A Guide to Constructive Debate, A.K.A. How Not to Waste Your Time or Other's Online

[psood0nym]

I was recently reading chapters 11 through 13 of a modern classic in advanced adult reading instruction, Mortimer J. Adler’s (1966) “How to Read a Book,” when I was stuck by the relevance of what I was reading to a recent short-lived thread in Philosophy and Spirituality by MyDoorsAreOpen titled Dialectics.

I’ve no doubt I’m not alone in my frequent exasperation in attempting to have intelligent productive discussions on Bluelight. What is especially frustrating is that the affordances of the online message board format – anonymity, time to compose a post, and the ability to review an entire discussion prior to posting one’s thoughts – make it a nearly perfect medium for productive discussion, yet so few of our global community seem to take advantage of or even be cognizant of the opportunities these tools present them.

Given how relevant to the concerns of formal dialectics these chapters are, I wasn’t too surprised when Dr.Adler admitted in the text that they represent a refinement of an early book of his, “Dialectic.” That book was about the art of intelligent conversation, the etiquette of controversy, and so I think chapters 11 through 13 of “How to Read a Book” are highly instructive for those of us looking to have more sophisticated discussions here on Bluelight or in any online forum. Of course, what follows does not apply to places like The Lounge, or social threads, but it does apply to most other threads where some degree of expository work is being attempted.

I realize I’m posting this to a drug message board where many of the readers are fairly young, and often inebriated while posting. That aside, this is the world’s largest and best organized public drug discussion board and I know there are those out there capable of engaging in productive discussion. This post is not for you so much as it is for you to help others who may just be beginning to learn to converse intelligently and constructively online. I feel if we heed Dr. Adler’s advice all online forums will be much more interesting places.

What follows is largely a collection of chronologically ordered pull quotes from chapters 11 through 13 of “How to Read a Book,” edited in the interest of brevity and appropriated by me at times to make the content more directly relevant to Bluelight. For readers looking for further exposition the entire book is available free online at this link.

From Chapters 11 through 13 of Mortimer J. Adler’s “How to Read a Book”:

The first thing a reader of a thread can say is that he understands or that he does not. In fact, he must say he understands, in order to say more. If he does not understand, he should keep his peace and go back to work.

There is one exception to the harshness of the second alternative. “I don’t understand” may be itself a critical remark. To make it so, the reader must be able to support it. If the fault is with the thread rather than himself, the reader must locate the sources of trouble.

If, in addition to understanding the thread, you agree thoroughly with what the original poster or a disscussant says, the work is over. You have been enlightened, and convinced or persuaded. It is clear that we have additional steps to consider only in the case of disagreement or suspended judgment.

To the extent that authors argue with their readers—and expect their readers to argue back—the good reader must be acquainted with the principles of argument. He must be able to carry on polite, as well as intelligent, controversy.

Now let us consider the situation in which, having said you understand, you proceed to disagree, and you disagree because you think the author can be shown to be wrong on some point. You are not simply voicing your prejudice or expressing your emotions.

There are four rules of thumb to keep in mind if you adversely criticize a post or posts. If you say, essentially, “I understand but I disagree,” you proceed in productive debate by making one or more of the following essential replies:

(1) “You are uninformed”;
(2) “You are misinformed”;
(3) “You are illogical, your reasoning is not cogent”; or,
(4) “Your analysis is incomplete.”

The reader cannot make any of these remarks without being definite and precise about the respect in which the poster is uninformed or misinformed or illogical.

If you have not been able to show that the thread's original poster or subsequent discussant is uninformed, misinformed, or illogical on relevant matters, you simply cannot disagree. You must agree.

You cannot say, as so many students and others do, “I find nothing wrong with your premises, and no errors in reasoning, but I don’t agree with your conclusions.” All you can possibly mean by saying something like that is that you do not like the conclusions. You are not disagreeing. You are expressing your emotions or prejudices. It you have been convinced, you should admit it. (If, despite your failure to support one or more of these three critical points, you still honestly feel unconvinced, perhaps you should not have said you understood in the first place.)

