Indeed, to really address someone's arguments well enough to try to change their opinion takes a lot of time and effort. The question is, what is the benefit to you of doing that? If it is a real live friend that you are going to spend a lot of time with it may be worth the effort as they become perhaps a more enjoyable friend to spend time with (e.g. a friend who keeps telling you what a Great job George Bush is doing may begin to grate on the nerves). However, a stranger on the Internet you only know by a fake name, if you refute their arguments and win them over, it is not clear that you gain much. They go away. So, in casual conversation such as in these responses here or in Reddit, where everything is anonymous and long term relationship is not likely, it is easier and perhaps more satisfying just to call them an ass. Perhaps this would change in a reddit embedded withing a facebook where there is more relationship context for the conversation and where perhaps, there is more to be clearly gained by changing someones mind about something.
I was hanging out the other day at a mixer and the subject of travel came up. There were some well-traveled people but it evolved into a pissing contest, their travel resume vs. the other person's. It seemed almost they were trying to one-up the other even when talking about their personal experiences (e.g. Punta Cana is alright for scuba. But. Have you been to Dominica? No? Well let me tell you...)
Reading this YC thread, I was reminded of observing this party talk/jousting and had the deep thought that if we hold an agenda (e.g. He's wrong or I'm better than that guy) we lose out when it comes down to it - we don't really listen or learn anything from the other person because we're too focused on proving the muzak in our head that we're right
if one side "wins" an argument that means the losing side gets ruled out. thus you both win in the search for the truth, because you've discovered that a particular position is false.
I can't say for sure what he's referring to, but maybe it's Dale Carnegie's philosophy that you can never "win" an argument because even when you "win" an argument, you haven't usually accomplished your objective of persuading the person. I looked for an excerpt and didn't see one. There's a small summary here, but the book says it best:
On a personal level, a relative of mine has alienated enough people that I have trouble bringing him out because he continually needs to be "right."
What good have you accomplished if you're "right", alone, and you've convinced no one.
The dynamic is different in a public debate, however, where you might be trying to persuade people other than the person you're debating, but Mr. Carnegie's ideas are still useful to remember.
No, by definition (or at least English convention) if you "win" an argument you are not winning, but rather "winning" in the sarcastic "wink, wink" sense.
I argue to learn more. If you disagree with someone, they usually spend their valuable time teaching you stuff that they would otherwise not. They get the satisfaction of winning the argument and I get the satisfaction of learning something.
One of the things I really like about YC news is the fact that it's a great place to disagree. I would even say that it is one of the sites defining characteristics. Whenever I hold an unpopular or controversial view here there will of course be replies - but very rarely do I experience namecalling, trollig or other fluff that doesn't add to the conversation. The replies are always tactful, and often very insightful. Sometimes I even have to take my words back, convinced by another user that I was wrong. And we all learn from it.
Right behind you on this one. After reading the article I was terrified that YC.News would line up behind PG - how refreshing to see that the community is more than happy to dissent. I don't agree, but I really respect the forum which he was instrumental in creating.
What do you gain by talking to someone on the internet anyway? Why am I even responding to this essay, or to your comment?
It's probably because it's interesting for me to do so, to see others' views. When I disagree, I tend to enjoy it if people come back and argue. I don't really do it because I care whether the other person comes to see my point of view - although it is more fun when they do, of course. Maybe some people enjoy yelling things such as, "u r a fag!!!!", although personally I can't say I understand those people...
It's useless to try and convince them otherwise for the most part - I don't think they'd listen to you in the first place.
As for the essay itself, I just wish more people would consciously THINK about how they talk to others. It would make the internet and the world a nicer place. (Oh, and that first part, DH0, seemed to me as if it was addressed directly towards Jeff's of Coding Horror response to PG's last essay. But I can't say I disagree - I was actually rather shocked to see such a, umm, 'vehement', response. Another instance of what people probably wouldn't say in person.)
This is when you preempt that with which you would disagree by stating your case in such a way as to elicit quick disagreement (in the form of DH0 to DH6). Usually done by noticing a subset of all data, forming a hypothesis to explain only that subset, and presenting it as a conclusion. Often done without even realizing it.
The relational database model is dead.
There is no future in enterprise software.
<Language du jour> is clearly the best.
No one else is doing <xyz>, so it must be a deadend.
I think the Flamebaiting category is a useful addition to PG's hierarchy.
The new category brings to mind an interesting property of this hierarchy though, namely that it seems to be difficult to respond to an "argument" with a higher order technique than that which was originally presented. For example, if one were disagreeing with a purely ad hominem rant, one would find it futile and nearly impossible to disagree with the rant at any higher level; how can one truly refute an argument that has no central point? It's somewhat depressing because, if true, it implies that a discussion is upper bounded at the level of discourse that initiated the discussion.
The way out of this, as far as I can tell, is recognizing that statements are not made in a vacuum. Sometimes the only way to raise the level of discourse is to engage in a sort of meta-disagreement. In other words, sometimes the point of a statement is not the content, but the context. While it works to classify criticisms of tone, for example, as weak if one were dealing with a substantive argument, the metadata (tone, speaker, etc) around the content of a non-argument may allow one to say something intelligent about the statement by tying it to the broader context in which it was made.
It's easy to at least get to DH3 in reply to anything. For example if they say, "you are an idiot" you can contradict them (close enough) by saying, "you haven't supported that statement". If they question your tone or authority, you can contradict by saying that isn't relevant to what position is true.
edit: btw my experience is that more often than not i get downvoted if i do this
About the downvoting, maybe it's because they feel you're making a predictable contradiction to a painfully obvious inane trolling? If somebody says something like "you are an idiot", just let them get downmodded alone.
It's possible, you just have to remember that there are many more lurkers than posters in any given discussion and write for the benefit of the lurkers that have not yet chosen a DH level.
Actually, I've used this as a fairly effective technique for arresting flamewars. It doesn't always work, but when it does, subsequent posts are usually at the DH level of your own response rather than that of the parent comment.
