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posted by martyb on Thursday April 18 2019, @10:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the argument-for-the-sake-of-argument dept.

To Swedish blogger John Nerst, online flame wars reveal a fundamental shift in how people debate public issues. Nerst and a nascent movement of other commentators online believe that the dynamics of today's debates—especially the misunderstandings and bad-faith arguments that lead to the online flame wars—deserve to be studied on their own terms. "More and less sophisticated arguments and argumenters are mixed and with plenty of idea exchange between them," Nerst explained in an email. "Add anonymity, and knowing people's intentions becomes harder, knowing what they mean becomes harder." Treating other people's views with charity becomes harder, too, he said.

Inspired by this rapid disruption to the way disagreement used to work, Nerst, who describes himself as a "thirty-something sociotechnical systems engineer with math, philosophy, history, computer science, economics, law, psychology, geography and social science under a shapeless academic belt," first laid out what he calls "erisology," or the study of disagreement itself. Here's how he defines it:

Erisology is the study of disagreement, specifically the study of unsuccessful disagreement. An unsuccessful disagreement is an exchange where people are no closer in understanding at the end than they were at the beginning, meaning the exchange has been mostly about talking past each other and/or hurling insults. A really unsuccessful one is where people actually push each other apart, and this seems disturbingly common.

[...] political scientists who study disagreement, unsurprisingly, disagree. Though Nerst has claimed that "no one needs to be convinced" of the needlessly adversarial quality of online discourse, Syracuse University political scientist Emily Thorson isn't buying it. "I actually do need to be convinced about this," she said in an email, "or at least about the larger implication that 'uncivil online discourse' is a problem so critical that we need to invent a new discipline to solve it. I'd argue that much of the dysfunction we see in online interactions is just a symptom of much larger and older social problems, including but not limited to racism and misogyny.

So, old political scientists think they've already identified the root cause of "bad behavior" and that online argument isn't a significant factor, or at least that's the argument they put forth in their e-mail vs the younger blogger... Dismissive, much ;-)


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Thursday April 18 2019, @12:50PM

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday April 18 2019, @12:50PM (#831596) Homepage Journal

    While I think you are right, I think it is only fair to say that there certainly are people who are just genuinely ill informed and/or very passionate about something and fall into the trap of going over the top with their language in an attempt to be "more convincing".

    Absolutely. The list of reasons I gave wasn't intended to be complete. People do and say things for all kinds of reasons.

    I've done as you suggest myself. Most recently here [soylentnews.org]. For me, at least, it's important to own up when I do something like that. In the above example, the person to whom I replied called me out on it. And rightly so, IMHO. And I responded (I hope) appropriately [soylentnews.org].

    As for "not feeding the trolls," Perhaps I should have been more explicit. When it's clear that someone is trying to bait others or being nasty and confrontational, not to further their arguments, but to annoy, anger or otherwise get a rise out of others, they should be ignored. It may not make them stop, but you don't need to be a part of it.

    It occurs to me that those who are, as you said, "just genuinely ill informed and/or very passionate about something and fall into the trap of going over the top with their language in an attempt to be "more convincing"." are most at risk of being drawn in by such trolls *because* they are passionate and miss the red flags that they're being trolled.

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