Regarding the fourth rule of thumb, to say that a poster’s analysis is incomplete is to say that he has not solved all the problems he started with, or that he has not made as good a use of his materials as possible, that he did not see all their implications and ramifications, or that he has failed to make distinctions which are relevant to his undertaking. It is not enough to say that an argument is incomplete. Anyone can say that of any argument. Men are finite, and so are their works, every last one. There is no point in making this remark, therefore, unless the reader can define the inadequacy precisely, either by his own efforts as a knower or through the help of other materials.

We have now completed, in a general way, the enumeration and discussion of the rules of reading threads. When you have read a thread according to these rules, you have done something. I need not tell you. You will feel that way about it yourself. But perhaps I should remind you that these rules describe an ideal performance. Few people have ever read any thread in this ideal manner, and those who have, probably read very few threads this way. The ideal remains, however, the measure of achievement. You are a good reader and forum participant in the degree to which you approximate it.

 

[ebola?]

You cannot say, as so many students and others do, “I find nothing wrong with your premises, and no errors in reasoning, but I don’t agree with your conclusions.” All you can possibly mean by saying something like that is that you do not like the conclusions. You are not disagreeing. You are expressing your emotions or prejudices.

In a strict sense, this might not be entirely true. People sometimes mean that they disagree with the warrants that underlie the linkages between the premises and conclusions involved (and as one traces the meta-warrants linking together the warrants logically, one may disagree with implicit axioms being posited) without necessarily implying that the structure of the argument is invalid. People often express this as a vague sense of unease about an argument rather than explicitly tracing the implicit logical scaffolding that structures the explicit argument being made.

ebola

 

[psood0nym]

True. If you have not read the full three chapters in the link to the full text provided, some of what you are contending may owe to the way my edit of the content necessarily sacrificed context. I figured posting 3 chapters of a book as a thread would scare the hell out of so many people this enterprise would be futile, so I did my best to edit it down, but instructive elaborations of Adler's points have certainly been omitted in the process.

EDIT: Will be back to discuss later. Must frolf while the frolfing is good.

 

[Foreigner]

I’ve no doubt I’m not alone in my frequent exasperation in attempting to have intelligent productive discussions on Bluelight. What is especially frustrating is that the affordances of the online message board format – anonymity, time to compose a post, and the ability to review an entire discussion prior to posting one’s thoughts – make it a nearly perfect medium for productive discussion, yet so few of our global community seem to take advantage of or even be cognizant of the opportunities these tools present them.

Maybe condensing the verbose OP into a tl;dr version would make it easier for your qualms about discussion format more readily understood by others.

I'm also curious to know your thoughts on dialectics vs. epistemology. Sometimes I am not in sync with the premise of a topic because it is not even operating within my world view. In that case, it's not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing, but offering a different epistemology.

 

[psood0nym]

^I'm not that interested in "tl;dr" readers for this thread. This thread is meant to help those who already have the patience to read through it engage more effectively with the "tl;dr" crowd. Its purpose is to help cultivate a more coherent and cohesive online forum culture in general. Insofar as threads have literary and expository qualities I feel that Adler's classic advice about how to read an author and respond to him critically is hugely relevant to effective interpersonal communications through message boards.

Personally, I try to engage in dialectics within an epistemological framework that is informed largely by foundherentism and Habermasian pragmatism (see Theory of Communicative Action). Naturally, as always, it's a conceptual mash-up and work in progress.

 

[kaywholed]

 

[psood0nym]

^Well, I'm convinced. I'm off to go kill myself now.

 

[kaywholed]

^Well, I'm convinced. I'm off to go kill myself now.

can't do that before we goodwin the thread.

 

[psood0nym]

I think deference to l33t speak and meme speak is a big part of the the problem actually, so this is pretty illustrative of my point. Communicating like this is not a discussion, it's cutting and pasting a point made by somebody else and then presenting it as reflective of our own individual voice. It's, foremost, lazy, secondly, unoriginal, and last but certainly not least, dishonest.

