This is when you preempt that with which you would disagree by stating your case in such a way as to elicit quick disagreement (in the form of DH0 to DH6). Usually done by noticing a subset of all data, forming a hypothesis to explain only that subset, and presenting it as a conclusion. Often done without even realizing it.
The relational database model is dead.
There is no future in enterprise software.
<Language du jour> is clearly the best.
No one else is doing <xyz>, so it must be a deadend.
I think the Flamebaiting category is a useful addition to PG's hierarchy.
The new category brings to mind an interesting property of this hierarchy though, namely that it seems to be difficult to respond to an "argument" with a higher order technique than that which was originally presented. For example, if one were disagreeing with a purely ad hominem rant, one would find it futile and nearly impossible to disagree with the rant at any higher level; how can one truly refute an argument that has no central point? It's somewhat depressing because, if true, it implies that a discussion is upper bounded at the level of discourse that initiated the discussion.
The way out of this, as far as I can tell, is recognizing that statements are not made in a vacuum. Sometimes the only way to raise the level of discourse is to engage in a sort of meta-disagreement. In other words, sometimes the point of a statement is not the content, but the context. While it works to classify criticisms of tone, for example, as weak if one were dealing with a substantive argument, the metadata (tone, speaker, etc) around the content of a non-argument may allow one to say something intelligent about the statement by tying it to the broader context in which it was made.
It's possible, you just have to remember that there are many more lurkers than posters in any given discussion and write for the benefit of the lurkers that have not yet chosen a DH level.
Actually, I've used this as a fairly effective technique for arresting flamewars. It doesn't always work, but when it does, subsequent posts are usually at the DH level of your own response rather than that of the parent comment.
The key seems to be drawing 3rd-party onlookers in before the original flamer responds. If someone else responds to your comment at a high DH level, the original flamer has a choice. He can respond to your comment with another flame, which makes him look stupid and petty because there's a sibling comment that's much more well-reasoned. He can respond with a real argument, in which case you've raised the level of discourse. Or he can go away, which seems to be what happens most of the time. Regardless of what he does, you're free to ignore his reply and continue responding to the person who engages you with actual arguments.
A corollary is that educated, rational lurkers hold a lot of power on discussion boards. If you don't get directly involved in arguments but instead cherry-pick the comments you respond to, you can set the whole tone for a community.
BTW, the same trick works in face-to-face conversations, as long as there are more than 2 people involved. The person who asks the questions controls the conversation, by virtue of which questions they choose to ask. And the person who sits back and shuts up controls whose ideas get developed, by virtue of who they choose to respond to. That's why the quietest person at a meeting usually controls it, as long as they're not just a passive onlooker.
Your comment gave me a crazy idea. What if one was to respond to a flamebait with a counterargument or refutation, and then create another username and add another intelligent comment that contradicted the first one you posted? So then the thread would look like this:
1. Original flamebait
2. Congent response to flamebait (posted by you using username 1)
3. Congent response to post 2 (posted by you using username 2)
This might be slightly unethical, but it means that the original flamer will always be dissuaded from posting again, and you're more likely to get more congent discussion participants.
If using multiple usernames bothers you, you could probably just check yourself with a small counterargument at the end of post 2, and it seems likely that the original flamer would still be dissuaded.
The problem with this proposal is that it ignores the fundamental problem behind any flamebait: that flamebait qua flamebait is not _intended_ as serious discussion, nor as a prelude to serious discussion.
The proven technique for dealing with flamebait is to tag it immediately for what it is, and not waste any reader's time with a detailed discussion of an idea that is not even worthy of refutation.
And yes, even Aristotle in the Topics agreed that there are propositions/arguments that are so silly or vain, they are not worthy of a serious refutation. Flamebait certainly counts as one of these. (BTW: I see there are Aquinas fans here, so I will point out that Aquinas expressed his agreement with this in, of all places, his commentary on the Ethics: I think it was Lecture I).
The only problem is that there really are people who are too quick to tag someone else's post as 'flamebait', even when it is not. This happens on those very topics that most need to be seriously discussed, simply because they are so important, yet so many people hold strong opinions on them, opinions that are not founded on sound logic, but on passionate attachment of one kind or another. So they are strong opinions, but they are wrong opinions. These are the
discussions that are the most difficult. They should not be attempted by amateurs. But there is no enforcing of _this_ principle on the Internet;)
Another way to not lose your time is to stop posting in troll infested comunities; I don't post on Digg anymore for that and I am now slowly fading out of Reddit for the same reason.
The problem on those sites is that their is not only poor comments but also tons of users who upmod them.
