The thing I'm getting at here is not really about what's inside people's hearts. You can never know for sure whether your interlocutor is a saboteur. This is ab

The thing I'm getting at here is not really about what's inside people's hearts. You can never know for sure whether your interlocutor is a saboteur. This is about what kinds of discourse norms society adopts, and what kinds of behavior participants are allowed to get away with. The problem with having an oversensitive trolling detector is that then people can spew arbitrary nonsense and dismiss counterarguments as trolling, and observers don't get a chance to find out that what's being said doesn't withstand scrutiny. The problem with an undersensitive trolling detector is that discourse becomes an endurance contest rather than a test of who's actually right. Hence the need for a well-calibrated trolling detector, or rather, for norms that weight speech according to some reasonable proxy of whether it's the kind of contribution that stands or falls on its merits. This is the challenge.