4 ms·

So here is a particularly unhelpful argument pattern. > Today’s experience of childhood, they wrote, was an “inner, solitary” affair, plagued by the proliferat

by dash2 5y ago

So here is a particularly unhelpful argument pattern. > Today’s experience of childhood, they wrote, was an “inner, solitary” affair, plagued by the proliferation of “obesity, anti-social behavior, friendlessness and fear.” where "they" means a bunch of authors who wrote an open letter about modern childhood. Then there follows a large amount of stuff about what these metaphors mean, how they relate to previous bits of the history ideas, etc. The Noble Savage makes a predictable appearance. But there is absolutely zero engagement with the authors' actual argument! Like, are kids getting fatter or not? Are kids suffering more from antisocial behaviour or not? Friendlessness? Fear? These are real factual questions, not tropes in some novel. In other words, this piece engages with vocabulary and metaphors, as a substitute for engaging with the argument. Not, in general, a good trade. I see this style of argument a lot in work derived from the humanities. I think it very rarely adds light to any debate. Perhaps it needs a name, so it can be pointed out, and when appropriate, mocked.

ssivark 5y ago
Great observation. I personally find such indirection extremely frustrating. I propose “aboutism” as a name — since such articles end up talking “about” things, rather than addressing them directly.
meiji163 5y ago
This article is a great example of what I'd call "mindless problematization" From what I've seen, this is you're trained to do in modern humanities departments. Take any seemingly obvious claim and "problematize" it. It's telling that they do not say "nuance" it, rather it has to be made a _problem_. e.g. if you think "wilderness" is a thing you subscribe to a racist idea for "white male elites", if you think social media is affecting childhood development you're just caught up in the religious fervor of "scientized version of the biblical story of the Fall". A whole lot of BS gets written this way, because these arguments have the superficial air of being subversive and contrarian.
- ad-astra 5y ago
  In some cases it reminds me of my fundamentalist religious upbringing where everything was “of the world” and even trivial things like Pokémon, Christmas Trees, and Teletubbies were viewed as problematic and sinister
- ghostbrainalpha 5y ago
  'the superficial air of being subversive and contrarian.' I like this idea, its a great filter for BS.
- LeftHandPath 5y ago
  Spot on. “Meretricious” is the ten-dollar word for this.
  - ptsneves 5y ago
    Never saw this word employed as anything else than euphemistic "whoreish". One never ceases to learn!
- alexpotato 5y ago
  In Mary Roach's book "Packing for Mars" [0], in the section where they talk about the psychological impact of going into space, there is an interesting anecdote about the history of trains. As trains began to become more commonplace, there were concerns in England that the speed at which trains traveled would cause passengers to panic given that humans had never experienced both the speed and the motion parallax. This of course, all turned out be for nought and was best summarized by a Russian cosmonaut in the book "This is problem only concern for psychologists". 0 - https://amzn.to/3yMBtVb https://amzn.to/3yMBtVb
throwawaygh 5y ago
I've always used the term "sophist" for this, although the dictionary definition of the term seems to have drifted slightly from the meaning it held in classical antiquity. Per Wikipedia, "In the second half of the 5th century BC, particularly in Athens, "sophist" came to denote a class of mostly itinerant intellectuals who taught courses in various subjects, speculated about the nature of language and culture, and employed rhetoric to achieve their purposes, generally to persuade or convince others. "Sophists did, however, have one important thing in common: whatever else they did or did not claim to know, they characteristically had a great understanding of what words would entertain or impress or persuade an audience." Sophists went to Athens to teach because the city was flourishing at the time. It was good employment for those good at debate, which was a speciality of the first sophists, and they received the fame and fortune they were seeking." from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophist
lukeschlather 5y ago
I think you're presuming an argument that's actually not in the piece. The author obviously is bemused with the movement to unplug, but I don't think the author actually says it's bad - just that it's better to search for a healthy relationship with civilization and by extension the Internet. The piece is not about why you shouldn't unplug, it's an exploration of how we people can get the same benefits of unplugging without actually unplugging. If you come at it looking for an argument that has a beginning, middle, and an end, you're going to be frustrated but the piece is not making an argument, it is talking about a variety of ways that people can have a more healthy relationship with the Internet. I know for me the piece crystallized a lot of thoughts about how I do and don't choose to unplug. There isn't one single answer, it's a thousand little things about when I choose to leave the phone on my desk and go for a walk, or sitting on the train I leave the phone in my pocket and daydream.
pgcj_poster 5y ago
The author is not arguing that online life is better for kids/people than offline life. She's arguing that it's unhelpful to frame the problems of modern life as a result of a departure from an Edenic "offline" or "wilderness" -- that just as white explorers in North America were not really entering an uninhabited wilderness, people who grew up with live TV and landlone phones were not really disconnected -- that the solution is not to temporarily "return" to an unspoiled wilderness that never really existed, but to bring ordinary life into alignment with the natural world -- not to go on an occasional digital detox that many of us can't afford, but to build an online life that doesn't hurt our self-esteem, attention spans, etc. She's tracing the history of the concepts of "wilderness" and "offline" so that she can deconstruct them as categories. In general, very few important disagreements are actually about facts. More often, they're about the framing of the issue itself. Is spending on social services "Big Government," or is it a "social safety net"? Are trans women as unfortunate women trapped in male bodies or weird men who enjoy pretending to be women? Is restricting immigration more like redlining a neighborhood or asking an unwanted guest to leave your home? These questions are about attitudes and interpretations, not facts. If you try to change someone's mind on such questions by presenting then with data, you're likely to fail. People who work with words and narratives intuitively understand this; people who work with data and numbers do not.
