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All political mud-slinging aside, all weighing and apportioning of blame withheld, the main suggestions of the article are worthwhile. 1. Don't allow yourself

All political mud-slinging aside, all weighing and apportioning of blame withheld, the main suggestions of the article are worthwhile. 1. Don't allow yourself to slide easily or prematurely into contempt. We do it too often these days. 2. Disagree better. You can disagree, but make your case and engage in the responses. Rhetoric has a place but it's being overused.

unclebucknasty 8y ago
Your comment assumes good faith.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  Good faith breeds good faith, and bad faith breeds bad faith.
  - unclebucknasty 8y ago
    Would that that were always true. The world would be a far simpler and better place.
    - _bxg1 8y ago
      I didn't say it always works. But if a person has any good faith inside, showing them good faith is the singular way of bringing it out.
      - unclebucknasty 8y ago
        Pablum.
- DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  I think it assumes that it's a complex problem and to untangle the mess will require that this is done persistently over a longer stretch of time. we didn't get into this over a couple of weeks. If this was unfolding since years if not decades then what we have now is the end stages of boiling frogs (we're just waking up to the water being unbearable having been oblivious for so long). I'm personally convinced that facing the problems can only be done by following these steps (even if it's painful and we'd rather have a quick fix to all this). It will take a long time to recover from this I think (having enough patience to hear an opposing view without judgement isn't easy).
  - unclebucknasty 8y ago
    All of this sounds good and, frankly, I don't have a simple alternative. To add, I think it's necessary to strive for good faith as a baseline. So, I am not disputing the principle that good faith is required; on the contrary, I am lamenting its demise and the weaponization of good faith against its practitioners. So, the issue is that while hoping it is sufficient to act in good faith, others are able to profit wildly from their own bad faith. In effect, your good faith empowers them. And, while the current situation unfolded over years, we cannot ignore the recent rapid acceleration and its meaning. We have come to a place where bad faith is normalized and even celebrated. Not sure what the way back is.
  - gotocake 8y ago
    It’s only painful in a stable, peaceful society with a strong rule of law. In any other context it’s downright lethal. Take the extreme of Dark Forest theory; you can try to explain your position and values all you like, and while you do it just serves to broadcast your location to someone who already decided to kill you. That’s extreme of course, an hopefully fictional, but in the intellectual and social spectrum it takes two to tango. If I’m just trying to waste your time and energy, and you’re insisting on addressing every point of my Gish Gallop... I win. Suspending judgement is an interesting and valuable intellectual exercise, and trying to see other perspectives makes us better people. We have to accept however, that a time comes when just like any other approach, such measures not only fail, but full catastrophically. Just like an ardent pacifist, or an equally ardent militant, lack of adaptability is doom. Sometimes you have to sit down and talk, and sometimes you have to fight to the death. The trick, and no one has yet figured out a formula for this, is to know when to adapt and how much. Anyone who tries to tell you that the only way to deal with a Nazi is a bullet, or conversely, love, is wrong. It’s advice that sounds good, but it’s totally useless. When to to talk, when to listen, and when to reach for a sidearm is the real question and more often than not people don’t even acknowledge that; it’s too nuanced, too open to interpretation, and too messy. The thing is, it’s messy regardless of whether or not we choose to approach conflict (intellectual or otherwise) programmatically rather than dynamically.
- noobermin 8y ago
  To be honest, I've yet to meet people in real life who mean bad faith. May be online or on talk shows it's different. The difference is people in real life are not the ones who make the decisions.
- fallous 8y ago
  That's kind of the point. Assuming good faith is akin to not ascribing to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence (or ignorance). Note that the incompetence or ignorance is not assigned so it may be either or both sides, which places a certain burden on you to try to evaluate and correct at least your part of that failure.
blueboo 8y ago
Unfortunately that leaves one vulnerable to the arsenal of concern trolling. The problem is that these strategies only work if your conversation partner is doing the same in good faith. (This is precisely what Arthur Brooks would have us do, someone who deserves all of our contempt, ironically.) After all, it’s human nature to (often) entrench when faced with facts that challenge ones beliefs! And that dynamic is particularly acute when someone has chosen to believe the less-plausible-thing, the mark of conspiracy.
- wisty 8y ago
  IMO a lot of people mistake disagreement for "concern trolling". "Oh my goodness, how can anyone be so stupid that they don't agree with my (somewhat statistically fringe) position, they must be a troll!"
  - s_m_t 8y ago
    Supposed concern trolling first of all isn't even relevant here. A concern troll acts as if they fundamentally agree with you. So someone on the other side of the aisle can't really be said to be concern trolling because they would have substantive disagreements.
mmsimanga 8y ago
I wonder how much of all these issues is due to Twitter. 140 characters isn't enough for nuanced conversation.
- RugnirViking 8y ago
  Twitter is a weird site. It's got a core of extremely active users who are almost entirely people who are famous or journalists. I'm at university - probably the place where the concentration of twitter users is likely to be highest, and hardly anybody I know has an account or if they do, doesn't use it for anything except occasionally reading something they got linked to. It's almost like a kind of echo chamber for the media and famous people imo - I don't know if thats nessacarily a bad thing entirely, so long as people are aware on some level of that. There just aren't the opinions of suburban moms on twitter. There aren't plumbers on twitter. Cleaners. Opinions might not matter, but it does bother me quite a lot when you see companies not caring on their support phone lines, on their facebook. There's almost no way to usefully get through to these copanies, but then one journalist idly tweets that they're having a problem with something suddenly you seem to see a dev team drop what they're doing and fix the problem. It's concerning that such behaviour benefits those who need it least.
  - DanBC 8y ago