Not surprisingly, Adler addressed the essential psychological issues that have plagued productive discussions forever decades ago:

I am saying that all human disagreements can be resolved by the removal of misunderstanding or of ignorance. Both cures are always possible, though sometimes difficult. Hence the man who, at any stage of a conversation, disagrees, should at least hope to reach agreement in the end. He should be as much prepared to have his own mind changed as seek to change the mind of another. He should always keep before him the possibility that he misunderstands or that he is ignorant on some point. No one who looks upon disagreement as an occasion for teaching another should forget that it is also an occasion for being taught.

But the trouble is that many people regard disagreement as unrelated to either teaching or being taught. They think that everything is just a matter of opinion. I have mine. You have yours. Our right to our opinions is as inviolable as our right to private property. On such a view, communication cannot be profitable if the profit to be gained is an increase in knowledge. Conversation is hardly better than a ping-pong game of opposed opinions, a game in which no one keeps score, no one wins, and everyone is satisfied because he ends up holding the same opinions he started with. I cannot take this view. I think that knowledge can be communicated and that discussion can result in learning.

 

[psood0nym]

… Maybe people need more of a “so what?” explanation for why I made this thread.

We are self-aware, semi-rational, social animals. To the extent that our unique, universally recognizable attributes among other life forms define an intrinsic sense of “purpose” for us, attributes that most of us can perceive through simple introspection, I believe we ought to develop and expand what is unique about us so that our lives stand some hope of bringing something novel and of value to the universal experiential table. That may sound lofty and fancy but it’s really a very basic claim if you have even the slightest faith in something more than meaninglessness. I’m simply saying: “Let’s think about ourselves and consider that what we recognize is unique about us is probably what we should be working to improve upon.”

This is a belief that has been inherent in most of the human endeavors throughout history that we’ve deemed noteworthy. I don’t mean to be condescending or preachy (and I appreciate that may strike many as disingenuous, really!), but I seriously do think these simple considerations give us some basic inherent idea of what to be doing with our lives and some basic standards of conduct to abide by, and that this is fairly obvious and so general in scope I can’t imagine how it could be controversial.

With that assumption in mind, we have this global communications forum, that is, Bluelight, where people are using drugs that have never existed previously to probe their unique consciousnesses in ways never before possible, and I think it’s highly likely there are interesting and worthwhile things that can and ought to be said in such a forum.

If your take on interpersonal discussion is similar to those of persons Adler describes in post #9, and you think this is merely a hypertextual game of opinion ping pong we’re playing at now, or meaningless, or a social jerk circle, well then you clearly couldn’t care less, so don’t let this bother you. I cannot conceive of your motives but I’m willing to dismiss you as quickly as you do me. Run off right now and play your games elsewhere to your heart’s content somewhere like The Lounge, but please don’t waste the time of others during instances where they are clearly striving for more with your petty self-distractions.

To the extent that you are a person that holds the modest belief that knowledge can be communicated and that discussion can result in learning this thread represents basic guidelines for how to approach achieving those ends while taking advantage of the unique opportunities online message boards lend to our ability to communicate with each other. As obvious a boon to our collective well-being as this may all seem in hindsight, it represents an understanding of things that is clearly widely unrecognized and unexploited in practice. Considering this, I borrowed from a classic universally renowned book and did a little adjusting to make its message more palatable and directly relevant to the concerns of an online forum as a reminder to myself (esp. myself) and others of its extremely practical advice. Following this advise doesn't mean we can't express ourselves, or joke around and have fun -- it's not a demand to adhere to nothing beyond what is necessitated by the rules of formal debate -- it's just what I think ought to be done generally to get more out of our interactions with each other.

I’ll reiterate Adler and remind everyone that these rules describe an ideal performance in discussion, yet the ideal remains the measure of achievement. You are a good reader and forum participant in the degree to which you approximate it. All it takes to make an effort at living up to this ideal is exercising our uniquely high-level self-awareness in the service of rationality, empathy, respecting ourselves and others, and humility when we communicate with each other. To me that sounds pretty natural and reasonable. I cannot imagine why anyone who is psychologically somewhere short of nihilistically suicidal wouldn’t want to heed Adler's advice. Now that we've been reminded there’s no respectable excuse for ignoring it, let’s show some respect to ourselves and each other and try it out.

