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| The continuing demise of reasoned discourse |
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26 August 05. I used to really care about how many people read this blog. Every day, I checked the server logs, and had a little spreadsheet with a nice bar chart entitled "How much people love me". It generally went up, probably in step with the number of entries in the archives that the search engines could pick up. At the moment, the little log typically lists about 90 visitors per day (within 70 to 120 with 95% confidence, or so), though that includes visitors to other pages hosted on this server and the four or five spambots getting through per day. Incidentally, I still have no idea where this server is located. I keep meaning to write my hosts and ask for an address, but since the information is entirely useless, I never get around to it. But of late, I've gained a tiny modicum of fame as an expert on a contentious but generally irrelevant topic. This means flame emails. You don't know what you're talking about, blah blah blah, everybody thinks what you wrote is filled with factual errors, blah blah. I actually reply to the flames, with something like `If you have any detailed comments or critiques, I'd love to hear them.' and although they will reply to this little one-liner with redoubled rhetoric, I haven't yet gotten the list of blatant errors that they noticed but nobody else did. The father of a pal is an academic studying medieval German literature. He used to get death threats because of his journal articles. There are also the trolls on my side. They write me these enthusiastic emails that indicate that they read enough of my writing to realize that I agree with them, so I'm cool. I know that if I had a different opinion, I'd be hearing from these same people in all caps. Some who disagree with me are sincerely trying to debate, but some do better than others. There exist those who get everything right, and are polite and understand my points and respond to them directly, but they're not really worth blogging about, are they. Instead I'll complain about the others, who use nitpicking as a substitute for reasoned argument. E.g., among the best was a person who clearly disagrees with me who writes me politely worded letter asking me about How, and I take him seriously, under the presumption that I should be able to handle reasonable critique, now that I'm a frigging world authority on this here iota of nothing. So I write back a page on How, and point out that really, we should be asking Why, and only answer How in the context of Why, et cetera. Person replies by cutting out 90% of my email, pointing out that, if you look at the two statements he left a little differently, they're not entirely true. The several paragraphs on Why somehow disappeared, correspondent brushes off my academic references as not quite what he had in mind, and concludes by pointing out once again that his method of answering How is da bomb. Oh, and that has my phone number and will give me a call next time he's in town so we can talk about it more. Which is why I'm happy that I've never written my name down in this here blog, and that not many people read it. I mean, I've spent the last week going sentence by sentence through my nearly 200-page book testing each line, asking: if I were an ass, how would I construe this sentence to be false and thus an excuse to dismiss the actual argument? Lots of rewordings and long footnotes that explain exactly what I mean, and other footnotes that explain that the sentence is right but common conception is wrong. Oh, I have fond memories of this one layreview on Amazon.com about how a random book on patenting is riddled with errors; for example, our anonymous reviewer points out that the book said that patents last for 20 years, but it's actually 14. How can you accept a book that gets such a basic fact wrong—one star. Sorry, bub, but 35 USC 154 (a)(2) says that the guy who wrote a book on the subject is right and you're wrong: it's 20 years (from date of filing of application). If I had to do that with this here web site, I'd be sunk. How would I be able to write entries while drunk? How can I guarantee that the reader can distinguish the info entries (that I do actually fact check, but not to such a level of one-could-maybe-misconstrue-this meticulousness) from the fluff entries (that don't really have any facts worth checking)? Would I ever be able to use sarcasm again? "Mr. BK is clearly a loon which we may safely disregard, because on 4 February 2005, he stated that 'if we want to encourage innovation in computing, we need to reward programmers with harems.'" As the reader can plainly see, it's all a conspiracy to kill fun. It just takes one troll who thinks too much of himself (why is it always a boy?) and the whole party is ruined. Our editor from the the 2 August entry knew this, which is why she has been preemptively removing any trace of fun from the book—for which I am grateful, because I would indeed rather have not-fun than more trolls picking at the fact that some jest on page 47 is not literally true. My last editor also saw all this coming. Her response to telling her that I had a few articles on their way to being published was `Congratulations. You'll get some good feedback and hear from a lot of crackpots.' But writing defensively is just not fun. We learn less about people and about the world in conversations where the other party is watching every word. If I could, I'd have a license shrinkwrapped around the book: by breaking this seal, ther reader agrees to let minor miswordings slide and focus on the overarching arguments presented. Reader will make some effort to understand author's arguments before dismissing them. Some people fare very well with defensive writing, but the art of expressing oneself well while covering one's ass in all directions is a skill I am nowhere near mastering. I can barely keep my metaphors from mixing. Policy implicationsI know some of you are already thinking of the first, which is to care less, and just not bother with even replying to anyone who gives indication of trolldom. But that means discourse goes from crappy to silent, which may or may not be an actual improvement. One troll actually replied to my `if you have any detailed critiques' email with an apology, which indicated to me that maybe not all is lost. We can't silence the people who are being asses, but we can drown them out with reasoned argumentation. So another policy recommendation: go pick an argument with someone today, and argue it in a fair manner, with due respect for those you disagree with. Remind them that there are those who disagree with them but who are not trolls or otherwise screwed in the head. See if you can get close to the root of the disagreement, and once you find it, whether it can be resolved.
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