The key seems to be drawing 3rd-party onlookers in before the original flamer responds. If someone else responds to your comment at a high DH level, the original flamer has a choice. He can respond to your comment with another flame, which makes him look stupid and petty because there's a sibling comment that's much more well-reasoned. He can respond with a real argument, in which case you've raised the level of discourse. Or he can go away, which seems to be what happens most of the time. Regardless of what he does, you're free to ignore his reply and continue responding to the person who engages you with actual arguments.
A corollary is that educated, rational lurkers hold a lot of power on discussion boards. If you don't get directly involved in arguments but instead cherry-pick the comments you respond to, you can set the whole tone for a community.
BTW, the same trick works in face-to-face conversations, as long as there are more than 2 people involved. The person who asks the questions controls the conversation, by virtue of which questions they choose to ask. And the person who sits back and shuts up controls whose ideas get developed, by virtue of who they choose to respond to. That's why the quietest person at a meeting usually controls it, as long as they're not just a passive onlooker.
Your comment gave me a crazy idea. What if one was to respond to a flamebait with a counterargument or refutation, and then create another username and add another intelligent comment that contradicted the first one you posted? So then the thread would look like this:
1. Original flamebait
2. Congent response to flamebait (posted by you using username 1)
3. Congent response to post 2 (posted by you using username 2)
This might be slightly unethical, but it means that the original flamer will always be dissuaded from posting again, and you're more likely to get more congent discussion participants.
If using multiple usernames bothers you, you could probably just check yourself with a small counterargument at the end of post 2, and it seems likely that the original flamer would still be dissuaded.
The problem with this proposal is that it ignores the fundamental problem behind any flamebait: that flamebait qua flamebait is not _intended_ as serious discussion, nor as a prelude to serious discussion.
The proven technique for dealing with flamebait is to tag it immediately for what it is, and not waste any reader's time with a detailed discussion of an idea that is not even worthy of refutation.
And yes, even Aristotle in the Topics agreed that there are propositions/arguments that are so silly or vain, they are not worthy of a serious refutation. Flamebait certainly counts as one of these. (BTW: I see there are Aquinas fans here, so I will point out that Aquinas expressed his agreement with this in, of all places, his commentary on the Ethics: I think it was Lecture I).
The only problem is that there really are people who are too quick to tag someone else's post as 'flamebait', even when it is not. This happens on those very topics that most need to be seriously discussed, simply because they are so important, yet so many people hold strong opinions on them, opinions that are not founded on sound logic, but on passionate attachment of one kind or another. So they are strong opinions, but they are wrong opinions. These are the
discussions that are the most difficult. They should not be attempted by amateurs. But there is no enforcing of _this_ principle on the Internet;)
More and more I'm starting to believe that this is the best approach. It was a wise person who said never to argue with fools because, from a distance, you can't tell who's who.
It was also a wise person who said: "Never argue with an idiot, they drag you down to their level and beat you with experience".
Seasoned trolling pros are usually very good at this. I think it helps a lot to look at their underlying motivation and to crank up the bullshit detector.
Another way to not lose your time is to stop posting in troll infested comunities; I don't post on Digg anymore for that and I am now slowly fading out of Reddit for the same reason.
The problem on those sites is that their is not only poor comments but also tons of users who upmod them.
The problem on those sites is that their is not only poor comments
This is a legitimate problem, and ironically it is a symptom that a news concentrator is becoming a victim of its own success. As the signal-to-noise ratio attracts a progressively larger crowd, the types of information that are viewed as 'signal' broaden to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It's similar to hiring in a small company -- but at least in that situation you have control over the purse strings. (Even the trolls get dumber as time goes by and a site grows more popular.) Thus the comments on an arbitrary story suffer, and it requires more work to pick through them. However, if you 'listen' to subcommunities (eg. economics, programming, math on reddit) you find that (unsurprisingly) the baseline rises again. If you have no interest in those subsets, however, you're kind of out of luck. (But if you're here you already knew that)
You could probably model this as a logistic process, provided that you account for renormalizations (such as the literal renormalization that took place on reddit recently).
but also tons of users who upmod them.
This part (or at least its independent, non-interaction effect) is irrelevant; if you focus solely on people who have strong and demonstrated critical thinking skills, you can learn a great deal, and also gain a different perspective. Their input is much more harmful when it comes to filtering in or out the news to be concentrated.
Most of the interesting threads in which I have participated eventually lost the interest of the masses because they had descended into minutiae. But that's where the interesting bits lay, so that's where they went.
Ignore the riffraff. Lord knows they'll usually ignore you if you're presenting anything challenging. Even in a swamp like Slashdot, there is occasionally a perspective-changing comment that is worth reading.
If you want to expose yourself to a wide variety of opinions, you have to be willing to do a bit of work yourself, and determine which ones hold merit. It's a two-way street, in many respects, and your priorities (in addition to your time pressures) will determine how far you are willing to take it.
It appears to me that the 'social news' sites on the Web are simply recapitulating the arc of the special-interest BBS nodes and Usenet cliques of years past. Everything old is new again.
Text-based disagreements aside, I'd like to do an arc off this comment - to talk about the importance of perspective. Guess which two perspective(s) can fuel disagreement...
The God perspective (Yeah, you the expert?)
"This restaurant is the best in town"
The 2nd person perspective (Why should you know what I should do)
"You really should try this restaurant."
The 1st-person perspective (the only one you can truly own)
"I really like this restaurant. I like the cooking and I feel like I am welcome here."
I don't think perspective is that much relevant. If someone says "This restaurant is the best in town", it means that of all the other restaurants the person tried, that one is the one he likes best. You don't need to be an expert to have opinions and feelings toward things. If you don't agree that restaurant is the best you can provide info why you think the statement "this restaurant is the best in town" is wrong.
The second person perspective is just a suggestion. Of course you're free not to go there if you don't want to.