- dash2 5y ago
  > In general, very few important disagreements are actually about facts. I disagree. In fact, behind each of your examples are real empirical questions. This form of thinking just hides them. There are real questions about what makes people want to change sex; about the effects of immigration; and about the effects of social spending. It's perfectly true that people's minds are hard to change, and that they can be swayed by the manipulative techniques of advertising and PR. The jump from that to accepting it as a valid, or the only possible, form of argument harms public debate and democracy, and we end up in the cynical, post-truth world of Peter Pomerantsev - or Trump - where all there is is competing narratives.
  - pgcj_poster 5y ago
    > There are real questions about what makes people want to change sex There is no widely-accepted empirical answer to this question, and even if there was, it wouldn't tell us how we should treat such people. Arguments on trans issues hinge almost entirely on one's level of sympathy for trans people and willingness to accept what they tell us about how the feel. It's not a coïncidence that those who personally know a trans person are much more supportive of trans rights. > about the effects of immigration; and about the effects of social spending Let's suppose that the data came in and we learned that immigration is slightly good for the economy as a whole, really good for immigrants, but bad for native blue-collar workers. Based on that hypothetical information, people would reach different conclusions about immigration policy based on their relative sympathy to immigrants and native workers. The framing device is also extremely important: "should America put our own people first?" vs "should the state condemn people to poverty because of where they were born?" > we end up in the cynical, post-truth world of Peter Pomerantsev - or Trump - where all there is is competing narratives. Trump managed to beat Clinton without uttering a single fact during his entire campaign. If you want to beat the Trumps of the world, you need to know how to deconstruct a narrative. Also, do you have any data suggesting that narrative-centric arguments employed by writers and humanities PhDs resulted in the rise of Trump -- or did you conclude that based on your value system?
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
There is a clear argument here, and it is repeated multiple times. I have no idea why its so difficult for anyone to see.. here’s one: > rather than encouraging us to think about the systems that determine the nature of our engagement with online platforms in the first place. In shifting the emphasis from what one is doing with the screen to how often one looks at it, we also shift the emphasis away from the worlds we are building… That distinction right there is obvious, important and yet constantly and repeatedly overlooked. For a lot of us, our parents told us that being on the computer was a waste of time and why don’t you go outside? The current approach to deal with “too much technology” as implemented by Screen Time on Apple devices counts all screen time as the same. I see my friends doing some form of digital detox often as well because they don’t understand this distinction. I don’t know why this turns off so many engineers, but it seems to be predicated on pattern matching off vocabulary. The sentence you quoted is refuted by the argument. No amount of statistics can fundamentally untangle the causation between A. hours spent online and B. obesity, antisocial behavior etc. That is why it’s important to build clear conceptual models before asking the “factual questions” you want. As a thought experiment maybe just consider how exactly you would go about getting factual answers to these questions in a reasonable time and budget without any theory to guide you, only data. I don’t believe its even possible. The replication crisis in psychology should also demonstrate how purely empirical methods can fail.
drooby 5y ago
I like it. It seems though that you’re defining a strawman argument. Perhaps though this is slightly different in that the opponents argument is completely avoided? Cloudman argument: An intentionally avoided proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than the opponents real argument.
rambambram 5y ago
I get what you mean. Half way through the piece I couldn't take it anymore. So much eloquent words saying essentially nothing. A name for this? I'm in! Why? Because this kind of article is extra harmful due to it's covert nature. One needs to read it before one realizes there's hardly an argument. That is, if you want to read a piece with a clear argument. On the other hand, pieces that just take an (opposite) stand and make me think (like this article did) definitely are valuable to me.
- mind-blight 5y ago
  I'm really frustrated by this article. I spent the first half arguing with my screen and getting more and more irritated at the condescending critiques of people trying to manage unhealthy screen use. And I really liked the second half, which made me even more irritated with the first. Her main argument is that focusing on individuals undermines our ability to change the systemic problems out current technology creates. Leaving social media may help your mental health, but we still live in a world where social media negatively impacts many of the people around us. We're still impacted by that system even if we're disconnected from our screen. The second half argues that we have to look for communal and systemic change to make the systems better, which I agree with. I just disagree that that can't coincide with individuals also choosing to change what they can about their immediate environment
h2odragon 5y ago
Exploratory thought provoking, or thought-jamming mental static? I'd call it the second masquerading as the first; perhaps through honest confusion on the author's part; never having been exposed to the actual examples of mind opening writing. My cynicism says that bullshit of this quality had to be paid for and carefully constructed. Ya want wilderness? come see my swamp. What the snakes don't do the coyotes will finish. I love the place and wouldn't be anywhere else.

