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The Notion of “Trolling” in Ancient Sanskrit

189 points by mcenedella 7y ago

marstomorrow 7y ago
This is very neat, and the last paragraph is indeed very heavy-hitting. It's always hard to read that some of our societies greatest present-day problems are so many thousands of years old. However, I think this definition is narrow and only encapsulates part of the modern definition of 'trolling'. Today, 'trolling' is used as a weapon of war, not only in debate with other individual people. Trolling is as much a mechanism of creating emotional trauma among a large population as it is a mechanism for 'debating' in bad faith. Modern trolls will post violent content, often based on lies, in order to get an emotional rise out of a population. This is a large-scale effect that wastes huge amounts of people's time and energy, as they 'debate' with these soldiers of war whose task at hand is to create unnecessary emotional pain and waste the time of their enemy. Yes, trolling is also happening on a more individual 'debate' level still, but narrowing our notion of trolling down to these ancient definitions is doing a major disservice to our modern understanding of how language is used in debate.
- h2odragon 7y ago
  I don't think anyone is attempting to narrow the definition of trolling; but in general any appeal to more nuanced understanding is worthwhile too so don't take this as disagreeing with you. I note that "doctrine" was also an important element of the definitions offered and regret that we do not question our doctrine (and its sources) enough even now.
- labgrown 7y ago
  for a definition to be useful it needs to be as narrow as possible, otherwise declaring any form of argument you don't like as trolling would be...
  - damnyou 7y ago
    That is just not true. Broader definitions are actually very useful when you're trying to describe general principles (like in law) — using a word that's too narrowly defined can limit the scope of what you're saying.
    - labgrown 7y ago
      That's the difference between a principle and a definition, law has both - criminal offenses for example are more defined than the principle of tort, the more you want something to be useful as an accusation the more narrowly defined it needs to be or you just end up with a moral panic.
- ljm 7y ago
  In a way I feel like I might have misunderstood something within my self. I agree with the assessment but I never connected trolling and trauma, because my personal concept of trolling is essentially a continual escalation of reductio ad absurdum. In that sense it's not really trolling or sarcasm, it's more of a way of livening up overly-serious conversations. I should probably not refer to that as trolling as the intention isn't to fuck people off, gaslight them, traumatise them...but to soften the mood.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >Trolling is as much a mechanism of creating emotional trauma among a large population as it is a mechanism for 'debating' in bad faith. Perhaps this was not present in older societies (and other countries today) because people were not as touchy feely as the current generations... And I'm not trolling. I seriously think modern western societies are too snow-flakey and touchy feely for their own good. It's like going out in life expecting padded roads, walls, and everything, lest you ever get hurt... And that's despite older societies having it much harder, and having much more difficult problems to be "traumatized" with...
  - pranjalv123 7y ago
    The argument here is "I shouldn't avoid emotionally traumatizing you because at some point, someone else in the future may emotionally traumatize you". Perhaps there's a case to be made for exposing people to controversial or offensive ideas in a controlled environment to prepare for encountering them in an uncontrolled environment - in fact, this is frequently called a "safe space" and ridiculed by people who believe that modern societies are too "snow-flakey"! But that's certainly not what internet trolls are doing.
  - marstomorrow 7y ago
    > It's like going out in life expecting padded roads, walls, and everything, lest you ever get hurt... What? How offensive. Let me be clear, then. The United States is committing a genocide against minorities as we speak and it is enabled and emboldened by "trolls". This is not touchy-feely. This is children in cages, separated illegally from their families and put into places of extreme disrepair, unhealthy conditions, etc, while the President goes on TV to state that machine guns would be a more "effective solution". This is not touchy feely or snowflaky stuff and I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. What I'm talking about are trolls going online an on TV to spread messages of hate and cruelty. This directly results in human suffering and death of innocent people. There is no logic behind talking about using machine guns to kill people who are trying to legally migrate to your country. To make those statements is to wage a weapon of war and to do it online and on TV en masse is a new kind of trolling that is physically dangerous. Your ..... dismissal of the problems of youth....and use of .... to not finish...sentences makes it difficult to understand your point. Trolling in the modern era has nothing to do with any of this "touchy feely" or "snow-flakey" rubbish. It has to do with enabling genocide. Trolls normalize bad behavior to the point where it goes unpunished. Bad behavior to the extreme, unpunished from the top, for years on end, can and does result in really bad things like genocide. I'm not making leaps here. This is real, it is physical, it is urgent, and it matters.