Finally, the first person perspective is just one other way to put things. In this case it's more verbose and, before the second phrase, don't even give you as much information as the god's perspective (in god's perspective you know this restaurant is the one the person likes the most, in 1st person perspective you just knows this person likes it). Saying "This restaurant is the best in town. Cooking is great and it's very welcoming." gives you at least the same information as the 1st-person perspective.
I'm saying all that because I hate see people trying to debunk an argument by picking on the guy's perspective. Stuff like "you can't state that as an absolute truth", just because you said something like "this restaurant is the best in town". If you have information that may change that opinion, please give us, otherwise, don't flood the comments with "you don't know that much". That's about the same as DH2.
DH-3.5: Disagreeing with the author's Disagreement Hierarchy.
This category is particularly troublesome, as even when both parties agree, in principle, to disagree, they may still disagree on how to disagree.
One particular nuisance is the disagreer who seeks to impose a disagreement meta-hierarchy on the problem of agreeing on a disagreement hierarchy. That way is turtles, all the way down.
Honestly I think you'd have to move his DH0 to DH-1 and then put flamebaiting as DH0. The straight up 'u r a fag!!!1' insults require much less effort than flamebait.
Although really, flamebaiting is just a more subtle way to call someone (or their idea) retarded, so maybe it's just a special (more eloquent) case of DH0.
It was just that when I checked back in on this about half an hour later it had already been downmodded, and that just seemed really ironic to me. Glad someone is out there stomping DH3... I would be.
You seem to imply in the essay that disagreeing comments are more valuable than agreeing ones, though:
"And when you agree there's less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you're entering territory he may not have explored"
That does not imply they are more valuable; rather, it is human nature to respond to a statement that you feel you can "correct". It is an ego boost, if nothing else.
To me, cooperative, exploratory statements are the most valuable.
"That is a interesting opinion, I've never heard that perspective. But what about case xyz, have you considered that."
In that context, it is much easier to build up interesting information trees, rather than simply staying stuck on one (often minor or irrelevant) node.
In the context/situation, talking about disagreement, I think a little conflict/drama is necessary to demonstrate how a person reacts and reveal a little more about who he/she is.
I like the quote because it reminds me that even the most logical people may default to reacting non-logically/emotionally in a stressful situation (where they may feel their ego is threatened e.g. have to "fight" to protect themselves)
It might be worth expanding the lower levels to include more than name-calling and ad-hominem, then. There's a huge variety of dirty tactics that can be used, and name-calling and ad-hominem are just two of the more obvious ones. A good list can be obtained at:
Perhaps it's worth adding a link in the article, clarifying that DH1 actually includes a whole set of techniques described at that URL (and other places).
The 38 Methods are said to have been added merely to provide examples. It is also interesting that he wrote the manuscript around 1830, but never published it. It was first published in 1864, four years after his death. See http://coolhaus.de/art-of-controversy/ for the full manuscript and an excellent translation to english.
The original title of Schopenhauer's “Art of Controversy” could be more accurately translated as “The Art of being always Right” (Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten). The reason why he described those stratagems was to prove his point: that the goal of a controversy is not finding the truth. According to him, it was like a fight where you just want to win.
PG advocates for controversies that help find the truth. Thus he makes a difference between fallacies and real arguments. To Schopenhauer, real arguments are actually fallacies, because mere humans have other goals than the truth. Ironically, in http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, PG followed Wittgenstein in that “most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language”. In a philosophical context, at least, this should lead to a similar conclusion as Schopenhauer's.
Now, whether the case of philosophy should be extended to the rest of controversies is an interesting question. My answer would be yes. I wonder what PG would say. The fun part is that, whatever he says, Schopenhauer will still be right (look: he doesn't care of the truth, he just wants to win the argument!). That's the whole fun of controversies about controversy...
I'll assume "To Schopenhauer, real arguments are actually fallacies, because mere humans have other goals than the truth" is an accurate summary of Schopenhauer's viewpoint. In that case, I _still_ have to say this is just a more thanaverage level of sophistication for a form of solipsism. But I cannot see it any other way than as solipsism.
That alone is reason enough to reject it. But here is another reason: his point about other goals is irrelevant. Why? Because though yes, we "mere humans" have other goals, at least _some_ of the time, those other goals require that we get to the truth of some matter. And those are precisely the fields of endeavor where rational argumentation still has some influence in our confused and irrational society.
That said, we _do_ have to take great care: the dishonest dissemblers who strive so hard to deceive us are _legion_, the honest reasoners who wish to persuade us of the truth by legitimate means are rare gems. But they have not disappeared completely yet.
I was not dissing your essay, just giving more information. I agree with you that most intellectual dishonesty is unintentional, and that knowing these things is important in avoding them. I was just pointing that there are other sources to draw upon, as this subject is timeless. But your essay is a much easier read than Aristotle's treatise. :-)
This is a nice catalog of some common forms of disagreement, but I'm not convinced that this set of six is exhaustive, nor am I convinced that if other forms are added that the set will remain well-ordered.
I agree that it's nowhere near exhaustive, most obviously because it doesn't address the ways that writers try to directly deceive the audience (appeals to flattery, conservatism, etc).
I remember being part of an Academic Games league in high school. One of my favorite games was simply called "Propaganda." Everyone sat in a big room, listened to arguments, and identified the type of rhetorical technique being used. It may sound lame, but it was actually pretty fun and cultivated some useful skills.
In that case it wouldn't be deceit as much as it is manipulation. To avoid any political insinuations, I could recast this as appeal to status quo. It's common to argue against new ideas in this way.
They should teach these skills at school, no later than right after kindergarten and with no less stress than any other subject. I'm convinced that's amongst the most important things that could be done to make the world a better place.
The Nizkor list _is_ pretty good, but some of their definitions, and even examples used to discuss them, are not very convincing. Please see the separate reply where I gave three other lists of definitions.
Actually, one of my long time favorite such sites is:
Each level (DH0,1,2,etc.) could include a variety of forms of disagreement, instead of just one. The resulting chart would become a rough guide to their relative strengths: move "up" the chart for better forms, and "down" for the bad ones (eliminate the one-to-one relationship between "DH-level" and "Form of Disagreement").