by dash2 5y ago

ssivark 5y ago

Great observation. I personally find such indirection extremely frustrating. I propose “aboutism” as a name — since such articles end up talking “about” things, rather than addressing them directly.

meiji163 5y ago

This article is a great example of what I'd call "mindless problematization" From what I've seen, this is you're trained to do in modern humanities departments. Take any seemingly obvious claim and "problematize" it. It's telling that they do not say "nuance" it, rather it has to be made a _problem_. e.g. if you think "wilderness" is a thing you subscribe to a racist idea for "white male elites", if you think social media is affecting childhood development you're just caught up in the religious fervor of "scientized version of the biblical story of the Fall". A whole lot of BS gets written this way, because these arguments have the superficial air of being subversive and contrarian.

ad-astra 5y ago
In some cases it reminds me of my fundamentalist religious upbringing where everything was “of the world” and even trivial things like Pokémon, Christmas Trees, and Teletubbies were viewed as problematic and sinister
ghostbrainalpha 5y ago
'the superficial air of being subversive and contrarian.' I like this idea, its a great filter for BS.
LeftHandPath 5y ago
Spot on. “Meretricious” is the ten-dollar word for this.
- ptsneves 5y ago
  Never saw this word employed as anything else than euphemistic "whoreish". One never ceases to learn!
alexpotato 5y ago
In Mary Roach's book "Packing for Mars" [0], in the section where they talk about the psychological impact of going into space, there is an interesting anecdote about the history of trains. As trains began to become more commonplace, there were concerns in England that the speed at which trains traveled would cause passengers to panic given that humans had never experienced both the speed and the motion parallax. This of course, all turned out be for nought and was best summarized by a Russian cosmonaut in the book "This is problem only concern for psychologists". 0 - https://amzn.to/3yMBtVb https://amzn.to/3yMBtVb

