Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!
I think one of the issues with online arguing, from most takes on it, is that the main reason people have to argue is to spread an idea. Whether it’s by convincing the opposing part of the argument and making them change their mind, or by changing or reinforcing the mind of anonymous readers of the argument.
Most of the time this leads to one of two conclusions: If someone tries to change the other person’s mind they will, most likely, find themselves hitting a wall, which will lead to frustration, disinterest, or personal attacks once it’s seen that the other person will not change their mind. If they do not care about changing the other person’s mind and just want to make clear that their own position is the right one to have, then the argument becomes a game of winning and losing. This could be achieved by many ways, depending on the context, it could lead to insulting and trying to put group pressure (via downvotes for instance) to make the other person’s opinion seem as the “bad” one. Or via creating a game of rules, and play that game better to become a winner. Please excuse the small attack I’m about to make on this very space, but part of this second approach is the rules of debate, as in consider arguments without sources, emotional responses, or fallacies as losing points in the game of arguing. And often when the other part falls into one of this issues the goal quickly becomes to point out all this “faults” the other person made, so they are clearly shown as the loser. Don’t get me wrong, it is important to argue without fallacies, and to be able to prove any statements that one’s make. But I don’t think anyone gains anything when the argument becomes a match on who is able to ask for more sources, link more articles and identify more fallacies.
That being said I’m going to just link some literature that support the basis of this statements. Can Arguments Change Minds? . This article goes into great lengths to show something that’s easily seen when arguing online: People don’t change their minds from an argument. The process of changing someone’s mind is very complex. The article explains some study cases where people from extremist backgrounds changed their minds over time, in a context of discussion, but it’s stated that this change had a lot more going out that just a proper intellectual discussion.
Why bother then? In my opinion, the best thing we can get when arguing with someone whose opinion differs to our own is to understand them. To find out their way of seeing things, their motives, their reasoning. That’s a great value. And to get this often we need to let them talk the way they want to talk, this tend to lead to some undesirable things, like mentioned fallacies, unsupported claims or straight up bigotry and name-calling. But I think that it is still valuable knowing if that’s their only reasoning, or trying to push past those to see if there’s something more in depth about why they don’t agree with us. But, ultimately, focusing the discussion in getting a win, will often make us miss a lot of valuable information that we could have gotten if we just saw the argument as a way to understand the other person, and of course, to understand ourselves. And not only for us to understand them, but to them to understand us. Explaining our point of view in the clearer way possible, and focussing not on winning when we talk about our opinions, but on showing why we have those opinions. To be able to reach a point of “I don’t agree with you but I understand you”.
Of course the big elephant in the room here is that taking this approach to it’s logical conclusion would mean letting some people express ideas that we don’t want to be expressed. The obvious example here is hate speech. Should hate speech, or extremist arguments be allowed, and discussed? If allowed, what’s our goal when engaging into an argument with them, to convince, or to understand and make the other part to also understand us? This is where I’m more torn apart, as the logic of this reasoning leads me to believe that the best is the later, but it confronts with everything I’ve learn about how to deal with hate speech and dangerous ideologies until now. Thus why the (OPEN-ENDED) tag, and why I hope for anyone to jump and give their opinion on this.
I don’t have much substance to contribute to this particular conversation beyond that I think your points are well thought out and articulated. On a separate note, as someone who recently discovered this community, I just want to say that I’ve been longing for a space like this for some time now. Thank you, OP and mods.
It’s been an uphill battle, but you’re very welcome!
Broadly speaking, I think you’re correct. I found a massive disconnect between how I operate when discussing online vs. how other people seem to, and it drives me bonkers. My response was why I began this Community in the first place. The only way you can realistically “win” is to make yourself better. If the other people in the discussion are focused on defeating you instead, then they’ve already lost at the outset.
When I discuss things online, I can’t even partially understand how people don’t want to have a more cohesive / logically sound opinion. You’d want to be more informed about a topic and smarter overall, wouldn’t you? I’m happy when I’m proven wrong because it means I’m now a better, smarter person and that is a massive win.
I agree that you should be trying to understand people. After all, if you’re potentially looking to change a mind, you can only do it once you understand them and can speak to the underlying issues with their argument.
