4 ms·

I think this is wrongheaded, for the simple reason that whether an idea is contrarian or not is irrelevant to its merit as an idea. Misrepresentation is only po

I think this is wrongheaded, for the simple reason that whether an idea is contrarian or not is irrelevant to its merit as an idea. Misrepresentation is only possible through sophistry, not through volume, or even placement. Therefore, it makes sense to downvote only things that are 'sophist', in the sense that they contain no kernel of communication, but rather, just obscure or muddy - not things that are contrarian. Indeed, to do so is in itself an attempt to cloud and thwart communication, as you're manipulating placement and representation to make arguments less or more present, independent of their actual content.

derefr 6y ago
This presumes that people have infinite time and motivation both to debate, and to read the ensuing infinite debate. Rhetoric works to win debates because debates are time-limited (and the audience's attention is both time- and attention-limited), and so you can win just by e.g. preventing your opponent from ever getting a word in edge-wise, or forcing them to answer for trivial side-issues and therefore never have time to say what they really want to say; etc. What I'm railing against here is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance: the rhetorical rearrangement of non-equal evidence into a debate presented to the audience as if each side had equal support behind it. And, make no mistake, that sort of rhetorical rearrangement is what discussion forums with comment voting are doing when the community rearranges the comments with upvotes/downvotes: they're curating which comments appear first (and thus which comments appear at all, to those without interest in reading the whole page.) They're changing the impression of aggregate weight-of-evidence someone gets by skimming the debate. But my claim is that this is not a bad thing, when it is done in the goal of presenting the debate accurately. If one side of a debate has little evidence, but more voices, those voices should be rhetorically damped down to compensate, until the force of their combined voice matches the volume of the evidence on their side. That is the proper goal of editorial curation in e.g. news journalism: to let authoritative primary sources speak loudly, secondary sources quietly, and kooks and rumormongers not-at-all. And it should, IMHO, be the proper goal of a community's editorial curation of a comments section, as well.
- pasabagi 6y ago
  I agree that rhetorical damping is necessary - I just think that it should be done on how much a given post contributes to a discussion, not by how much it contributes to the majority opinion's side of a discussion. I think Carl Schmitt, for instance, should have been put in prison. His ideas are horrible. I still think they are worth reading.

derefr 6y ago

This presumes that people have infinite time and motivation both to debate, and to read the ensuing infinite debate. Rhetoric works to win debates because debates are time-limited (and the audience's attention is both time- and attention-limited), and so you can win just by e.g. preventing your opponent from ever getting a word in edge-wise, or forcing them to answer for trivial side-issues and therefore never have time to say what they really want to say; etc. What I'm railing against here is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance: the rhetorical rearrangement of non-equal evidence into a debate presented to the audience as if each side had equal support behind it. And, make no mistake, that sort of rhetorical rearrangement is what discussion forums with comment voting are doing when the community rearranges the comments with upvotes/downvotes: they're curating which comments appear first (and thus which comments appear at all, to those without interest in reading the whole page.) They're changing the impression of aggregate weight-of-evidence someone gets by skimming the debate. But my claim is that this is not a bad thing, when it is done in the goal of presenting the debate accurately. If one side of a debate has little evidence, but more voices, those voices should be rhetorically damped down to compensate, until the force of their combined voice matches the volume of the evidence on their side. That is the proper goal of editorial curation in e.g. news journalism: to let authoritative primary sources speak loudly, secondary sources quietly, and kooks and rumormongers not-at-all. And it should, IMHO, be the proper goal of a community's editorial curation of a comments section, as well.

pasabagi 6y ago
I agree that rhetorical damping is necessary - I just think that it should be done on how much a given post contributes to a discussion, not by how much it contributes to the majority opinion's side of a discussion. I think Carl Schmitt, for instance, should have been put in prison. His ideas are horrible. I still think they are worth reading.