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Would it be too much to ask that we collectively say "The Damore thing is obviously a [scissor statement](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controve
by Smaug123 6y ago
Would it be too much to ask that we collectively say "The Damore thing is obviously a [scissor statement](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/), on which otherwise-reasonable people bafflingly manage to hold different views very strongly, and we should stop talking about it forthwith because no good can come of it"? Nothing new can be said on the subject, vanishingly few people can be persuaded one way or the other, and "news site primarily populated by shortform comments" is hardly the appropriate place to hold a protracted argument.
- bitcharmer 6y agoI don't think shutting down discourse is a positive thing.
- Smaug123 6y agoThis is the problem, though. That discourse is not productive, when held here - witness the dumpster fire of downvotes all over the place. If the topic needs discussion, it needs long and nuanced discussion where each party is trying hard to understand the other - not rapid-fire three-line comments on a news site.
- zozbot234 6y agoDo you know of any other place for this discussion that would be better-suited to nuance and genuine intellectual curiosity ("each party ... trying hard to understand the other")? Downvites are quite common here, in any discussion.
- Smaug123 6y agoThis is kind of why people are meant to have blogs. A network of blogs where people can maintain historical records of their thinking, for example. Scott Alexander is a great example of this: every so often we get a "contra PERSON on SUBJECT", a long well-thought-out discussion with nuance and a good-faith attempt to understand the argument under criticism. And people reply with their own long-form blogs in a similar vein.
- im3w1l 6y agoI think it would be productive to move the discussion to the fact that Google is for many people the arbiter of truth. And how they are and ought to deal with political controversies in light of that. Frankly, if this controversy had happened at... I dunno... Coca Cola, it would be completely uninteresting.
- jansan 6y agoThat story you links makes for some fascinating reading. Thanks.
- mLuby 6y agoFormat reminds me of this cold war story: https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail "It made a horrible kind of sense, for Cold War values of sense: not a real rocket motor, but a vile way of getting your enemy’s best and brightest to kill themselves by trying to reverse-engineer an impossible nightmare."
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y agoI think it would be much more valuable to address why it works as a scissor statement. The fact that it does is obvious in the debate, but it's unclear why/how it does that. I wonder how much of it comes from people first seeing opinionated reporting, misleading excerpts, or edited versions (one of the key statements - that differences in populations cannot be applied to make decisions about individuals - was part of a diagram [1] that was missing in initial leaks), or not having seen it at all. However, I believe it acts as a scissor statement even for people who started by reading the full version, which is extremely interesting, and which I'd love to understand. [1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo... page 4 top
- kharak 6y agoThat is such an interesting story / concept. Love it, thanks for posting this.