Dreamer Easy

I have, basically, been asleep all day. I knew I was a bit run down after a crazy week, but blimey. Have some links.

Bullying

Bullying in Australian primary schools is in the worst category in the world. Of year 4 students, more than a quarter had been bullied in at least three ways in the previous month - almost 50% above the international average.

A recent Australian Institute of Family Studies report, Working with families concerned with school-based bullying, opens with an overview of the problem.


The Gentle Art of Disputation

Character Attacks: How to Properly Apply the Ad Hominem

Beyond flaming: how to fight fair online

Internet Drama and You. teh lol (and useful, too)

The Incestuous Amplification Effect explains how groupthink works.

Stadtler and Waldorf elucidate the Intersplat

Do you remember the extract from Don Watson's little book, On Indignation, which I linked to back in October? I got hold of the book, and not only is it terribly funny (generally when you least expect it) it also taught me a few things about myself, as well as more about fandom than most of the academic books on the subject have or will.

Indignation is distinct from anger; is exaggerated; is about a bruise on the ego. It results from a perceived slight, such as impertinence from a lower status person, an insult to an extension of one's self ("our children or our dog, our car or refrigerator, our God, our horse"... our favourite story or ship, our fanfic, our opinions). An indignant person's "real or presumed self has been threatened, [causing] an all but irresistable need to get on one's high horse and brain the offender at once." It's possible to give unintentional offence by blundering into someone else's sense of self-worth, causing them to explode into inexplicable rage, "outbursts out of all proportion to the offence, capable of causing lethal strokes or heart attacks in the offended and painful if not actually dangerous to bystanders."

"Anger obliterates personality," remarks Watson, but "Indignation expresses it" - a rich source of drama and comedy. There's righteous indignation, and there's unrighteous indignation, the refusal to conform and obey: "Among people who fear God and value peace and harmony, the chronically wilful represent the greatest threat." Shock jocks whip up righteous indignation, and feed on it. Politicians use it to "bolster [themselves], reduce others and manipulate as many as possible". Or it may gag us: how many times have you seen someone post "There are no words" instead of actually saying something?

Watson's insights helped me see my own indignation in online debates: "How can you say something so stupid! I'm speechless! No, wait, let me write several thousand words about it." :)

I said: Discussing the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival recently, which has long excluded transwomen who don't "share the experience of growing up under patriarchy", I wondered if I'd qualify as a woman by that definition, lacking so many female experiences: never been raped, never experienced intimate violence, never been pregnant. For that matter, I've only worn makeup a handful of times.

Multiple commenters remarked that rape was not "part of being female" and one disputed that "most women have been raped". Now the confusion is partly my fault for being unclear, so I've clarified what I meant in the comments - that rape is an experience of a large proportion of women "under patriarchy". But think about this: why were the only objections to the mention of rape? Why didn't anyone argue pregnancy is not an automatic part of being female, or dispute that "most women have been bashed by a boyfriend or husband"?

Oh dear. Last night I realised I'm something even worse a troll: I'm a contrarian. Someone who takes a contrary position. Jon and I often lament our Interplodge participation as being essentially reactive: someone talks rubbish, we put out the debunking kit, with a sigh and a slightly demented grin. (In my case this stems partly from 90s backlash bullshit; my activism, such as it is, arose from countering anti-feminist lies on Usenet. In Jon's case it involves an awful lot of looking things up in DWM.) The nature of the net channels a lot of discourse into this, erm, channel: someone says something, someone else disagrees, and back and forth it goes, sometimes for years on end. This habitual contrariety allows others to set the agenda, so you're always battling on someone else's turf, but it does have two advantages: one, when you have already been branded a troll/racist/misogynist/whatever, you have nothing to lose and can therefore speak your mind freely; and two, you can catch fresh insights when they arise from the melee like new-hatched butterflies, while everyone else is busy violently agreeing with each other. And sometimes violently agreeing with you, which is always entertaining: sometimes when you cede a point to an opponent, they are so confused that they try to argue you out of it.

So why get into pointless arguments online - as I have been doing for the last 15 years? Habit, ego, indignation... and in the face of the craziness, the inability to shake the delusion that people are basically rational. All I have to do is explain something the right way, and they'll get it.

Alas, our brains did not evolve to think rationally - to use facts and logic - any more than they evolved to understand probability or physics, which is why we think heavy objects fall faster and that we might win the Lotto. Debate (in fandom, in politics, everywhere) is almost never about seeking the truth by testing out different ideas. It's about (a) which side you're on and (b) your self-esteem. People on my team, the Blues, are good and right, and the other team, the Greens, are unfair and mean. By extension, I am good and right.

