4 ms·

Can you give some specifics of #3 just for color? I'm not interested in debating or trolling at all. I'm just curious what people say that does this. Is it just

by sfblah 6y ago

Can you give some specifics of #3 just for color? I'm not interested in debating or trolling at all. I'm just curious what people say that does this. Is it just people cheering for Trump or something?

lordCarbonFiber 6y ago
Tones of statements fall under that header. It can be Trump supporters tallking about election fraud, nazis talking about "race based IQ distributions" or transphobes talking about "bathroom predators"; there's no shortage of these kind of bad faith low effort "arguements". There are mountains of high quality sources you can use to argue against the claims but it takes many times the work than just showing up to "just ask questions" as bigots are want to do. Having a 0 tolerance policy for these kinds of people makes your space safer for maginalized communities and ends up with better debates/discussions over all since, as i alluded to, these arguments aren't actually in good faith or rooted in any sort of data.
- sfblah 6y ago
  No interest in wading into the specifics of these topics obviously. But, it occurs to me that deciding which topics are troll topics and which ones aren’t confers a lot of power. I have actually seen people banned from communities when coming armed with pretty detailed data and thorough argumentation. I wonder if there’s a principled way to separate low-effort trolls from those simply willing to argue the unpopular side of a controversial topic.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    There is a principled way I'd think, but very few minds remain anymore that haven't been corrupted by incompatible heuristics.
  - croon 6y ago
    I don't moderate anything anymore, but I generally have an n strikes policy when debating with someone. If I spend [not insignificant amount of time/mental energy] with you just to disprove something inane, and you do that to me n times, I won't argue with you anymore, even if the n+1th time happens to not be completely baseless. At that point it's either explicitly on purpose, or implicitly linked with a bias that makes them susceptible to bullshit that confirms said bias. I don't know if there's any ab initio way of knowing if someone's spouting nonsense on purpose or not, so character patterns are hard to scale. But that's why moderation online is harder and faster than in real life, because you don't have a 1on1 interaction in the same way. It's up to netizens to behave and think before speaking.
  - lordCarbonFiber 6y ago
    You have to always remember it comes down to scale. The fact that making the claims is always less work than debunking them already has the balance of power way off into the claimant end. So anyone moderating anything is going to turn to heuristics; you can see which topics tend to attract people acting in bad faith and at the very least have extra standards on. I'll go back to trans people since Ive personally got the most experience debunking bigotry in that arena, what are the odds that some random user on an unrelated forum has independently researched something that's going to completely flip established science on its head? It's fairly low, and allowing argument just creates a false debate. To use examples I would hope get everyone on board, think flat earthers. There's no version of that discussion that doesn't end with "here are all the data suggesting a round earth + things you can literally do yourself with a bit of math and a car" vs "that's just what the <insert boogieman that's a thin metaphor for marginalized group> want you to think". Since you know how it ends, just ban it to start. Hell you can see the consequences of not holding a firm line on these sorts of things in this thread. There are people literally "just asking questions" about "men in women's sports" as an example of the "terrible reddit censorship"; as if it's not transparently obvious what they're doing. So you have to ask yourself, even if you could reliably id anyone who wanted to argue in good faith (i'd argue this is considerably harder than you'd think though that's more of a gut feeling /shrug), if their goals are "convince the world that <race, gender, nationality, sexuality> is causing harm" what is the value of giving that a platform even if you're willing to expend the emotional energy to debunk it (over and over and over and over because even if you have some kind of metric, your users don't and if allowed someone always feeds the trolls).
- shemtay 6y ago
  Your examples are very revealing of a larger problem. Not only are these viewpoints, which you claim can only be argued in bad faith, supported by empirical evidence, but the people who dare to support them publicly are risking social and financial ruin. If "unsafe" and "marginalized" do not describe their situation, then the words have no meaning. As a minority from one of the groups at the unflattering end of the crime rate distributions, it is my lived experience that the type of censorship you are advocating for is what makes me feel unsafe. Inconvenient empirical truths about my community can not be discussed in the sort of polite and caring settings where the seeds of real solutions that don't ignore reality could germinate. Instead, they can only be discussed in rude and hateful settings.
artemisyna 6y ago
Not the OP, but as an example: Take a flat earther argument that's explanations within explanations within explanations to cover whatever "what about x?" type of questions you have. Change "flat earther" to whatever conspiracy theory/controversial topic of the day, and there you go.
- mistermann 6y ago
  How to build a strawman 101.
Pfhreak 6y ago
I believe this is called the "Gish Gallop". The idea being that I can come up with many, many more questions that are hypothetical, but that require more energy to answer than they take to ask. Often times the person will combine this with a carefully worded question that has to be unwound by the counter-debater. Like, "Knowing that this will cost working class Americans jobs, why do you want X?" Well... X doesn't cost jobs, X might even create jobs. But now I have to explain that. And if I slow down for even one second, you have an opening to fire off another question or paint me as somehow waffling.
- mr_toad 6y ago
  > Like, "Knowing that this will cost working class Americans jobs, why do you want X?" A good politician would never answer that question. Instead they would answer a different question that they already had a good answer to. “I think the important thing to remember here is...” This tactic works just as well online. Never directly answer a question you don’t like. Always stay on message. By the time you finish your answer the listener should have already forgotten the question.
  - eropple 6y ago
    Thing is--you are assuming that both sides want to exercise rhetoric. The weakness, and it is a weakness, of the generally liberal discussion participant is that they very often want to discuss what a thing is and what it means. Wonkishness is a positive trait in discussing policy, but it means that rhetoric, no matter how openly disingenuous, has to be addressed; the consequences (or the inanity) have to be dissected, that's part of why they are there. Incidentally, this is what leads to the current state of affairs--the side that is unmoored from any pretense of reality can say whatever the hell they want and will put the other side into knots. It isn't clever, and it is frustrating because your advice is good, but it is real.
  - pasabagi 6y ago
    I find this inappropriate. Politicians are engaged in political messaging - so it makes sense there - but online, we're engaged in conversation. What you're describing is good at putting a message across - but I don't want to have conversations with people who are simply broadcasting a message in my general direction. It's a form of bad faith communication, same as the weighted question. These days, I'd probably just not respond to bad faith communication, but I've historically enjoyed being horrible. Unlike a politician, you don't have to preserve your own credibility in the eyes of onlookers, so you can just be awful if you want.
sellyme 6y ago
While it doesn't address the "massive emotional payload" bit, Russell's Teapot is the canonical example of an argument that's easy to make and almost impossible to categorically disprove, despite being factually inaccurate. Now imagine that but about a topic people have strong opinions on, and you get something that requires so much preamble to disprove that those who believe it aren't willing to hear the rebuttal. Basically, you just make something up entirely. If you say that 100,000,000 Americans are killed every year in skiing accidents, that's easy to disprove. But if you post a clip of someone getting punched from an obscure 1970s sitcom that only aired in Hungary and then claim it happened at a restaurant in Denver, that's going to be a lot more difficult to disprove even if the claim is extremely dubious unless you're lucky enough to know the original context. Some of the more common examples of this in recent times include faked tweet screenshots (mildly difficult to disprove as Twitter's search isn't very useful, and the liar can just say "oh they deleted it"), anecdotes about meeting a celebrity and them doing something unacceptable (basically impossible to disprove unless the meeting DID happen but the incident didn't and eyewitnesses can vouch - see also: the Gritty incident), and videos being used to smear a group despite none of the people involved actually being from that group (reverse video search is extremely difficult, and that relies on it being something previously published rather than recorded explicitly for misinformation campaigns).