It would become more comprehensive, but also harder to present in a simple, compelling, immediately understandable way. Not sure if it'd be worth it.
I thought this was a pretty good essay. Timely as well. There was considerable disagreement over PG's last essay. You could see the hierarchy of responses on both sides, including straw man arguments.
If comments could be tagged with hierarchy levels, it might raise the general level of argument.
"Such labels may help writers too. Most intellectual dishonesty is unintentional."
I totally agree with this, particularly on YC News where there are a lot of smart people. When the words fly, there's a tendency to overreact and say things that wouldn't occur if we were face-to-face. I admit having done this. It would be great if some optional tagging feature were built into a comment system, so writers could get some feedback when others thought they strayed.
Hmm... Doesn't Slashdot sort of do this? Not completely, but to some extent, it does have "Flamebait" or "Interesting" or "Insightful" 'ratings' for comments.
I don't really think that's too useful, because it's usually pretty obvious what category the comment falls in after reading it anyway...
Those kinds of tags are too broad. I was thinking of some javascript to let you highlight subparts of a comment then tag it with a more specific label, like "Straw Man Argument."
People would probably view the comment differently, but readers (and the author) could then see 60% of people thought part of his comment wasn't useful. Ad hominem and straw dog attacks, for example, might be unintentionally inserted in the heat of argument. Right now, comment rating is very blocky.
Make it so you can tag arbitrary pages from within your browser, and other people visiting the page can see the tags if they wish. Imagine the fun of doing this with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, in addition to blogs and discussion forums, etc. etc.
The author's main point seems to be x. As he says:
<quotation>
But this is wrong for the following reasons: Who is this guy and what authority does he have to write about these topics? I haven't read the essay, but there's no way anything so short and written in such an informal style could have anything useful to say about such and such topic, when people with degrees in the subject have already written many thick books about it.
Paul Graham does a good job outlining the different forms a disagreement can take and evaluating their effectiveness. I agree with his analysis. I'm going to expand on it.
It seems this piece was written in response to the various criticisms he received because for his "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss" essay. In addition to objecting to the form these criticisms took, I think he could also have talked about one of the fundamental causes of most disagreements on the internet - lack of charitable interpretation.
Many interpreted his essay as an attack on big-company programmers - using as evidence the analogies he used, the frankness of his writing style, etc. - and reached the conclusion that he had an elitist attitude about his profession. Now, this may or may not be true (having met him, my opinion is a firm "not true"). But the point is that it doesn't matter. If we interpret charitably, we remain agnostic on what his argument implies about him (thus abstaining from DH1 and DH2 attacks) and instead focus on the actual argument. Some critics managed to do that. But many didn't. And the worst part is that the lack of charitable interpretation obscured their actual disagreements, so now we've wasted time talking about "how to disagree" instead of "what are the correlations/effects of company type on programmer happiness/ability/prospects".
Of course, an author should be careful to frame his arguments in a way that minimizes the danger from misinterpretation. In other words, an author should try to write well.
Many times people will enter a passionate debate if they feel their lifestyle or livelihood is at stake. It's the same reason news media have long focused on crime, sex, and scandal - BAD THINGS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!
But in forming an actual dialogue, such all-or-nothing viewpoints make people defensive. The behavior of monopolies that have been obsoleted by technology is little different from that of the Luddites - they try to stop the change, even when it's irrational to try. "Irrational self-interest" is a pretty neat term to sum it up.
"You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss" strikes keenly and precisely at the employed, because it primarily lists benefits of startup life, presenting an unbalanced picture. The title certainly doesn't help matters. That PG's arguments are pretty strong, and he has some established weight in online communities, makes him hard to dismiss out of hand, which further increases the tension.
Internet discussion tends to stay low on the hierarchy because the people replying are mostly stuck in defensive mode. Pragmatic, nuanced thinking doesn't seem to come naturally to humans.
"an author should be careful to frame his arguments in a way that minimizes the danger from misinterpretation"
I find this takes more effort than any other part of writing. There is a point where this doesn't necessarily make the text better because it becomes less succinct since the author must clarify against every possible non-charitable interpretation.
I wish more people wrote stuff like this. There are a million writing books on grammar and style, but god forbid someone ever write something about what makes good ideas...
As mascarenhas already posted, Aristotle spent quite a bit of time on the topic, and his ideas are still studied, though perhaps not as widely as they should be.
The way I read it, the PG essay was meant less as a statement about the absolute nature of reality and more as an attempt to get people to suck less. Even if Aristotle came up with some superset of these ideas 2400 years ago, I think there is still some value here.
I thought the essay was quite good. I wasn't trying to say that I thought pg was being redundant.
My point was merely that there has been plenty already written on the subjects of rhetoric and logic as ways of expressing ideas, and that the topic isn't as neglected as you seemed to believe in the post I responded to. If you're looking for more resources on the topic, they're out there.
On my to-do someday list is a site for recording and organizing debates. Arguments would appear as boxes of text, organized into a tree structure. Opposing arguments could be added as children to a parent node. Arguments could be filtered by up/down voting or some other system. Debate trees could be searched. Etc...
Somebody really should make this. I remember messing with some Flash site somewhere that did something similar, but the interface was pretty lowzy.
I think you're on to something here. If the debates weren't structured (e.g. on a single site) but distributed across blogs.
Something that can automatically categorize the blogosphere discussion - e.g. who's agreeing/who's disagreeing (what's the median level of agreement/disagreement). I'd like it for the sole feature of finding/filtering out the (sometimes useless) echo-chamber opinions - to surface the divergent disagreements/opinions
User-originated voting is good but combining it with intelligent algorithmic appraisal (what they are voting by what they are saying) might be interesting
My partner and I have been working on something similar at thinklinkr.com. We are currently (3/31/08) showing our crude version to friends and iterating rapidly. Drop me a line at vishu at thinklinkr.com and I'll send you an invitation.
