Comment by LexiMax
6 days ago
> For all of the reasons I've brought up already. If your goal is to convince someone of a position then the effort you put in isn't tightly coupled to the effort that your interlocutor put sin.
If someone is demonstrating bad faith, the goal is no longer to convince them of anything, but to convince onlookers. You don't necessarily need to put in a ton of effort to do so, and sometimes - such as in this case - the crowd is already on your side.
Winning the attention economy against a internet troll is a strategy almost as old as the existence of internet trolls themselves.
I feel like we're talking in circles here. I'll just restate that I think that attempting to convince people of your position is better than not attempting to convince people of your position when your goal is to convince people of your position.
The point that we disagree on is what the shape of an appropriate and persuasive response would be. I suspect we might also disagree on who the target of persuasion should be.
Interesting. I didn't really pick up on that. It seemed to me like the advocacy was to not try to be persuasive. The reasons I was led to that are comments like:
> I don't appreciate his politeness and hedging. [..] That just legitimizes AI and basically continues the race to the bottom. Rob Pike had the correct response when spammed by a clanker.
> The correct response when someone oversteps your stated boundaries is not debate. It is telling them to stop. There is no one to convince about the legitimacy of your boundaries. They just are.
> When has engaging with trolls ever worked? When has "talking to an LLM" or human bot ever made it stop talking to you lol?
> Why should anyone put any more effort into a response than what it took to generate?
And others.
To me, these are all clear cases of "the correct response is not one that tries to persuade but that dismisses/ isolates".
If the question is how best to persuade, well, presumably "fuck off" isn't right? But we could disagree, maybe you think that ostracizing/ isolating people somehow convinces them that you're right.
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