by sfblah 6y ago

lordCarbonFiber 6y ago

Tones of statements fall under that header. It can be Trump supporters tallking about election fraud, nazis talking about "race based IQ distributions" or transphobes talking about "bathroom predators"; there's no shortage of these kind of bad faith low effort "arguements". There are mountains of high quality sources you can use to argue against the claims but it takes many times the work than just showing up to "just ask questions" as bigots are want to do. Having a 0 tolerance policy for these kinds of people makes your space safer for maginalized communities and ends up with better debates/discussions over all since, as i alluded to, these arguments aren't actually in good faith or rooted in any sort of data.

sfblah 6y ago
No interest in wading into the specifics of these topics obviously. But, it occurs to me that deciding which topics are troll topics and which ones aren’t confers a lot of power. I have actually seen people banned from communities when coming armed with pretty detailed data and thorough argumentation. I wonder if there’s a principled way to separate low-effort trolls from those simply willing to argue the unpopular side of a controversial topic.
- mistermann 6y ago
  There is a principled way I'd think, but very few minds remain anymore that haven't been corrupted by incompatible heuristics.
- croon 6y ago
  I don't moderate anything anymore, but I generally have an n strikes policy when debating with someone. If I spend [not insignificant amount of time/mental energy] with you just to disprove something inane, and you do that to me n times, I won't argue with you anymore, even if the n+1th time happens to not be completely baseless. At that point it's either explicitly on purpose, or implicitly linked with a bias that makes them susceptible to bullshit that confirms said bias. I don't know if there's any ab initio way of knowing if someone's spouting nonsense on purpose or not, so character patterns are hard to scale. But that's why moderation online is harder and faster than in real life, because you don't have a 1on1 interaction in the same way. It's up to netizens to behave and think before speaking.
- lordCarbonFiber 6y ago
  You have to always remember it comes down to scale. The fact that making the claims is always less work than debunking them already has the balance of power way off into the claimant end. So anyone moderating anything is going to turn to heuristics; you can see which topics tend to attract people acting in bad faith and at the very least have extra standards on. I'll go back to trans people since Ive personally got the most experience debunking bigotry in that arena, what are the odds that some random user on an unrelated forum has independently researched something that's going to completely flip established science on its head? It's fairly low, and allowing argument just creates a false debate. To use examples I would hope get everyone on board, think flat earthers. There's no version of that discussion that doesn't end with "here are all the data suggesting a round earth + things you can literally do yourself with a bit of math and a car" vs "that's just what the <insert boogieman that's a thin metaphor for marginalized group> want you to think". Since you know how it ends, just ban it to start. Hell you can see the consequences of not holding a firm line on these sorts of things in this thread. There are people literally "just asking questions" about "men in women's sports" as an example of the "terrible reddit censorship"; as if it's not transparently obvious what they're doing. So you have to ask yourself, even if you could reliably id anyone who wanted to argue in good faith (i'd argue this is considerably harder than you'd think though that's more of a gut feeling /shrug), if their goals are "convince the world that <race, gender, nationality, sexuality> is causing harm" what is the value of giving that a platform even if you're willing to expend the emotional energy to debunk it (over and over and over and over because even if you have some kind of metric, your users don't and if allowed someone always feeds the trolls).
shemtay 6y ago
Your examples are very revealing of a larger problem. Not only are these viewpoints, which you claim can only be argued in bad faith, supported by empirical evidence, but the people who dare to support them publicly are risking social and financial ruin. If "unsafe" and "marginalized" do not describe their situation, then the words have no meaning. As a minority from one of the groups at the unflattering end of the crime rate distributions, it is my lived experience that the type of censorship you are advocating for is what makes me feel unsafe. Inconvenient empirical truths about my community can not be discussed in the sort of polite and caring settings where the seeds of real solutions that don't ignore reality could germinate. Instead, they can only be discussed in rude and hateful settings.

