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[naath]

Why is it that anytime I see a post that someone has made of the form "thing X is a bad thing and I wish people-who-do-X would stop doing it" there are almost always responses of the form:
a)"but *I* never do X"
and
b)"but thing Y is bad too!"

as for (a) - great, continue not doing X. Unless the initial post clearly accused *you personally* of doing X then why bother commenting to say that? Do you have anything else to add?

(b) comes in two forms; sometimes it's *true* and sometimes it's *not*. But really, NOT RELEVANT. Sure, if you were having one of those lazy afternoons down the pub and letting the conversation go hither and yon my "OMG I HATE X" might well be responded to you saying "WELL I HATE Y" and then we can all be "YEAH, HATING STUFF". But if one wants to have a Serious Discussion about X and how it affects people, and why it is bad, then Talking About Y rarely helps.

These tactics (among others) are things I think come under the heading of "Derailing" that means that they take the conversation away from what was intended (travelling along it's rails). It takes a fair amount of effort to deal with these types of comments, even if one's moderation policy is "don't like, will delete"; they really do get in the way of serious discussion. It is certainly my experience that even reading with no intention of dealing with (because someone else is doing that) these types of comments really eats up valuable head space that I could be using to engage in interesting discussion (and I'm doing quite well for spare head space really).

If you want to use your corner of the internet to have other discussions about other things then you do that. It's a big internet, there's space for everyone. But increasingly I'm find that there are a lot of topics that simply can't be discussed in a public forum, because others come along and refuse to let the discussion happen; and I find that bad because, whilst of course we could all retreat to closed communities, it makes it much harder for people who are just starting to dip their toes in the water to find things. I have a great deal of respect for people who have been, and continue to be, willing to deal with moderating public discussions of sensitive subjects and kept their sanity.


(Hello Metafandom; OMG I've been metafandom'd!)

Comments

[simont]

Unless the initial post clearly accused *you personally* of doing X then why bother commenting to say that?

A lot of posts of the sort you're talking about tend to cite some sort of subset of humanity (let's keep it general and call that subset S) as the perpetrators of X. A literal reading of the post often does make it clear that what's meant by that is that all (or nearly all) people who do X are in S rather than that all people in S do X, but I think it's well documented that human brains do have trouble dealing with the subtleties of predicate logic and will tend to accidentally and unconsciously conflate A=>B with B=>A. Also, some posts of this type don't take care with their wording in this way and let slip some sort of indiscriminate "oh, <members of S> are such bastards" comment – and if they don't, it's a good bet that at least one of the commenters will. Either way, if a member of S reads the post, it's very easy for them to feel as if they are personally accused, inspiring an immediate desire to defend oneself.

Even I'm not immune to that tendency – and I am highly trained in predicate logic, and also have seen enough of these posts to know better. It's still not instinctive to look at a post like that and calmly think "that doesn't mean me"; the gut instinct is "hey, that means me! how unfair!" and it takes a conscious effort every time to read more carefully and think "oh no, actually it doesn't". It's a fundamental misfeature of the human brain, I fear. (One of the many.)

[ptc24]

Predicate logic does indeed say that it a fallacy to conclude B=>A from A=>B. However, Bayes theorem does allow a weaker version of this, and lots of the machine learning that I do (did?) at work relies on this. Also, there's the issue that no matter how strong your grasp on predicate logic is, you don't know how strong everyone else's is.

[naath]

It's not at all shocking to me that people *think* these things (I know *I* think these things!). It's just, I guess, that I've spent a lot of time practising sitting on my hands and saying "it's not about me"... and just listening to what other people have to say about their experiences of the world. It feels really *rude* (to me) to step into someone else's blog and start shouting at them for being rude to me when I've had no interaction with them previously; to take advantage of their willingness to talk to use up their tuits by dragging the conversation off to be about me.

I guess not everyone knows that, or has experienced having their arguing tuits eaten up by repeating the same basic statements over and over again; people are rarely completely precise in their statements, it's a feature of human languages, making one's blog-rants be completely precise and open to absolutely no mis-interpretation whatsoever is a great deal of effort. I guess it depends what you blog about.

[simont]

I guess it depends what you blog about.