    > There just aren't the opinions of suburban moms on twitter. Surburban moms are also nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers, programmers, etc etc, and all of these groups are active on Twitter. But if you want a community of mums who are there as mums you could look at #netmums and #mumsnet. Here's one example: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23netmums&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23netmums&src=typd > There aren't plumbers on twitter. There are plumbers on Twitter. Twitter doens't do a good job of surfacing different communities, especially for new users. When you join the site Twitter makes stupid suggestions for celebs, and makes no attempt to find out what you're actually interested in. But you can ignore those selections and find, and follow, people who you're interested in. > Cleaners. This is a good point. People on low incomes are excluded from digital life, and we should probably work out ways to help them access tech. > There's almost no way to usefully get through to these copanies, but then one journalist idly tweets that they're having a problem with something suddenly you seem to see a dev team drop what they're doing and fix the problem. So, this isn't quite what you've mentioned, but using Twitter is sometimes a useful way to get customer support. "This happened, what do you suggest, @CompanyName?" will usually get you the right number to call.
pjc50 8y ago
There's a real prisoner's dilemma phenomenon going on here. If the two options are "respect" and "contempt", and one side has ramped the contempt up to 11 and won the elections, what should the other side do? I'm all for a winding-down of this process, because eventually it could escalate all the way up to violence, but like nuclear disarmament, you first. Or at least some plausible commitment to de-escalation that can be observed to actually happen over a period of time, as a signal of good faith for the next round of talks. I think this is partially why people like AOC or Ilhan Omar have suddenly achieved success; they know that, regardless of what they do or say, they will never get anything less than total disrespect from Republicans and a large segment of the media; so they're free to ignore that contempt. This comes across in the other direction as contempt, when really it's just a refusal to be intimidated. Contempt is also being manufactured by a variety of media sources from foreign intelligence agencies to all-American fraudsters like Alex Jones.
- vibrato 8y ago
  Aoc and omar are successful because they have denounced competency in the name of identity politics
- nilskidoo 8y ago
  Great points! And it is curious, in that I was always taught how respect must be earned, yet we give our contempt away so freely. If those are the only options, they are not equal.
- Fellshard 8y ago
  The contempt spiral did not magically start with Trump.
- repolfx 8y ago
  That's not a prisoner's dilemma. That's exactly what the article is talking about: saying there doesn't need to be a "you first" because both sides are equally guilty, so someone has to put down their contempt and it may as well be you (where "you" here means anyone at all). The act of one side being less contemptuous is not useless in isolation, as would be required for a prisoner's dilemma. I would also caution against concluding that one side "ramped contempt up to 11". As a foreigner observing the US elections from afar, I saw a lot of contempt in both directions, but especially towards conservatives in the USA who were being routinely described as if they were mindless cattle, good for nothing at all beyond slowly dwindling industrial production. Compared coldly to the rest of the world, Trump's policies (some trade protectionism and enforcement of immigration laws) are nothing special or unusual, not in contemporary times nor historically. But somehow this position became held with utmost contempt and was routinely described as the most hateful forms of racism. You can see that as well with Brexit in which the majority of the voting population has been routinely described as racist. There's no word for this kind of rhetoric other than contempt - it's literally what the article describes, in which the complexities and motives of millions of people are considered in trivial moralistic terms of "you hate, i love".
nilskidoo 8y ago
I agree with this in the same sense that I never agreed with the old adage of opinions being like @$$holes, with everyone having one. There is far too much reaction and repetition, particularly online, for me to believe that everyone actually has an opinion of their own. Political partisanship is brand loyalty is religious zealotry. I feel our culture dissuades too many people from earnestly thinking their beliefs objectively through, "all or nothing" ethos prevailing, which limits our access to healthy debate. Friction is natural. The blacksmith has to hammer a sword into shape before it can effectively do its slicy thing.
gotocake 8y ago
The problem is that 2 opens you up to (using a phrase from some submissions on HN) “intellectual denial of service attacks.” You could spend a dozen lifetimes responding reasonably, with well researched and phrased rebuttals to anti-vaxxers, or young Earth creationists and all you’d do is (ironically) help them evolve new fantasies, new conspiracies, and more convincing verbiage. It’s possible to assume goodwill and sincerity in the limited case of a site like this, but in the general case it’s literaly impossible. Brandolini’s Law ensures that this is effectively a form of asymmetric conflict, and the well-meaning person is doomed from the start. It’s like dealing with a forum troll, who dedicates the whole of their waking life to their “business” while the mods and other users actually have lives and limited energy to spare. I don’t have a solution beyond using and refining heuristics, but at some point you have to accept that you can’t afford to treat everyone and every viewpoint fairly. At some point, dealing with dishonest, foolish, and potentially harmful ideologies breeds contempt, and when you can’t just log off to avoid it, that contempt will take root. Some people, some ideas are contemptible, and the rational response isn’t tolerance and acceptance. I think my personal answer is to accept the world and life as it is, not just as I wish it could be. On some level life is a competition, and ideas are a competition. Choosing not to play the game is far from a winning move.
- unclebucknasty 8y ago
  >It’s possible to assume goodwill and sincerity in the limited case of a site like this Even that's changing steadily, albeit slightly more slowly/subtly. The slower pace is likely due to the superior moderation here, combined with the astuteness of the HN crowd. But, that latter point also makes HN a prized target for propagandists and trolls. And, if you look closely, you'll see them, including here on this thread. But, the rest of your comment is spot-on: the sociopathic troll feasts on good-will and contemptible views should be met with contempt. In fact, however, this is their strategy: purposely earn contempt then claim to be the victim when that contempt is paid. For instance, they trigger vulnerable people, then attack them further when they try to defend themsleves. The trolls justify these attacks by claiming they are the actual victims.