artemisyna 6y ago

Not the OP, but as an example: Take a flat earther argument that's explanations within explanations within explanations to cover whatever "what about x?" type of questions you have. Change "flat earther" to whatever conspiracy theory/controversial topic of the day, and there you go.

mistermann 6y ago
How to build a strawman 101.

Pfhreak 6y ago

I believe this is called the "Gish Gallop". The idea being that I can come up with many, many more questions that are hypothetical, but that require more energy to answer than they take to ask. Often times the person will combine this with a carefully worded question that has to be unwound by the counter-debater. Like, "Knowing that this will cost working class Americans jobs, why do you want X?" Well... X doesn't cost jobs, X might even create jobs. But now I have to explain that. And if I slow down for even one second, you have an opening to fire off another question or paint me as somehow waffling.

mr_toad 6y ago
> Like, "Knowing that this will cost working class Americans jobs, why do you want X?" A good politician would never answer that question. Instead they would answer a different question that they already had a good answer to. “I think the important thing to remember here is...” This tactic works just as well online. Never directly answer a question you don’t like. Always stay on message. By the time you finish your answer the listener should have already forgotten the question.
- eropple 6y ago
  Thing is--you are assuming that both sides want to exercise rhetoric. The weakness, and it is a weakness, of the generally liberal discussion participant is that they very often want to discuss what a thing is and what it means. Wonkishness is a positive trait in discussing policy, but it means that rhetoric, no matter how openly disingenuous, has to be addressed; the consequences (or the inanity) have to be dissected, that's part of why they are there. Incidentally, this is what leads to the current state of affairs--the side that is unmoored from any pretense of reality can say whatever the hell they want and will put the other side into knots. It isn't clever, and it is frustrating because your advice is good, but it is real.
- pasabagi 6y ago
  I find this inappropriate. Politicians are engaged in political messaging - so it makes sense there - but online, we're engaged in conversation. What you're describing is good at putting a message across - but I don't want to have conversations with people who are simply broadcasting a message in my general direction. It's a form of bad faith communication, same as the weighted question. These days, I'd probably just not respond to bad faith communication, but I've historically enjoyed being horrible. Unlike a politician, you don't have to preserve your own credibility in the eyes of onlookers, so you can just be awful if you want.

sellyme 6y ago

While it doesn't address the "massive emotional payload" bit, Russell's Teapot is the canonical example of an argument that's easy to make and almost impossible to categorically disprove, despite being factually inaccurate. Now imagine that but about a topic people have strong opinions on, and you get something that requires so much preamble to disprove that those who believe it aren't willing to hear the rebuttal. Basically, you just make something up entirely. If you say that 100,000,000 Americans are killed every year in skiing accidents, that's easy to disprove. But if you post a clip of someone getting punched from an obscure 1970s sitcom that only aired in Hungary and then claim it happened at a restaurant in Denver, that's going to be a lot more difficult to disprove even if the claim is extremely dubious unless you're lucky enough to know the original context. Some of the more common examples of this in recent times include faked tweet screenshots (mildly difficult to disprove as Twitter's search isn't very useful, and the liar can just say "oh they deleted it"), anecdotes about meeting a celebrity and them doing something unacceptable (basically impossible to disprove unless the meeting DID happen but the incident didn't and eyewitnesses can vouch - see also: the Gritty incident), and videos being used to smear a group despite none of the people involved actually being from that group (reverse video search is extremely difficult, and that relies on it being something previously published rather than recorded explicitly for misinformation campaigns).