The tradition of debate in India that this article is about (or dialogue, or dialectic, or whatever you want to call it) is very interesting, and unfortunately not well-known because most of the sources on the topic quickly get into technicalities.
Two non-technical (somewhat accessible to the general public) sources I've found are:
1. The book “Religions, Reasons, and Gods” by the late John Clayton has many interesting essays that touch on the vāda tradition. One of his interesting points is that the goal of dialogue need not be consensus or establishing common ground, but simply the “clarification of defensible difference”: understanding the other party better, and coming to shared understanding of what our differences are. Some of it is also touched on in his lecture here: http://www.bu.edu/religion/mar25-98/
2. Elaborating on the jalpa/vitaṇḍa mentioned in this article, the nyāya tradition recognized a long list of logical fallacies and poor arguments that were grounds for losing a (formal) debate. A list I've found is in the paper “Twenty-Two Ways to Lose a Debate” (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-009-9083-y) which also carries out some comparison with the ideas of Grice.
It does not appear to be the case that the “di” in “dialectic” (unlike, say, the “di” in “dilemma”) refers to the number “two”. According to Etymonline and many other dictionaries (follow links from https://www.onelook.com/?w=dialectic), the word comes via Latin ultimately from Greek dialektos, “discourse, conversation”. This in turn is formed with the prefix dia- (“across, between”), also found in words like diagonal, diameter, dialogue, diagnosis, adiabatic, diabetes, diarrhea, diacritic.
This prefix dia- in turn may indeed be cognate with bi or di-, but at any rate the “di” in “dialectic” does not directly refer to “two”. What you've read may be a later re-analysis / false etymology.
The confusion seems rooted in the relatively common word "monologue" which etymology seems to imply was a 17th Century French "back formation". Interesting how much that bit of word play seems to confuse things centuries later.
Which makes sense, it doesn't need to be a back formation or slight pun - it's already different from dia 'across'/'between' (like diameter) talking, it's specifically not that.
I frequently argue points I do not personally hold. This sometimes gets misinterpreted as me holding the opinion, or an attack on the person, or some such. But really I am testing the idea and recognizing that someone else could hold this opinion but not be in the room to advocate for it.
Unless someone prefaces their statements with a disclaimer (like "just for the sake of the argument"), I will assume in good faith they believe their own statements. Any later claim to the contrary leaves me with the following choice to make: were they lying then, or are they lying now.
This seems a little extreme. A lot of discussions are too abstract to bother prefacing with "this is not my actual view". I don't think it should be called lying if my own opinion is not very relevant, or the thing being discussed.
A lot of the time this can take the shape of "have you considered...?" or "what if...?", so there is a built in hypothetical.
I guess that's fine but don't presume the other person is somehow accountable to you for their opinion or values your assessment that they're a liar at all.
I frequently make points to taste test them without being married to them, but I'm not going to lose sleep if someone wants to get worked up over whether or not it was genuine.
Either an assertion is a conventional belief, which is a truth that has no evidence, or a logical conclusion belief, which they don't fully understand (eg lack of understanding about cause and effect in a study). These concepts are often confused, but neither of them are fundamental to a rational discussion.
A lack of acknowledgement when these biases are discovered, is a compelling reason to eject from a discussion. Discussion is one tool to convert beliefs to truths. Sometimes the beliefs changed are ill-recieved, but it your own or another's.
It should not. The decision to assess a claim in context (eg a speaker's expertise or lack thereof) or in isolation is often an important one, and creating an implicit contextual fork and then attacking an opponent for choosing the 'wrong' prong is a well-worn rhetorical tactic for seizing control of an argument on procedural rather than substantive grounds.
>Unless someone prefaces their statements with a disclaimer (like "just for the sake of the argument"), I will assume in good faith they believe their own statements.
That is perhaps an unusually... mechanical... way of conversing.
Human conversation can be a playful dance when contextual grey areas of shared and individual intent and information are explored. Most people do this implicitly, without need for explicit disclaimers — indeed, explicitness extinguishes much of the pleasure of the dance.
In other words, many people talk with others for the sheer pleasure of conversation, as opposed to a simple exchange of facts. This conversation-as-pleasure naturally leaks even into specific conversations that are indeed largely about the exchange of facts, because many people are accustomed to, familiar with, and enjoy the dance.
If no party to the conversation tries to win, but rather discuss it - it should not matter. It doesn't matter what my world view is at one particular moment - I am sure it is faulty in one way or another always. And world view changes all the time. Stepping out from that worldview, especially when there is no one to argue a different point of view, IMHO is beneficial (as long as it is not malicious). And adding some sort of disclaimer makes such viewpoint automatically weak since no one in the room holds this viewpoint, therefore it must be wrong.
The notion that these conversations are free is an idea held by a very small group. Most people have reasonable reasons for assuming that the conversation has a cost and therefore you have a motivation for proposing a particular point of view. Some people find conversations emotionally draining, some people perceive every conversation as a risk to one's political capital, other people feel that any time invested in a conversation is a cost that should be recouped at other points, other people are keenly aware of the meta message sent by one's words and therefore the impact on the relationship of those who participate in the conversation. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that most people will assume that a person advancing a viewpoint also believes in that viewpoint, and since that perception is wide spread, if you refuse to acknowledge it with a comment such as "for the sake of argument" then ask yourself why you feel those 5 words cost you more than the 500 or 5,000 other words that you'd like to invest in the conversation.
