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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   24722 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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I definitely recognize the behavior in your story, but my reaction is less that it's a rejection of someone being annoying, and more the rejection of an inconvenient argument by fixating on the single least-defensible sentence or part of a sentence in the entire post, while ignoring the rest.

I feel like the very basic design feature of

quoted text

ends up encouraging this behavior a lot. It's such a convenient and coherent way to reply to a post that many people (myself included) use it as the primary organizational scheme for their replies to comments. But it carries a great danger of making it feel natural to pick out individual sentences and only reply to those, either taking them out of context of the overall argument or else only engaging with the weakest or less-central parts of the argument.

And it doesn't help when people (laudably!) like to write very long and engaged posts that cover a lot of ground, making it harder to hold everything about it in your head and respond to the whole gestalt at once, and easier to glaze over and skim stuff until you see a sentence that pops out at you.

I do this myself more than I want to, it's a bad habit that's easy to fall into. And I feel like a lot of people do it when responding to me, and it gets frustrating. It is especially harmful when people are trying to talk across the aisle on some issue, because they ussually have a pre-cached response to at least one sentence in the other side's comment, and firing that off in response to a single quoted sentence really feels like contributing!

But, yeah, I think it limits discussion and is pretty bad for the health of the site.

But it carries a great danger of making it feel natural to pick out individual sentences and only reply to those, either taking them out of context of the overall argument or else only engaging with the weakest or less-central parts of the argument.

Yeah, I realized that the post that I got AAQC'd for last month had exactly that problem—I looked at the specific sentences and mostly failed to address the overall argument or look at them in the context (hopefully at least partly fixed in my next one in that chain). It's easy enough to do.

In defense of using quoted texts, I think it’s actually a pretty helpful feature in arguments because it helps the future readers know exactly what parts of the argument I’m talking about in my response. The post is there for readers to refer back to as needed, which works pretty well to keep people honest. I think my personal rule of using the whole paragraph is useful for me in preventing quote mining and taking things out of context.

It's such a convenient and coherent way to reply to a post that many people (myself included) use it as the primary organizational scheme for their replies to comments. But it carries a great danger of making it feel natural to pick out individual sentences and only reply to those, either taking them out of context of the overall argument or else only engaging with the weakest or less-central parts of the argument.

This may sound bad, but I'm more interested in making my own points than in proving someone else's points wrong. I'll often respond to a particular point, not to nitpick, but to add to the discussion with a point I think is valuable enough to be worth saying.

The more common case is a middle ground between what you describe and what I describe, where someone uses a particular sentence as a jumping-off point to make their own point which actually responds to the general vibe of the entire comment. It could say "here's where you're wrong", "the error in this sentence is representative of an error you make throughout your comment", or "here's the best place to chime in with something you've missed."

The only real issue is when the reply is a sort of reverse gish-gallop where a single slight inaccuracy supposedly proves your whole point wrong. I don't honestly think we have much of an issue with that though.

Fixating on the least defensible sentence is also a defense against Gish gallops, where the author will of course tell you that whichever of the 25 arguments you refuted is the least defensible one.

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