shas3 7y ago
Ancient sanskrit, yes. But the term vitanDa is very current. It is a common word in my language, Kannada and I imagine in other Indian languages as well. This article is as much about the etymology of a modern term as about a concept from Sanskrit philosophical texts.
- m33k44 7y ago
  Indian languages are heavily influenced by Samskrutam and have borrowed words from the language. So the word vitanDa in Kannada is borrowed from Samskrut language.
- QuercusMax 7y ago
  What does vitanDa mean in Kannada? Google hasn't been much help.
  - nitheshm 7y ago
    In Telugu, I use vitanda vadam to mean something closer to a rhetorical fallacy than deliberate dishonesty.
    - grey-sunshine 7y ago
      In Tamil it means speech that leads no where. In the sense of debating but not useful.
- danans 7y ago
  "The Notion of Trolling in Ancient Indian Literature" may have been a better choice of title. Of course it was in Sanskrit, because that was the literary language of the time. But this is probably named this way because the names of Ancient Indian works of literature, especially obscure ones like Nyaya Sutra, are not well known in the west, whereas "Sanskrit" almost immediately contextualizes the post to Ancient South Asia for most readers, even though the language in which it is composed is a bit beside the point, which is that an ancient society sort of identified "trolling".
- ensconced 7y ago
empath75 7y ago
Seems like Socrates would fall under that definition.
- simondedalus 7y ago
  Socrates “knows that he knows nothing” and spends his time trying to refute that. He looks for knowledge earnestly but usually doesn’t find it. Socrates is less devil’s advocate, more “how can we be sure of X when Y? If not Y because Z, doesn’t Z also make X problematic because of (blablabla)?” Sure, he gets people RAGEing like a great troll, but at least ostensibly he’s doing more the 2nd type of argument described in the article, but with kind of a backdrop that precise intellectual beliefs are really hard to specify or maintain. It’s like dialectic but it’s not Hegelian; he wants to return to some central question and doesn’t necessarily see that thesis/antithesis climb as crucial, he just finds problems with the premises and wants to find better ones (Hegel’s whole thing was a bit more nuanced than that). Re: article, trolling initially meant trying to get a rise out of people. It’s not so much you won’t admit you’re wrong or you’re eristically tearing everything down, it’s that you’re pretending to play the argument game (or some other game, like “art criticism” or “testimonial”) but in fact you’re fucking with people of varying levels of specificity.
thwave 7y ago
There's a nice parallel in Ancient Greek, and from there to modern philosophical parlance: Eristic[0]. Here's Plato, for example: "it is on the purely verbal level that they look for the contradiction in what has been said, and employ eristic, not dialectic, on one another." (Republic V 454a, translated by Reeve) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eristic
dav 7y ago
Did they have a word for the intellectually dishonest practice of just making stuff up to support one's argument?
- sideaccount 7y ago
  I think gish galloping is the modern phrase, gish gallopers are toxic.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    Gish galloping is burying an opponent in an avalanche of claims or factoids that would take far longer to refute. The practice of just making stuff up without regard to its truthfulness is called bullshit, and has achieved some traction as a technical term thanks to this excellent little essay on the topic: http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_... It reads like a joke at first, but is well worth your sustained attention.
emily2747 7y ago
Now you can judge who is lying or who is telling the truth Just watch this and save yourself from others https://howto105.blogspot.com/2019/03/detect-lie1.html https://howto105.blogspot.com/2019/03/detect-lie1.html Love between lion and man See in video how much they are taking care of each others http://bit.ly/2Yh5oBe http://bit.ly/2Yh5oBe Very funny pets video of 2019 Just watch I am sure you can't control your laugh http://bit.ly/2E1UsQs http://bit.ly/2E1UsQs
byteofprash 7y ago
Very well written article. If I may add to this, the vāda usually composes of 3 parts. 1. Purva paksha. 2. Khandana 3. Uttara paksha. Purva paksha which literally translates prior view is when the debater should talk from the opponent's perspective. This has to be confirmed by the opponent, which proves that the debater has understood the opponent's view point. Then comes khandana, which is the actual opposing view point that the debater puts forward refuting the view point of the opponent. The last is Uttara paksha, the opinion of the debater. (Or siddhānta as mentioned in this article)
asveikau 7y ago
I frequently argue points I do not personally hold. This sometimes gets misinterpreted as me holding the opinion, or an attack on the person, or some such. But really I am testing the idea and recognizing that someone else could hold this opinion but not be in the room to advocate for it.
- rakejake 7y ago