 

[Thorns Have Roses]

1)I'm not that interested in "tl;dr" readers for this thread. 2)relevant to effective interpersonal communications through message boards.

These attitudes are antithetical, if your goal is inclusiveness/raising the bar. Stating your concerns as concisely as possible is a big part of being constructive.

OP, prequote material, tl;dr version (using 81.15% fewer words):

NSFW:

I was recently reading Mortimer J. Adler’s (1966) “How to Read a Book,” when I was stuck by the relevance of what I was reading to a P&S thread by MyDoorsAreOpen titled Dialectics.

I’ve no doubt I’m not alone in my exasperation in attempting to have productive discussions on Bluelight. What follows is largely a collection of pull quotes from “How to Read a Book,” edited and appropriated by me at times to make the content more directly relevant.

Regardless, Adler's advice is excellent.

 

[psood0nym]

These attitudes are antithetical, if your goal is inclusiveness/raising the bar. Stating your concerns as concisely as possible is a big part of being constructive.

OP, prequote material, tl;dr version (using 81.15% fewer words):

NSFW:

I was recently reading Mortimer J. Adler’s (1966) “How to Read a Book,” when I was stuck by the relevance of what I was reading to a P&S thread by MyDoorsAreOpen titled Dialectics.

I’ve no doubt I’m not alone in my exasperation in attempting to have productive discussions on Bluelight. What follows is largely a collection of pull quotes from “How to Read a Book,” edited and appropriated by me at times to make the content more directly relevant.

Regardless, Adler's advice is excellent.

This attempt at condensing my post doesn’t communicate remotely as much as is intended by the original. Despite affirming it is “excellent,” you’ve ignored Adler’s advice to precisely elaborate your disagreement. Instead, you’ve simply implied your shorter version contains the same meaning with “81.15%” fewer words. So much meaningful context is left out, though presumably you think that's all totally superfluous. However, as stated earlier, I’m making an argument intended to persuade a specific audience of like-minded people (not be inclusive). That means using rhetoric, not just sticking to the facts.

If you want a more academic explanation of why “more is more,” in both fiction and expository writing read my thread “Less is Not More, More is More” in the Words forum. The thread borrows from Iowa University Professor of English Brooks Landon’s work on the important roles of cumulative syntax – which involves adding words to gain precision of meaning – and sharing an author’s context and thought processes with the reader in producing effective prose.

Otherwise, consider this quote from Paul West, which is very closely related to many of Landon's arguments:

“Certain producers of plain prose have conned the reading public into believing that only in prose plain, humdrum or flat can you articulate the mind of inarticulate ordinary Joe. For every hundred people with a hair-trigger response to what they think excessive, there are a few with a hair-trigger response to prose stripped down. The objection is empirical, not moral. It says life is infinitely more complex and magical than we will ever know unless we stop trying to pin down feeling in pat little formulas or sentences so understated as to be vacant, their only defense the lamebrain cop-out that, because they say so little, they imply volumes. Got up as a cry from the heart, it is really an excuse for dull and mindless writing, larded over with the democratic myth that says this is how most folks are. Well, most folks are lazy, especially when confronted with a book, and some writers are lazy too, writing in the same anonymous style as everyone else.

Paul West, “In Defense of Purple Prose,” (1985) The New York Times.

I’m not trying to address the tl;dr crowd because they don’t care enough to read things like books written by Adler, so why would I expect them to take the time to help explain Adler to those who don’t practice his advice? I have no idea what even motivates the effort to post “tl;dr.” I can only imagine they reply “tl;dr” because not only are such people too lazy to read let alone write such posts, but because rather than simply ignore a long post they want to prevent the recurrence of whatever they feel in reaction to the work of a poster who cares enough to make such a substantial effort anonymously by publicly shaming them for doing so. The tl;dr crowd aren’t the sort of people who I’d expect to go out of their way to explain to others why they should heed Adler’s advice and ultimately write FAR MORE by thoroughly explaining their disagreements and perspectives.

