Jeff Dee said, We live in a nation where people who do not care think they are superior to people who do. I think thats often true. Its called some other thoughts to my mind, on how to try to undo this situation. ----- I think its OKAY to not be excited about the things I care about. I wont automatically think somebody is a dope UNLESS they also go out of their way to denigrate people who care about it, in an attempt to validate their own apathy. Bonus contempt if they reveal they dont actually know much about the subject yet they have enough energy to post a dozen replies on Facebook. I think thats a fair judgment. I have a similar problem with attempts to hijack a thread by claiming something else is more important. I call this Duelling Issues. It looks something like this: How can you talk about the way people dont tip at a sit-down restaurant when the BEES are dying?! Somebodys just thrown in what a bunch of famous dead Romans would have called a non sequitur. In plain English, its something that was irrelevant to the matter at hand. If theres an informal debate/discussion/argument going on, call it a Fallacy. If I say that bees are irrelevant it can sound like Im attacking their position. I dont mean to say that what theyve mentioned is unimportant. If I point out that somebodys just laid a big turd of a non sequitur right in the middle of the thread, I can come off as patronizing. Im the bad guy. In the eyes of the people who are very familiar with the non sequitur concept, Im patronizing, arrogant for pointing out something so obvious. So, a non sequitur often gets ignored-- by the very people who come from a slightly more sophisticated culture where everybody already knows what a non sequitur is and why you shouldnt do it. In the eyes of the person who isnt familiar with what a non sequitur is, they havent done anything wrong. They wonder why they are receiving no validation for what might be a valid point- if expressed on its own, rather than a conversation with an established subject, flow. Through no fault of their own, theyre kind of oblivious. They come from a background where theyve never discussed what a fallacy is, nor were they taught at least 75 of them as a matter of course. If nobody tells them, theyll never know why they keep getting treated like a second-class citizen when they try to take part in discussions but their comments keep being ignored. ----- We live in a nation where people who do not care think they are superior to people who do. ----- Jeff has reminded me, everybody has things they care about more, and things they care about less. If someone is not for your position, that doesnt automatically make them against you. Thats another Fallacy, called the false dichotomy. Sometimes theres more than just two possibilities. Somebody can be neutral on a subject. And if they are, they dont deserve to be treated as if they were anti. Jeff suggests that its sometimes more constructive not to slam them for the crime of thread-crapping, but instead, to reassure them that while Im speaking strongly on an issue, this is not a witch-hunt to shame or persecute those people who arent activists for THAT issue. Sometimes when someone goes out of their way to announce how they dont care, its because theyre insecure. It can mean theyre defensive as a reflex to how theyve been treated previously. Theres a less-sophisticated culture out there where If youre not for us, youre against us is the norm. Regardless of where its coming from, I think its worth our effort to disassemble and discard this harmful meme. Knowledge of fallacies isnt just about arguing better. It frequently has an immediate positive effect on our day-to-day lives. ----- From time to time, somebody will introduce a non-sequitur in a *deliberate* attempt to derail the argument. This seems to be another meme from Planet Less Sophisticated. The person doing it honestly thinks they are doing the right thing, trying to be the peacemaker, trying to defuse conflict. They have a belief that arguments are inherently a bad thing. Its something like this: If youre disagreeing, youre wasting time and youre irritating everyone else. Everything important has already been decided. Not changing your mind is a virtue; no one EVER changes their mind. Therefore, heated discussion is futile. So stop fighting. An unavoidable corollary of this outlook is that being willing to strongly disagree, in public, for any extended amount of time, is somehow immoral. I think that this is the source of our situation where people who do not care think they are superior to people who do. They admire the ability to let that with which you disagree, slide like water off a Zen-coated ducks back. Its characterized as maturity. While I think self-control is important, I dont think holding your peace is automatically virtuous. To undo this situation, the people who make a loud verbal demonstration of not caring need to be brought into the rest of the world where the norms of discussion are more complicated. Non sequiturs, ad hominems, false dichotomies, slothful inductions, circumstantial evidence treated as actual, argument from anecdote, argument from ignorance....blah blah blah... If folks dont learn these customs, theyll remain uncomfortable with debate. They arent normally a part of U.S. public school education, and (with exceptions) theyre even less a part of private school education. Theyre usually taught in the first year at college if you are going into a field thats science- or mathematics-oriented. Everybody tends to learn a bit of it school of the streets on the Internet but the difference between people who were formally taught and those who sorta picked it up is often striking. (Ive always feared a situation in our society where there are the Computer-Haves versus the Computer-Have-Nots. Sometimes I wonder if the Understands-Debate versus the Never-Learned-Debate populations are already a reflection of this kind of a situation.) I suppose we ALSO live in a nation where people who care often think they are superior to people who do not. More understanding is called for. If someone is not for your issue, that doesnt necessarily mean theyre against it. You can be disappointed; thats natural; but try not to be hostile or condescending: browbeating and namecalling are both, themselves, fallacies. Whether or not somebody can hold their own in discussion is often a result of what they happened to be exposed to in their background, not necessarily their intelligence or their empathy. Remember that it feels exactly like being thrown into a regulation NBA game of basketball but nobody ever explained what Traveling is-- and then suddenly everybody is yelling at you. Its tough not to view the world as Uss and Thems. Remember that everybody starts out not knowing how to debate. Where they are, you were once there, too-- and it doesnt end. I mentioned the number 75. The not-yet-educated-in-debate person knows about 40. There arent just 75, there are far more. Some are less commonly encountered. Some are newly described. A high school debater would tend to know maybe 100. Someone who deals with scientific contention and controversy should perhaps know about 150. If you happen to like podcasts, maybe check out this site. There are yet more fallacies to learn to recognize. The Nirvana Fallacy? Kettle Logic? And hey-- maybe youll see a fallacy or two you actually recognize-- but you just didnt know it had a name.
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 05:25:42 +0000
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