If that goal turns out to be “convince this person that their cherished belief is wrong”, and that outcome is unrealistic, I’m less likely to make the attempt.
That’s true in interpersonal situations, but on the internet, do you really care if anyone changes their mind?
For me I find that it’s mostly “try to provoke this person into saying something interesting about this specific topic”. I’m not saying it’s a good impulse—it’s mostly just a waste of time, but it’s fun in the sense that video games are fun. If there’s anything to “quell” it’s the tendency to procrastinate through pointless novelty seeking.
Perhaps you have a better class of Facebook friend than I do. I would love it if I could provoke them into saying interesting things about a topic, rather than them just making unprincipled tribalistic noise about it.
Something I’ve started experimenting with at the moment, when someone says “it’s terrible that this politician has done [x] because [some stupid argument]” is “three reasons why [x] is good, and one broader conceptual reason why it might not be”. This seems to confuse people’s Political-Enemy-o-meter, and also frames the dispute along a moderately sensible axis.
Oh, I didn’t realize we were talking about facebook. (I mostly started reading when you invoked my username). I was mainly talking about all internet forums, in general.
When I was younger I used to do more facebook debates, because I hadn’t discovered the Internet properly, and because I had silly ideas about “discussions” and “learning” coming out of it, and because I did not fully realize that other people were actually capable of getting legitimately upset about this stuff. (Still glad I did it, at least I read some cool stuff when I was searching for citations.)
Today I only ever seriously engage with maybe 2 facebook friends, because they know what it means to engage—and even then, I’m leery about doing it in open forum, lest other people see it and take it out of context. I definitely prefer to argue anonymously so I can be more blunt and feel free get bored and trail off at any time. I’m now super pragmatic when it comes to people who don’t know how to engage, to the point of blatantly just nodding and smiling. I still test people who show signs of intellligence sometimes, just to see what sort of person they are, but they only ever get one test before falling into “we can be friends, but I reserve the right to nod and smile if you start getting angry”.
I worry that this makes me a bad and manipulative person, but people who formally had a problem with me have literally told me “you are much more open minded, accepting and easier to get along with now compared to before”, so I’ve started embracing the idea of manipulation so long as it is done with good intentions, in cases where I feel maintaining an agreeable environment supersedes other people’s right to know that I completely disagree with everything they say.
Warning: politics. This is an example only. Please don’t discuss the object-level question of nationalised rail services.
In 2009 the (previous) UK government nationalised a railway company that was suffering from credit problems. It’s being re-privatised at the moment. Privatisation of publicly-owned assets is an extremely contentious issue for the current government, and so this event spawned a bunch of garbage on Facebook. I responded to a friend forwarding one of these with three reasons why, in this specific case, the railway company probably should be in private hands, and then gave one considerably more abstract argument for why it might make sense to nationalise all railways.
That’s true in interpersonal situations, but on the internet, do you really care if anyone changes their mind?
For me I find that it’s mostly “try to provoke this person into saying something interesting about this specific topic”. I’m not saying it’s a good impulse—it’s mostly just a waste of time, but it’s fun in the sense that video games are fun. If there’s anything to “quell” it’s the tendency to procrastinate through pointless novelty seeking.
Perhaps you have a better class of Facebook friend than I do. I would love it if I could provoke them into saying interesting things about a topic, rather than them just making unprincipled tribalistic noise about it.
Something I’ve started experimenting with at the moment, when someone says “it’s terrible that this politician has done [x] because [some stupid argument]” is “three reasons why [x] is good, and one broader conceptual reason why it might not be”. This seems to confuse people’s Political-Enemy-o-meter, and also frames the dispute along a moderately sensible axis.
Oh, I didn’t realize we were talking about facebook. (I mostly started reading when you invoked my username). I was mainly talking about all internet forums, in general.
When I was younger I used to do more facebook debates, because I hadn’t discovered the Internet properly, and because I had silly ideas about “discussions” and “learning” coming out of it, and because I did not fully realize that other people were actually capable of getting legitimately upset about this stuff. (Still glad I did it, at least I read some cool stuff when I was searching for citations.)
Today I only ever seriously engage with maybe 2 facebook friends, because they know what it means to engage—and even then, I’m leery about doing it in open forum, lest other people see it and take it out of context. I definitely prefer to argue anonymously so I can be more blunt and feel free get bored and trail off at any time. I’m now super pragmatic when it comes to people who don’t know how to engage, to the point of blatantly just nodding and smiling. I still test people who show signs of intellligence sometimes, just to see what sort of person they are, but they only ever get one test before falling into “we can be friends, but I reserve the right to nod and smile if you start getting angry”.
I worry that this makes me a bad and manipulative person, but people who formally had a problem with me have literally told me “you are much more open minded, accepting and easier to get along with now compared to before”, so I’ve started embracing the idea of manipulation so long as it is done with good intentions, in cases where I feel maintaining an agreeable environment supersedes other people’s right to know that I completely disagree with everything they say.
Could you give an example of “three reasons why [x] is good, and one broader conceptual reason why it might not be”? I’m not sure I follow.
Warning: politics. This is an example only. Please don’t discuss the object-level question of nationalised rail services.
In 2009 the (previous) UK government nationalised a railway company that was suffering from credit problems. It’s being re-privatised at the moment. Privatisation of publicly-owned assets is an extremely contentious issue for the current government, and so this event spawned a bunch of garbage on Facebook. I responded to a friend forwarding one of these with three reasons why, in this specific case, the railway company probably should be in private hands, and then gave one considerably more abstract argument for why it might make sense to nationalise all railways.