Suggestion How to discuss: Hierarchy of Disagreement

[MichaelMc]

A recent thread had me looking up ad hominem attacks. Which lead to Graham's hierarchy of Disagreement, which seemed useful.

Some things it points out are:
- Name calling is not a counter argument.
- I do x and haven't died doesn't address if x is generally (still) optimal.
- That's wrong, x is better, with no why. Is not an argument.

The lower levels are not counter arguments, and many are just noise. Only the top three are counter arguments, yet they differ in if they relate to some minor side point (noise) or to the central issue.

Graham's article, How to Disagree, describes them further.

There are likely other categorizations of arguments, but this seemed a useful one.

For example, in response to an off-track debate one might post:

"""
Your response:
- says Fred is wrong, but doesn't say why (contradiction), or
- Argues about something else besides the main point (counter argument), or
- Nit picks at a side issue, but ignores the central issue of discussion (refutation).

A further explanation is in Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement.
Can you raise your response to a higher level?

"""

(Edited to make the last part an example post)

 

[Alaskan Scuba Dude]

At the risk of getting people mad at me:


Sure. In conditions x y z, I've found a. Though that is different from: a is best period.


Concur to the experiences you are likely to see? To your set of priorities? Both good.
Or, just agreeing with you. Hmm. not so great. You might just be wrong, seriously misinformed, or living in a world no one else lives in.


Kind of a tautology, useful if useful... Not so useful.
Plus I'm sure there is some glimmer of added usefulness buried in some happy unnamed diver's posts, but digging it out of the reams of text may not be productive, and surrounded by lots of un-useful stuff.

Confident divers are diplomatic in their responses. It's the recently indoctrinated divers who usually become hysterical.

 

[tursiops]

Confident divers are diplomatic in their responses. It's the recently indoctrinated divers who usually become hysterical.

"Confident divers are diplomatic in their responses" and overconfident divers are dogmatic in their responses.

 

[MichaelMc]

Confident divers are diplomatic in their responses. It's the recently indoctrinated divers who usually become hysterical.

Agree. Yet I'm not sure it is the central issue of how to respond to bad discussions.

And it seemed like BoulderJohn's discussion was a verbal one, but that would be a side detail.

 

[Alaskan Scuba Dude]

Agree. Yet I'm not sure it is the central issue of how to respond to bad discussions.

And it seemed like BoulderJohn's discussion was a verbal one, but that would be a side detail.

It's a start.

And some comments I believe are insights into a diver's own personality traits.

 

[MichaelMc]

And some comments I believe are insights into a diver's own personality traits.

Always and fascinating, but they can get therapy for their ego-mania or whatever somewhere else. And keeping a running list of who is what is beyond my level of interest.

 

[boulderjohn]

He had realized or you had surmised that he had realized? Everyone on this forum has the opportunity to make their point without interruptions. That's a given fact. It's entirely up to the reader as to whether they act on that information.

Laughter is good for the heart.

He told me he had realized that I was on my way to a point that would defeat him, so he used a strategy to prevent that from happening.

Since this is not a verbal discussion site, that strategy does not work. But there are others that will. Here are the most common strategies used on ScubaBoard:

• Deliberate lies. When I was on staff, we had some serious debates about what to do when we believed people were deliberately and repeatedly lying. This was usually done by people who had a personal agenda about which they wanted people to get worked up. The debates usually ended with the decision that they could lie all they wanted, and it was up to other people to refute those lies. If, however, the people refuting said something that suggested the person was lying, no matter how obvious it was, then that would was not allowed.
• Ignore the effective response. If someone makes a really good point, you just go on as if the person had not said a thing.
• Retreat and recover. A key method used by several people in the past when arguments are made effectively against them in a thread is to bow out, wait a month or two, then renew it in another thread.
• Straw Man. If someone makes an effective argument, you either rephrase it or twist the actual meaning to lessen its effectiveness by turning it into an argument you can defeat.

 

[boulderjohn]

Today I participated briefly in a scuba-related discussion on FaceBook before realizing how futile it was. A person started a discussion in a forum in which he expressed his anger about a common scuba operator practice, and I was one of the first to show him why it was common--universal, actually. Others joined in. Some of them were very knowledgeable. All of them said the same thing I did. None of that mattered. As people repeatedly pointed out in growing frustration, he was just repeating his argument over and over and over again. He apparently has a lot of time on his hands, because the thread is flooded with his comments--perhaps he hopes people will not notice he is just about the only one making them. Finally, I wrote a long detailed post with detailed and searchable examples showing he was wrong. In response, he used a strategy not open to ScubaBoard discussions--as the owner of the thread, he had the power to delete posts, and he deleted that one of mine.

 

[MichaelMc]

I grant that heavy duty malicious disagreement is difficult to respond to without persistent work. But it really leaves a bad mark of its own. I think weak misdirection likely can be tamped down, as it is in many threads.
(Said as one who studied logic at university, but didn't teach it....)

 

[boulderjohn]

I know my posts sound pessimistic in the extreme, so I want to clarify that I fully support efforts to reform the system, despite that admitted pessimism. I want to stress why it is we need to discuss these issues under the circumstances I described, and the main reason is that we have to remember that the people who use such tactics are really a small minority, and once you realize you are dealing with one, you have to then realize that the true audience is the readership silently reading and forming conclusions. In such cases, the obstinate debater is your friend.

I was once doing a presentation on innovative instructional strategies to an audience of about 50 teachers. Two of them were real, solid pains in the arse. They raised objections continually, and I struggled to give polite and reasoned responses, trying to hide the fact that I thought they were total jerks. At the end, I passed out evaluation sheets, and I got 2 negative reviews and 48 glowing reviews, and the comments told me that everybody else thought they were jerks, too, and having them fight me as they did pushed everyone over to my side.

 

[MichaelMc]

I have no magic bullet. Beyond short descriptions that they are off track and letting the persistent ones babble to themselves. Hopefully digging their hole only deeper.