I suspect based on your writing you may be taking yourself a tad too seriously, and that can have huge costs in terms of anxiety.
The point being made is if it's a substantive point it doesn't matter how much the speaker identifies with it, the valid point has been made to you and it is to be considered. Hence it should not matter provided you are sticking to the facts. It seems you have made this into a personal insult about whether or not your transactional view of the costs of speaking are being respected. That is to shoot the messenger.
The person is doing you a favor by pointing out valid concerns even if they don't agree with them.
> But if the discussion actually influence real-world decisions then it matters a great deal what people actually believe
I really don't understand why more people are not getting this.
It can be plenty consequential in the real world, I said from the start of this thread that someone could be arguing a popular opinion that nobody in the room happens to hold.
This happens all the time in silicon valley as an example: a bunch of educated, comparatively wealthy, mostly white men make decisions. Maybe they are not very in touch with the opinions of the vast majority of humans who fall outside that category. What I am advocating for this case is the ability to have empathy for those who are unlike you, step outside your biases and adopt an argument that is not your own. This is a good skill. People are falling over themselves trying to call that lying and universally bad or nearly so.
Sorry, I got lost a little in the second part. I assume you mean "a negative influence". How exactly discussing viewpoint, which is not believed by the person, influences the real-world decision in a negative manner, considering that more information is processed, not less?
Lets say two presidential candidates are having a debate. Does it matter if they actually believe in what they are arguing? Of course it does. Or two prospective parents discussing how to best raise a child? Of course it matters if they actually believe what they say.
Presidential "debates" to me appears as a PR campaign. I guess there indeed it is important to know exactly what candidates are standing for and proving their view is the right one (i.e. aligned with viewer's worldview)
With parenting - I see no issues. And I do use such an approach, but my spouse, I believe, trusts me.
So... It looks like the problem is - when the debate is used to judge world view of the person to decide if one would like to trust them - such "devil advocate" arguments are harmful. I believe it is just one possible use of the discussion, but I will keep in mind that and try to avoid arguing from some other perspective if I see the person is trying to figure out if they want to trust me or not.
it can also be called devils advocate. it can be helpful when you do not have someone to argue that side and good for understanding a issue from many sides and can be in good faith. stating a disclaimer does make things more transparent though and may or may not be good for the sake of the argument. bad faith in this case would be misrepresenting or downplaying the other argument wrongfully to further your own opinion.
Also, it can be useful to remember that if you find yourself playing Devil's Advocate a lot, you should maybe check your pay stubs from the Devil. Even if you don't believe in the arguments that you are making, you still might be persuading others towards those causes. There are things to consider when advocating for opinions you do not personally hold.
Relatedly too, getting called in a lot to play Devil's Advocate by other people for sides/opinions that you do hold and care about can be an indicator that those people do not value your opinion and think you may be in the Devil's employ already. While they may not mean harm by it, it can be important to realize the emotional investment you are putting into the work will not be returned in how it is perceived, you might not be well enough "compensated" for that work, and should maybe renegotiate terms (or stop agreeing to it).
It seems to me that even when a statement is prefaced with something like "just for the sake of the argument", this is just a cover, allowing the writer to state an unpopular (or hateful, or patently wrong) opinion, while hopefully shielding themselves from some of the blowback.
It's the whole "I'm just asking the question" phenomena, and I see it a lot with people who claim to be centrists but are more accurately described as right wing reactionaries. It allows them to seed the discussion with bullshit, without having to defend any of it.
Presuming that is always the case will also lead you to some very incharitable conclusions, and in turn lead /you/ to take up the lattermost position of the article: taking up positions solely in order to be in opposition.
There's lots of rhetorical contexts where it's a valid approach if both parties are operating in good faith - ie in pursuit of some mutually agreeable truth or within the bounds of some mutually agreed-upon process such as litigation. Many bitter political debates involve the deliberate confusion of substantive and rhetorical claims for deceptive effect.
Very good point. The internet was a great opportunity to test divisive/contrarian hypotheses. In the ideal case, you get counter arguments which will help you come up with a decision rule. Unfortunately it does not work this way in most cases.
Today. the mechanics of internet forums works such that on average, the safe milquetoast post gets the most points, so it devolves into a popularity contest of who gets the most Internet points, especially when the person is not anonymous.
This is pretty much what the Sophists did professionally.
In the city state of Athens there were no such things as 'lawyers' to represent you. If you had a legal problem and it was brought up to court (typically consisting of dozens, sometimes hundreds of judges) you argued your case yourself. Those who were better orators had a better chance of winning, so the nobility and rich often went to schools where they practiced rhetoric.
This obviously meant having to argue over the dumbest and inane things possible, some of these discourses we've managed to preserve over the millennia.
I used to do that frequently and eventually came to hold some of those positions. In particular I convinced myself to be pro-choice after sort of arguing about abortion for sport with my very Christian conservative family.
I watched half of it before deciding I don't understand how this relates. If we're talking about arguments in which the objective truth is unambiguous (eg. who invaded Spain), there is no argument among reasonable people. And I explicitly said I am talking about adopting positions for the purpose of argument not to "attack the other side".
There’s certainly a fine line between playing devil’s advocate to measure the strength of an argument and “trolling”, much like, as an example, there is a fine line between hunting an animal for sustenance and hunting an animal for sport.
I completely agree, generally when I play devil's advocate, I preface it with: "Playing devils advocate, how would you respond to this counter point". The fine line is whether or not the other participants in the conversation are aware of your intent to play devil's advocate. If you are the only one who knows you are playing devil's advocate, your intent might be misconstrued. And if they never find out you were playing devils advocate, then well...