throwawaygh 5y ago

I've always used the term "sophist" for this, although the dictionary definition of the term seems to have drifted slightly from the meaning it held in classical antiquity. Per Wikipedia, "In the second half of the 5th century BC, particularly in Athens, "sophist" came to denote a class of mostly itinerant intellectuals who taught courses in various subjects, speculated about the nature of language and culture, and employed rhetoric to achieve their purposes, generally to persuade or convince others. "Sophists did, however, have one important thing in common: whatever else they did or did not claim to know, they characteristically had a great understanding of what words would entertain or impress or persuade an audience." Sophists went to Athens to teach because the city was flourishing at the time. It was good employment for those good at debate, which was a speciality of the first sophists, and they received the fame and fortune they were seeking." from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophist

lukeschlather 5y ago

I think you're presuming an argument that's actually not in the piece. The author obviously is bemused with the movement to unplug, but I don't think the author actually says it's bad - just that it's better to search for a healthy relationship with civilization and by extension the Internet. The piece is not about why you shouldn't unplug, it's an exploration of how we people can get the same benefits of unplugging without actually unplugging. If you come at it looking for an argument that has a beginning, middle, and an end, you're going to be frustrated but the piece is not making an argument, it is talking about a variety of ways that people can have a more healthy relationship with the Internet. I know for me the piece crystallized a lot of thoughts about how I do and don't choose to unplug. There isn't one single answer, it's a thousand little things about when I choose to leave the phone on my desk and go for a walk, or sitting on the train I leave the phone in my pocket and daydream.

pgcj_poster 5y ago

The author is not arguing that online life is better for kids/people than offline life. She's arguing that it's unhelpful to frame the problems of modern life as a result of a departure from an Edenic "offline" or "wilderness" -- that just as white explorers in North America were not really entering an uninhabited wilderness, people who grew up with live TV and landlone phones were not really disconnected -- that the solution is not to temporarily "return" to an unspoiled wilderness that never really existed, but to bring ordinary life into alignment with the natural world -- not to go on an occasional digital detox that many of us can't afford, but to build an online life that doesn't hurt our self-esteem, attention spans, etc. She's tracing the history of the concepts of "wilderness" and "offline" so that she can deconstruct them as categories. In general, very few important disagreements are actually about facts. More often, they're about the framing of the issue itself. Is spending on social services "Big Government," or is it a "social safety net"? Are trans women as unfortunate women trapped in male bodies or weird men who enjoy pretending to be women? Is restricting immigration more like redlining a neighborhood or asking an unwanted guest to leave your home? These questions are about attitudes and interpretations, not facts. If you try to change someone's mind on such questions by presenting then with data, you're likely to fail. People who work with words and narratives intuitively understand this; people who work with data and numbers do not.

