I used to think I trolled all the time, but then I realized I wasn’t looking for anyone else’s anger or frustration, just trying to find their exact train of thought and get to reasonable arguments. Have you had worthwhile experiences probing for information in ways that could be misinterpreted as trolling or just by asking?
Even when there’s no trolling going on, the discussions I’ve seen online are predominantly shouting matches where no one leaves happy. When there’s a troll, at least someone wins. But when debates become rational, everyone wins.
There are times when I’ve made deliberately provocative statements to attempt to get someone to think and realize, but when you’re dealing with mental children this doesn’t work. Meaning it rarely works.
I can’t decide whether our culture has created a great “under class” of people who don’t want to deal rationally with the world, or whether it’s just a ‘feature’ (or bug if you will) of the great masses of humanity. Either way I’ve come to the conclusion that the vast majority of people are basically peasants with varying degrees of technical training, willing and able to operate at fairly high intellectual levels within narrow areas, then going home, popping a pabst and watching prime time cop buddy shows for decades at a time. you know, as opposed to operating at high intellectual levels, then going home and getting on the internet and arguing about peoples intellectual levels.
There are places online where discussions happen, but these are often places where discussion of one category of contentious issues is disallowed by fiat, and forum owners and/or moderators screen or are very active in preventing those sorts of shouting matches. Whether you’d think these were rational discussions or not is another matter :)
I used to think I trolled all the time, but then I realized I wasn’t looking for anyone else’s anger or frustration, just trying to find their exact train of thought and get to reasonable arguments. Have you had worthwhile experiences probing for information in ways that could be misinterpreted as trolling or just by asking?
Even when there’s no trolling going on, the discussions I’ve seen online are predominantly shouting matches where no one leaves happy. When there’s a troll, at least someone wins. But when debates become rational, everyone wins.
There are times when I’ve made deliberately provocative statements to attempt to get someone to think and realize, but when you’re dealing with mental children this doesn’t work. Meaning it rarely works.
I can’t decide whether our culture has created a great “under class” of people who don’t want to deal rationally with the world, or whether it’s just a ‘feature’ (or bug if you will) of the great masses of humanity. Either way I’ve come to the conclusion that the vast majority of people are basically peasants with varying degrees of technical training, willing and able to operate at fairly high intellectual levels within narrow areas, then going home, popping a pabst and watching prime time cop buddy shows for decades at a time. you know, as opposed to operating at high intellectual levels, then going home and getting on the internet and arguing about peoples intellectual levels.
There are places online where discussions happen, but these are often places where discussion of one category of contentious issues is disallowed by fiat, and forum owners and/or moderators screen or are very active in preventing those sorts of shouting matches. Whether you’d think these were rational discussions or not is another matter :)