I wasn't naive when I started this blog. I had read enough other blogs to know that the level of comments is often quite disappointing, that, for every interesting discussion where disparate ideas fly back and forth, there are a hundred (a thousand?) where the discourse is essentially, "Oh, yeah, I'm right because I'm right."
Obviously, I expected that, if I ever did attract any attention, and if I commented on political and economic matters, there would be comments that would disappoint me, dissent that would come without basis, and I was prepared for that. I preferred to think that disagreement would come from people armed with solid evidence, I even looked forward to that; I've learned a lot in my life, changed opinions as new facts or new situations presented themselves, and I'm always willing to listen.
What, I guess, has surprised me is the philosophy of those who have disagreed with me. (It shouldn't have, but I guess I never did much meta-thinking about the ludicrous exchanges I've seen on other blogs.) It's a philosophy so opposed to my own that I have real trouble understanding it.
You see, I have developed beliefs over a period of time. But I try to stay grounded in realizing the things I know (if I kick the ball, it will move in the direction of the kick), the things I don't know (how, really, does consciousness work?), and the things I believe based in part on what I've experienced, but mostly on inference based on a preponderance of evidence. If I state in this blog that I know exactly the right number of H-1B visas to issue each year, whether it be 0, 20,000, or a million, then I need to back it up with some evidence (or at least be willing to; it's unlikely that I can recreate my full thinking in every blog post).
But, for that vast category of things that fall into the third class, evidence can certainly sway my opinion and, since I am most interested in getting closer to truth, I am quite pleased to entertain any such evidence. If I write that we should scrap the entire H-1B program, and someone says, no, the best 2,000 people we let in each year actually do generate more jobs than they cost, and they have something more than simple regression to back that up, then I might well go along with that. But I wouldn't then support an argument that says we should increase the quota to 200,000 on the off chance we'll find those 2,000 - I would say instead that we need to develop some method to identify the 2,000, and let them in.
So, to have had a couple of disagreements the past couple of weeks is not surprising to me, but to have had them based on utterly specious premises, or a deliberate misreading of what I am stating, is profoundly disappointing. My recent dust-up on another site with a fellow who insisted that, because his personal situation is fine, everyone else's is as well was a waste of time. He offered no evidence beside his personal story and those of a couple of family members, but ignored the larger trends. Had he argued that the larger trends would be subsumed to something even larger, that the American economy is inevitably self-correcting and our current problems transitory, it might have been possible to have a discussion. He didn't, and it wasn't.
My current conflict, which can be seen here and here if anyone wants to go through it, started with the simplest of assertions (that, if you split off a certain segment of the population and could measure it as we measure the aggregate economy, that segment may already be in a recession). The respondent proposed that it was incorrect to redefine the term "recession," that it applied only to the economy as a whole.
This is fair, if limited, and I commented back that I was willing to use a different term for a non-recession recession, but it still argued for some policy intervention. At that point, the discussion flew off the rails, but the respondent never offered up another fact, just an increasing level of invective, wholly inappropriate to the point.
I spent a little time looking around the Net to see if this was unusual for this respondent; indeed, it is not. This is a person who has had his comments taken off several sites for, apparently, the same kind of escalating nonsense that I saw.
I have no way to understand why someone seeks out someone else's post, then uses it as a springboard not to make an argument, but to be willfully inflammatory and simplistic. I know there's a lot of anger and bitterness in the world, but to translate that into the kind of behavior we see too often in the Web 2.0 world is foreign to me. Even though I want to foment discussion that will expand my thinking, my knowledge base, I begin to understand why reasonable bloggers need to moderate comments. I hope it doesn't come to that, I really don't want to spend that time, but a blog is a little like a virtual home, and I don't need other guests to feel their visit is ruined by a couple of clowns standing in the corner.
Obviously, I expected that, if I ever did attract any attention, and if I commented on political and economic matters, there would be comments that would disappoint me, dissent that would come without basis, and I was prepared for that. I preferred to think that disagreement would come from people armed with solid evidence, I even looked forward to that; I've learned a lot in my life, changed opinions as new facts or new situations presented themselves, and I'm always willing to listen.
What, I guess, has surprised me is the philosophy of those who have disagreed with me. (It shouldn't have, but I guess I never did much meta-thinking about the ludicrous exchanges I've seen on other blogs.) It's a philosophy so opposed to my own that I have real trouble understanding it.
You see, I have developed beliefs over a period of time. But I try to stay grounded in realizing the things I know (if I kick the ball, it will move in the direction of the kick), the things I don't know (how, really, does consciousness work?), and the things I believe based in part on what I've experienced, but mostly on inference based on a preponderance of evidence. If I state in this blog that I know exactly the right number of H-1B visas to issue each year, whether it be 0, 20,000, or a million, then I need to back it up with some evidence (or at least be willing to; it's unlikely that I can recreate my full thinking in every blog post).
But, for that vast category of things that fall into the third class, evidence can certainly sway my opinion and, since I am most interested in getting closer to truth, I am quite pleased to entertain any such evidence. If I write that we should scrap the entire H-1B program, and someone says, no, the best 2,000 people we let in each year actually do generate more jobs than they cost, and they have something more than simple regression to back that up, then I might well go along with that. But I wouldn't then support an argument that says we should increase the quota to 200,000 on the off chance we'll find those 2,000 - I would say instead that we need to develop some method to identify the 2,000, and let them in.
So, to have had a couple of disagreements the past couple of weeks is not surprising to me, but to have had them based on utterly specious premises, or a deliberate misreading of what I am stating, is profoundly disappointing. My recent dust-up on another site with a fellow who insisted that, because his personal situation is fine, everyone else's is as well was a waste of time. He offered no evidence beside his personal story and those of a couple of family members, but ignored the larger trends. Had he argued that the larger trends would be subsumed to something even larger, that the American economy is inevitably self-correcting and our current problems transitory, it might have been possible to have a discussion. He didn't, and it wasn't.
My current conflict, which can be seen here and here if anyone wants to go through it, started with the simplest of assertions (that, if you split off a certain segment of the population and could measure it as we measure the aggregate economy, that segment may already be in a recession). The respondent proposed that it was incorrect to redefine the term "recession," that it applied only to the economy as a whole.
This is fair, if limited, and I commented back that I was willing to use a different term for a non-recession recession, but it still argued for some policy intervention. At that point, the discussion flew off the rails, but the respondent never offered up another fact, just an increasing level of invective, wholly inappropriate to the point.
I spent a little time looking around the Net to see if this was unusual for this respondent; indeed, it is not. This is a person who has had his comments taken off several sites for, apparently, the same kind of escalating nonsense that I saw.
I have no way to understand why someone seeks out someone else's post, then uses it as a springboard not to make an argument, but to be willfully inflammatory and simplistic. I know there's a lot of anger and bitterness in the world, but to translate that into the kind of behavior we see too often in the Web 2.0 world is foreign to me. Even though I want to foment discussion that will expand my thinking, my knowledge base, I begin to understand why reasonable bloggers need to moderate comments. I hope it doesn't come to that, I really don't want to spend that time, but a blog is a little like a virtual home, and I don't need other guests to feel their visit is ruined by a couple of clowns standing in the corner.
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