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cousin_it comments on How can we get more and better LW contrarians? - Less Wrong
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Seconding your suggestion because it's worked well for me every time I found the strength to use it. Also, when you feel really aggravated at your opponent's tone, fogging is a useful and civil-sounding technique.
For a good example, note how wonderful Wei Dai's tone consistently is, even when responding to comments where "go away you idiot" would be a quite reasonable reaction.
Worked well in what sense? David talked about netting upvotes, but surely that's not a main consideration for you at this point. I'm hoping that being nice and responding just to substance might make the other person less belligerent and a better contributor to the community. I tried this on Dmytry and it didn't work, but I wonder if it has worked in the past on others. Do you or anyone else have any anecdotes in this regard?
Avoiding flame wars. Leaving the 'contrarian' at least with the sense that some of their ideas have been heard and validated. Reducing the extent to which you yourself get caught up in negative spirals. All without enabling them or encouraging more undesired behavior.
Both you and David_Gerard seem to have taken my question as asking about the general benefits of "ignoring tone", when I was trying to figure out what cousin_it meant by "worked well", specifically whether he had succeeded in making a rude commenter less belligerent and a better contributor to the community, and also explaining why I wasn't sure what he meant.
Did you really misinterpret my question, or did you just use it as an opportunity to go off on a tangent and write something of general interest? (I'm trying to figure out if I need to be more careful about how to express myself.)
I would be interested to know what "worked well" meant more specifically as well (more specifically than "I felt personally satisfied with the conversation").
I don't seem to have done that at all.
Not only was I repling to what 'worked well' meant - in general and from what I have observed of specific recent applications here - I was discussing the use of fogging, not merely tone-ignorance.
(I remember being sort of rude or at least mildly-aggressively-uncharitable to you about a year ago and you responded saying we could clear up any misunderstandings via chat. I subsequently issued some mea culpas and was probably more charitable towards you from then on. Not sure if that counts, IIRC I was only being mildly rude.)
It nets upvotes because it produces a useful response post for the onlookers, who have the votes. This is why it's work, because it involves turning an annoying post into something of value.
Hmm, you're right, I just checked and it has never worked on rude people for me either. I must've been thinking about my exchanges with some people who were confident and confused about an issue, but not rude. Sorry.
That took forever for me to figure out. Wikipedia:Fogging.
Hmm... I just realized my standard for "taking forever" to find a piece of information is about 30 seconds. I love the future.