  Very good point. The internet was a great opportunity to test divisive/contrarian hypotheses. In the ideal case, you get counter arguments which will help you come up with a decision rule. Unfortunately it does not work this way in most cases. Today. the mechanics of internet forums works such that on average, the safe milquetoast post gets the most points, so it devolves into a popularity contest of who gets the most Internet points, especially when the person is not anonymous.
- sideaccount 7y ago
  This could also be considered gaslighting, or just plain old attention seeking behavior.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    This sounds like paranoia. I have absolutely no malicious intent, do not make such arguments by lying, and don't do it for attention.
    - sideaccount 7y ago
      That's good.
  - nvrspyx 7y ago
    There’s certainly a fine line between playing devil’s advocate to measure the strength of an argument and “trolling”, much like, as an example, there is a fine line between hunting an animal for sustenance and hunting an animal for sport.
    - 7y ago
devoply 7y ago
> The third type of dialogue, if it can be called dialogue at all, is known as vitaṇḍa (Nyāya Sūtra 1.2.3). We may call this “trolling”, because its objective is not to win by proving one’s own idea correct, but to make the other person lose by opposing every argument of the opponent no matter what. Vitaṇḍa is considered a destructive style of argumentation. Here, the person who employs vitaṇḍa has no position of one’s own, and does not attempt to defend any thesis. A person may even adopt a viewpoint that is opposed to one's own for the sake of vitaṇḍa. There is nothing to be gained by either party in this encounter. It is the troll’s point of view – “I will humiliate you and argue that you are wrong, not because I fundamentally disagree with your position, but because it was you who said it!” Sounds very much like what in the West is called the Socrattic method championed by Socrates... who used to ask questions until he proved that his opponent was an idiot who did not know what they were talking about.
- dvtrn 7y ago
  The Socratic method doesn't come with the intent of making the other person "lose" by blunt-force contrarianism, is a difference I'd like to think matters.
herodotus 7y ago
Vada and Vitana. I love this. When I was a prof. in a CSC department, I often had to persuade computing services or some other part of the university bureaucracy to do or get something for the students. I soon learned that I would encounter two types of beuracrats. (Actually, three, but I will discount the ones who were just not very smart. The other two types were smart.) The first type I called "obstructors". If I (our my department) proposed something, the obstructors always had a dozen or more compelling reasons why the proposal was impractical, infeasible , or otherwise without merit. The other type, I called them "enablers" might have some initial objections, but they would typically work with me (or us) to overcome the objections so that we could get what we wanted. In the second case, it was "Vada". After a while I learned that the best way to achieve an outcome was simply to avoid ever engaging with the people whose style was "Vitanda". Of course at the time (1980's and 90's) I did not think of them as Trolls - just as jerks who didn't want to do anything that created work for themselves.
tanderson92 7y ago
On a slight tangent, has anyone ever looked into the etymology of the modern term troll? There hasn't been too much serious scholarship that I can find on the term, seemingly arising in mid-1980s newsgroups. But, I did find this which is my current best understanding; I also read in an old student newspaper edition that it refers to the trollish inhabitants underneath Bridge building on campus. From an Oral History of Caltech: > ERWIN:Could you perhaps tell about bringing back A Broader View with its sequel, the new sequel? Because I think that’s very interesting. CLARK:Well, that was fun to do. The play readers group in 1987 decided to renew the play-reading party, which was one of the great traditions of the fifties and early sixties. And Bob Oliver asked me if I’d dust of f A Broader View. Well, I looked at it and I thought of updating it. But the shift in the twenty years had been so much that updating was impossible; it’s just a period piece or nothing. So we had to do it unchanged. And then I felt honor bound to write a sequel to it, which is called Troll’s Progress. The theme of it is that the essential Caltech never changes. It’s firmly founded on terror. [Laughter] And no froufrou can disguise that fact. And people who play together pray together, twitch together, stay together. Anyway, that theme allowed for a number of wisecracks, and I like to think the dialogue is rather funny. The kids who did it were tremendous. The undergraduates, of course, we know are stars. > ERWIN:What was the origin of the troll? > CLARK:Well, that goes back into Caltech history. And it’s probably Caltech’s only contribution to American culture. [Laughter] If you have to ask the meaning of the word, you’ll never understand what it means. But to put you sort of in the framework—that’s discussed, incidentally, in the dialogue of Beautiful Beckman there’s a segment on that. But a troll is a very high-voltage nerd. It used to be he lived “under DuBridge.” The kid that never sees the light of day, really, he’s so busy with his books. There are apprentice trolls at other schools, but ours are an order of magnitude more trollish. People who are compulsive and pathological students are much more so here. > ERWIN:Somewhere you referred to this as a “random troll.” > CLARK:Oh, that’s the worst thing you can be called. You see, it means you’re just like a number; you have no personality. You might as well be a computer—nothing to distinguish. Oh, man, when you’re a random troll, you’re beyond the pale. [Laughter] > ERWIN:In A Broader View, you called the Caltech undergrad “intellectually brilliant, emotionally immature, culturally deprived, and socially gauche.” And then, immediately afterward, I believe you gave the Caltech professor the identical description. That brings us to the point of what the shows were for underneath it all. Source: http://oralhistories.library.caltech.edu/95/1/OH_Clark_K.pdf http://oralhistories.library.caltech.edu/95/1/OH_Clark_K.pdf
