December Days 2022 #26: Opinionated
Dec. 26th, 2022 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[What's December Days this year? Taking a crowdsourced list of adjectives and seeing if I can turn them into saying good things about myself. Or at least good things to talk about.]
I'm pretty sure most of you have seen what happens when I Have Opinions about things. Most of my upbringing and professional training is based in a paradigm that says when you want to argue and refute and do philosophical things, the correct way of going about it is burying a fool in citations and the words and arguments of others and letting the weight of all those words against them crush them, slowly or swiftly, until they admit error and yield. The hardest part about that form of argument is that whole it's supposed to be two or more people engaging with each other, the whole thing is usually for the audience. Papers written and published are usually for the audience, and so are most of the forums and panels. Because the point is to become the person quoted by others, which gives you authority in your field.
This kind of argument style can lead to the definition of flaming that I left off in the earlier post, one borne of the BBS and the email list, and other methods where the threaded reply was the primary structure in place, and there were far fewer algorithms making decisions about where particular posts should be shown. Flame wars happened here and there, usually when strong opinions butted heads with each other and then started making appeals to moderators or dug in with personal and usually off-topic attacks about a person. I didn't do a whole lot of the flame wars or the ship wars, being both late to discussing and seeking out fandom and mostly curating my spaces so as not to draw flames. It's only pretty recently that I've had to think about how to respond to people who have made decisions to make public comments about how they dislike or take issue with my fic or my interpretations of characters. Politics and my philosophy toward who belongs in a library and its collections, much more of that and more frequently. I feel like much of the flame war's prominence vanished with the implementation of the quote tweet, because rather than grandstand in front of your audience by engaging with your target, the quote tweet lets you grandstand directly to your audience and then let them do any engaging they want. It's a far more effective way of harnessing harassing energy and sending it out, rather than having to engage them everywhere and to hope that your audience will also make posts and replies and hound someone all over the forum until they disappear. With push notifications, it's also easier for each person's attack to be felt, rather than rapidly scrolling through several replies of the same thing until the next substantive point appears.
Most people argue for an unseen audience on the Internet. If they are arguing for an audience in person, it's usually a more direct one, trying to convince someone they know and sometimes, in limited situations, signaling whether you are safe for someone in the audience to confide in or be more open with outside of this specific situation. It's also pretty well-documented that fighting with citations and facts, bringing reality and truth to the fight, tends to backfire horribly. When confronted with the evidence that someone is wrong, the wrong beliefs often get more deeply entrenched instead of dug up and replaced with the better material. It's what makes a conspiracy theory difficult to defeat - the nebulousness that allows anything and everything to be evidence of the truth, and that most conspiracy theories learn into the idea that anything that shows the conspiracy is untrue becomes "fake news" or evidence that the conspiracy reaches farther and deeper than previously thought. After a while, the amount of damage to the self that might come from admitting to being wrong can be too much, and then it takes the possibility of even bigger damage from persistence in being wrong before change can happen.
As Fred Clark points out, sometimes the refusal to admit that you have enabled something monstrous and beyond what you supposedly wanted means you end up voting for something even more monstrous because you assume that this time, you'll only get what you personally wanted, instead of what they say they're going to do. And the cycle begins again, because most people want to believe, even in the face of the evidence, that there are going to be sensible exceptions and precautions put in place, that nothing will be enacted to that kind of strictness, that there will surely be exceptions in practice, even if there are none in the letter of the law and there are none in the execution and practice of what the law demands. It becomes frustrating when the argument is trying to scope itself down to "the thing you did, the thing these people you support did, the thing your friend did, the thing the person on the television is advocating for, they are harmful and awful" and there is an immediate conflation of "the thing is bad" with "you, the person, are bad." Sometimes those things are meant to be conflated, but it usually happens after several demonstrations that a person who did a bad act has no remorse about it, or not enough remorse or desire to change. "This person is evil" is a statement that they are beyond help, beyond convincing of change, and otherwise not worth the argument, because there's no point in arguing with them. Evil people cannot be trusted with resources, power, or any other thing that would allow them to be evil toward someone else. Evil people act in bad faith and should not be given any possibility of a doubt or other motivation to their action other than the worst ones.
