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Sorry if I wasn't clear. The "'change my mind' crowd" I'm referring to is absolutely your group 3, or what I referred to as "the propagandists and the purposefu

Sorry if I wasn't clear. The "'change my mind' crowd" I'm referring to is absolutely your group 3, or what I referred to as "the propagandists and the purposeful jerks". They're people acting the same way that Sartre was criticizing here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-anti-semites-are-completely-unaware-of-the-absurdity https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-... Or here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Semite_and_Jew#Bad_faith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Semite_and_Jew#Bad_faith And I'll note that he was writing well before on-line discussion. The problems run deeper. Yes, to the extent that you can use a bad-faith actor to show something to a broader crowd, they can be useful. I do plenty of that here. But a) on social media, that's rarely the case, in that few see arguments down in the reply chains, b) any actual points they have will get discussed by more persuadable interlocutors, and c) one can find and address those points without platforming or elevating the jerks in question. So if you want to engage with the jerks as part of your own personal quest, go for it. I sometimes do. But I say again that blocking bad-faith actors is not, as you claim, the heart of why discourse is broken online, and that people who have a block-on-site strategy are making good and reasonable choices, especially when they are the regular target of historical inequities that you and I don't face.

haswell 3y ago
> And I'll note that he was writing well before on-line discussion. The problems run deeper. I don't question that. My point was that the Internet magnifies it. It's far easier to encounter that type of individual now than at any other point in history. > But I say again that blocking bad-faith actors is not, as you claim, the heart of why discourse is broken online To be clear, this was not my claim, and I should have made that more clear. My point was that the instinct to block and the default assumption of bad faith is at the heart of the problems (and as I acknowledged, it's just one of many). My point was that people block other people without even considering whether the question was in good/bad faith, and assume bad faith based on the existence of any disagreement. You can find this happening from all ideological viewpoints across social media. When it's antisemitism, it's obviously bad behavior. It's why places like HN still have pockets of decent discussion. Assuming good faith is encoded into the rules, which often reveals that disagreements are caused by an incomplete understanding of the other, rather than actual bad behavior. I couldn't have raised the points I raised in this thread on a place like Twitter without getting lambasted by people claiming I hate women, or support groping, or somesuch. I'm all for blocking bad-faith actors and I do my flagging duty here when needed.

haswell 3y ago

> And I'll note that he was writing well before on-line discussion. The problems run deeper. I don't question that. My point was that the Internet magnifies it. It's far easier to encounter that type of individual now than at any other point in history. > But I say again that blocking bad-faith actors is not, as you claim, the heart of why discourse is broken online To be clear, this was not my claim, and I should have made that more clear. My point was that the instinct to block and the default assumption of bad faith is at the heart of the problems (and as I acknowledged, it's just one of many). My point was that people block other people without even considering whether the question was in good/bad faith, and assume bad faith based on the existence of any disagreement. You can find this happening from all ideological viewpoints across social media. When it's antisemitism, it's obviously bad behavior. It's why places like HN still have pockets of decent discussion. Assuming good faith is encoded into the rules, which often reveals that disagreements are caused by an incomplete understanding of the other, rather than actual bad behavior. I couldn't have raised the points I raised in this thread on a place like Twitter without getting lambasted by people claiming I hate women, or support groping, or somesuch. I'm all for blocking bad-faith actors and I do my flagging duty here when needed.