I am fine with hate speech existing as long as it’s in a space that it can also be safely dismantled. If they’re free to speak, so are those that can utterly demolish that speech. If either drops their poop and then refuses to engage, that’s when I have a problem. If you look at where things fall apart in most online discourse, it has to do with the terminology they use. Each “side” of an issue has their own version of terms, and pretend that their opponent is using the same terminology they are.
To quote myself in a previous weekly thread:
Some of those issues are persistent in Lemmy to this day and are things I tried to add rules against in the sidebar. Things like:
- Calling someone dumb for bringing forth a logical opinion. No discussion, no “here’s where things fall apart” or “here’s why that isn’t applicable to the situation”, simply “lol fuck u, ur dum.” Or as with modern social media, a drive-by downvote. Most often in the forum days, this would come from someone who you’d recognize as being very opinionated, but not intelligent or self-aware enough to articulate why they felt a certain way. We’ve got tons of threads on this community where bad logic is called out, then the person downvotes and doesn’t comment further. My feeling is that this is because they don’t want to be wrong, so they don’t engage. They internalize the idea that their opponent must just be stupid, and walk away.
- You can be right for the wrong reasons, and wrong for the right reasons. There are tons of examples. You do not have to disagree with someone in order to point out that their reasoning sucks.
- Your morals are not an argument. You can use how you arrived at those morals, but not the morals themselves. Your morals are not logic and apply only to your outlook.
- It’s okay to be wrong. It’s downright awesome to become smarter due to someone correcting you or providing newer / more accurate information. You shouldn’t argue from a position of “I’m right, let me convince you.” Instead we should approach things from “This is how I arrived at this position. Are you able to articulate why I’m incorrect in believing this?”
Things at present remind me of my high school days and that “shut up nerd” culture that the jocks were stereotyped to have. Everyone thinks they have the moral high ground. Everyone thinks their position is the most defensible. Everyone feels they are better than their out group.
(Also, fantastic job sticking to the posting guidelines! Wanna be a mod?)
(Also, fantastic job sticking to the posting guidelines! Wanna be a mod?)
Thanks for the offer, I feel honoured. But I must reject, I tried that before (a couple of times) and did a terrible job. I think I’m unfitted for that position. But I really hope this community could take off.
There’s a few scenarios where I think it’s worthwhile to get into these discussions online. Listed below in order of how much effort I’d put into it.
- I don’t know enough to hold an opinion or my currently opinion stands on shaky grounds, and I either want the other party to convince me of their position, or use the discussion to flesh out my thoughts and come to a more solid conclusion.
- The stance I currently hold differs from the other party and I want to understand where we diverge. Do they know something I don’t? Did they consider a variable that I didn’t think about? Did they just start from a different set of “facts” and neither of us have the means of verifying which is correct?
- I agree with their conclusion but disagree with how they reached it. The intent is to help the other party strengthen their position so that they can go off and preach the good word to everyone else more effectively.
The last scenario is the only one where I’m actually trying to change someone’s mind. I do recognize that it’s unlikely, which is also why I wouldn’t put much effort into this. For everything else, the exercise of putting your thoughts into coherent words and thinking in new directions is where the value lies. Having the discussion with someone else forces you to consider many things that you wouldn’t otherwise think about on your own.
Handling hate speech is tangential to promoting logical and well thought out discussions. I believe that this kind of community necessarily has to be homogenous in terms of values, otherwise there’s nothing to discuss. If I want to maximize the number of oranges growing in the orchard and you want to maximize the number apples, then that’s two conflicting goals. If we get into a discussion on how to manage the orchard, it won’t go anywhere because at the end of the day, I don’t care for apples and you don’t care for oranges. There’s no amount of logic that can convince your taste buds to change how they respond.
Not disagreeing with anything you said and enjoyed your perspective, but just wanted to add a personal thought to the end.
I don’t believe that hate speech can survive in a well-behaved logical discussion because most hate speech isn’t logical. This is one reason I feel you should never ban or even discourage discussion. If you figure out the hows and whys of someone you see as hateful, you can often expose and dismantle their faulty reasoning. If we can’t logically describe why an idea is bad instead of relying on personal morality-du-jour, then we are relying on faith, not intellect. Faith can not be relied upon for logical guidance because it is blind and often astoundingly stupid. Banning offensive speech as a blanket to extinguish thought is how churches (past and present) deal with dissension and detractors; it used to be immoral and offensive to be against God or interpretations of the higher-up holy rollers, and is still considered so in some countries.
