Julia Galeph on Trolls and Intellectual Inquiry

My comment is on the types of media we have available to conduct rational discussion. A great many of the problems on modern social media systems stem from the kinds of ways people can respond to each other in a mass-debate. They are very limited, and seem almost to have been designed to produce these power-law-scaling tweet-storms.

The problem with these cascades of outrage is that they inevitably focus on only a small part of the broader issue one needs to understand, and because of this excessive focus they inhibit understanding of the broader issue. Worse still, they also draw attention away from the other less controversial issues, most of which, if taken together as a whole, would contribute to a better understanding of the contentious issues, and render them much less contentious.

At 4 minutes 20 seconds, the question of what one should be "allowed" to assert and on what basis they claim that right, always depends on some background knowledge which is more often than not omitted from their statement. I think that a large part of the reason for this is the difficulty of quoting and referring to other texts on social media. Social media systems seem to focus much more on self-contained content. For example, in a comment on a YouTube video, try and refer to a comment on another YouTube video.

I could go on at length about how lame social media software is, and how to fix it, but for some reason it doesn't seem to make any difference. I presume this because there many other far more contentious issues that people feel a much more urgent need to debate on social media. Climate change, for example:

Here is an illustration of the "I can't understand why someone would say X" phenomenon, and how awkward it is to explain on Blogger/YouTube. The Economist Showing That Some People Understand Climate Change Economics.

And here is an amusing example of the phenomenon:

Which brings us to this related discussion:

Again, the premisses of the argument are vital. Without them, one cannot do better than Putin and say "I cannot accept this". Well, Putin adds "God created all men equal", which contradicts that, because people like Obama were not created with a capacity for rational discourse, but perhaps that is not God-given, but rather man-made ... Well, maybe this should be called "Diplomatic licence"?