svat 7y ago
The tradition of debate in India that this article is about (or dialogue, or dialectic, or whatever you want to call it) is very interesting, and unfortunately not well-known because most of the sources on the topic quickly get into technicalities. Two non-technical (somewhat accessible to the general public) sources I've found are: 1. The book “Religions, Reasons, and Gods” by the late John Clayton has many interesting essays that touch on the vāda tradition. One of his interesting points is that the goal of dialogue need not be consensus or establishing common ground, but simply the “clarification of defensible difference”: understanding the other party better, and coming to shared understanding of what our differences are. Some of it is also touched on in his lecture here: http://www.bu.edu/religion/mar25-98/ http://www.bu.edu/religion/mar25-98/ 2. Elaborating on the jalpa/vitaṇḍa mentioned in this article, the nyāya tradition recognized a long list of logical fallacies and poor arguments that were grounds for losing a (formal) debate. A list I've found is in the paper “Twenty-Two Ways to Lose a Debate” (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-009-9083-y https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-009-9083-y) which also carries out some comparison with the ideas of Grice.
- pvelagal 7y ago
  Even today, in my language "Telugu" if some one is trolling we call it "vitanda vadam" - i.e. No point in continuing the discussion.
  - cmonnow 7y ago
    same in Tamil. That's because it's a Sanskrit phrase, and all Indian languages borrow heavily from Sanskrit.
- ratmice 7y ago
  I guess a pet peeve of mine, the Di, in Dialectic refers specifically to two-valued logic, resolving to a truth or false. Which at least in the case of Jain philosophy, with 3 basic truth values true, false, and unassertable, so really these traditions are not necessarily dialectic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaina_seven-valued_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaina_seven-valued_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada
dheerajrav 7y ago
This was taught to us as kids. 3 types of arguments - vaada, vivaada, and vittanda vaada.
alchemism 7y ago
In the Roman Catholic Church there was once an official position known as the Advocatus Diaboli, or Devil’s Advocate. Their task was to be the skeptic, and argue persuasively against the canonization of a new Saint - essentially an applied version of the third form of dialectic mentioned here.
thinkingemote 7y ago
If I could be forgiven to be meta here, are there any comments in this thread which are elaborate trolls on the nature of trolling? I'm not as sophisticated as some of you but it seems as if those with more experience in these matters wouldn't find it easy to be sucked into discussions with a troll. Could there be a master troll or two here which you have fallen for?
emmelaich 7y ago
The useful thing to take away from this is to how to combat them. > Simply by asking them what their position is, or what they propose to debate, they are forced into a quandary: if they propose something, then they have to defend it, and can be argued with; if they do not propose anything, then they may be asked to exit the debate. This may be easier said than done, but it may also help stop a troll once in a while! Be sure to read the linked posts "The toll of the trolls" (5/25/19) "Eristic argument" (4/6/19)
daodedickinson 7y ago
What's called "debate" at high schools and universities fell to vitanda decades ago.
t4ko 7y ago
This is interesting to read and especially since their understanding of trolling is actually accurate. "Here, the person who employs vitaṇḍa has no position of one’s own, and does not attempt to defend any thesis. A person may even adopt a viewpoint that is opposed to one's own for the sake of vitaṇḍa." I think people mostly misuse the word trolling, a troll's final goal is to disrupt and incite reactions often times for the lulz. To me (you may very well disagree) anybody claiming that trolling is used to achieve something is wrong. It may have consequences but if they are intended it's just manipulation of opinions. I also have my doubt about the motivation given to trolls, I believe they target people that are "weak" to trolling because their propension to react help the troll reach his goal faster. i believe this is a reason why trolling it can quickly become harassment or at least be perceived as such. I used to like being a troll as a teenager and my first reaction when reading an opinion that looks absurd is to wonder if the author is trolling. This first reaction is slowly shifting to "who does this statement serves" since organisations of all sizes have weaponized internet to spread such opinions.

