Dvorak on Online Community

Yes. It's perfect for things like rationalizing pre-emptive wars of agression against other countries.

OK, that explains it. Getting platform zealots (Apple, open source...) riled up so you get more page views is an important and valuable cause.

Well, valuable if they click on the banner ads anyway.

Anil, you are too smart to not know definition of 'important' and 'valuable'. It's disappointing to see -- on your own blog! -- the same type of intellectual dishonesty you so passionately condemned last year.

Curious article.

Is there any way to establish and maintain an online community with no fakes and vandals ruining it for everyone?

Either way, there has to be some social feedback mechanism (rating moderation on /., public humiliation on MeFi [upon both of which I'm "wah"]) or the freedom of such sites is leveraged and overwhelmed by teenagers (and people with teenage maturity) wanting attention.

The only reason we're not all egotistical assholes in real life is because it just doesn't work (i.e. you don't get laid and reproduce, hence it has been bred mostly out of the gene pool).

Nope. Dvorak is *just* boring. Has been for the last 10 years. Also when he for once stops trolling and tries to be informative.

" I don't think many people actually care about the community aspect of Flickr at all" is just plain wrong. How come several smaller software developers even put their forums in Flickr if not for the great community tools there? And the thousands (millions) of groups, for any topic imaginable?

Call me idealistic, but as far as I'm concerned intellectual dishonesty, while possibly productive, is *never* right. Not for any reason. If you have to lie to defend a position then either 1) it's not a position that should be defended or 2) you're not worthy to defend it and should stay out of it until you know enough to make an honest case.

I have debated this with Jason before, so I do think that it's important to acknowledge the value of an emotional appeal vs. a logical appeal. However, I'm not seriously suggesting that's what John's doing when he trolls Mac users. I think in that case he's just being a provoking entertainer, in the grand tradition of everybody who's ever been an asshole for attention.

That's not to say I don't think there's a place for that, too, although I'll admit to being less enamored of that form of performance than I used to be.

"Call me idealistic, but as far as I'm concerned intellectual dishonesty, while possibly productive, is *never* right. Not for any reason. If you have to lie to defend a position..."

You know, I think it's just a sense that I have that it's a continuum from an emotional appeal to intellectual dishonesty. It's overstating my point to say that they're two names for the same thing, but in both cases you're abandoning rationality in service of something you believe in. I'm not a big fan of faith-based arguments, but these are all of a kind, and as much as I regret non-logical arguments, they're always going to exist. Given that it's the case, it becomes a question of how to best address the problem, and that probably requires approaching illogicality on its own terms.

Dvorak likes to be controversial, and slamming online communities is like poking a hornet nest with a stick. Still, he makes a good point - as a community developer and operator, I agree that phony members can be a big problem. Often, of course, they simply don't matter. The destructive ones, though, can alienate good members. Some online community participants are extremely generous of their time, crafting detailed replies to those seeking help and sometimes even researching a topic before responding. When the problem they tried to solve proves to have been fiction, they'll be slower to help the next time someone in need comes along.

it's a continuum from an emotional appeal to intellectual dishonesty.

That sums up the problem with emotional appeals quite concisely, I think.

I'm afraid I only think intellectual dishonesty can be used for good in circumstances where the debate has already been cripplingly degraded by people using it. In those circumstances, if you believe - for intellectually reasonable reasons that you have blocked through - that the debate is hideously corrupt and that it matter significantly for your side to to win, then I can see it being considered a justifiable action. If - for example - your wife or an innocent person is to be burned as a witch on spurious grounds and if the crowd is wild and in a frenzy and screaming out for blood, then I imagine rational argument would fall on deaf ears and it would be the barnstorming emotive speeches that would save the day. But as I've said, this is a result of the near-total debasement of the discourse, and should be fought against at all odds.

But basically, winning an argument by appeal to emotion rather than reason, particularly when you know intellectually that you're misrepresenting the argument - this is a form of cheating. It's the old altruism vs. self-interest debate that means that while the aggregate benefit from fair systems, individuals can choose to become free riders, or cheat the system for their own advantage. Tragedy of the commons stuff. If you consider that it is bad for the discourse for this to happen, which I certainly feel it is, then you end up having to argue - correctly I think - that it's something to be fought against and that intellectual dishonesty is a symptom of a corrupt environment. And the main way that human's deal with trying to fight against these things are with punative social measures.