I think there's a lot of useful criticism of arguments that falls outside this hierarchy. You can attack an argument without ever disagreeing with it, such as by challenging its interestingness or applicability or its relevance to the rest of the discussion. Where does this comment fall in the hierarchy?
I think what's really going on here is that the hierarchy isn't actually a hierarchy. In a proper hierarchy, each level should necessarily entail the previous. Here DH1 entails DH0 (I call DH0 "ordinary ad hominem" and DH1 "circumstantial ad hominem") and DH6 entails DH5 entails DH4 entails DH3. But DH2 has nothing to do with any of the others, and DH3 has nothing to do with any of the previous.
One thing that isn't mentioned in this essay is an appreciation of the concept of having a "preponderance of evidence." In U.S. law, for example, this concept is introduced directly through the burden of proof hierarchy (terms like reasonable suspicion, clear and convincing evidence, reasonable doubt, etc.).
While only DH4-DH6 can strictly prove an argument wrong, there are many, many situations in which it is infeasible to unilaterally determine "truth." In these cases, DH1-DH3 can be used to determine the probability of a statement being true.
Take ad hominem. Sure it's a weak form of argumentation, but it is reasonable to exercise a certain amount of skepticism based on the nature of the speaker. For example, the New York Post tends to be a more conservative newspaper, while the New York Times tends to be more liberal. Obviously, neither of these facts can definitively prove or disprove a statement, but they can inform an analysis of these papers' claims.
If I'm making a counter-argument I care about, I try to take a "defense-in-depth" approach and attack the original statement at all levels that are useful and try to establish credibility in all the ways I can. I don't think arguing well maps directly to using a higher form of rhetoric. At the end of the day, it depends on your audience. Just ask Karl Rove and James Carville. ;)
On a related note, I have a friend who tried to argue for Ruby on Rails in his workplace and one of the Perl guys there literally said "Whatever dude, frameworks are for fags." He was dead serious.
Aside from what appears to be an intentionally combative post, it's interesting that this illustrates how difficult it can be to avoid the trap of responding to the tone of a post, especially if you read the post you're responding to as impolite.
If anything, this illustrates the point from the current essay that it's easy to fall into the trap of responding to the tenor of an argument instead of the substance unless you pay careful attention. I expect we've all been guilty of this at one time or another.
You may or may not have meant it way, but thanks for the observation.
Edited to add: I hadn't seen pg's response when I posted this. Perhaps the observation is indeed superseded by the fact that pg's post wasn't intended as a refutation.
DH1: Hmm... Same author of the article and of the comment... :)
Honestly though, I don't think you should be too insulted. Everyone has moments when perhaps they aren't particularly prime to good comments, although I suppose it would be a bit better had pg said something along the lines of, "Support that instead of just saying it" or asked for an actual discussion instead of what seemed like a loud (from the caps) one-line outburst.
Well, the main problem with this essay is that sometimes mocking someone's argument is the best way to disagree with it. The parody of PG's last essay on having a boss was highly effective at this: http://www.jsequeira.com/blog/2008/03/24.html
Is this a lower form of disagreement than DH6? Most definitely, however, the English language has a rich tradition of satire and mockery going back at least as far as Jonathan Swift.
I'd say that (good) parody and satire frequently make use of DH1-4 in order to effect an argument that's usually at DH6. It's the matter of creating straw men or ad hominem attacks which are implicit criticisms on the actual content of the argument.
Depends on what you mean by "the best way to disagree". If you are preaching to the choir (and most disagreements on the web fall into this category), then mocking is the best way, because it entertains, whereas the alternative does nothing at all.
But if you care about making someone understand your argument for the first time, why would you put extra layers on it, which will have to be unwrapped to get to the inner logic?
I think I know why most people do it. The point made in the form of mockery is laborious to refute, so nobody bothers. And if somebody bothers, the refutation is laborious to follow, so nobody bothers to read it. Thus mockery, however idiotic, often stays unrefuted, and to the author and his camp that's close enough to "correct".
Have you been to Reddit lately? Half of all disagreements are in the form of (idiotic) mockery. It wasn't like this early on.
You ask, "why would you put extra layers on it, which will have to be unwrapped to get to the inner logic?".
There are two possible reasons:
1) you know your audience is not that logical to begin with, and need to be lured by illogical appeals to emotions etc.
2) you know they could be persuaded by logical argument, but need help summoning up the will to persist in following it. In that case, you mix logic with entertainment and exhortation. But you must mix carefully, to keep from falling into the trap of merely luring by illogical appeals (or even seeming to do this). Unfortunately, few have the patience for this, so many take the easy way, (merely luring).
Plato took course 2) often in his dialogs. Augustine did the same in both sermons and treatises. Aristotle never did, at least not in his surviving works (his dialogs are lost).
Nice article, and timely. But I believe your senators' salary example is technically a genetic fallacy, not ad hominem. Could be wrong - it's happened before ;-)
237 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] threadReading this YC thread, I was reminded of observing this party talk/jousting and had the deep thought that if we hold an agenda (e.g. He's wrong or I'm better than that guy) we lose out when it comes down to it - we don't really listen or learn anything from the other person because we're too focused on proving the muzak in our head that we're right
http://www.carsonified.com/biz-tips/how-to-win-an-argument
On a personal level, a relative of mine has alienated enough people that I have trouble bringing him out because he continually needs to be "right."
What good have you accomplished if you're "right", alone, and you've convinced no one.
The dynamic is different in a public debate, however, where you might be trying to persuade people other than the person you're debating, but Mr. Carnegie's ideas are still useful to remember.
You don't see that in many forums.
Actually I do not. There are many good long replies here but Reddit, at least for some of the submissions, also has some good long discussions.
It's probably because it's interesting for me to do so, to see others' views. When I disagree, I tend to enjoy it if people come back and argue. I don't really do it because I care whether the other person comes to see my point of view - although it is more fun when they do, of course. Maybe some people enjoy yelling things such as, "u r a fag!!!!", although personally I can't say I understand those people...