unclebucknasty 8y ago

Your comment assumes good faith.

_bxg1 8y ago
Good faith breeds good faith, and bad faith breeds bad faith.
- unclebucknasty 8y ago
  Would that that were always true. The world would be a far simpler and better place.
  - _bxg1 8y ago
    I didn't say it always works. But if a person has any good faith inside, showing them good faith is the singular way of bringing it out.
    - unclebucknasty 8y ago
      Pablum.
DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
I think it assumes that it's a complex problem and to untangle the mess will require that this is done persistently over a longer stretch of time. we didn't get into this over a couple of weeks. If this was unfolding since years if not decades then what we have now is the end stages of boiling frogs (we're just waking up to the water being unbearable having been oblivious for so long). I'm personally convinced that facing the problems can only be done by following these steps (even if it's painful and we'd rather have a quick fix to all this). It will take a long time to recover from this I think (having enough patience to hear an opposing view without judgement isn't easy).
- unclebucknasty 8y ago
  All of this sounds good and, frankly, I don't have a simple alternative. To add, I think it's necessary to strive for good faith as a baseline. So, I am not disputing the principle that good faith is required; on the contrary, I am lamenting its demise and the weaponization of good faith against its practitioners. So, the issue is that while hoping it is sufficient to act in good faith, others are able to profit wildly from their own bad faith. In effect, your good faith empowers them. And, while the current situation unfolded over years, we cannot ignore the recent rapid acceleration and its meaning. We have come to a place where bad faith is normalized and even celebrated. Not sure what the way back is.
- gotocake 8y ago
  It’s only painful in a stable, peaceful society with a strong rule of law. In any other context it’s downright lethal. Take the extreme of Dark Forest theory; you can try to explain your position and values all you like, and while you do it just serves to broadcast your location to someone who already decided to kill you. That’s extreme of course, an hopefully fictional, but in the intellectual and social spectrum it takes two to tango. If I’m just trying to waste your time and energy, and you’re insisting on addressing every point of my Gish Gallop... I win. Suspending judgement is an interesting and valuable intellectual exercise, and trying to see other perspectives makes us better people. We have to accept however, that a time comes when just like any other approach, such measures not only fail, but full catastrophically. Just like an ardent pacifist, or an equally ardent militant, lack of adaptability is doom. Sometimes you have to sit down and talk, and sometimes you have to fight to the death. The trick, and no one has yet figured out a formula for this, is to know when to adapt and how much. Anyone who tries to tell you that the only way to deal with a Nazi is a bullet, or conversely, love, is wrong. It’s advice that sounds good, but it’s totally useless. When to to talk, when to listen, and when to reach for a sidearm is the real question and more often than not people don’t even acknowledge that; it’s too nuanced, too open to interpretation, and too messy. The thing is, it’s messy regardless of whether or not we choose to approach conflict (intellectual or otherwise) programmatically rather than dynamically.
noobermin 8y ago
To be honest, I've yet to meet people in real life who mean bad faith. May be online or on talk shows it's different. The difference is people in real life are not the ones who make the decisions.
fallous 8y ago
That's kind of the point. Assuming good faith is akin to not ascribing to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence (or ignorance). Note that the incompetence or ignorance is not assigned so it may be either or both sides, which places a certain burden on you to try to evaluate and correct at least your part of that failure.