Which is to say, basically, that I can completely see why there would be a pressure towards intellectual dishonesty in argument, as individual's cheated to gain advantage for their position. But it must remain fundamentally wrong to do so, and therefore while we must accept its use as a tactic, we must also socially stigmatise those who undertake it. Which leads me to say, even if it has its uses, it's our duty to stand up against intellectual dishonesty wherever possible, and we cannot - must not - celebrate (as I think you do above) those people who employ it.

"But it must remain fundamentally wrong to do so, and therefore while we must accept its use as a tactic, we must also socially stigmatise those who undertake it. Which leads me to say, even if it has its uses, it's our duty to stand up against intellectual dishonesty wherever possible, and we cannot - must not - celebrate (as I think you do above) those people who employ it."

Tom, you make a great point, and I agree with the fundamental moral issue that you raise. But if you look at Jerry's comment above (which, to be fair, wasn't published at the time you commented), you'll see that distinguishing between an emotional appeal and intellectual dishonest can very easily become a fuzzy line.

And emotional appeals are not going to lose their effectiveness with people. We're wired that way; It's how we work. I don't want to by any means glamourize lying or intentionally being deceitful. But I absolutely do want to encourage people who are making a case to be persuasive in realms other than pure logic. Because honestly, the marketplace of ideas is not a pure meritocracy. It's frustrating for the same reason that, say, geeks get made when the best technology doesn't win, but ultimately some arguments do come down to making a case that feels right to people.

Now, I'm joking about most of Dvorak's hijinks -- I just think that provoking people by being deliberately irresponsible can be funny sometimes. But that immaturity aside, it's absolutely imperative to think that simply because a cause or a concept has a straightforward logical justification that people are simply going to hop on board.

Advocacy has to encompass both logic and emotion. To those of us who live in the world of logic, rules, and code, emotional appeals are intellectually dishonest. Perhaps I'm deliberately being provocative in how I'm phrasing it, but that doesn't diminish the importance of being persuasive in every way we can.

I think I agree with you to a large extent, but not totally. I think the problem I have with it comes down to the reason I take such issue with the terrible Paul Arden book, It's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be which has this whole section on advertising and how people think advertising is bad but we all do it every day when we put on nice clothes or stand up in the pulpit and talk about God. I found that particular piece of the book profoundly troubling for the same reason I find the bit you're talking about here troubling - that there has to be a profound difference between representing a position as effectively as possible and misrepresenting the position.

Many of the things you're talking about are about framing an argument so that it is easy to follow, shows clear resonance to people's lives and is short and compelling enough to carry a person through from the beginning to the conclusion. I don't think I could dispute that these are good components of presenting an argument designed to persuade, but again I think there's something profound here about the difference between persuading people honourably of the value of a logical argument and persuading people dishonourably, by underhand tactics, of the value of any argument.

I would say that intellectual dishonesty of any kind is a dishonourable practice. It indicates that you are prepared to stand behind any position, that you have no integrity. I think it's a position that demonstrates personal weakness, that you're not prepared to stand up for what you feel is right, or that you'd rather self-delude yourself of a position than stick to a harder path that you know is really correct. And I don't think it's about being diminished in other people's views of you but for your own view of yourself. I can imagine other situations where there is a more honourable path where you must compromise in one place for a greater good, but I think they're in the minority.

Somewhere in my head I think there's a way to distinguish between a way of representing an argument that's honourable and one that is dishonourable which is of a higher level or different place than just whether or not you appeal to rhetoric or emotion, but I can't place it. I think perhaps for me it might just come down to woolly, messy things like your motives for talking, whether you (or other people) feel that your appeals to emotion are deforming the argument, or persuading by misdirection, or whether they're representing the argument as clearly and effectively as you can in a way that people will understand. I'd also go as far as to say that there's an element of honour in not taking advantage of an opponents verbal clumsiness, and in helping to express the differences between the two points of view as elegantly as possible so as to help people make an accurate choice. If you can present your opponents argument as clearly as your own, but you know it to be wrong, then demonstrating it is surely the best way to convince them. Accepting the territories where they're right seems to me to also be a good thing to do, as well as good argument technique in that you pull the debate down to the specifics of the things that you disagree upon.

The other thing of course, is that so often the person who wins an argument in the public's eyes is the one who appears more reasonable, no matter how reasonable their positions or tactics actually might be. And then there's issues of trust - that people who express themselves clearly, act honourably and admit when they're wrong can develop trust relations with the people who listen to them. All these things seem to me to be advantages and significant advantages at that, that can be used to counter the shift towards rabble-rousing and misrepresentation in debate.