It's useless to try and convince them otherwise for the most part - I don't think they'd listen to you in the first place.
As for the essay itself, I just wish more people would consciously THINK about how they talk to others. It would make the internet and the world a nicer place. (Oh, and that first part, DH0, seemed to me as if it was addressed directly towards Jeff's of Coding Horror response to PG's last essay. But I can't say I disagree - I was actually rather shocked to see such a, umm, 'vehement', response. Another instance of what people probably wouldn't say in person.)
DH-1. Flamebaiting.
This is when you preempt that with which you would disagree by stating your case in such a way as to elicit quick disagreement (in the form of DH0 to DH6). Usually done by noticing a subset of all data, forming a hypothesis to explain only that subset, and presenting it as a conclusion. Often done without even realizing it.
The new category brings to mind an interesting property of this hierarchy though, namely that it seems to be difficult to respond to an "argument" with a higher order technique than that which was originally presented. For example, if one were disagreeing with a purely ad hominem rant, one would find it futile and nearly impossible to disagree with the rant at any higher level; how can one truly refute an argument that has no central point? It's somewhat depressing because, if true, it implies that a discussion is upper bounded at the level of discourse that initiated the discussion.
The way out of this, as far as I can tell, is recognizing that statements are not made in a vacuum. Sometimes the only way to raise the level of discourse is to engage in a sort of meta-disagreement. In other words, sometimes the point of a statement is not the content, but the context. While it works to classify criticisms of tone, for example, as weak if one were dealing with a substantive argument, the metadata (tone, speaker, etc) around the content of a non-argument may allow one to say something intelligent about the statement by tying it to the broader context in which it was made.
edit: btw my experience is that more often than not i get downvoted if i do this
Actually, I've used this as a fairly effective technique for arresting flamewars. It doesn't always work, but when it does, subsequent posts are usually at the DH level of your own response rather than that of the parent comment.
The key seems to be drawing 3rd-party onlookers in before the original flamer responds. If someone else responds to your comment at a high DH level, the original flamer has a choice. He can respond to your comment with another flame, which makes him look stupid and petty because there's a sibling comment that's much more well-reasoned. He can respond with a real argument, in which case you've raised the level of discourse. Or he can go away, which seems to be what happens most of the time. Regardless of what he does, you're free to ignore his reply and continue responding to the person who engages you with actual arguments.
A corollary is that educated, rational lurkers hold a lot of power on discussion boards. If you don't get directly involved in arguments but instead cherry-pick the comments you respond to, you can set the whole tone for a community.
BTW, the same trick works in face-to-face conversations, as long as there are more than 2 people involved. The person who asks the questions controls the conversation, by virtue of which questions they choose to ask. And the person who sits back and shuts up controls whose ideas get developed, by virtue of who they choose to respond to. That's why the quietest person at a meeting usually controls it, as long as they're not just a passive onlooker.
1. Original flamebait
2. Congent response to flamebait (posted by you using username 1)
3. Congent response to post 2 (posted by you using username 2)
This might be slightly unethical, but it means that the original flamer will always be dissuaded from posting again, and you're more likely to get more congent discussion participants.
If using multiple usernames bothers you, you could probably just check yourself with a small counterargument at the end of post 2, and it seems likely that the original flamer would still be dissuaded.
The proven technique for dealing with flamebait is to tag it immediately for what it is, and not waste any reader's time with a detailed discussion of an idea that is not even worthy of refutation.
And yes, even Aristotle in the Topics agreed that there are propositions/arguments that are so silly or vain, they are not worthy of a serious refutation. Flamebait certainly counts as one of these. (BTW: I see there are Aquinas fans here, so I will point out that Aquinas expressed his agreement with this in, of all places, his commentary on the Ethics: I think it was Lecture I).
The only problem is that there really are people who are too quick to tag someone else's post as 'flamebait', even when it is not. This happens on those very topics that most need to be seriously discussed, simply because they are so important, yet so many people hold strong opinions on them, opinions that are not founded on sound logic, but on passionate attachment of one kind or another. So they are strong opinions, but they are wrong opinions. These are the discussions that are the most difficult. They should not be attempted by amateurs. But there is no enforcing of _this_ principle on the Internet;)
(Admittedly, this is not always possible or desirable.)
Seasoned trolling pros are usually very good at this. I think it helps a lot to look at their underlying motivation and to crank up the bullshit detector.
The problem on those sites is that their is not only poor comments but also tons of users who upmod them.
This is a legitimate problem, and ironically it is a symptom that a news concentrator is becoming a victim of its own success. As the signal-to-noise ratio attracts a progressively larger crowd, the types of information that are viewed as 'signal' broaden to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It's similar to hiring in a small company -- but at least in that situation you have control over the purse strings. (Even the trolls get dumber as time goes by and a site grows more popular.) Thus the comments on an arbitrary story suffer, and it requires more work to pick through them. However, if you 'listen' to subcommunities (eg. economics, programming, math on reddit) you find that (unsurprisingly) the baseline rises again. If you have no interest in those subsets, however, you're kind of out of luck. (But if you're here you already knew that)
You could probably model this as a logistic process, provided that you account for renormalizations (such as the literal renormalization that took place on reddit recently).
but also tons of users who upmod them.
This part (or at least its independent, non-interaction effect) is irrelevant; if you focus solely on people who have strong and demonstrated critical thinking skills, you can learn a great deal, and also gain a different perspective. Their input is much more harmful when it comes to filtering in or out the news to be concentrated.
Most of the interesting threads in which I have participated eventually lost the interest of the masses because they had descended into minutiae. But that's where the interesting bits lay, so that's where they went.
Ignore the riffraff. Lord knows they'll usually ignore you if you're presenting anything challenging. Even in a swamp like Slashdot, there is occasionally a perspective-changing comment that is worth reading.
