by robertdreed » Wed Oct 12, 2005 5:44 am
...here's another vote in favor of you staying. <br><br>You're either taking this bulletin board business too seriously, or not seriously enough.<br><br>I've read this board intensively enough to figure out that there are several strata of discourse and dialogue happening simultaneously here, across a broad array of topics, each of which overlaps with other topics ranging from negligible to considerable. <br><br>I haven't calculated your index of verified reliability or your percentage of congruence with my own opnions, but I think you're one of the posters on RI who most emphasizes the imperatives of well-referenced research, disciplined thought, ontological agnosticism, and healthy skepticism. The board could use as much of that input as it can recieve. You're also one of the posters who develops their ideas in longer essay form, rather than simply passing along rumors, posting cut-and-pastes, or venturing brief opinions/prognostications. And you sound as if you have a mind of your own, rather than simply picking favorite "opinion leaders", throwing your lot in with them, and re-writing their material. <br><br>As for the disinformationists...they can be wearying. But successfully tracking and unmasking those who are willfully and consciously practicing fraud and deception is one of the most rewarding pursuits in the arena. Disinformationists are taking a risk in their participation that the rest of us have no need to worry about- the risk that they might betray their own insincerity. Not merely their factual mistakes- their dishonesty. It's a tangled web, and tangled webs form different designs than honestly woven ones. <br><br>Ill-informed, obdurate, and intellectually unskilled contributors abound on the Internet, and they're vulnerable to acting as conduits for misinformation, bad data, spurious deductions, scientific absurdities, and unsupportable explanations that can only be defended by people with threadbare knowledge bases and imaginations that begrudge no practical limits. But after a while, it many cases it becomes plainly evident that such people don't know any better. In other cases, that's a more difficult judgement call to make. <br><br>My own inclination is to keep my suspicions and reservations about another poster's sincerity to myself. As for the consistently mistaken, and those who demonstrate unfamiliarity with the principles of informal logic...well, that's an indication of lack of intellectual skill. And that's another judgement I keep to myself, because only intellectually secure people can deal with being characterized as stupid. I can't speak for other countries, but he American public educational system does not train students to be intellectually secure. It trains them to consider intellectual ability as a general faculty like the visual sense, rather than a set of skills comparable to athletic skills; to stake their egos on their personal accumulation and store of knowledge; to be touchy about admitting a state of ignorance; to sulk when their facts or ideas are challenged, to equate being proven wrong with being humiliated as intellectually inferior, to equate being right with being smart- and as a subordinate corollary, to equate being smart with not admitting being wrong. <br><br>Therefore, when I have a dispute with someone, I strive to be as specific as possible in pointing out what appear to be factual errors, faulty reasoning, logical fallacies, surmises that overleap the evidence, or conclusions that I find unsupportable. And I'm beginning to learn the lesson that once my objections are clearly enumerated, it's useless to repeat them. In fact, my feeling a need to repeat myself is pretty much a function of the failure of the opposing position to address my points the first time around. <br><br>My arguments stand or fall on their merits. Beyond that, I rarely feel compelled to add more general characterizations. I think there's entirely too much emphasis on imputing ulterior motives to the comments of others. That's tantamount to accusing someone of disinformation, which is in my view a much more grave offense than questioning their understanding of a given specific subject, or their command of informal logic, or remarking on their chronic tendency to believe the most pessimistic scenario. <br><br>Arriving at conclusions about the motives of a newbie or a rare contributor shouldn't be anyone's top priority. Generating such an assessment with any certitude requires an extensive review of the entire record of posts by someone who posts frequently and regularly. Perhaps the biggest pitfall for a disinformationist is the necessity of maintaining consistency, of sticking to their story. Sometimes they corner themselves with a detail that doesn't jibe with something they said in a long-forgotten post. Other times, they respond to a simple question with unconvincing evasions. Other times, they act as if part of the content of a given post is non-existent, despite the fact that it's there to be read as plainly as everything else on the page. Or they take umbrage and get defensive at the first demand for elementary confirmation of one of their extravagant claims or unlikely anecdotes, admitting no further inquiry. Other times, there's a weird malleability in their responses, depending on whom they address. Furthermore, on-line disinformationists don't always work solo. They usually have at least one collaborator to give them "strokes" and provide back-up support. However, a given network usually relies on one "lead voice", with the others in less complicated supporting roles, or simply as a chorus. <br><br>There are other signs to watch for in a suspected disinformationist, such as being extremely circumspect about verifiable details in regard to past life history, employment, locales and addresses, friends, relatives, encounters with activists and others well-known in political movements, etc. communities, early formative experiences, and the believability of the stories they decide to tell about themselves, or on themselves. Even a bot program can claim to "like fishing", for instance, but they have a tendency to "leave the building" if someone begins asking about the best line test to use as a shock leader when matching the hatch for snook in the Columbia River. Answering questions like that requires specialized back-up by an actual human, and even then it may take some time before they realize that the feeding habits and natural habitat for snook pretty much rule out a serious response to the inquiry. <br><br>One thng that all serious disinformationists can be counted on to have planned for is what to do in the case of being directly confronted and openly accused. There are a number of stock gambits, most of which are fairly effective at deflecting such attacks. That's because once such an accusation is explicitly stated, the burden of proof falls upon the accuser. So- what are you going to do...hire a PI to prove that someone is misrepresenting themselves? Hunt down the suspected provocateur personally? Not me. <br><br>Personally, I find it very hard to imagine a scenario whereby I would ever call out another Internet poster as intentionally dishonest and misleading people in order to further a hidden political agenda. I don't know how I could provide a proof so thorough and so convincingly argued that every last poster on the board would agree with the accusation. I much prefer to deal with people I suspect of running a game by patiently pointing out the specific problems I have with their comments, as if we were both merely two people with different points of view- prone to error, sometimes demonstrably wrong, but not bent on a mission of deception. Give them enough rope, I say...and then give them some more, just to be sure. And then the fun starts...for instance, you're allowed to remind disinformationists about specific slips that they've made. Do it subtly and slyly, as if they're too stupid to understand what you might be saying. This can really drive them up the wall, because one of their main gambits is playing stupid/innocent. But if they let on that they realize what you're implying, they drop their ability to hide behind their mask of stupidity/innocence. As long as you haven't accused them directly, there's nothing to protest. It's also possible to ambiguously and deniably hint that you've seen through their act, or to ridicule the patent absurdity of their claims, daring them to respond. <br><br>Mind you, this only works once you've confirmed a consistent track record of inaccuracies and misrepresentations- because you've narrowed the choices down to ig'nant/deceptive. It doesn't work for someone who admits the gaps in their knowledge, who apologizes for their errors, who strives to provide references and fact-check as scrupulously as possible within reasonable limits, or who otherwise has their ducks in a row. Someone might look at my record of posts, for instance, and conclude that I was never a night shift cab driver, because I have a fair number of messages on record with original post dates from the evening and early morning hours. But that isn't enough evidence to go on. It ain't that simple any more, the cellphone has revolutionized the business. Anyone hinting with a wink and a nod that I've been making up my employment history as a cover would be leaving themselves open to be buried by a truckload of my bona fides in short order. <br><br>By contrast, a disinformationist would probably simply leave- maybe for only a few weeks until the heat died down, maybe for good. One thing you won't get from a disinformationist is a lot of concrete verifiable details. On the other hand, one thing you will get is a covert agenda. Another reason to keep them around...the longer they stick around, the better an idea you get as to the sort of seeds they're sowing into the popular discourse. <br> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 10/12/05 4:49 am<br></i>
