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This is closer to the truth. I remember when the net first came up, I'd watch my friends in both parties argue online. They'd do some research, agree on the un

This is closer to the truth. I remember when the net first came up, I'd watch my friends in both parties argue online. They'd do some research, agree on the underlying facts, then things would progress. They might never come to agreement, but they began a discussion on the terms of the discussion, which was progress. If done well, everybody could part as friends. This is the dialectic. It's what friends do. It's designed to understand the issue by understanding one another better. This is how productive conversations are supposed to happen. But folks caught on to that, so they started flooding the internet with a lot of rhetoric. Now, if you disagree, there are a hundred sites on your side that are quite happy to provide you with all the emotional ammunition you need. This is argumentation, what lawyers do. It's designed to win at all costs. Conversations are battles to be won. Combine that with some nice rhetorical tricks and there's really no need to discuss facts anymore. Take a look at what education a lot of the talking heads on TV have had. They were trained in rhetoric, the legal profession. That's no accident.

goatlover 8y ago
> This is argumentation, what lawyers do. It's designed to win at all costs. Conversations are battles to be won. Combine that with some nice rhetorical tricks and there's really no need to discuss facts anymore. Sounds like what the ancient Greek sophists taught. That rhetoric was a useful tool for winning debates and being persuasive, particularly in politics.
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  After writing that, that's what I was thinking too. Two thousand years later, and Socrates is still relevant.
- gaius 8y ago
  That rhetoric was a useful tool for winning debates and being persuasive, particularly in politics But that cuts both ways: two skilled rhetoriticians in debate each won't permit the other to deploy a logical fallacy. Therefore they will always converge on the truth. Rhetoric can only be weaponised when your opponent is unaware of it, and is powerless when they don't care about debate because their mind is already made up.
  - DanielBMarkham 8y ago
    But that cuts both ways: two skilled rhetoriticians in debate each won't permit the other to deploy a logical fallacy. Therefore they will always converge on the truth. Been thinking about this all day. I didn't want to flippantly disagree, but there was something about your comment that bugged me. I think maybe you have overstated. I would phrase it this way: skilled rhetoriticians _tend_ to converge on a semantic definition around the meaning of words and phrases. I don't think they come to any ultimate truth, no matter what the greeks thought. I think what happens in any productive conversation is something more along the lines of shared mental model alignment, which I would argue is vastly more important. Thanks for giving me something to cogitate on yesterday!
bachbach 8y ago
Here is an hypothesis: we know that higher IQ populations are more analytical and that they are capable of supporting abstract positions like Free Speech even if this position gives oxygen to people and ideas they disagree with. If you believe there has been a degeneration then something must have changed. I see three ideas of why that might be so. One is that media like the web and 24 hr news have prioritized rhetoric over substance. Another is that the groups of people living in America/Europe have become dramatically less homogenous in the last 50 years - an obvious spur to tribalism and lastly the Flynn Effect has gone into reverse for some time now although this has been not reported as widely. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flynn%20effect%20reverse https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flynn%20effect%20rever... This is my way of saying that there's a lot of reasons why society is becoming more conflict oriented - we can't all blame Twitter. An unpleasant thought - One might reasonably think that mentioning cultural/racial clustering and then IQ falling is already radioactive territory but my suspicions are darker yet because if group intelligence rises and falls over time then violent conflict could be generated out of a biological-cultural cycle. Orwell made a work of fiction describing how wars were used to destroy resources and perpetuate stagnation - but as some fear - maybe if you have a good time for a while it stirs the forces that undo it. The idea of a peace-war cycle was conventional wisdom centuries ago but we assumed since the invention of WMD that this was suppressed. tldr; Maybe "They'd do some research, agree on the underlying facts, then things would progress." has the correlation and causation mixed up. Maybe that happens in peace time with ample resources and when those dry up so too does our ability to be rational. I hope this is all FUD. "It's not the first time we've seen this kind of dip. Research by Flynn himself that looked at the IQs of British teenagers almost a decade ago observed a similar fall in test scores. "It looks like there is something screwy among British teenagers," Flynn told The Telegraph at the time. "While we have enriched the cognitive environment of children before their teenage years, the cognitive environment of the teenagers has not been enriched."" I didn't want to end on a dismal note of no hope so there's some light over here - https://youtu.be/pi7h6nmkvAM?t=1837 https://youtu.be/pi7h6nmkvAM?t=1837 This topic - on technology enriching the cognitive environment - is a key part of David Krakauer's thinking (Santa Fe Institute President) and I think it is never discussed enough here. If Silicon Valley is to ever get serious about human improvement then it probably should be laser focused on the criticism of people like David.