Mmmm. The other thing I was considering saying is that you draw a distinction here between an aimless conversation in a pub wandering every which way and a blog post in which there's a clear purpose and scope to the discussion and the blog owner has the moral authority to dictate it (and the effective ability to enforce it). I think the latter is not true in general of blog posts: plenty of posts on LJ and DW spark conversation which wanders here and there in much the same way that a conversation in a pub might, and comments moving off in new directions ("hey, that reminds me of an only tangentially related thing that I thought was interesting", or "I think a more important point than the one you made is this") can easily be seen as valuable and worthwhile contributions by everybody including the original poster – and posters who excessively discourage tangential chat that other people see as valuable become sidelined because people stop seeing their journal as a nice place to be. In that situation the fact that there happens to be an "owner" of the space in which the conversation is taking place is essentially irrelevant unless they suddenly get on their high horse and start throwing their weight about. (You may recall that IWJ for one has ranted at length about the badness of owned web fora as venues for certain types of discussion, because he sees it as a bad thing that one person does have the power to control the space whether they exercise it or not.)

What you're really doing here – I think – is characterising a subset of blog posts in which there are some "rails" along which you want follow-up discussion to run. Those rails are largely implicit – people are expected to recognise that a given post is one of those posts, and to know from previous experience what sorts of direction-changing comments are unwelcome. There will always be some people who haven't acquired that experience yet, and some others who take exception to the whole idea of one participant in a conversation being able to dictate its "real" purpose as opposed to all the participants having their own equally important goals.

As I see it, this is a tragedy-of-the-commons thing: for each individual person doing this, it's entirely understandable why they did it and why it seemed reasonable to them (well, probably with the exception of some actual inexcusable hardcore dickheads, which is another fundamental flaw the human race is regrettably stuck with...), but the combined effect of all of them is that it's hard to clear them out of the way to do something they're making difficult, and you can't educate them all because half the problem is that there are always new ones coming along.

[naath]

I think part of the problem is, er, not that this is taking the discussion in some new and interesting direction; but that it is shutting down discussion. That is, not changing the points so you go on different rails but causing a crash.

I think there's a big difference between saying "hmm, yes, this makes me think of that time when..." and adding something new and interesting. Or even saying "I, as a member of S, have never done X; and here are some things that I think contribute to that" which is also interesting and discussable. And being directly confrontational without explanation/discussion which don't contribute really, other than to annoy other people in the discussion.

It's also to do with the repetition, I guess that a lot of people won't read all the comments to a post and just post their own view - but if that view has already been expressed and is already being discussed then it's really annoying if someone comes along and says it again.

I'm not a fan of heavy-handed moderation; but sometimes I think that sometimes it is needed. If I don't like a forum's moderation policy or rules then I don't have to post there.

There is a matter of experience, of seeing what discussions have *been had* and working out whether your thoughts might be adding anything; but I would usually tend to spend some time reading a forum before sticking my oar in to see what the normal social interaction looks like before diving in. I think it's pretty annoying to disregard the social norms of a forum without good reason to do so, especially if you don't understand how those norms developed.

And there's the kind of general purpose social interaction thing where it's important that some subjects are, by their nature, more emotionally charged and carry more potential to hurt people than others. That's an "experience" thing too, but less specific, and something I'd expect most people to know about if not to actually be able to decide which topics fall under that. Some of the rails go off into dark places where people might not want to go, and I don't think it's nice to drag people there (I am overextending this metaphor...)

[tim]

To be more concrete about it, one of my friends recently made a post decrying the lack of willingness of some men to take the responsibility to use condoms. She received a comment from someone assuming she was saying "all men are bad", and responding to that point rather than the one she actually made. This sort of reply is depressingly common. You could address that by saying it's a common logical fallacy. Perhaps so, but it's one people ought to be aware of and work to avoid in their speech, which is one of the things I think was saying. The other problem there is that even if my friend *had* been implying "all men are bad", perhaps there are more important things than refuting such a statement, such as the specific point she was making about condom use. When people systematically ignore everything else somebody says as long as they can extract whatever faint "all men are bad" implications they can find, and jump on those, you have to wonder why their first priority is to defend the reputation of men (and not any specific man, just men-as-a-whole!) And I think that goes beyond universal brain wiring and into sexism, which is, again, something people need to work actively to overcome.

[tim]

Er, that should say "one of the things I think naath was saying". Haven't mastered this DW thing yet.

[naath]

:-) I was generalising, of course. Your example fits the pattern (and isn't one I've seen, which, I think that's depressing).

[ptc24]

I did a one-day assertiveness course about a month and a half ago. One of the words the tutor spent a while talking about was "manipulation", and she produced a list of common forms of manipulation. There was a good deal of overlap between this, and the lists of things that commonly get called derailing.

I've got a quite long post about the general topic in my head, which I should write up some time.

[liv]

Don't have time to get into a deep discussion about this because I'm leaving for the US in like 10 minutes (OMG!), but I just wanted to say, this is a really well written post and you're absolutely right about all of it. Thank you.

[naath]

OMG! someone thought I wrote something sane. /me dies of shock.

Thanks :-)