dash2 5y ago
> In general, very few important disagreements are actually about facts. I disagree. In fact, behind each of your examples are real empirical questions. This form of thinking just hides them. There are real questions about what makes people want to change sex; about the effects of immigration; and about the effects of social spending. It's perfectly true that people's minds are hard to change, and that they can be swayed by the manipulative techniques of advertising and PR. The jump from that to accepting it as a valid, or the only possible, form of argument harms public debate and democracy, and we end up in the cynical, post-truth world of Peter Pomerantsev - or Trump - where all there is is competing narratives.
- pgcj_poster 5y ago
  > There are real questions about what makes people want to change sex There is no widely-accepted empirical answer to this question, and even if there was, it wouldn't tell us how we should treat such people. Arguments on trans issues hinge almost entirely on one's level of sympathy for trans people and willingness to accept what they tell us about how the feel. It's not a coïncidence that those who personally know a trans person are much more supportive of trans rights. > about the effects of immigration; and about the effects of social spending Let's suppose that the data came in and we learned that immigration is slightly good for the economy as a whole, really good for immigrants, but bad for native blue-collar workers. Based on that hypothetical information, people would reach different conclusions about immigration policy based on their relative sympathy to immigrants and native workers. The framing device is also extremely important: "should America put our own people first?" vs "should the state condemn people to poverty because of where they were born?" > we end up in the cynical, post-truth world of Peter Pomerantsev - or Trump - where all there is is competing narratives. Trump managed to beat Clinton without uttering a single fact during his entire campaign. If you want to beat the Trumps of the world, you need to know how to deconstruct a narrative. Also, do you have any data suggesting that narrative-centric arguments employed by writers and humanities PhDs resulted in the rise of Trump -- or did you conclude that based on your value system?

zaptheimpaler 5y ago

There is a clear argument here, and it is repeated multiple times. I have no idea why its so difficult for anyone to see.. here’s one: > rather than encouraging us to think about the systems that determine the nature of our engagement with online platforms in the first place. In shifting the emphasis from what one is doing with the screen to how often one looks at it, we also shift the emphasis away from the worlds we are building… That distinction right there is obvious, important and yet constantly and repeatedly overlooked. For a lot of us, our parents told us that being on the computer was a waste of time and why don’t you go outside? The current approach to deal with “too much technology” as implemented by Screen Time on Apple devices counts all screen time as the same. I see my friends doing some form of digital detox often as well because they don’t understand this distinction. I don’t know why this turns off so many engineers, but it seems to be predicated on pattern matching off vocabulary. The sentence you quoted is refuted by the argument. No amount of statistics can fundamentally untangle the causation between A. hours spent online and B. obesity, antisocial behavior etc. That is why it’s important to build clear conceptual models before asking the “factual questions” you want. As a thought experiment maybe just consider how exactly you would go about getting factual answers to these questions in a reasonable time and budget without any theory to guide you, only data. I don’t believe its even possible. The replication crisis in psychology should also demonstrate how purely empirical methods can fail.

drooby 5y ago

I like it. It seems though that you’re defining a strawman argument. Perhaps though this is slightly different in that the opponents argument is completely avoided? Cloudman argument: An intentionally avoided proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than the opponents real argument.

rambambram 5y ago

I get what you mean. Half way through the piece I couldn't take it anymore. So much eloquent words saying essentially nothing. A name for this? I'm in! Why? Because this kind of article is extra harmful due to it's covert nature. One needs to read it before one realizes there's hardly an argument. That is, if you want to read a piece with a clear argument. On the other hand, pieces that just take an (opposite) stand and make me think (like this article did) definitely are valuable to me.

mind-blight 5y ago
I'm really frustrated by this article. I spent the first half arguing with my screen and getting more and more irritated at the condescending critiques of people trying to manage unhealthy screen use. And I really liked the second half, which made me even more irritated with the first. Her main argument is that focusing on individuals undermines our ability to change the systemic problems out current technology creates. Leaving social media may help your mental health, but we still live in a world where social media negatively impacts many of the people around us. We're still impacted by that system even if we're disconnected from our screen. The second half argues that we have to look for communal and systemic change to make the systems better, which I agree with. I just disagree that that can't coincide with individuals also choosing to change what they can about their immediate environment

h2odragon 5y ago

Exploratory thought provoking, or thought-jamming mental static? I'd call it the second masquerading as the first; perhaps through honest confusion on the author's part; never having been exposed to the actual examples of mind opening writing. My cynicism says that bullshit of this quality had to be paid for and carefully constructed. Ya want wilderness? come see my swamp. What the snakes don't do the coyotes will finish. I love the place and wouldn't be anywhere else.