It’s possible that pushing particular LW posts at people when we see a problematic argument would help, e.g. resolving arguments about definitions, being charitable to the other person, arguments as soldiers, that sort of thing.
Someone asking the other person to write a longer, more general discussion post outlining their views actually helped me a lot—previously I didn’t understand just what they was being argued for.
Once people are already committed to not listening to us, feeding them or not feeding them doesn’t seem to make a difference (unless some person goes a step further and start being intentionally disruptive, but then they’d just get banned, hopefully), but maybe we could “not feed the trolls” as a proactive strategy against having bad discussions. If someone seems to be getting into a bad pattern, we could stop all confrontational discussions and try to only have more cooperative, fact-finding discussions. Discuss the problem before proposing solutions (and link to that too). If they are confrontational, turn the other cheek, unless they violate very basic (e.g. not lying) ground rules for discussion. This plan should be carried out in a way that does not fail if they are right, so discussion should keep going as long as there you can muster genuine curiosity, and not much longer. For ending discussions, even if you feel tired of the other person, maybe try to ramp up the politeness—“thank you for talking about this” “I’m sorry we couldn’t find more common ground,” that sort of thing, and then link them to an interesting place in the sequences if they want to read more.
Not sure if that would actually work, but I’ll try to give it a shot next time.
Tough question, let me think.
It’s possible that pushing particular LW posts at people when we see a problematic argument would help, e.g. resolving arguments about definitions, being charitable to the other person, arguments as soldiers, that sort of thing.
Someone asking the other person to write a longer, more general discussion post outlining their views actually helped me a lot—previously I didn’t understand just what they was being argued for.
Once people are already committed to not listening to us, feeding them or not feeding them doesn’t seem to make a difference (unless some person goes a step further and start being intentionally disruptive, but then they’d just get banned, hopefully), but maybe we could “not feed the trolls” as a proactive strategy against having bad discussions. If someone seems to be getting into a bad pattern, we could stop all confrontational discussions and try to only have more cooperative, fact-finding discussions. Discuss the problem before proposing solutions (and link to that too). If they are confrontational, turn the other cheek, unless they violate very basic (e.g. not lying) ground rules for discussion. This plan should be carried out in a way that does not fail if they are right, so discussion should keep going as long as there you can muster genuine curiosity, and not much longer. For ending discussions, even if you feel tired of the other person, maybe try to ramp up the politeness—“thank you for talking about this” “I’m sorry we couldn’t find more common ground,” that sort of thing, and then link them to an interesting place in the sequences if they want to read more.
Not sure if that would actually work, but I’ll try to give it a shot next time.