If you want to expose yourself to a wide variety of opinions, you have to be willing to do a bit of work yourself, and determine which ones hold merit. It's a two-way street, in many respects, and your priorities (in addition to your time pressures) will determine how far you are willing to take it.
It appears to me that the 'social news' sites on the Web are simply recapitulating the arc of the special-interest BBS nodes and Usenet cliques of years past. Everything old is new again.
Unfortunately this rarely works in the sense of eliciting a reply. But when it doesn't, it does at least tend to shut them up.
The God perspective (Yeah, you the expert?) "This restaurant is the best in town"
The 2nd person perspective (Why should you know what I should do) "You really should try this restaurant."
The 1st-person perspective (the only one you can truly own) "I really like this restaurant. I like the cooking and I feel like I am welcome here."
The second person perspective is just a suggestion. Of course you're free not to go there if you don't want to.
Finally, the first person perspective is just one other way to put things. In this case it's more verbose and, before the second phrase, don't even give you as much information as the god's perspective (in god's perspective you know this restaurant is the one the person likes the most, in 1st person perspective you just knows this person likes it). Saying "This restaurant is the best in town. Cooking is great and it's very welcoming." gives you at least the same information as the 1st-person perspective.
I'm saying all that because I hate see people trying to debunk an argument by picking on the guy's perspective. Stuff like "you can't state that as an absolute truth", just because you said something like "this restaurant is the best in town". If you have information that may change that opinion, please give us, otherwise, don't flood the comments with "you don't know that much". That's about the same as DH2.
This category is particularly troublesome, as even when both parties agree, in principle, to disagree, they may still disagree on how to disagree.
One particular nuisance is the disagreer who seeks to impose a disagreement meta-hierarchy on the problem of agreeing on a disagreement hierarchy. That way is turtles, all the way down.
Although really, flamebaiting is just a more subtle way to call someone (or their idea) retarded, so maybe it's just a special (more eloquent) case of DH0.
(DH3 ftw!)
Edit: Irony.
It was just that when I checked back in on this about half an hour later it had already been downmodded, and that just seemed really ironic to me. Glad someone is out there stomping DH3... I would be.
"And when you agree there's less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you're entering territory he may not have explored"
To me, cooperative, exploratory statements are the most valuable.
"That is a interesting opinion, I've never heard that perspective. But what about case xyz, have you considered that."
In that context, it is much easier to build up interesting information trees, rather than simply staying stuck on one (often minor or irrelevant) node.
I like the quote because it reminds me that even the most logical people may default to reacting non-logically/emotionally in a stressful situation (where they may feel their ego is threatened e.g. have to "fight" to protect themselves)
Edit: and on a more recent (and cynical :-) ) note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right
http://www.vandruff.com/art_converse.html
Perhaps it's worth adding a link in the article, clarifying that DH1 actually includes a whole set of techniques described at that URL (and other places).
Daniel
In his Eristic Dialectic, he described a system of stratagems, see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eristische_Dialektik (unfortunately, this hasn't been translated to english yet).
The 38 Methods are said to have been added merely to provide examples. It is also interesting that he wrote the manuscript around 1830, but never published it. It was first published in 1864, four years after his death. See http://coolhaus.de/art-of-controversy/ for the full manuscript and an excellent translation to english.
PG advocates for controversies that help find the truth. Thus he makes a difference between fallacies and real arguments. To Schopenhauer, real arguments are actually fallacies, because mere humans have other goals than the truth. Ironically, in http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, PG followed Wittgenstein in that “most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language”. In a philosophical context, at least, this should lead to a similar conclusion as Schopenhauer's.
Now, whether the case of philosophy should be extended to the rest of controversies is an interesting question. My answer would be yes. I wonder what PG would say. The fun part is that, whatever he says, Schopenhauer will still be right (look: he doesn't care of the truth, he just wants to win the argument!). That's the whole fun of controversies about controversy...
That alone is reason enough to reject it. But here is another reason: his point about other goals is irrelevant. Why? Because though yes, we "mere humans" have other goals, at least _some_ of the time, those other goals require that we get to the truth of some matter. And those are precisely the fields of endeavor where rational argumentation still has some influence in our confused and irrational society.
That said, we _do_ have to take great care: the dishonest dissemblers who strive so hard to deceive us are _legion_, the honest reasoners who wish to persuade us of the truth by legitimate means are rare gems. But they have not disappeared completely yet.
I remember being part of an Academic Games league in high school. One of my favorite games was simply called "Propaganda." Everyone sat in a big room, listened to arguments, and identified the type of rhetorical technique being used. It may sound lame, but it was actually pretty fun and cultivated some useful skills.
Anyway, here's the technique list they used: http://mlagonline.org/Prop_ABCE.pdf [pdf]
and a more detailed but somewhat different list of logical fallacies: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
Actually, one of my long time favorite such sites is:
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/index.html.
It would become more comprehensive, but also harder to present in a simple, compelling, immediately understandable way. Not sure if it'd be worth it.
If comments could be tagged with hierarchy levels, it might raise the general level of argument.
"Such labels may help writers too. Most intellectual dishonesty is unintentional."
I totally agree with this, particularly on YC News where there are a lot of smart people. When the words fly, there's a tendency to overreact and say things that wouldn't occur if we were face-to-face. I admit having done this. It would be great if some optional tagging feature were built into a comment system, so writers could get some feedback when others thought they strayed.
I don't really think that's too useful, because it's usually pretty obvious what category the comment falls in after reading it anyway...
People would probably view the comment differently, but readers (and the author) could then see 60% of people thought part of his comment wasn't useful. Ad hominem and straw dog attacks, for example, might be unintentionally inserted in the heat of argument. Right now, comment rating is very blocky.
Make it so you can tag arbitrary pages from within your browser, and other people visiting the page can see the tags if they wish. Imagine the fun of doing this with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, in addition to blogs and discussion forums, etc. etc.
Meta-satire, well done sir/mam.