The problem on those sites is that their is not only poor comments
This is a legitimate problem, and ironically it is a symptom that a news concentrator is becoming a victim of its own success. As the signal-to-noise ratio attracts a progressively larger crowd, the types of information that are viewed as 'signal' broaden to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It's similar to hiring in a small company -- but at least in that situation you have control over the purse strings. (Even the trolls get dumber as time goes by and a site grows more popular.) Thus the comments on an arbitrary story suffer, and it requires more work to pick through them. However, if you 'listen' to subcommunities (eg. economics, programming, math on reddit) you find that (unsurprisingly) the baseline rises again. If you have no interest in those subsets, however, you're kind of out of luck. (But if you're here you already knew that)
You could probably model this as a logistic process, provided that you account for renormalizations (such as the literal renormalization that took place on reddit recently).
but also tons of users who upmod them.
This part (or at least its independent, non-interaction effect) is irrelevant; if you focus solely on people who have strong and demonstrated critical thinking skills, you can learn a great deal, and also gain a different perspective. Their input is much more harmful when it comes to filtering in or out the news to be concentrated.
Most of the interesting threads in which I have participated eventually lost the interest of the masses because they had descended into minutiae. But that's where the interesting bits lay, so that's where they went.
Ignore the riffraff. Lord knows they'll usually ignore you if you're presenting anything challenging. Even in a swamp like Slashdot, there is occasionally a perspective-changing comment that is worth reading.
If you want to expose yourself to a wide variety of opinions, you have to be willing to do a bit of work yourself, and determine which ones hold merit. It's a two-way street, in many respects, and your priorities (in addition to your time pressures) will determine how far you are willing to take it.
It appears to me that the 'social news' sites on the Web are simply recapitulating the arc of the special-interest BBS nodes and Usenet cliques of years past. Everything old is new again.
More and more I'm starting to believe that this is the best approach. It was a wise person who said never to argue with fools because, from a distance, you can't tell who's who.
It was also a wise person who said: "Never argue with an idiot, they drag you down to their level and beat you with experience".
Seasoned trolling pros are usually very good at this. I think it helps a lot to look at their underlying motivation and to crank up the bullshit detector.
It's easy to at least get to DH3 in reply to anything. For example if they say, "you are an idiot" you can contradict them (close enough) by saying, "you haven't supported that statement". If they question your tone or authority, you can contradict by saying that isn't relevant to what position is true.
edit: btw my experience is that more often than not i get downvoted if i do this
About the downvoting, maybe it's because they feel you're making a predictable contradiction to a painfully obvious inane trolling? If somebody says something like "you are an idiot", just let them get downmodded alone.
Text-based disagreements aside, I'd like to do an arc off this comment - to talk about the importance of perspective. Guess which two perspective(s) can fuel disagreement...
The God perspective (Yeah, you the expert?)
"This restaurant is the best in town"
The 2nd person perspective (Why should you know what I should do)
"You really should try this restaurant."
The 1st-person perspective (the only one you can truly own)
"I really like this restaurant. I like the cooking and I feel like I am welcome here."
I don't think perspective is that much relevant. If someone says "This restaurant is the best in town", it means that of all the other restaurants the person tried, that one is the one he likes best. You don't need to be an expert to have opinions and feelings toward things. If you don't agree that restaurant is the best you can provide info why you think the statement "this restaurant is the best in town" is wrong.
The second person perspective is just a suggestion. Of course you're free not to go there if you don't want to.
Finally, the first person perspective is just one other way to put things. In this case it's more verbose and, before the second phrase, don't even give you as much information as the god's perspective (in god's perspective you know this restaurant is the one the person likes the most, in 1st person perspective you just knows this person likes it). Saying "This restaurant is the best in town. Cooking is great and it's very welcoming." gives you at least the same information as the 1st-person perspective.
I'm saying all that because I hate see people trying to debunk an argument by picking on the guy's perspective. Stuff like "you can't state that as an absolute truth", just because you said something like "this restaurant is the best in town". If you have information that may change that opinion, please give us, otherwise, don't flood the comments with "you don't know that much". That's about the same as DH2.
DH-3.5: Disagreeing with the author's Disagreement Hierarchy.
This category is particularly troublesome, as even when both parties agree, in principle, to disagree, they may still disagree on how to disagree.
One particular nuisance is the disagreer who seeks to impose a disagreement meta-hierarchy on the problem of agreeing on a disagreement hierarchy. That way is turtles, all the way down.
Honestly I think you'd have to move his DH0 to DH-1 and then put flamebaiting as DH0. The straight up 'u r a fag!!!1' insults require much less effort than flamebait.
Although really, flamebaiting is just a more subtle way to call someone (or their idea) retarded, so maybe it's just a special (more eloquent) case of DH0.
DH-1. Flamebaiting.
This is when you preempt that with which you would disagree by stating your case in such a way as to elicit quick disagreement (in the form of DH0 to DH6). Usually done by noticing a subset of all data, forming a hypothesis to explain only that subset, and presenting it as a conclusion. Often done without even realizing it.