189 points by mcenedella 7y ago

This is very neat, and the last paragraph is indeed very heavy-hitting. It's always hard to read that some of our societies greatest present-day problems are so many thousands of years old. However, I think this definition is narrow and only encapsulates part of the modern definition of 'trolling'. Today, 'trolling' is used as a weapon of war, not only in debate with other individual people. Trolling is as much a mechanism of creating emotional trauma among a large population as it is a mechanism for 'debating' in bad faith. Modern trolls will post violent content, often based on lies, in order to get an emotional rise out of a population. This is a large-scale effect that wastes huge amounts of people's time and energy, as they 'debate' with these soldiers of war whose task at hand is to create unnecessary emotional pain and waste the time of their enemy. Yes, trolling is also happening on a more individual 'debate' level still, but narrowing our notion of trolling down to these ancient definitions is doing a major disservice to our modern understanding of how language is used in debate.

h2odragon 7y ago
I don't think anyone is attempting to narrow the definition of trolling; but in general any appeal to more nuanced understanding is worthwhile too so don't take this as disagreeing with you. I note that "doctrine" was also an important element of the definitions offered and regret that we do not question our doctrine (and its sources) enough even now.
labgrown 7y ago
for a definition to be useful it needs to be as narrow as possible, otherwise declaring any form of argument you don't like as trolling would be...
- damnyou 7y ago
  That is just not true. Broader definitions are actually very useful when you're trying to describe general principles (like in law) — using a word that's too narrowly defined can limit the scope of what you're saying.
  - labgrown 7y ago
    That's the difference between a principle and a definition, law has both - criminal offenses for example are more defined than the principle of tort, the more you want something to be useful as an accusation the more narrowly defined it needs to be or you just end up with a moral panic.
ljm 7y ago
In a way I feel like I might have misunderstood something within my self. I agree with the assessment but I never connected trolling and trauma, because my personal concept of trolling is essentially a continual escalation of reductio ad absurdum. In that sense it's not really trolling or sarcasm, it's more of a way of livening up overly-serious conversations. I should probably not refer to that as trolling as the intention isn't to fuck people off, gaslight them, traumatise them...but to soften the mood.
coldtea 7y ago
>Trolling is as much a mechanism of creating emotional trauma among a large population as it is a mechanism for 'debating' in bad faith. Perhaps this was not present in older societies (and other countries today) because people were not as touchy feely as the current generations... And I'm not trolling. I seriously think modern western societies are too snow-flakey and touchy feely for their own good. It's like going out in life expecting padded roads, walls, and everything, lest you ever get hurt... And that's despite older societies having it much harder, and having much more difficult problems to be "traumatized" with...
- pranjalv123 7y ago
  The argument here is "I shouldn't avoid emotionally traumatizing you because at some point, someone else in the future may emotionally traumatize you". Perhaps there's a case to be made for exposing people to controversial or offensive ideas in a controlled environment to prepare for encountering them in an uncontrolled environment - in fact, this is frequently called a "safe space" and ridiculed by people who believe that modern societies are too "snow-flakey"! But that's certainly not what internet trolls are doing.
- marstomorrow 7y ago
  > It's like going out in life expecting padded roads, walls, and everything, lest you ever get hurt... What? How offensive. Let me be clear, then. The United States is committing a genocide against minorities as we speak and it is enabled and emboldened by "trolls". This is not touchy-feely. This is children in cages, separated illegally from their families and put into places of extreme disrepair, unhealthy conditions, etc, while the President goes on TV to state that machine guns would be a more "effective solution". This is not touchy feely or snowflaky stuff and I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. What I'm talking about are trolls going online an on TV to spread messages of hate and cruelty. This directly results in human suffering and death of innocent people. There is no logic behind talking about using machine guns to kill people who are trying to legally migrate to your country. To make those statements is to wage a weapon of war and to do it online and on TV en masse is a new kind of trolling that is physically dangerous. Your ..... dismissal of the problems of youth....and use of .... to not finish...sentences makes it difficult to understand your point. Trolling in the modern era has nothing to do with any of this "touchy feely" or "snow-flakey" rubbish. It has to do with enabling genocide. Trolls normalize bad behavior to the point where it goes unpunished. Bad behavior to the extreme, unpunished from the top, for years on end, can and does result in really bad things like genocide. I'm not making leaps here. This is real, it is physical, it is urgent, and it matters.

