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sixes_and_sevens comments on Group rationality diary, 12/10/12 - Less Wrong
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In the spirit of this ridiculously chord-striking XKCD comic, I have been training myself to feel a warm sense of satisfaction whenever I don't respond to people who are wrong on the internet. It's a lot easier than I imagined. I simply visualise an angry and frustrated future version of myself, and make a better decision on his behalf.
I'm considering keeping a record of the subject of every intractable and drawn-out argument I fail to get into for subsequent review.
I've been using a version of this for a while, where I get a very satisfied feeling out of writing an angry response and then deleting it without sending. It's not that I train myself to write and then discard responses; I'd rather not write them at all and save the time. But when I catch myself having already written one, checking it before submitting, pondering what to change, I want to remember that I have the very satisfying option of deleting it all and backing out.
(I just thought that this may easily appear foolish - what's the benefit of deleting if I've already invested the time to write it, and furthermore, perhaps I'm inadvertently training myself to attempt engaging more often in order to get the satisfaction of backing out? But the thing is, for me personally the costs of writing one comment or post are dwarfed by the costs of entering a spirited debate or a flamewar. Having entered the arena, I tend to obsess over the ensuing argument, rehearse past and future responses in my head, try to predict the reply I'll get and how I'll answer it - all this even for stupid and trivial arguments. It's a gigantic time sinkhole. So remembering and valuing the option of backing out at the last moment before entering the fray is on balance hugely beneficial to me).
This is exactly the same problem I have. There are a couple of arguments I'm still having in the privacy of my own head, years after my correspondents have probably forgotten about the issue.
I generally exercise this option when going through the first draft of a response. I don't personally think this is foolish. Even if there's no value in explaining a position to the other person, there's value in explaining it to myself.
Do you have a blog?
If yes, then you could do this: Write a response, and save it. Wait one week. Read the response again, whether you still agree with what it says. If you do, publish it as an article on your blog. (If during the week you wrote more responses on the same topic, join them. If the response is too short for an article, just keep it in the database in case you will later write more reponses on the same topic.)
By doing this you could transform the response-writing impulse into something valuable, assuming that you care about blogging e.g. for reasons of status (articles are higher status than comments) or Adsense money. Waiting one week and posting on a different place than what made you angry could reduce the flamewar risk.
I do have a blog, but it won't work for this purpose (it's got way more readers than any comment flamewar I'm likely to participate in, so I'd probably create a larger flamewar in my own comments). Nice idea though.
Am I committing some sort of sin by reading your blog via Google Translate? Is there an alternative that doesn't involve my learning Russian?
I don't mind you using Google Translate, nor do I mind comments in English, if you ever feel like commenting. Unfortunately, there's no better alternative (and I'm aware of how much Google Translate can suck sometimes). I've tried in the past to blog in two languages and self-translate, and it just wouldn't work, hideously time-consuming and anti-fun.
Related: I used to have a much bigger problem tabling arguments, even if I really needed to be doing something else. (Especially pernicious if you're part of a college debate group where people think nothing of staying up til 3am talking, even if you have glassblowing class at 8:30am).
I felt like saying "I really have to go to bed, or I'll burn myself in the morning" was tantamount to "You're so much better than I am, but I'm too much of a coward to admit I'm begging off." So, what I did was to visualize the worst thing that would happen as a result of leaving the fight. In one case, I imagined my interlocutor, D_, emailing all our friends to say "I was arguing with Leah about how well fleshed out the female characters in Assassins are and she ran away because she sucks!"
One I said that explicitly to myself, it was pretty obvious that D_ wouldn't do that, and, even if he did, our mutual friends would think it was the email, not my going to bed, that was weird. And then I went to bed.
It seems far too easy for a verbal argument to morph into a degenerate crossbreed of Chicken and Last Word.
One of the most remarkable social inventions I've discovered here at LW is explicit "tapping out." Real Life needs a custom for tapping out.
I was reading Twitter today. I was tempted to create a Twitter account solely to publish a wry rebuttal to particularly obnoxious user, but then I remembered this post. Thanks for helping me resist the temptation.