This leads to many of the most familiar logical fallacies. Everybody knows argumentum ad hominem, the personal attack, an attempt to discredit the argument by slagging off the speaker. Unfortunately, someone can act like a complete asshole and still have a good point (Richard Dawkins, me, etc). They can also be a total hypocrite and still be right: "You're a fine one to talk" is the fallacy called tu quoque, which is Latin for NO U. (Watch out: abuse can rebound on the attacker.)

The "straw man" is also familiar - distorting an opponent's argument and then attacking the distortion. Beware retorts which start, "Right, because..." This isn't always malicious; online debate is swift and shallow and few participants really give much of a damn, driving the small proportion who do care about it out of our tiny minds.

Another familiar fallacy is argumentum ad populum: lots of people believe this, so it must be true. Online, this often appears as the result of groupthink: all my mates say this, so everyone says this (so it must be true). When RTD dismisses fandom's complaints as a couple of hundred loudmouths, he's pulling the rug out from under this fallacy. You'd think the shipwar involved a thousand fans; in reality, it's only about a dozen people making a lot of noise.

Maddeningly, the exact opposite is also common: the fallacy called "hasty generalisation". A single posting can become "what everyone thinks" or "what the Blues say". (And of course, if you're a Blue, you obviously hold that opinion too.)

A fun one which Jon's always encountering in OG is the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, which goes something like this:

A: The new show is a failure.
J: Actually, it's a success - look at the high ratings.
A: The public will watch any old rubbish. It's a failure with the fans.
J: Erm, actually, it's very popular with the fans, too.
A: Not with real fans.

We are not born knowing these things are fallacies, any more than we're born knowing that if a coin comes up heads ten times, the chance it will come up heads on the eleventh toss is still just one in two. It's not a matter of intelligence or virtue, but learning to use the tools that will give us the right answers.

And, crucially, allowing ourselves to be wrong. This is one of the hardest and most useful things anyone can do in an argument. I bloody hate to be wrong. Being wrong has, on occasion, freaked me out so badly that I could barely function. But if your goal is to test ideas to find the truth, what choice do you have? Disconnect being right from your self-esteem; attach honesty instead. (If nothing else, it will confuse the hell out of your opponent.)

As I mentioned earlier, Chicago TARDIS proved to be the cure for Internet fandom: the sound of laughter beats the silence of snark hands down. Unfortunately it also triggers a painful recollection of one's own online behaviour. For example: I can't quite believe that, on more than one occasion, I have bet online fans money they were wrong. Fandom's negligent, nay, cavalier attitude to fact is infuriating, of course, but can you imagine doing that to someone's face?! (Hell, even if you did, it would be defused by the exchange of visible signals - "what the shit", "I am not entirely serious", etc.) Egad. Jon had the good sense to apologise at the con for everything he has ever said on the Intersplat, and I more or less followed suit. As a forum for discussion, the net is worse than useless: I shall henceforth dedicate myself to essays (and, on contentious convention panels, shall fall silent and observe).

In related news, I have somehow managed to order two copies of the S4 boxed set, neither of which contains the promised outtakes. Blat. :P

*electricity goes from one side of Kate's brane to the other*

1. Invocation of particular scientist as authority
2. Invocation of trustworthy religious figures as authorities
3. Reports in Hadith judged by good reputation of reporters
4. Mediaeval reliance on authorities (eg classical authors) vs Renaissance investigation
5. Galileo counts the horse's teeth while friends debate what Aristotle said on the subject (apocryphal)
6. Change from reliance on authority to reliance on own investigation an Enlightenment phenomenon?
7. Cf C19 upheavals leading to Fundamentalism?

Numerous letters in today's SMH responding to yesterday's article defending torture at Guantanamo Bay. Amongst the points the letter writers make:

- The Chicago Tribune news report cited does not support the article's premise - that torture has saved civilian lives. (I have a copy of the news report, so more on this later.)
- Some of the prisoners were not captured on the battlefield, but "taken, unarmed, in neutral countries".
- The article understates the severity of the abuse (if Gitmo's practices were merely "mild discomfort", then the abuses at Abu Ghraib were "positively bad manners"!).

It's heartening that the responses aren't just vague handwringing about the nastiness of torture. The article is misleading (in my view, intentionally misleading), and the writer's case can be attacked solidly on facts and logic.