
These days, a little unreasonable silence of the world actually sounds kind of nice! With apologies to Camus, I think a 21st-century Sisyphus would have been condemned to endlessly respond to annoying internet comments.
I'm not talking about outright trolling or doxxing. That's 21st-century Prometheus.
Sisyphus isn't tormented by trollish insults, but by the compulsion to engage in ambiguous forms of effortful and frustrating dialog that he knows won't lead anywhere but feels like he has to participate in anyway. He's responding to comments full of ill-informed overconfidence, self-righteous activist monoperspective, and the crappiest of drive-by criticisms, which I call PONDS ("prickly, opaque, nitpicky, disengaged, and shallow"). He himself, at some point in his life, has written a comment that's just as bad as the stupidity he's responding to, and he angrily empathizes with the other person's state of mind while wishing they'd just listen and learn! Every time he perfects his reply and hits "submit," the conversation rolls back downhill again.
Stopping Out Loud is a way of wedging the boulder of a bad conversation in place. Sisyphus declares that he will no longer be reading or replying to responses to the comment he's about to post. He's leaving the boulder halfway up the hill. Anyone trying to drag him down into a pointless fight or fruitless back-and-forth is, well, S.O.L.
Stopping Out Loud helps Sisyphus avoid the perception of social defeat that comes with letting the other person "have the last word." It also avoids disincentivizes further attention-getting and nastiness, and helps him feel like he's in control of his actions.
Sisyphus sometimes includes extra information when he Stops Out Loud.
- Why he's stopping.
- A clear, final statement of the point he wanted to make.
- Conditions under which he'd revisit the thread.
- An invitation or disinvitation to get in touch when he and the other person have had a chance to cool off.
- A suggestion to continue the debate via PM, where it's sometimes easier to speak freely without feeling like the whole internet is looking on.
This is also helpful to the other person, who might just be engaging in Socratic Grilling. It allows them to avoid wasting further effort in crafting a reply, and informs an immature but good-faith debater that they should consider approaching conversation differently next time. The audience also gains information about the way the conversation had on Sisyphus.
You seem like a Kantian - searching for a universalizable law that makes society operate well. For Kant, it was never permissible to lie. In his view, behaviors were either permissible in all contexts, or permissible in no contexts. The moral code that society should follow was the set of rules that could be universally imposed, context-free, and still have society function well. He bit the bullet: if an axe murder was at the door, demanding you tell him where his intended victim was hiding, you were morally forbidden from lying to him - although I don't know if it was required to tell him what he wanted to know.
Hence, when I offer a situation which (in my mind), the student was clearly the victim of a year-long campaign of degrading his literary talents and preferences by a teacher with an axe to grind, your response is to consider a different situation in which the student is rejecting sound advice, or at least advice worthy of consideration, by a teacher with a respectful tone.
If SOL helps in protecting one's well-being the axe-grinding teacher, but also impairs our ability to receive useful feedback from constructive criticism, and if the common good depends more on receptivity to constructive criticism than to defense against destructive criticism, then we have to reject SOL entirely. It is not universalizable.
I'm a utilitarian, not a Kantian.
As a utilitarian, I allow that we shouldn't always evaluate individual actions on their own merits. Instead, we sometimes need to create rules that are net utility enhancing. However, I think that it's best when rules are as contextually-informed as possible, while Kant thought they should be minimally contextually informed, or really evaluated in a context-free manner, as in the axe murderer scenario.
Sometimes, we deal with the problem where contexts are misinterpreted, deliberately or accidentally. In situations like this, I think the right thing to do is lean toward more general, "outside-view," less contextual rules. Sometimes, the problem of context interpretation is so huge that we have to impose a crude, context-free rule to deal with the problem.
For example, the vast majority of people who might like to bring sharp objects onto an airplane are probably people who want them for nonviolent purposes. We could consider a rule that it's permissible to bring sharp objects onto planes, as long as you don't intend to hijack the aircraft. However, the problem of terrorism is so important that we impose a blanket ban on sharp objects, entirely ignoring contexts like "this is an old lady with her knitting needles, she obviously wants to pass the time on the plane knitting a sweater." This is the right thing to do to make rules about what you can bring on planes, in my view. It happens to align with the Kantian tendency to make blanket rules.
By contrast, in the school setting, I think that there exist both students who reject constructive criticism, and teachers who treat their students badly. I think that ultimately, both student and teacher, in collaboration with their social networks, must interpret context and decide what behaviors seem right and wrong in fielding conflicts. Hence, I think that the decision for students in these situations to SOL is neither obviously right nor obviously wrong. It would be contextual, and I think that the student and teacher have to be the interpreters of that context.
Likewise in internet comments. There is typically no outside authority to appeal to, and the aspects of the conversation that inform its overall context are ambiguous. Participants therefore must ultimately make contextual decisions for themselves, to decide whether or not SOL is appropriate.
Since I can see contexts where SOL would be both appropriate and inappropriate, I think it is basically morally neutral, and feels to me like a status-neutral move that is not inherently rude. The key, then, is to parse these contexts and try to generalize to identify when SOL is appropriate. If it is not a common/visible technique in situations where it would be appropriate and helpful, then the thing to do is to raise awareness of how to apply it in that context. This is why I wrote the post. I didn't describe the context too elaborately, because I thought that to most readers, the problem was coming up with the SOL technique, not figuring out what sort of context I meant.
As a note, I engage with fight-related metaphors partly because I am trying to engage with previous LW-linked writings on the subject, and partly because it has taken a while to figure out a more appropriate metaphor that captures how I think about these issues. Now that I have, I would probably prefer to drop the fight metaphor, because I think that an "intimidation" and "context interpretation" metaphor captures better how I parse this whole issue.