shas3 7y ago

Ancient sanskrit, yes. But the term vitanDa is very current. It is a common word in my language, Kannada and I imagine in other Indian languages as well. This article is as much about the etymology of a modern term as about a concept from Sanskrit philosophical texts.

m33k44 7y ago
Indian languages are heavily influenced by Samskrutam and have borrowed words from the language. So the word vitanDa in Kannada is borrowed from Samskrut language.
QuercusMax 7y ago
What does vitanDa mean in Kannada? Google hasn't been much help.
- nitheshm 7y ago
  In Telugu, I use vitanda vadam to mean something closer to a rhetorical fallacy than deliberate dishonesty.
  - grey-sunshine 7y ago
    In Tamil it means speech that leads no where. In the sense of debating but not useful.
danans 7y ago
"The Notion of Trolling in Ancient Indian Literature" may have been a better choice of title. Of course it was in Sanskrit, because that was the literary language of the time. But this is probably named this way because the names of Ancient Indian works of literature, especially obscure ones like Nyaya Sutra, are not well known in the west, whereas "Sanskrit" almost immediately contextualizes the post to Ancient South Asia for most readers, even though the language in which it is composed is a bit beside the point, which is that an ancient society sort of identified "trolling".
ensconced 7y ago

empath75 7y ago

Seems like Socrates would fall under that definition.

simondedalus 7y ago
Socrates “knows that he knows nothing” and spends his time trying to refute that. He looks for knowledge earnestly but usually doesn’t find it. Socrates is less devil’s advocate, more “how can we be sure of X when Y? If not Y because Z, doesn’t Z also make X problematic because of (blablabla)?” Sure, he gets people RAGEing like a great troll, but at least ostensibly he’s doing more the 2nd type of argument described in the article, but with kind of a backdrop that precise intellectual beliefs are really hard to specify or maintain. It’s like dialectic but it’s not Hegelian; he wants to return to some central question and doesn’t necessarily see that thesis/antithesis climb as crucial, he just finds problems with the premises and wants to find better ones (Hegel’s whole thing was a bit more nuanced than that). Re: article, trolling initially meant trying to get a rise out of people. It’s not so much you won’t admit you’re wrong or you’re eristically tearing everything down, it’s that you’re pretending to play the argument game (or some other game, like “art criticism” or “testimonial”) but in fact you’re fucking with people of varying levels of specificity.

thwave 7y ago

There's a nice parallel in Ancient Greek, and from there to modern philosophical parlance: Eristic[0]. Here's Plato, for example: "it is on the purely verbal level that they look for the contradiction in what has been said, and employ eristic, not dialectic, on one another." (Republic V 454a, translated by Reeve) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eristic

dav 7y ago

Did they have a word for the intellectually dishonest practice of just making stuff up to support one's argument?

sideaccount 7y ago
I think gish galloping is the modern phrase, gish gallopers are toxic.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Gish galloping is burying an opponent in an avalanche of claims or factoids that would take far longer to refute. The practice of just making stuff up without regard to its truthfulness is called bullshit, and has achieved some traction as a technical term thanks to this excellent little essay on the topic: http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_... It reads like a joke at first, but is well worth your sustained attention.

emily2747 7y ago

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byteofprash 7y ago

Very well written article. If I may add to this, the vāda usually composes of 3 parts. 1. Purva paksha. 2. Khandana 3. Uttara paksha. Purva paksha which literally translates prior view is when the debater should talk from the opponent's perspective. This has to be confirmed by the opponent, which proves that the debater has understood the opponent's view point. Then comes khandana, which is the actual opposing view point that the debater puts forward refuting the view point of the opponent. The last is Uttara paksha, the opinion of the debater. (Or siddhānta as mentioned in this article)

asveikau 7y ago

I frequently argue points I do not personally hold. This sometimes gets misinterpreted as me holding the opinion, or an attack on the person, or some such. But really I am testing the idea and recognizing that someone else could hold this opinion but not be in the room to advocate for it.