If someone else might hold that view legitimately and it stands on reasonable logic by itself, does it matter if someone is playing "devil's" advocate or not? Maybe this is not devil's advocate but something called empathy?
I have come across this in some friends. It's super interesting but also dangerous. It has taken me sometimes years or a decade to fully come to terms with some past debates. My friends would seemingly hold opinions and cling to them dearly, opinions I felt were so unconscionable I could not imagine holding them. Friendships were strained and maybe some lost. They tell me now that they were doing as you do, and that they did not hold those opinions but were merely testing them and practicing debating, learning about both sides, etc.
But I wonder about the unintended consequences of this. How many 'opinions' are out there in the world purely to cause pain? What portion of opinions that are shared on social media or the news actual opinions from those people, vs crafted statements of trolling themselves?
When you take the 'other side' for practice, is there really a valid [1] other side to take? I find often that the other side is based on logical fallacies and is not, at its base, a valid argument. I wonder if you are creating distance between you and others while you test out the opinions of propagandists? How valid [1 again] really are all these opinions?
[1] Okay here we go with this. I am indeed calling some opinions "invalid". What I mean is, I do not think it is a valid opinion to cause harm to minorities on purpose. I think this is cruel and amounts to a crime in our society. But you will find people advocating it loudly on social media and TV - and their arguments are based on treating humans cruelly for no reason other than the cruelty and other various logical fallacies.
If you are to take stances that you don't agree with, please check them logically first before putting those arguments out there in the world. Some things are better understood without trying to understand 'the other side', simply because it is not going to be based in logic and has no possible outcome of being 'understood'.
For these cases, you have to examine the whole of those friends' character. If that friend repeatedly brings up the same arguments 'just to test or practice', and/or if they reveal the fruits of those arguments in other aspects of their character or thought, you can make the argument to them that you cannot in good faith believe that they are merely holding that position for argument's sake.
However, if they have a known position and they make arguments clearly outside those boundaries, and then /show that they return to their usual position after/, it is much more feasible to believe that they are indeed merely testing their own position thoroughly, as any reasoning person should.
My own experience with this tends to arise out of an extreme cognitive dissonance - I want my opinions to be internally consistent, and I've come to realize that a few of them just aren't consistent. When you get into reading the philosophy (or the relevant literature in other cases) you can come to conclusions which are quite far removed from beliefs one holds dear. So there's some tension between what I'd like to be true (security in a belief) and what seems true when I rationally consider the arguments. The second part of my experience shows that when you report your findings to others, they are immediately skeptical to the point of refusing to engage with the established literature. In reality, I try and make others aware of these opinions by arguing for them - partially in the hope that they can offer a counter-argument and that I can be back "home" safe in my original opinions which I thought I couldn't justify.
Secondly is the matter of epistemological framework; some people seem stuck with a particular way of finding information about the world which intentionally or not is constructed to dismiss critical engagement.
The most controversial topics of political philosophy are very interesting to me because it can be hard to find a view which is internally consistent. I'm emotionally upset when I can't arrive at such a view. To hold a view I can't justify is a horrible feeling. The kind of topics I'm talking about are issues of freedom of speech (pornography, hate speech, censorship, debate, the notion of harm and the validity of the harm principle), economics (the labour theory of value, tendency for the rate of profit to fall, objectivity or subjectivity of value, various historical arguments), social psychology (ideology in society and the flattening of culture, totalitarianism of the market, the experience of other sexualities e.g. the adult My Little Pony fan community and the Japanese lolicon phenomenon), and the nature of work (the meaning of consent and coercion, free will, the phenomenon of "bullshit jobs"). In the face of these issues, I find that it's hard to spend any energy on talking about such banalities as vim vs emacs or FOSS.
The trouble with entirely self consistent philosophically positions is they have tended towards extremism. At least according to my reading of the history of philosophy.
As with science, we have to accept that we can simultaneously hold two theories to be "true" even when they don't square with each other. To do otherwise is an exercise in frustration. Or extremism, if you choose to discard all philosophies that do not fit with your preferred one.
Open any unmoderated comments section on any site and you'll find thousands of trolls.
It's strange that you think trolling is some subversive and venerable reaction to censorship, when anonymously commenting on websites is a nearly effortless act that incurs neither a cost nor risk.
I totally agree that, when adopting a hypothetical opinion, it's a good idea to vet it, and prevent wasting everybody's time in hypotheticals. Though part of that process may be to temporarily adopt an absurd view and work out how it fails.
You almost never have to spend an entire argument to vet a complete garbage opinion. If you do it quickly, or the opinion isn't complete garbage, you're not running afoul of the complaint.
On a slight tangent, has anyone ever looked into the etymology of the modern term troll? There hasn't been too much serious scholarship that I can find on the term, seemingly arising in mid-1980s newsgroups. But, I did find this which is my current best understanding; I also read in an old student newspaper edition that it refers to the trollish inhabitants underneath Bridge building on campus. From an Oral History of Caltech:
> ERWIN:Could you perhaps tell about bringing back A Broader View with its sequel, the new sequel? Because I think that’s very interesting. CLARK:Well, that was fun to do. The play readers group in 1987 decided to renew the play-reading party, which was one of the great traditions of the fifties and early sixties. And Bob Oliver asked me if I’d dust of f A Broader View. Well, I looked at it and I thought of updating it. But the shift in the twenty years had been so much that updating was impossible; it’s just a period piece or nothing. So we had to do it unchanged. And then I felt honor bound to write a sequel to it, which is called Troll’s Progress. The theme of it is that the essential Caltech never changes. It’s firmly founded on terror. [Laughter] And no froufrou can disguise that fact. And people who play together pray together, twitch together, stay together. Anyway, that theme allowed for a number of wisecracks, and I like to think the dialogue is rather funny. The kids who did it were tremendous. The undergraduates, of course, we know are stars.
