reasoning, which yields a result which I think YOU think is a contradiction, but is not. Ie it would not be logically false to insist that no action, even deliberately undertaken, can objectively be called trolling. Presumably, in an effort to remedy this, you attempt a construction, which fails in two ways. First that is the skeeviest use of the word objective if I've ever seen. An objective definition is one which does not depend on the observer. To get around this, you have simply fixed two observers, thereby demonstrating the one to one correspondence of subjective statements and objective statements as follows: I believe X is so -> X' is so if I believe X is so. This doesn't really count, I think, partly because of the second way the argument fails which is that your construction uses no properties OTHER than what these two observers think. In particular, the definition of troll, is formally equivalent to the following definition of ice cream. "if the poster, and at least one responder think it is ice cream then it is ice cream". So before you invoke things phrases like "logically false" and "narrow logic", I think you should take a good hard look inward, and I mean this, of course, objectively.

breatheoften 10y ago
We are discussing trolling in the context of communication between groups of humans. "Trolling is in the eye of the beholder" -- the intuitive basis for this claim is that there cannot be a method for establishing agreement about what is and is not trolling. I offered a minimal definition of trolling for which constructing agreement is clearly possible. My toy example is just to illustrate that there exist ways to construct or approximate agreement on what trolling is -- there are in fact many ways to construct such agreement. Pretending like such agreement is impossible is a strategy to empower trolls. I'll partially accept your pedantic criticism over my use of the phrase "logically false" -- but your attempt to disparage my use of the word Objective is welcome to go sit alone with you in a motionless universe for the rest of eternity.
- ouid 10y ago
  Let me put it another way. In your construction, if I make a post, and someone makes a comment on a post which a responder then describes as trolling, How may I objectively determine whether or not that comment qualified as trolling? Since I am the poster, and at least one responder has called it trolling, it is now trolling if and only if I say it is trolling. In this case, I have no objective definition to look to. This is both a real world case, and a case where your definition is degenerate, which I would call a critical failure of your definition.