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> > "I have no position!" he cried. "If you have a position, it is always something screwed down." He twisted an invisible screwdriver into the table. "I have o
by vageli 7y ago
> > "I have no position!" he cried. "If you have a position, it is always something screwed down." He twisted an invisible screwdriver into the table. "I have opinions that I defend rather vigorously, and then I find out how silly they are, and I give them up!"
> By modern social convention this is "trolling".
Can you expand on this? That hardly sounds like trolling and more like "Strong opinions loosely held" which is an admirable intellectual stance to take in my opinion.
- pjc50 7y agoSee my reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22127853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22127853
- mcguire 7y agoI like pjc50's answer, but here's an alternative take: it's a matter of intention. Trolling involves making people angry because making them angry is fun. It's not any kind of intellectual stance. The alternative is a method of teaching or learning, where unpopular opinions are as something between a counterfactual for exploration and the best way of getting a question answered on the internet: by asserting a wrong answer. "Strong opinions loosely held" requires the opinions to actually be loosely held. You have to admit there are other options and you have to let go when yours are shown to be silly. On the other hand, keep in mind that intent is impossible to judge from the outside.
- QuesnayJr 7y agoIf you read the introduction to "Against Method", it's clear that he's trolling. He says that he was writing a wicked book, and that Lakatos was supposed to write an even-more wicked refutation of the book before he passed away.