Fair enough! My claim is that you zoomed out too far: the quadrilemma you quoted is neither good nor evil, and it occurs in both healthy threads and unhealthy ones.
(Which means that, if you want to have a norm about calling out fucky dynamics, you also need a norm in which people can call each others’ posts “bullshit” without getting too worked up or disrupting the overall social order. I’ve been in communities that worked that way but it seemed to just be a founder effect, I’m not sure how you’d create that norm in a group with a strong existing culture).
It’s often useful to have possibly false things pointed out to keep them in mind as hypotheses or even raw material for new hypotheses. When these things are confidently asserted as obviously correct, or given irredeemably faulty justifications, that doesn’t diminish their value in this respect, it just creates a separate problem.
A healthy framing for this activity is to explain theories without claiming their truth or relevance. Here, judging what’s true acts as a “solution” for the problem, while understanding available theories of what might plausibly be true is the phase of discussing the problem. So when others do propose solutions, do claim what’s true, a useful process is to ignore that aspect at first.
Only once there is saturation, and more claims don’t help new hypotheses to become thinkable, only then this becomes counterproductive and possibly mostly manipulation of popular opinion.
Endorsed.
Fair enough! My claim is that you zoomed out too far: the quadrilemma you quoted is neither good nor evil, and it occurs in both healthy threads and unhealthy ones.
(Which means that, if you want to have a norm about calling out fucky dynamics, you also need a norm in which people can call each others’ posts “bullshit” without getting too worked up or disrupting the overall social order. I’ve been in communities that worked that way but it seemed to just be a founder effect, I’m not sure how you’d create that norm in a group with a strong existing culture).
It’s often useful to have possibly false things pointed out to keep them in mind as hypotheses or even raw material for new hypotheses. When these things are confidently asserted as obviously correct, or given irredeemably faulty justifications, that doesn’t diminish their value in this respect, it just creates a separate problem.
A healthy framing for this activity is to explain theories without claiming their truth or relevance. Here, judging what’s true acts as a “solution” for the problem, while understanding available theories of what might plausibly be true is the phase of discussing the problem. So when others do propose solutions, do claim what’s true, a useful process is to ignore that aspect at first.
Only once there is saturation, and more claims don’t help new hypotheses to become thinkable, only then this becomes counterproductive and possibly mostly manipulation of popular opinion.