I think this is a subject where we’d probably need to hash out a dozen intermediary points (the whole “inferential distance” thing) before we could come close to a common understanding.
Anyway, yeah, I get the whole not-backing-down-to-bullies thing; and I get being willing to do something personally costly to avoid giving someone an incentive to walk over you.
But I do think you can reach a stage in a conversation, the kind that inspired the “someone’s wrong on the internet” meme, where all that game theory logic stops making sense and the only winning move is to stop playing.
Like, after a dozen back-and-forths between a few stubborn people who absolutely refuse to cede any ground, especially people who don’t think they’re wrong or see themselves as bullies… what do you really win by continuing the thread? Do you really impart outside observers with a feeling that “Duncan sure seems right in his counter-counter-counter-counter-rebuttal, I should emulate him” if you engage the other person point-by-point? Would you really encourage a culture of bullying and using-politeness-norms-to-impose-bad-behavior if you instead said “I don’t think this conversation is productive, I’ll stop now”?
It’s like… if you play an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and every player’s strategy is “tit-for-tat, always, no forgiveness”, and there’s any non-zero likelihood that someone presses the “defect” button by accident, then over a sufficient period of time the steady state will always be “everybody defects, forever”. (The analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s an example of how game theory changes when you play the same game over lots of iterations)
(And yes, I do understand that forgiveness can be exploited in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma.)
My objection is that it doesn’t distinguish between [unpleasant fights that really should in fact be had] from [unpleasant fights that shouldn’t].
Again, I don’t think I have a sufficiently short inferential distance to convince you of anything, but my general vibe is that, as a debate gets longer, the line between the two starts to disappear.
It’s like… Okay, another crappy metaphor is, a debate is like photocopying a sheet of paper, and adding notes to it. At first you have a very clean paper with legible things drawn on it. But as it progresses, you have a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, you end up with something that has more noise from the photocopying artifacts than signal from what anybody wrote on it twelve iterations ago.
At that point, no matter how much the fight should be had, you’re not waging it efficiently by participating.
I think this is a subject where we’d probably need to hash out a dozen intermediary points (the whole “inferential distance” thing) before we could come close to a common understanding.
Anyway, yeah, I get the whole not-backing-down-to-bullies thing; and I get being willing to do something personally costly to avoid giving someone an incentive to walk over you.
But I do think you can reach a stage in a conversation, the kind that inspired the “someone’s wrong on the internet” meme, where all that game theory logic stops making sense and the only winning move is to stop playing.
Like, after a dozen back-and-forths between a few stubborn people who absolutely refuse to cede any ground, especially people who don’t think they’re wrong or see themselves as bullies… what do you really win by continuing the thread? Do you really impart outside observers with a feeling that “Duncan sure seems right in his counter-counter-counter-counter-rebuttal, I should emulate him” if you engage the other person point-by-point? Would you really encourage a culture of bullying and using-politeness-norms-to-impose-bad-behavior if you instead said “I don’t think this conversation is productive, I’ll stop now”?
It’s like… if you play an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and every player’s strategy is “tit-for-tat, always, no forgiveness”, and there’s any non-zero likelihood that someone presses the “defect” button by accident, then over a sufficient period of time the steady state will always be “everybody defects, forever”. (The analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s an example of how game theory changes when you play the same game over lots of iterations)
(And yes, I do understand that forgiveness can be exploited in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma.)
Again, I don’t think I have a sufficiently short inferential distance to convince you of anything, but my general vibe is that, as a debate gets longer, the line between the two starts to disappear.
It’s like… Okay, another crappy metaphor is, a debate is like photocopying a sheet of paper, and adding notes to it. At first you have a very clean paper with legible things drawn on it. But as it progresses, you have a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, you end up with something that has more noise from the photocopying artifacts than signal from what anybody wrote on it twelve iterations ago.
At that point, no matter how much the fight should be had, you’re not waging it efficiently by participating.