Most of the arguments that happen between people who have social links with each other beyond professional correspondence and sniping at each other in their academic writings forego the citation method, except as suggestions for a thing to read or as a way of trying to put a human touch on something that is normally an abstract concept. Sometimes, a way of making progress on an argument or an issue is to get someone to go from an undifferentiated Them to a Them with exceptions. (The plural is important, in my experience. A single exception usually makes it a "still Them, but you're cool" situation.) Put enough exceptions, enough consistent stories in front of someone, especially if you are part of those stories and exceptions, and it's possible you might be able to move someone's opinion on the matter. The connection you make with a person may be the thing that helps move them in a better direction.
Putting in the effort for all of this is, frankly, exhausting. It takes far less effort and often feels more satisfying to dunk savagely on someone for their ignorance or malice, especially public figures who are often proud of or running their campaigns on ignorance and malice. Their positions need refuting, their arguments need dismantling, their ignorance and malice needs to be guarded against, deflected, or pushed aside from its target. But many of the people who understand what they are doing and are proud to do it anyway feed on the ratio. It allows them to adopt the position of the persecuted victim and claim there must be something that's right about their position if so many of Them are so clearly unhappy about it. It's transparent manipulation of an audience that's likely to be predisposed to sympathy toward them because of systemic biases. It's not fair, and they've spent a lot of time and effort to make sure it's not fair and stays that way.
Sometimes the winning play in a situation where you will be outnumbered is not to light the fuse and dynamite everything, but to find the people who might be sympathetic and work them individually, away from the pressure to put up a united front. Sometimes the right action is to light the fuse and blow everything up, because that's the level of consequences needed to get through. (And if that's not going to work, sometimes we need to see that before we are willing to admit to ourselves that our efforts are not working at this time and there will have to be growth and change from them before putting in more time and energy toward the argument.) We are not obligated to keep trying against something that only exhausts us and there is no sign of progress on that front, even if it completely offends our belief in a universe where people listen to logic and reasoning.
- opinionated (comparative more opinionated, superlative most opinionated)
- Having very strong opinions.
- Holding to one's own opinion obstinately and unreasonably.
I'm pretty sure most of you have seen what happens when I Have Opinions about things. Most of my upbringing and professional training is based in a paradigm that says when you want to argue and refute and do philosophical things, the correct way of going about it is burying a fool in citations and the words and arguments of others and letting the weight of all those words against them crush them, slowly or swiftly, until they admit error and yield. The hardest part about that form of argument is that whole it's supposed to be two or more people engaging with each other, the whole thing is usually for the audience. Papers written and published are usually for the audience, and so are most of the forums and panels. Because the point is to become the person quoted by others, which gives you authority in your field.
This kind of argument style can lead to the definition of flaming that I left off in the earlier post, one borne of the BBS and the email list, and other methods where the threaded reply was the primary structure in place, and there were far fewer algorithms making decisions about where particular posts should be shown. Flame wars happened here and there, usually when strong opinions butted heads with each other and then started making appeals to moderators or dug in with personal and usually off-topic attacks about a person. I didn't do a whole lot of the flame wars or the ship wars, being both late to discussing and seeking out fandom and mostly curating my spaces so as not to draw flames. It's only pretty recently that I've had to think about how to respond to people who have made decisions to make public comments about how they dislike or take issue with my fic or my interpretations of characters. Politics and my philosophy toward who belongs in a library and its collections, much more of that and more frequently. I feel like much of the flame war's prominence vanished with the implementation of the quote tweet, because rather than grandstand in front of your audience by engaging with your target, the quote tweet lets you grandstand directly to your audience and then let them do any engaging they want. It's a far more effective way of harnessing harassing energy and sending it out, rather than having to engage them everywhere and to hope that your audience will also make posts and replies and hound someone all over the forum until they disappear. With push notifications, it's also easier for each person's attack to be felt, rather than rapidly scrolling through several replies of the same thing until the next substantive point appears.