> ERWIN:What was the origin of the troll?
> CLARK:Well, that goes back into Caltech history. And it’s probably Caltech’s only contribution to American culture. [Laughter] If you have to ask the meaning of the word, you’ll never understand what it means. But to put you sort of in the framework—that’s discussed, incidentally, in the dialogue of Beautiful Beckman there’s a segment on that. But a troll is a very high-voltage nerd. It used to be he lived “under DuBridge.” The kid that never sees the light of day, really, he’s so busy with his books. There are apprentice trolls at other schools, but ours are an order of magnitude more trollish. People who are compulsive and pathological students are much more so here.
> ERWIN:Somewhere you referred to this as a “random troll.”
> CLARK:Oh, that’s the worst thing you can be called. You see, it means you’re just like a number; you have no personality. You might as well be a computer—nothing to distinguish. Oh, man, when you’re a random troll, you’re beyond the pale. [Laughter]
> ERWIN:In A Broader View, you called the Caltech undergrad “intellectually brilliant, emotionally immature, culturally deprived, and socially gauche.” And then, immediately afterward, I believe you gave the Caltech professor the identical description. That brings us to the point of what the shows were for underneath it all.
1. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on
Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the
post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in
turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one
trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well-
constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers
to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while
subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact
a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in
on it. See also YHBT.
2. An individual who chronically trolls in sense
1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a
newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to
annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the
fact that they have no real interest in learning about the topic at
hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures
they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and
as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as
in, "Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll." Compare kook.
3. [Berkeley]
Computer lab monitor. A popular campus job for CS students. Duties
include helping newbies and ensuring that lab policies are followed.
Probably so-called because it involves lurking in dark cavelike
corners.
Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower
category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing
some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. See also
Troll-O-Meter.
The use of `troll' in either sense is a live metaphor that readily
produces elaborations and combining forms. For example, one not
infrequently sees the warning "Do not feed the troll" as part of a
follow-up to troll postings.
> On Usenet it always seemed to be a fishing metaphor, which is why people talk about taking the bait or spitting the hook.
This is why I'm certain it started out as 'trawling'. The conversion to 'troll' was a result of misspelling or misunderstanding the spoken word. Or perhaps just standard punning - one who trawls is a troll.
"trawling for opinions" is a well-known and still often used phrase.
Vada and Vitana. I love this. When I was a prof. in a CSC department, I often had to persuade computing services or some other part of the university bureaucracy to do or get something for the students. I soon learned that I would encounter two types of beuracrats. (Actually, three, but I will discount the ones who were just not very smart. The other two types were smart.)
The first type I called "obstructors". If I (our my department) proposed something, the obstructors always had a dozen or more compelling reasons why the proposal was impractical, infeasible , or otherwise without merit.
The other type, I called them "enablers" might have some initial objections, but they would typically work with me (or us) to overcome the objections so that we could get what we wanted.
In the second case, it was "Vada". After a while I learned that the best way to achieve an outcome was simply to avoid ever engaging with the people whose style was "Vitanda".
Of course at the time (1980's and 90's) I did not think of them as Trolls - just as jerks who didn't want to do anything that created work for themselves.
> The third type of dialogue, if it can be called dialogue at all, is known as vitaṇḍa (Nyāya Sūtra 1.2.3). We may call this “trolling”, because its objective is not to win by proving one’s own idea correct, but to make the other person lose by opposing every argument of the opponent no matter what. Vitaṇḍa is considered a destructive style of argumentation. Here, the person who employs vitaṇḍa has no position of one’s own, and does not attempt to defend any thesis. A person may even adopt a viewpoint that is opposed to one's own for the sake of vitaṇḍa. There is nothing to be gained by either party in this encounter. It is the troll’s point of view – “I will humiliate you and argue that you are wrong, not because I fundamentally disagree with your position, but because it was you who said it!”
Sounds very much like what in the West is called the Socrattic method championed by Socrates... who used to ask questions until he proved that his opponent was an idiot who did not know what they were talking about.
The Socratic method doesn't come with the intent of making the other person "lose" by blunt-force contrarianism, is a difference I'd like to think matters.
Ancient sanskrit, yes. But the term vitanDa is very current. It is a common word in my language, Kannada and I imagine in other Indian languages as well.
This article is as much about the etymology of a modern term as about a concept from Sanskrit philosophical texts.
"The Notion of Trolling in Ancient Indian Literature" may have been a better choice of title. Of course it was in Sanskrit, because that was the literary language of the time.
But this is probably named this way because the names of Ancient Indian works of literature, especially obscure ones like Nyaya Sutra, are not well known in the west, whereas "Sanskrit" almost immediately contextualizes the post to Ancient South Asia for most readers, even though the language in which it is composed is a bit beside the point, which is that an ancient society sort of identified "trolling".
Indian languages are heavily influenced by Samskrutam and have borrowed words from the language. So the word vitanDa in Kannada is borrowed from Samskrut language.