blueboo 8y ago

Unfortunately that leaves one vulnerable to the arsenal of concern trolling. The problem is that these strategies only work if your conversation partner is doing the same in good faith. (This is precisely what Arthur Brooks would have us do, someone who deserves all of our contempt, ironically.) After all, it’s human nature to (often) entrench when faced with facts that challenge ones beliefs! And that dynamic is particularly acute when someone has chosen to believe the less-plausible-thing, the mark of conspiracy.

wisty 8y ago
IMO a lot of people mistake disagreement for "concern trolling". "Oh my goodness, how can anyone be so stupid that they don't agree with my (somewhat statistically fringe) position, they must be a troll!"
- s_m_t 8y ago
  Supposed concern trolling first of all isn't even relevant here. A concern troll acts as if they fundamentally agree with you. So someone on the other side of the aisle can't really be said to be concern trolling because they would have substantive disagreements.

mmsimanga 8y ago

I wonder how much of all these issues is due to Twitter. 140 characters isn't enough for nuanced conversation.

RugnirViking 8y ago
Twitter is a weird site. It's got a core of extremely active users who are almost entirely people who are famous or journalists. I'm at university - probably the place where the concentration of twitter users is likely to be highest, and hardly anybody I know has an account or if they do, doesn't use it for anything except occasionally reading something they got linked to. It's almost like a kind of echo chamber for the media and famous people imo - I don't know if thats nessacarily a bad thing entirely, so long as people are aware on some level of that. There just aren't the opinions of suburban moms on twitter. There aren't plumbers on twitter. Cleaners. Opinions might not matter, but it does bother me quite a lot when you see companies not caring on their support phone lines, on their facebook. There's almost no way to usefully get through to these copanies, but then one journalist idly tweets that they're having a problem with something suddenly you seem to see a dev team drop what they're doing and fix the problem. It's concerning that such behaviour benefits those who need it least.
- DanBC 8y ago
  > There just aren't the opinions of suburban moms on twitter. Surburban moms are also nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers, programmers, etc etc, and all of these groups are active on Twitter. But if you want a community of mums who are there as mums you could look at #netmums and #mumsnet. Here's one example: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23netmums&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23netmums&src=typd > There aren't plumbers on twitter. There are plumbers on Twitter. Twitter doens't do a good job of surfacing different communities, especially for new users. When you join the site Twitter makes stupid suggestions for celebs, and makes no attempt to find out what you're actually interested in. But you can ignore those selections and find, and follow, people who you're interested in. > Cleaners. This is a good point. People on low incomes are excluded from digital life, and we should probably work out ways to help them access tech. > There's almost no way to usefully get through to these copanies, but then one journalist idly tweets that they're having a problem with something suddenly you seem to see a dev team drop what they're doing and fix the problem. So, this isn't quite what you've mentioned, but using Twitter is sometimes a useful way to get customer support. "This happened, what do you suggest, @CompanyName?" will usually get you the right number to call.