"Conversational terrorism" outlines more techniques used by conversational bullies: http://www.vandruff.com/art_converse.html
It seems this piece was written in response to the various criticisms he received because for his "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss" essay. In addition to objecting to the form these criticisms took, I think he could also have talked about one of the fundamental causes of most disagreements on the internet - lack of charitable interpretation.
Many interpreted his essay as an attack on big-company programmers - using as evidence the analogies he used, the frankness of his writing style, etc. - and reached the conclusion that he had an elitist attitude about his profession. Now, this may or may not be true (having met him, my opinion is a firm "not true"). But the point is that it doesn't matter. If we interpret charitably, we remain agnostic on what his argument implies about him (thus abstaining from DH1 and DH2 attacks) and instead focus on the actual argument. Some critics managed to do that. But many didn't. And the worst part is that the lack of charitable interpretation obscured their actual disagreements, so now we've wasted time talking about "how to disagree" instead of "what are the correlations/effects of company type on programmer happiness/ability/prospects".
Of course, an author should be careful to frame his arguments in a way that minimizes the danger from misinterpretation. In other words, an author should try to write well.
But in forming an actual dialogue, such all-or-nothing viewpoints make people defensive. The behavior of monopolies that have been obsoleted by technology is little different from that of the Luddites - they try to stop the change, even when it's irrational to try. "Irrational self-interest" is a pretty neat term to sum it up.
"You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss" strikes keenly and precisely at the employed, because it primarily lists benefits of startup life, presenting an unbalanced picture. The title certainly doesn't help matters. That PG's arguments are pretty strong, and he has some established weight in online communities, makes him hard to dismiss out of hand, which further increases the tension.
Internet discussion tends to stay low on the hierarchy because the people replying are mostly stuck in defensive mode. Pragmatic, nuanced thinking doesn't seem to come naturally to humans.
I find this takes more effort than any other part of writing. There is a point where this doesn't necessarily make the text better because it becomes less succinct since the author must clarify against every possible non-charitable interpretation.
author <- DH0;
Thanks Paul!
My point was merely that there has been plenty already written on the subjects of rhetoric and logic as ways of expressing ideas, and that the topic isn't as neglected as you seemed to believe in the post I responded to. If you're looking for more resources on the topic, they're out there.
Somebody really should make this. I remember messing with some Flash site somewhere that did something similar, but the interface was pretty lowzy.
Something that can automatically categorize the blogosphere discussion - e.g. who's agreeing/who's disagreeing (what's the median level of agreement/disagreement). I'd like it for the sole feature of finding/filtering out the (sometimes useless) echo-chamber opinions - to surface the divergent disagreements/opinions
User-originated voting is good but combining it with intelligent algorithmic appraisal (what they are voting by what they are saying) might be interesting
I think what's really going on here is that the hierarchy isn't actually a hierarchy. In a proper hierarchy, each level should necessarily entail the previous. Here DH1 entails DH0 (I call DH0 "ordinary ad hominem" and DH1 "circumstantial ad hominem") and DH6 entails DH5 entails DH4 entails DH3. But DH2 has nothing to do with any of the others, and DH3 has nothing to do with any of the previous.
While only DH4-DH6 can strictly prove an argument wrong, there are many, many situations in which it is infeasible to unilaterally determine "truth." In these cases, DH1-DH3 can be used to determine the probability of a statement being true.
Take ad hominem. Sure it's a weak form of argumentation, but it is reasonable to exercise a certain amount of skepticism based on the nature of the speaker. For example, the New York Post tends to be a more conservative newspaper, while the New York Times tends to be more liberal. Obviously, neither of these facts can definitively prove or disprove a statement, but they can inform an analysis of these papers' claims.
If I'm making a counter-argument I care about, I try to take a "defense-in-depth" approach and attack the original statement at all levels that are useful and try to establish credibility in all the ways I can. I don't think arguing well maps directly to using a higher form of rhetoric. At the end of the day, it depends on your audience. Just ask Karl Rove and James Carville. ;)
I believe their area of expertise is propaganda, not argument.
(But I suppose both could be a form of rhetoric.)
I mean, where do you go from there?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123400
If anything, this illustrates the point from the current essay that it's easy to fall into the trap of responding to the tenor of an argument instead of the substance unless you pay careful attention. I expect we've all been guilty of this at one time or another.
You may or may not have meant it way, but thanks for the observation.
Edited to add: I hadn't seen pg's response when I posted this. Perhaps the observation is indeed superseded by the fact that pg's post wasn't intended as a refutation.
DH1: Hmm... Same author of the article and of the comment... :)
Honestly though, I don't think you should be too insulted. Everyone has moments when perhaps they aren't particularly prime to good comments, although I suppose it would be a bit better had pg said something along the lines of, "Support that instead of just saying it" or asked for an actual discussion instead of what seemed like a loud (from the caps) one-line outburst.
Is this a lower form of disagreement than DH6? Most definitely, however, the English language has a rich tradition of satire and mockery going back at least as far as Jonathan Swift.
But if you care about making someone understand your argument for the first time, why would you put extra layers on it, which will have to be unwrapped to get to the inner logic?
I think I know why most people do it. The point made in the form of mockery is laborious to refute, so nobody bothers. And if somebody bothers, the refutation is laborious to follow, so nobody bothers to read it. Thus mockery, however idiotic, often stays unrefuted, and to the author and his camp that's close enough to "correct".
Have you been to Reddit lately? Half of all disagreements are in the form of (idiotic) mockery. It wasn't like this early on.
There are two possible reasons:
1) you know your audience is not that logical to begin with, and need to be lured by illogical appeals to emotions etc.
2) you know they could be persuaded by logical argument, but need help summoning up the will to persist in following it. In that case, you mix logic with entertainment and exhortation. But you must mix carefully, to keep from falling into the trap of merely luring by illogical appeals (or even seeming to do this). Unfortunately, few have the patience for this, so many take the easy way, (merely luring).
Plato took course 2) often in his dialogs. Augustine did the same in both sermons and treatises. Aristotle never did, at least not in his surviving works (his dialogs are lost).