There's a nice parallel in Ancient Greek, and from there to modern philosophical parlance: Eristic[0]. Here's Plato, for example:
"it is on the purely verbal level that they look for the contradiction in what has been said, and employ eristic, not dialectic, on one another." (Republic V 454a, translated by Reeve)
This is interesting to read and especially since their understanding of trolling is actually accurate.
"Here, the person who employs vitaṇḍa has no position of one’s own, and does not attempt to defend any thesis. A person may even adopt a viewpoint that is opposed to one's own for the sake of vitaṇḍa."
I think people mostly misuse the word trolling, a troll's final goal is to disrupt and incite reactions often times for the lulz. To me (you may very well disagree) anybody claiming that trolling is used to achieve something is wrong. It may have consequences but if they are intended it's just manipulation of opinions.
I also have my doubt about the motivation given to trolls, I believe they target people that are "weak" to trolling because their propension to react help the troll reach his goal faster. i believe this is a reason why trolling it can quickly become harassment or at least be perceived as such.
I used to like being a troll as a teenager and my first reaction when reading an opinion that looks absurd is to wonder if the author is trolling. This first reaction is slowly shifting to "who does this statement serves" since organisations of all sizes have weaponized internet to spread such opinions.
Gish galloping is burying an opponent in an avalanche of claims or factoids that would take far longer to refute. The practice of just making stuff up without regard to its truthfulness is called bullshit, and has achieved some traction as a technical term thanks to this excellent little essay on the topic: http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_...
It reads like a joke at first, but is well worth your sustained attention.
The useful thing to take away from this is to how to combat them.
> Simply by asking them what their position is, or what they propose to debate, they are forced into a quandary: if they propose something, then they have to defend it, and can be argued with; if they do not propose anything, then they may be asked to exit the debate. This may be easier said than done, but it may also help stop a troll once in a while!
If I could be forgiven to be meta here, are there any comments in this thread which are elaborate trolls on the nature of trolling?
I'm not as sophisticated as some of you but it seems as if those with more experience in these matters wouldn't find it easy to be sucked into discussions with a troll. Could there be a master troll or two here which you have fallen for?
Socrates “knows that he knows nothing” and spends his time trying to refute that. He looks for knowledge earnestly but usually doesn’t find it. Socrates is less devil’s advocate, more “how can we be sure of X when Y? If not Y because Z, doesn’t Z also make X problematic because of (blablabla)?”
Sure, he gets people RAGEing like a great troll, but at least ostensibly he’s doing more the 2nd type of argument described in the article, but with kind of a backdrop that precise intellectual beliefs are really hard to specify or maintain. It’s like dialectic but it’s not Hegelian; he wants to return to some central question and doesn’t necessarily see that thesis/antithesis climb as crucial, he just finds problems with the premises and wants to find better ones (Hegel’s whole thing was a bit more nuanced than that).
Re: article, trolling initially meant trying to get a rise out of people. It’s not so much you won’t admit you’re wrong or you’re eristically tearing everything down, it’s that you’re pretending to play the argument game (or some other game, like “art criticism” or “testimonial”) but in fact you’re fucking with people of varying levels of specificity.
In the Roman Catholic Church there was once an official position known as the Advocatus Diaboli, or Devil’s Advocate. Their task was to be the skeptic, and argue persuasively against the canonization of a new Saint - essentially an applied version of the third form of dialectic mentioned here.
This is very neat, and the last paragraph is indeed very heavy-hitting. It's always hard to read that some of our societies greatest present-day problems are so many thousands of years old.
However, I think this definition is narrow and only encapsulates part of the modern definition of 'trolling'. Today, 'trolling' is used as a weapon of war, not only in debate with other individual people. Trolling is as much a mechanism of creating emotional trauma among a large population as it is a mechanism for 'debating' in bad faith.
Modern trolls will post violent content, often based on lies, in order to get an emotional rise out of a population. This is a large-scale effect that wastes huge amounts of people's time and energy, as they 'debate' with these soldiers of war whose task at hand is to create unnecessary emotional pain and waste the time of their enemy.
Yes, trolling is also happening on a more individual 'debate' level still, but narrowing our notion of trolling down to these ancient definitions is doing a major disservice to our modern understanding of how language is used in debate.
In a way I feel like I might have misunderstood something within my self.
I agree with the assessment but I never connected trolling and trauma, because my personal concept of trolling is essentially a continual escalation of reductio ad absurdum. In that sense it's not really trolling or sarcasm, it's more of a way of livening up overly-serious conversations.
I should probably not refer to that as trolling as the intention isn't to fuck people off, gaslight them, traumatise them...but to soften the mood.
I don't think anyone is attempting to narrow the definition of trolling; but in general any appeal to more nuanced understanding is worthwhile too so don't take this as disagreeing with you.
I note that "doctrine" was also an important element of the definitions offered and regret that we do not question our doctrine (and its sources) enough even now.
>Trolling is as much a mechanism of creating emotional trauma among a large population as it is a mechanism for 'debating' in bad faith.
Perhaps this was not present in older societies (and other countries today) because people were not as touchy feely as the current generations...
And I'm not trolling. I seriously think modern western societies are too snow-flakey and touchy feely for their own good. It's like going out in life expecting padded roads, walls, and everything, lest you ever get hurt...
And that's despite older societies having it much harder, and having much more difficult problems to be "traumatized" with...
I say this without snark, but the only way I can imagine someone actually thinks this, is because that someone is not well read on history, or holds values that were more in vogue to be "traumatized" for in such past generations.