pjc50 8y ago

There's a real prisoner's dilemma phenomenon going on here. If the two options are "respect" and "contempt", and one side has ramped the contempt up to 11 and won the elections, what should the other side do? I'm all for a winding-down of this process, because eventually it could escalate all the way up to violence, but like nuclear disarmament, you first. Or at least some plausible commitment to de-escalation that can be observed to actually happen over a period of time, as a signal of good faith for the next round of talks. I think this is partially why people like AOC or Ilhan Omar have suddenly achieved success; they know that, regardless of what they do or say, they will never get anything less than total disrespect from Republicans and a large segment of the media; so they're free to ignore that contempt. This comes across in the other direction as contempt, when really it's just a refusal to be intimidated. Contempt is also being manufactured by a variety of media sources from foreign intelligence agencies to all-American fraudsters like Alex Jones.

vibrato 8y ago
Aoc and omar are successful because they have denounced competency in the name of identity politics
nilskidoo 8y ago
Great points! And it is curious, in that I was always taught how respect must be earned, yet we give our contempt away so freely. If those are the only options, they are not equal.
Fellshard 8y ago
The contempt spiral did not magically start with Trump.
repolfx 8y ago
That's not a prisoner's dilemma. That's exactly what the article is talking about: saying there doesn't need to be a "you first" because both sides are equally guilty, so someone has to put down their contempt and it may as well be you (where "you" here means anyone at all). The act of one side being less contemptuous is not useless in isolation, as would be required for a prisoner's dilemma. I would also caution against concluding that one side "ramped contempt up to 11". As a foreigner observing the US elections from afar, I saw a lot of contempt in both directions, but especially towards conservatives in the USA who were being routinely described as if they were mindless cattle, good for nothing at all beyond slowly dwindling industrial production. Compared coldly to the rest of the world, Trump's policies (some trade protectionism and enforcement of immigration laws) are nothing special or unusual, not in contemporary times nor historically. But somehow this position became held with utmost contempt and was routinely described as the most hateful forms of racism. You can see that as well with Brexit in which the majority of the voting population has been routinely described as racist. There's no word for this kind of rhetoric other than contempt - it's literally what the article describes, in which the complexities and motives of millions of people are considered in trivial moralistic terms of "you hate, i love".

nilskidoo 8y ago

I agree with this in the same sense that I never agreed with the old adage of opinions being like @$$holes, with everyone having one. There is far too much reaction and repetition, particularly online, for me to believe that everyone actually has an opinion of their own. Political partisanship is brand loyalty is religious zealotry. I feel our culture dissuades too many people from earnestly thinking their beliefs objectively through, "all or nothing" ethos prevailing, which limits our access to healthy debate. Friction is natural. The blacksmith has to hammer a sword into shape before it can effectively do its slicy thing.

gotocake 8y ago

The problem is that 2 opens you up to (using a phrase from some submissions on HN) “intellectual denial of service attacks.” You could spend a dozen lifetimes responding reasonably, with well researched and phrased rebuttals to anti-vaxxers, or young Earth creationists and all you’d do is (ironically) help them evolve new fantasies, new conspiracies, and more convincing verbiage. It’s possible to assume goodwill and sincerity in the limited case of a site like this, but in the general case it’s literaly impossible. Brandolini’s Law ensures that this is effectively a form of asymmetric conflict, and the well-meaning person is doomed from the start. It’s like dealing with a forum troll, who dedicates the whole of their waking life to their “business” while the mods and other users actually have lives and limited energy to spare. I don’t have a solution beyond using and refining heuristics, but at some point you have to accept that you can’t afford to treat everyone and every viewpoint fairly. At some point, dealing with dishonest, foolish, and potentially harmful ideologies breeds contempt, and when you can’t just log off to avoid it, that contempt will take root. Some people, some ideas are contemptible, and the rational response isn’t tolerance and acceptance. I think my personal answer is to accept the world and life as it is, not just as I wish it could be. On some level life is a competition, and ideas are a competition. Choosing not to play the game is far from a winning move.

unclebucknasty 8y ago
>It’s possible to assume goodwill and sincerity in the limited case of a site like this Even that's changing steadily, albeit slightly more slowly/subtly. The slower pace is likely due to the superior moderation here, combined with the astuteness of the HN crowd. But, that latter point also makes HN a prized target for propagandists and trolls. And, if you look closely, you'll see them, including here on this thread. But, the rest of your comment is spot-on: the sociopathic troll feasts on good-will and contemptible views should be met with contempt. In fact, however, this is their strategy: purposely earn contempt then claim to be the victim when that contempt is paid. For instance, they trigger vulnerable people, then attack them further when they try to defend themsleves. The trolls justify these attacks by claiming they are the actual victims.