How about 6.: arguing for the lurkers’ benefit? That argument was voluminous, repetitious, and random sampling of the low-voted comments turned out to only be useful for verifying that their scores weren’t capricious, but a few of the upvoted comments were worth my time to find and read; if a few dozen other people felt the same then they might have also been worth the authors’ time to write.
It is true that some people can benefit from such arguments. My claim is that a voluminous repetitious heated debate is a rather inefficient way to convey the benefits. If I want to provide the lurkers with a valuable counterargument against a plausible position, I would better write it somwhere else, in a separate post with proper explanation, where the readers would not be distracted by the noise invariably present in the trollish debates.
There is a second related point. It seems to me that if LW is intended as a place to have arguments, the arguments ought to satisfy some minimal quality requirements. There are many places over the internet where you can encounter debunking of common non-sequiturs, red herrings, ad hominems and strawmen; I just think LW should be one level above that—we should take for granted that the debaters here don’t commit those things, at least not systematically.
You may possibly argue that if some people wish to engage in fallacy busting, let them go; that LW can have a low-quality debate now and then. The problem I have is that those debates are distracting. I feel an urge to react to fallacious arguments, to support people arguing against rude opponents, and often don’t resist and do that. But afterwards, I almost universally regret participating in these nowhere-leading discussions. I don’t think that I am so extraordinary in this respect and suppose thus that people can be attracted to such debates “against their will”.
And finally, such debates feel bad and damage the atmosphere of friendliness and mutual trust which LW has.
How about 6.: arguing for the lurkers’ benefit? That argument was voluminous, repetitious, and random sampling of the low-voted comments turned out to only be useful for verifying that their scores weren’t capricious, but a few of the upvoted comments were worth my time to find and read; if a few dozen other people felt the same then they might have also been worth the authors’ time to write.
It is true that some people can benefit from such arguments. My claim is that a voluminous repetitious heated debate is a rather inefficient way to convey the benefits. If I want to provide the lurkers with a valuable counterargument against a plausible position, I would better write it somwhere else, in a separate post with proper explanation, where the readers would not be distracted by the noise invariably present in the trollish debates.
There is a second related point. It seems to me that if LW is intended as a place to have arguments, the arguments ought to satisfy some minimal quality requirements. There are many places over the internet where you can encounter debunking of common non-sequiturs, red herrings, ad hominems and strawmen; I just think LW should be one level above that—we should take for granted that the debaters here don’t commit those things, at least not systematically.
You may possibly argue that if some people wish to engage in fallacy busting, let them go; that LW can have a low-quality debate now and then. The problem I have is that those debates are distracting. I feel an urge to react to fallacious arguments, to support people arguing against rude opponents, and often don’t resist and do that. But afterwards, I almost universally regret participating in these nowhere-leading discussions. I don’t think that I am so extraordinary in this respect and suppose thus that people can be attracted to such debates “against their will”.
And finally, such debates feel bad and damage the atmosphere of friendliness and mutual trust which LW has.