People forget that in those older societies, people were killed, jailed and fined for holding certain beliefs. People were literally burnt at the stake, witch hunts were something more serious than a twitter mob complaining, intellectuals wrote lengthy arguments about the immorality of certain views; for christ sake, "Marge & Itchy and Scratchy" is almost 30 years old.
So yeah, I hold the opinion that people who think today's society is more easily offended than past generations are either too disconnected to what past generations really were, or is shocked to find themselves on the receiving end.
We had dictatorships, civil wars, and other such things in my country not that long ago.
I have relatives who went through those things -- and other modern tragedies today. I have befriended, talked to, and interviewed people jailed and tortured for decades for their beliefs. Even family killed by previous regimes.
So, it's not like I don't know that people "were killed, jailed and fined for holding certain beliefs".
I do know however that people that had those things happen to them in real-time history and in their full horror, were much more resilient, courageous, and could even shrug them off.
The touchy feely, safe-space demanding people today, who get discouraged or hysterical for 1/1000th the offense done to them, are a regression and an insult to those people (whose actual sacrifices and efforts gave the rights to the snowflakes of today).
I don't see how that disproves my point, I also come from a country with a recent and ongoing history of hardship, just 6 years ago while I was on vacation, a shootout happen in front of my home while my father and I were painting; actual bullet holes were made on the wall we were working on, and yet after we saw the cars flee, my dad just shrug it off and continued painting. Yes, I know that people can be resilient and adapt to life's hardships
And still, social sensitivities can be quite complex. My dad, a man who accepted a rain of bullets as just one more of the life's hardships, can get quite uncomfortable to the point of refusing to eat, if you insist on passing the salt on his hand instead of leaving it on the table near him, and I just picked one of the weirder but he and a lot of people have some petty stuff that causes them great offense.
With the examples I gave on GP, my point was not that people endured hardships, but that people who offended societies sensibilities were harshly punished. If you think that society that got so offended by stuff like blasphemy, sexual preferences, and failing to follow caste systems or even other weird social customs, are more courageous or have a tougher skin, then we have a different definition of courage.
And I say this without making a moral judgement, maybe severe punishment from deviancy served as a societal glue that allowed to thrive despite the material hardships, or perhaps a case can be made on the pathological aspect of having real hardships and still devoting so much time on irrelevant stuff. Still my point is that I don't think people got any less offended than nowdays, and perhaps watching today's punishments on the offenders, maybe that's one indicator where we are getting better.
> I do know however that people that had those things happen to them in real-time history and in their full horror, were much more resilient, courageous, and could even shrug them off.
This is wildly untrue and outrageously offensive. Do you really think this? What evidence do you have for this? Today's youth are experiencing their own valid forms of discrimination, hate and violence fed by trolls and you are no judge of their pain. And why are you doing this whataboutism with the past anyway? What do you have to gain from saying lambasting those who suffer and whom with you share so little you can surely hardly understand their circumstance?
> The touchy feely, safe-space demanding people today, who get discouraged or hysterical for 1/1000th the offense done to them,
Who are these people? Do they really exist? I think you have made up, invented an enemy towards which you are directing these statements.
> are a regression and an insult to those people (whose actual sacrifices and efforts gave the rights to the snowflakes of today).
How on earth? Everyone I know today who cares to improve society is trying to avoid the atrocities of the past. Positing that reasonable discourse, backed by facts and logic, with an avoidance of 'trolling' and bad-faith acting, is a direct attempt to reduce the suffering and pain of the future so that we can avoid such horrible things from the past from happening again.
Your callous dismissal of today's youth looking to improve the world by reducing the spread of hatred and violence is exactly the kind of thing that enabled such horrid violence in the past.
We can see history rhyming. We can see the genocides being committed around the world, fed and enabled by trolls, and we are trying to stop it from happening. We are trying to slow down the intentional suffering hoist upon minorities today by reducing the online vitriol and hatred that creates such physical horror.
> This is wildly untrue and outrageously offensive.
Oh no, it's definitely true.
If not, can you give me a modern equivalent to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weary_Dunlop ?
Prisoner of War under the Japanese for three years, suffering horrific conditions.
After the war "Dunlop forgave his captors and turned his energies to the task of healing and building."
>This is wildly untrue and outrageously offensive. Do you really think this? What evidence do you have for this?
This is wildly true, and 100% not offensive.
I've talked to such people, I'm in a country with actual historical scars and full of people that went through extreme hardships, I've interviewed dozens of them people, I've read tons of historical accounts, interviews, and so on.
>Today's youth are experiencing their own valid forms of discrimination, hate and violence fed by trolls and you are no judge of their pain
Well, I can be the judge of their pain (it's a free universe), and I can tell you that their pain of "discrimination, hate, and violence caused by trolls" is nothing compared to war, civil war, dictatorship, genocide, torture, and so on (all of which experienced numerous times in the last 100 years in my country).
It's a sad state of affairs that this has to even be spelt out, or that people think someone being called names by online trolls, or harassed at school for being X, or whatever, is as serious and as important as those kinds of events.
I've banned this account until we get some indication that you intend to stop taking HN threads further into flamewar. Would you please stop creating accounts to do that with?
As the guidelines explain, this is not a site for ideological and political battle. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
>The pain the trolls are creating is directly causing war, discrimination, dictatorship, genocide. And regardless, there is no need to obsess over who "had it worse" or whatever.
Not really.