rakejake 7y ago
Very good point. The internet was a great opportunity to test divisive/contrarian hypotheses. In the ideal case, you get counter arguments which will help you come up with a decision rule. Unfortunately it does not work this way in most cases. Today. the mechanics of internet forums works such that on average, the safe milquetoast post gets the most points, so it devolves into a popularity contest of who gets the most Internet points, especially when the person is not anonymous.
sideaccount 7y ago
This could also be considered gaslighting, or just plain old attention seeking behavior.
- asveikau 7y ago
  This sounds like paranoia. I have absolutely no malicious intent, do not make such arguments by lying, and don't do it for attention.
  - sideaccount 7y ago
    That's good.
- nvrspyx 7y ago
  There’s certainly a fine line between playing devil’s advocate to measure the strength of an argument and “trolling”, much like, as an example, there is a fine line between hunting an animal for sustenance and hunting an animal for sport.
  - 7y ago

devoply 7y ago

> The third type of dialogue, if it can be called dialogue at all, is known as vitaṇḍa (Nyāya Sūtra 1.2.3). We may call this “trolling”, because its objective is not to win by proving one’s own idea correct, but to make the other person lose by opposing every argument of the opponent no matter what. Vitaṇḍa is considered a destructive style of argumentation. Here, the person who employs vitaṇḍa has no position of one’s own, and does not attempt to defend any thesis. A person may even adopt a viewpoint that is opposed to one's own for the sake of vitaṇḍa. There is nothing to be gained by either party in this encounter. It is the troll’s point of view – “I will humiliate you and argue that you are wrong, not because I fundamentally disagree with your position, but because it was you who said it!” Sounds very much like what in the West is called the Socrattic method championed by Socrates... who used to ask questions until he proved that his opponent was an idiot who did not know what they were talking about.

dvtrn 7y ago
The Socratic method doesn't come with the intent of making the other person "lose" by blunt-force contrarianism, is a difference I'd like to think matters.

herodotus 7y ago

Vada and Vitana. I love this. When I was a prof. in a CSC department, I often had to persuade computing services or some other part of the university bureaucracy to do or get something for the students. I soon learned that I would encounter two types of beuracrats. (Actually, three, but I will discount the ones who were just not very smart. The other two types were smart.) The first type I called "obstructors". If I (our my department) proposed something, the obstructors always had a dozen or more compelling reasons why the proposal was impractical, infeasible , or otherwise without merit. The other type, I called them "enablers" might have some initial objections, but they would typically work with me (or us) to overcome the objections so that we could get what we wanted. In the second case, it was "Vada". After a while I learned that the best way to achieve an outcome was simply to avoid ever engaging with the people whose style was "Vitanda". Of course at the time (1980's and 90's) I did not think of them as Trolls - just as jerks who didn't want to do anything that created work for themselves.

tanderson92 7y ago

On a slight tangent, has anyone ever looked into the etymology of the modern term troll? There hasn't been too much serious scholarship that I can find on the term, seemingly arising in mid-1980s newsgroups. But, I did find this which is my current best understanding; I also read in an old student newspaper edition that it refers to the trollish inhabitants underneath Bridge building on campus. From an Oral History of Caltech: > ERWIN:Could you perhaps tell about bringing back A Broader View with its sequel, the new sequel? Because I think that’s very interesting. CLARK:Well, that was fun to do. The play readers group in 1987 decided to renew the play-reading party, which was one of the great traditions of the fifties and early sixties. And Bob Oliver asked me if I’d dust of f A Broader View. Well, I looked at it and I thought of updating it. But the shift in the twenty years had been so much that updating was impossible; it’s just a period piece or nothing. So we had to do it unchanged. And then I felt honor bound to write a sequel to it, which is called Troll’s Progress. The theme of it is that the essential Caltech never changes. It’s firmly founded on terror. [Laughter] And no froufrou can disguise that fact. And people who play together pray together, twitch together, stay together. Anyway, that theme allowed for a number of wisecracks, and I like to think the dialogue is rather funny. The kids who did it were tremendous. The undergraduates, of course, we know are stars. > ERWIN:What was the origin of the troll? > CLARK:Well, that goes back into Caltech history. And it’s probably Caltech’s only contribution to American culture. [Laughter] If you have to ask the meaning of the word, you’ll never understand what it means. But to put you sort of in the framework—that’s discussed, incidentally, in the dialogue of Beautiful Beckman there’s a segment on that. But a troll is a very high-voltage nerd. It used to be he lived “under DuBridge.” The kid that never sees the light of day, really, he’s so busy with his books. There are apprentice trolls at other schools, but ours are an order of magnitude more trollish. People who are compulsive and pathological students are much more so here. > ERWIN:Somewhere you referred to this as a “random troll.” > CLARK:Oh, that’s the worst thing you can be called. You see, it means you’re just like a number; you have no personality. You might as well be a computer—nothing to distinguish. Oh, man, when you’re a random troll, you’re beyond the pale. [Laughter] > ERWIN:In A Broader View, you called the Caltech undergrad “intellectually brilliant, emotionally immature, culturally deprived, and socially gauche.” And then, immediately afterward, I believe you gave the Caltech professor the identical description. That brings us to the point of what the shows were for underneath it all. Source: http://oralhistories.library.caltech.edu/95/1/OH_Clark_K.pdf http://oralhistories.library.caltech.edu/95/1/OH_Clark_K.pdf

