Biting my tongue to avoid an object-level response.
Seems to me that in real life this is a smaller problem than in online communities. Because real-life interactions allow various kinds of signals that are difficult to translate into comments and votes. For example, in real life people usually stand in a small group and talk; it is obvious who is and who isn’t a part of the group, even if some people don’t talk at the moment. You know who is listening to what. But in the online debate, I have no idea who is reading what, until they reply.
If there is a person in real life who only offers nitpicking, others may decide, independently, to only discuss important stuff in their absence. The person will simply be not invited to an important debate. This doesn’t require any confrontation like “John, go away, we want to discuss stuff we care about, and your contributions are predictably not helpful”. It’s more like Alice invites Bob, Cathy and Dan to discuss a topic she considers important, and no one invites John. He either will not know what happened, or there will be a socially acceptable excuse “well, you were not there when the topic came up”.
Is there an equivalent of this in online debates? I guess on Facebook one can start a conversation and invite a group of people. But on LW, there is no such mechanism.
On the other hand, the cost of invitation-only debates (both on Facebook and in real life) is that many potentially useful contributors are excluded. So there seems to be a trade-off between open debate and private debate.
A possible technical solution: imagine a chat where anyone can start a debate on a new topic, and the person who started the debate automatically becomes a moderator of the thread. If you think the moderator is abusing their powers, you can start a new thread on the same topic. (There can be other safeguards against mod abuse, such as making it possible—but trivially inconvenient—to see the censored comments. So the people can decide whether it is worth to continue debating the same stuff somewhere else.)
tl;dr—I agree that nitpicking can become a serious problem, and that it is more frequent among nerds. However, I also think that this problem is further complicated by the software we use, if it doesn’t support solutions similar to those we would naturally choose in real life.
Biting my tongue to avoid an object-level response.
Seems to me that in real life this is a smaller problem than in online communities. Because real-life interactions allow various kinds of signals that are difficult to translate into comments and votes. For example, in real life people usually stand in a small group and talk; it is obvious who is and who isn’t a part of the group, even if some people don’t talk at the moment. You know who is listening to what. But in the online debate, I have no idea who is reading what, until they reply.
If there is a person in real life who only offers nitpicking, others may decide, independently, to only discuss important stuff in their absence. The person will simply be not invited to an important debate. This doesn’t require any confrontation like “John, go away, we want to discuss stuff we care about, and your contributions are predictably not helpful”. It’s more like Alice invites Bob, Cathy and Dan to discuss a topic she considers important, and no one invites John. He either will not know what happened, or there will be a socially acceptable excuse “well, you were not there when the topic came up”.
Is there an equivalent of this in online debates? I guess on Facebook one can start a conversation and invite a group of people. But on LW, there is no such mechanism.
On the other hand, the cost of invitation-only debates (both on Facebook and in real life) is that many potentially useful contributors are excluded. So there seems to be a trade-off between open debate and private debate.
A possible technical solution: imagine a chat where anyone can start a debate on a new topic, and the person who started the debate automatically becomes a moderator of the thread. If you think the moderator is abusing their powers, you can start a new thread on the same topic. (There can be other safeguards against mod abuse, such as making it possible—but trivially inconvenient—to see the censored comments. So the people can decide whether it is worth to continue debating the same stuff somewhere else.)
tl;dr—I agree that nitpicking can become a serious problem, and that it is more frequent among nerds. However, I also think that this problem is further complicated by the software we use, if it doesn’t support solutions similar to those we would naturally choose in real life.