From the native Americans to Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, the US (and Western Europe and USSR for that matter) did war, genocide, discrimination, segregation, slavery, and so on, very well, on a huge scale, without trolls.
Trolls are absolutely insignificant in causing "war, discrimination, dictatorship, genocide".
If anything, our "troll heavy" days are much better in all of the above terms.
And if you mean the infamous "Kremlin trolls", those are just the fad of the day, to point them blame on someone. The US had and will again do its thing in the middle east for oil, regardless of what some Facebook troll says. And they'll compete and go to trade war with China for their private interests, regardless of what Twitter says.
The argument here is "I shouldn't avoid emotionally traumatizing you because at some point, someone else in the future may emotionally traumatize you".
Perhaps there's a case to be made for exposing people to controversial or offensive ideas in a controlled environment to prepare for encountering them in an uncontrolled environment - in fact, this is frequently called a "safe space" and ridiculed by people who believe that modern societies are too "snow-flakey"!
But that's certainly not what internet trolls are doing.
> It's like going out in life expecting padded roads, walls, and everything, lest you ever get hurt...
What? How offensive.
Let me be clear, then. The United States is committing a genocide against minorities as we speak and it is enabled and emboldened by "trolls". This is not touchy-feely. This is children in cages, separated illegally from their families and put into places of extreme disrepair, unhealthy conditions, etc, while the President goes on TV to state that machine guns would be a more "effective solution".
This is not touchy feely or snowflaky stuff and I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. What I'm talking about are trolls going online an on TV to spread messages of hate and cruelty. This directly results in human suffering and death of innocent people.
There is no logic behind talking about using machine guns to kill people who are trying to legally migrate to your country. To make those statements is to wage a weapon of war and to do it online and on TV en masse is a new kind of trolling that is physically dangerous.
Your ..... dismissal of the problems of youth....and use of .... to not finish...sentences makes it difficult to understand your point.
Trolling in the modern era has nothing to do with any of this "touchy feely" or "snow-flakey" rubbish.
It has to do with enabling genocide. Trolls normalize bad behavior to the point where it goes unpunished. Bad behavior to the extreme, unpunished from the top, for years on end, can and does result in really bad things like genocide.
I'm not making leaps here. This is real, it is physical, it is urgent, and it matters.
> using machine guns to kill people who are trying to legally migrate to your country. To make those statements is to wage a weapon of war and to do it online and on TV en masse is a new kind of trolling that is physically dangerous.
Nobody is doing any of this and I am perfectly happy to dismiss such ridiculous claims.
This is not real. This is not physical. Nobody is machine gunning down people at the mexico border.
You you are the one who is engaging in trolling and lies by spreading such a message around.
>Let me be clear, then. The United States is committing a genocide against minorities as we speak and it is enabled and emboldened by "trolls". This is not touchy-feely.
The United States has committed some soft of genocide or another since the days of the Native Americans. That's not touchy feely.
Crying about this or that opinion being published, or whether a coworker can make or not make a comment, or what group is the more victimized for BS offenses (where usually the crying is made white middle/upper middle class self-appointed spokepersons) is.
And I'm not talking about the "children in cages" either. This is obviously not a kind of "touchy feely" issue.
Plus, the "children in cages" has been going on since forever one way or another. My people were hunted by the KKK back in the 20s and 30s for not being white enough. I've written (in other places) about the Mexican immigrants fueling the California agricultural sector, and how they're exploited and sent away when bosses are done with them (eg. the strawberry picking business).
Even the Wall is nothing new, there has been a wall, beatings, and killings at the border well before Trump. Now it's just fashionable to speak against it (because Trump), whereas under Obama 2 million could be deported and it was OK (and it didn't involve as many children imprisoned, so late night talk shows didn't feel the need to cover it).
Still, I'm not an American myself. But the hypocrisy is strong, as if all those "good souls" care about the "children in cages".
There are "children in cages" all over Europe, in camps for immigrants (where they're not allowed to leave):
>Your ..... dismissal of the problems of youth....and use of .... to not finish...sentences makes it difficult to understand your point.
You could replace "..." with "." in my comment, and nothing would change of its point. Instead you've chose to point an inconsequential stylistic issue, and exaggerate it to death.
Let's make my point even clearer: aside from general economic prospects (college debt and so on), there are no serious "problems of youth" in 2019 in the USA in the white middle/upper middle-class population that cries about being "traumatized" the most. It literally never had been better trauma-wise, today when people cry the most about it, for anything and everything.
And I don't expect you to agree with this assessment. That's my opinion, it's a free universe.
> Crying about this or that opinion being published,
I have absolutely never once in my life seen someone cry over an opinion being published. I have, however, seen hundreds of people complain about others 'crying', or 'literally shaking' but I have never seen it once happen and I have been looking. I honestly think such people do not exist. Can you cite any? This is surely not the cultural phenomenon you make it out to be.
> Plus, the "children in cages" has been going on since forever one way or another.
Something happening in the past does not make it okay to happen today. Are you suggesting that nobody should protest children being put in cages, simply because it has happened before? I don't understand. Since it has happened before, and it's awful, and it's happening again right now, don't you think we should stand up and stay that it should be stopped?
> Even the Wall is nothing new, there has been a wall, beatings, and killings at the border well before Trump.
Again, just because something isn't new doesn't have any bearing on it being bad or not. In fact I think it emphasizes how important these issues are. They persist and we must fight against them fully.