svat 7y ago

The tradition of debate in India that this article is about (or dialogue, or dialectic, or whatever you want to call it) is very interesting, and unfortunately not well-known because most of the sources on the topic quickly get into technicalities. Two non-technical (somewhat accessible to the general public) sources I've found are: 1. The book “Religions, Reasons, and Gods” by the late John Clayton has many interesting essays that touch on the vāda tradition. One of his interesting points is that the goal of dialogue need not be consensus or establishing common ground, but simply the “clarification of defensible difference”: understanding the other party better, and coming to shared understanding of what our differences are. Some of it is also touched on in his lecture here: http://www.bu.edu/religion/mar25-98/ http://www.bu.edu/religion/mar25-98/ 2. Elaborating on the jalpa/vitaṇḍa mentioned in this article, the nyāya tradition recognized a long list of logical fallacies and poor arguments that were grounds for losing a (formal) debate. A list I've found is in the paper “Twenty-Two Ways to Lose a Debate” (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-009-9083-y https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-009-9083-y) which also carries out some comparison with the ideas of Grice.

pvelagal 7y ago
Even today, in my language "Telugu" if some one is trolling we call it "vitanda vadam" - i.e. No point in continuing the discussion.
- cmonnow 7y ago
  same in Tamil. That's because it's a Sanskrit phrase, and all Indian languages borrow heavily from Sanskrit.
ratmice 7y ago
I guess a pet peeve of mine, the Di, in Dialectic refers specifically to two-valued logic, resolving to a truth or false. Which at least in the case of Jain philosophy, with 3 basic truth values true, false, and unassertable, so really these traditions are not necessarily dialectic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaina_seven-valued_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaina_seven-valued_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada

dheerajrav 7y ago

This was taught to us as kids. 3 types of arguments - vaada, vivaada, and vittanda vaada.

alchemism 7y ago

In the Roman Catholic Church there was once an official position known as the Advocatus Diaboli, or Devil’s Advocate. Their task was to be the skeptic, and argue persuasively against the canonization of a new Saint - essentially an applied version of the third form of dialectic mentioned here.

thinkingemote 7y ago

If I could be forgiven to be meta here, are there any comments in this thread which are elaborate trolls on the nature of trolling? I'm not as sophisticated as some of you but it seems as if those with more experience in these matters wouldn't find it easy to be sucked into discussions with a troll. Could there be a master troll or two here which you have fallen for?

emmelaich 7y ago

The useful thing to take away from this is to how to combat them. > Simply by asking them what their position is, or what they propose to debate, they are forced into a quandary: if they propose something, then they have to defend it, and can be argued with; if they do not propose anything, then they may be asked to exit the debate. This may be easier said than done, but it may also help stop a troll once in a while! Be sure to read the linked posts "The toll of the trolls" (5/25/19) "Eristic argument" (4/6/19)

daodedickinson 7y ago

What's called "debate" at high schools and universities fell to vitanda decades ago.

t4ko 7y ago

This is interesting to read and especially since their understanding of trolling is actually accurate. "Here, the person who employs vitaṇḍa has no position of one’s own, and does not attempt to defend any thesis. A person may even adopt a viewpoint that is opposed to one's own for the sake of vitaṇḍa." I think people mostly misuse the word trolling, a troll's final goal is to disrupt and incite reactions often times for the lulz. To me (you may very well disagree) anybody claiming that trolling is used to achieve something is wrong. It may have consequences but if they are intended it's just manipulation of opinions. I also have my doubt about the motivation given to trolls, I believe they target people that are "weak" to trolling because their propension to react help the troll reach his goal faster. i believe this is a reason why trolling it can quickly become harassment or at least be perceived as such. I used to like being a troll as a teenager and my first reaction when reading an opinion that looks absurd is to wonder if the author is trolling. This first reaction is slowly shifting to "who does this statement serves" since organisations of all sizes have weaponized internet to spread such opinions.