I agree that it is important to defend and concentrate the force of rationality.
However, I think the difficulty in the original context that this post is about might be that community drama is hard to address in a good way. One major constraint in understanding any topic is having a high flow of representative or unusually useful information from the topic. But for community drama, this is really hard, because it interferes in people’s privacy, it involves events that happened in the past, it involves adding up many small interactions, it may be dependent on social relationships, etc..
As such, I think it’s going to be really hard for anyone to prove or disprove the validity of complaints about community dynamics in online writing. The best approach I can think of right now is to just allow people to speak up about their impressions without too much burden of proof, to test if others have the same impressions. Maybe there are other, better approaches, but I don’t think standards of argumentation can solve them without doing something about the information bottleneck.
I agree that it is important to defend and concentrate the force of rationality.
However, I think the difficulty in the original context that this post is about might be that community drama is hard to address in a good way. One major constraint in understanding any topic is having a high flow of representative or unusually useful information from the topic. But for community drama, this is really hard, because it interferes in people’s privacy, it involves events that happened in the past, it involves adding up many small interactions, it may be dependent on social relationships, etc..
As such, I think it’s going to be really hard for anyone to prove or disprove the validity of complaints about community dynamics in online writing. The best approach I can think of right now is to just allow people to speak up about their impressions without too much burden of proof, to test if others have the same impressions. Maybe there are other, better approaches, but I don’t think standards of argumentation can solve them without doing something about the information bottleneck.