> Now it's just fashionable to speak against it (because Trump), whereas under Obama 2 million could be deported and it was OK (and it didn't involve as many children imprisoned, so late night talk shows didn't feel the need to cover it)
What are you talking about? Putting children in cages, family removals, etc of legal immigrants is completely different from deportations of illegal immigrants.
Are you suggesting nobody should speak out against these atrocities or try to avoid them happening in the first place, simply because they have happened before? I don't get it.
> There are "children in cages" all over Europe, in camps for immigrants (where they're not allowed to leave)
That sounds awful. Everyone should be protesting this everywhere. Everyone should aim to avoid the circumstances that allow this to happen: chief among them is trolling.
>I have absolutely never once in my life seen someone cry over an opinion being published.
Well, I've seen then cry, demand it's unpublished, demand the person writing it is fired, and so on.
>I have, however, seen hundreds of people complain about others 'crying', or 'literally shaking' but I have never seen it once happen and I have been looking.
Well, perhaps not looking unbiased enough.
>Something happening in the past does not make it okay to happen today.
Which I didn't say in the first place. My point is that as an old thing this is not related to the recent touchy-feely behavior I spoke against. (Nor of course are the people kept in cages, or the people who complain about them, are complaining about touchy feely issues).
>Are you suggesting nobody should speak out against these atrocities or try to avoid them happening in the first place, simply because they have happened before? I don't get it.
No, there are two threads here: 1) tons of younger people today complain about touchy feely issues, and 2) most younger people complain about these serious issues only when it becomes fashionable (e.g. now under Trump or previously under Bush, not before under Obama or Clinton).
I argue that (1) the touchy feely issues should be dropped, and (2) the important issues should be complained all the time, not when it's in vogue.
>That sounds awful. Everyone should be protesting this everywhere. Everyone should aim to avoid the circumstances that allow this to happen: chief among them is trolling.
Trolling is nowhere in the list of things that "allow this to happen".
Capitalism, EU immigration policies, hypocrisy, exploitation, and other things are.
You really need a citation? Go look on social media for yourself, and the kind of trending complain posts. Or college campuses for that matter. Or youth oriented news outlets.
>And anyway, if it were true, why would that be bad?
Well, because for me people should be more resilience, less hysteric, and more adult. That's why. And because a society of touchy-feelers is a crippled society.
Also the world is not a safe space, and life is not a Disney movie. People unprepared for it will only fail more, be more gullible, and make a mess of things (like an idiot who thinks all animals are like cute pets, and gets eaten by a wild animal).
>Oh wow that is so wrong and so offensive to boot. These are straight up lies. You have no backing to this
Yeah, I don't have "backing", e.g. some expert report by scientists, saying "Only 21% of the people complained about this under Obama, but 87% under Trump", and "67.4% didn't care, they just show it on some media, and will drop it again, when it's not trending anymore", as if those things exist.
I only have my grasp of reality and observation skills. And my experience dealing with such things, and being involved with people across different decades, and seeing people jump on bandwagons, and going off again when it's not trendy anymore.
>> I argue that (1) the touchy feely issues should be dropped,
>> Wait. You are arguing that young people should be banned from discussing topics of their interest?! A total ban on free speech for the youth? what do you mean by this?*
No, I'm saying that touchy feely issues should be dropped (e.g. voluntarily discarded by those peddling them).
That said, your (strawman) suggestion is not bad. "A total ban on free speech for the youth" could be a good plan to me, if somewhat heavy handed. They can listen, learn and understand first, speak later (e.g. after 25 or so).
As Bertolt Brecht once wrote (as a standing judge for a collection of crappy poems from young poets on social issues, most full of melodrama and naivety), "People shouldn't be allowed to write poems until they've completed their army service" (referring to the mandatory general conscription at his era, at around 18 y.o. or so, synonymous to becoming an adult).
I'm half joking, though B.B did say that. But the point is that people should be able to listen to such suggestions and be "offended" without screaming bloody murder and run for "safe spaces".
That is just not true. Broader definitions are actually very useful when you're trying to describe general principles (like in law) — using a word that's too narrowly defined can limit the scope of what you're saying.
That's the difference between a principle and a definition, law has both - criminal offenses for example are more defined than the principle of tort, the more you want something to be useful as an accusation the more narrowly defined it needs to be or you just end up with a moral panic.
If I may add to this, the vāda usually composes of 3 parts.
1. Purva paksha.
2. Khandana
3. Uttara paksha.
Purva paksha which literally translates prior view is when the debater should talk from the opponent's perspective. This has to be confirmed by the opponent, which proves that the debater has understood the opponent's view point.
Then comes khandana, which is the actual opposing view point that the debater puts forward refuting the view point of the opponent.
The last is Uttara paksha, the opinion of the debater. (Or siddhānta as mentioned in this article)
Two non-technical (somewhat accessible to the general public) sources I've found are:
1. The book “Religions, Reasons, and Gods” by the late John Clayton has many interesting essays that touch on the vāda tradition. One of his interesting points is that the goal of dialogue need not be consensus or establishing common ground, but simply the “clarification of defensible difference”: understanding the other party better, and coming to shared understanding of what our differences are. Some of it is also touched on in his lecture here: http://www.bu.edu/religion/mar25-98/
2. Elaborating on the jalpa/vitaṇḍa mentioned in this article, the nyāya tradition recognized a long list of logical fallacies and poor arguments that were grounds for losing a (formal) debate. A list I've found is in the paper “Twenty-Two Ways to Lose a Debate” (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-009-9083-y) which also carries out some comparison with the ideas of Grice.