goatlover 8y ago

> This is argumentation, what lawyers do. It's designed to win at all costs. Conversations are battles to be won. Combine that with some nice rhetorical tricks and there's really no need to discuss facts anymore. Sounds like what the ancient Greek sophists taught. That rhetoric was a useful tool for winning debates and being persuasive, particularly in politics.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago
After writing that, that's what I was thinking too. Two thousand years later, and Socrates is still relevant.
gaius 8y ago
That rhetoric was a useful tool for winning debates and being persuasive, particularly in politics But that cuts both ways: two skilled rhetoriticians in debate each won't permit the other to deploy a logical fallacy. Therefore they will always converge on the truth. Rhetoric can only be weaponised when your opponent is unaware of it, and is powerless when they don't care about debate because their mind is already made up.
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  But that cuts both ways: two skilled rhetoriticians in debate each won't permit the other to deploy a logical fallacy. Therefore they will always converge on the truth. Been thinking about this all day. I didn't want to flippantly disagree, but there was something about your comment that bugged me. I think maybe you have overstated. I would phrase it this way: skilled rhetoriticians _tend_ to converge on a semantic definition around the meaning of words and phrases. I don't think they come to any ultimate truth, no matter what the greeks thought. I think what happens in any productive conversation is something more along the lines of shared mental model alignment, which I would argue is vastly more important. Thanks for giving me something to cogitate on yesterday!

bachbach 8y ago

Here is an hypothesis: we know that higher IQ populations are more analytical and that they are capable of supporting abstract positions like Free Speech even if this position gives oxygen to people and ideas they disagree with. If you believe there has been a degeneration then something must have changed. I see three ideas of why that might be so. One is that media like the web and 24 hr news have prioritized rhetoric over substance. Another is that the groups of people living in America/Europe have become dramatically less homogenous in the last 50 years - an obvious spur to tribalism and lastly the Flynn Effect has gone into reverse for some time now although this has been not reported as widely. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flynn%20effect%20reverse https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flynn%20effect%20rever... This is my way of saying that there's a lot of reasons why society is becoming more conflict oriented - we can't all blame Twitter. An unpleasant thought - One might reasonably think that mentioning cultural/racial clustering and then IQ falling is already radioactive territory but my suspicions are darker yet because if group intelligence rises and falls over time then violent conflict could be generated out of a biological-cultural cycle. Orwell made a work of fiction describing how wars were used to destroy resources and perpetuate stagnation - but as some fear - maybe if you have a good time for a while it stirs the forces that undo it. The idea of a peace-war cycle was conventional wisdom centuries ago but we assumed since the invention of WMD that this was suppressed. tldr; Maybe "They'd do some research, agree on the underlying facts, then things would progress." has the correlation and causation mixed up. Maybe that happens in peace time with ample resources and when those dry up so too does our ability to be rational. I hope this is all FUD. "It's not the first time we've seen this kind of dip. Research by Flynn himself that looked at the IQs of British teenagers almost a decade ago observed a similar fall in test scores. "It looks like there is something screwy among British teenagers," Flynn told The Telegraph at the time. "While we have enriched the cognitive environment of children before their teenage years, the cognitive environment of the teenagers has not been enriched."" I didn't want to end on a dismal note of no hope so there's some light over here - https://youtu.be/pi7h6nmkvAM?t=1837 https://youtu.be/pi7h6nmkvAM?t=1837 This topic - on technology enriching the cognitive environment - is a key part of David Krakauer's thinking (Santa Fe Institute President) and I think it is never discussed enough here. If Silicon Valley is to ever get serious about human improvement then it probably should be laser focused on the criticism of people like David.