It seemed useful to dig into “what actually are the useful takeaways here?”, to try an prompt some more action-oriented discussion.
The particular problems Elizabeth is arguing for avoiding:
Active suppression of inconvenient questions
Ignore the arguments people are actually making
Frame control / strong implications not defended / fuzziness
Sound and fury, signifying no substantial disagreement
Bad sources, badly handled
Ignoring known falsehoods until they’re a PR problem
I left off “Taxing Facebook” because it feels like the wrong name (since it’s not really platform specific). I think the particular behavior she was commenting on there was something like “persistently bringing up your pet issue whenever a related topic comes up.”
Many of the instances here are noteworthy that a single instance of them isn’t necessarily that bad. It can be reasonable to bring up your pet issue once or twice, but if there’s a whole crowd of people who end up doing it every single time, it becomes costly enough to tax conversation and have systematic effects.
“Replying to an article as if it made a claim it didn’t really make” is likewise something that’s annoying if it just came up once, but adds up to a systemic major cost when either one person or a crowd of people are doing it over and over.
I’m not actually sure what to do about this, but it seemed like a useful frame for thinking about the problem.
It seemed useful to dig into “what actually are the useful takeaways here?”, to try an prompt some more action-oriented discussion.
The particular problems Elizabeth is arguing for avoiding:
Active suppression of inconvenient questions
Ignore the arguments people are actually making
Frame control / strong implications not defended / fuzziness
Sound and fury, signifying no substantial disagreement
Bad sources, badly handled
Ignoring known falsehoods until they’re a PR problem
I left off “Taxing Facebook” because it feels like the wrong name (since it’s not really platform specific). I think the particular behavior she was commenting on there was something like “persistently bringing up your pet issue whenever a related topic comes up.”
Many of the instances here are noteworthy that a single instance of them isn’t necessarily that bad. It can be reasonable to bring up your pet issue once or twice, but if there’s a whole crowd of people who end up doing it every single time, it becomes costly enough to tax conversation and have systematic effects.
“Replying to an article as if it made a claim it didn’t really make” is likewise something that’s annoying if it just came up once, but adds up to a systemic major cost when either one person or a crowd of people are doing it over and over.
I’m not actually sure what to do about this, but it seemed like a useful frame for thinking about the problem.