Most people argue for an unseen audience on the Internet. If they are arguing for an audience in person, it's usually a more direct one, trying to convince someone they know and sometimes, in limited situations, signaling whether you are safe for someone in the audience to confide in or be more open with outside of this specific situation. It's also pretty well-documented that fighting with citations and facts, bringing reality and truth to the fight, tends to backfire horribly. When confronted with the evidence that someone is wrong, the wrong beliefs often get more deeply entrenched instead of dug up and replaced with the better material. It's what makes a conspiracy theory difficult to defeat - the nebulousness that allows anything and everything to be evidence of the truth, and that most conspiracy theories learn into the idea that anything that shows the conspiracy is untrue becomes "fake news" or evidence that the conspiracy reaches farther and deeper than previously thought. After a while, the amount of damage to the self that might come from admitting to being wrong can be too much, and then it takes the possibility of even bigger damage from persistence in being wrong before change can happen.
As Fred Clark points out, sometimes the refusal to admit that you have enabled something monstrous and beyond what you supposedly wanted means you end up voting for something even more monstrous because you assume that this time, you'll only get what you personally wanted, instead of what they say they're going to do. And the cycle begins again, because most people want to believe, even in the face of the evidence, that there are going to be sensible exceptions and precautions put in place, that nothing will be enacted to that kind of strictness, that there will surely be exceptions in practice, even if there are none in the letter of the law and there are none in the execution and practice of what the law demands. It becomes frustrating when the argument is trying to scope itself down to "the thing you did, the thing these people you support did, the thing your friend did, the thing the person on the television is advocating for, they are harmful and awful" and there is an immediate conflation of "the thing is bad" with "you, the person, are bad." Sometimes those things are meant to be conflated, but it usually happens after several demonstrations that a person who did a bad act has no remorse about it, or not enough remorse or desire to change. "This person is evil" is a statement that they are beyond help, beyond convincing of change, and otherwise not worth the argument, because there's no point in arguing with them. Evil people cannot be trusted with resources, power, or any other thing that would allow them to be evil toward someone else. Evil people act in bad faith and should not be given any possibility of a doubt or other motivation to their action other than the worst ones.
Most of the arguments that happen between people who have social links with each other beyond professional correspondence and sniping at each other in their academic writings forego the citation method, except as suggestions for a thing to read or as a way of trying to put a human touch on something that is normally an abstract concept. Sometimes, a way of making progress on an argument or an issue is to get someone to go from an undifferentiated Them to a Them with exceptions. (The plural is important, in my experience. A single exception usually makes it a "still Them, but you're cool" situation.) Put enough exceptions, enough consistent stories in front of someone, especially if you are part of those stories and exceptions, and it's possible you might be able to move someone's opinion on the matter. The connection you make with a person may be the thing that helps move them in a better direction.
Putting in the effort for all of this is, frankly, exhausting. It takes far less effort and often feels more satisfying to dunk savagely on someone for their ignorance or malice, especially public figures who are often proud of or running their campaigns on ignorance and malice. Their positions need refuting, their arguments need dismantling, their ignorance and malice needs to be guarded against, deflected, or pushed aside from its target. But many of the people who understand what they are doing and are proud to do it anyway feed on the ratio. It allows them to adopt the position of the persecuted victim and claim there must be something that's right about their position if so many of Them are so clearly unhappy about it. It's transparent manipulation of an audience that's likely to be predisposed to sympathy toward them because of systemic biases. It's not fair, and they've spent a lot of time and effort to make sure it's not fair and stays that way.
Sometimes the winning play in a situation where you will be outnumbered is not to light the fuse and dynamite everything, but to find the people who might be sympathetic and work them individually, away from the pressure to put up a united front. Sometimes the right action is to light the fuse and blow everything up, because that's the level of consequences needed to get through. (And if that's not going to work, sometimes we need to see that before we are willing to admit to ourselves that our efforts are not working at this time and there will have to be growth and change from them before putting in more time and energy toward the argument.) We are not obligated to keep trying against something that only exhausts us and there is no sign of progress on that front, even if it completely offends our belief in a universe where people listen to logic and reasoning.