I’ve bothered to try and explain some of Adler, which is why I’m looking for like-minded people to help explain him in their debates with others. The most reliable way I know of to inspire a like-minded person to respond is to generate sympathy through empathy or simple recognition by sharing one’s own mind. Adler took three chapters to give his advice, and his purposefully lengthy arguments gain further weight within the context of the entirety of his book that does not and cannot survive the chop job of a bullet point presentation (I know, I wrote a pull quote summary of it). Don’t take my word for it, read Adler’s chapters and you’ll see he goes out of his way to describe the personal context within which he decided to write them. This personal context is what I’ve provided in post #1. Pared down “just the facts” writing doesn’t mean the same thing to a perceptive and passionate human mind that will actually react to it as it would to a logical security camera that, in its dispassionate passive judgment, observes negligently. Further, anyone who simply cannot be bothered to read more is likely to have little of consequence to write to those who can.

 

[Thorns Have Roses]

I have no idea what even motivates the effort to post “tl;dr.”

They mean to say that a poster is ignoring forum etiquette. In a place where everyone is involved in multiple discussions simultaneously, one should be mindful of the time constraints their fellow forumites are under while reading/responding to posts.

I’m making an argument intended to persuade a specific audience of like-minded people (not be inclusive)

Acknowledged, my post was going for a #4, but only if you meant to raise the bar generally, not just to make intermediate level writers advanced.

adding words to gain precision of meaning

At some point, precision becomes pedantry.

I have read your thread in words, but I subscribe to Hemmingway's school of thought.

Presumably you think that's all totally superfluous

As superfluous as that "totally."

 

[psood0nym]

They mean to say that a poster is ignoring forum etiquette. In a place where everyone is involved in multiple discussions simultaneously, one should be mindful of the time constraints their fellow forumites are under while reading/responding to posts.



Acknowledged, my post was going for a #4, but only if you meant to raise the bar generally, not just to make intermediate level writers advanced.



At some point, precision becomes pedantry.

I have read your thread in words, but I subscribe to Hemmingway's school of thought.

Well then I would suggest you read Brooks Landon's thoughts on Hemingway, here quoted from lecture notes (which you would have read had you had read post #1 of my thread in Words, which quotes this):

Ask anyone who has read much Hemingway whether his sentences were characteristically long or characteristically short, and the odds are they’ll choose short. But consider this sentence from Death in the Afternoon: "Once I remember Gertrude Stein talking of bullfights spoke of her admiration for Joselito and showed me some pictures of him in the ring and of herself and Alice Toklas sitting in the first row of the wooden barreras at the bull ring at Valencia with Joselito and his brother Gallo below, and I had just come from the Near East, where the Greeks broke the legs of their baggage and transport animals and drove and shoved them off the quay into the shallow water when they abandoned the city of Smyrna, and I remember saying that I did not like the bullfights because of the poor horses. "

When you say "As superfluous as that "'totally.'" My reply is "OK, doesn't really change anything."

 

[TheAppleCore]

If you have not been able to show that the thread's original poster or subsequent discussant is uninformed, misinformed, or illogical on relevant matters, you simply cannot disagree. You must agree.

Yes.

A = B and B = C, yet I insist that A ≠ C!



I will also echo the sentiment that being concise is very important on an online forum. A forum thread isn't a book that people read in a linear word-for-word fashion. People, myself included, scan threads for quick and easy bites of relevant information. Huge walls of text are formidable enemies of the computer generation's attention span.

This may not be ideal, but it's just a fact that must be dealt with - get too verbose and everything you say goes unnoticed.

 

[Thorns Have Roses]

which you would have read

I did read that, I meant Iceberg Theory rather than sentence length.

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.

My reply is "OK, doesn't really change anything."

That was my tongue in cheek way of saying that you use too many qualifiers (a vice I was afflicted with worse than you). Something to keep in mind:

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Anyway, I've voiced my concerns, I would like to see you implement your project in P&S if you have the time.


tl;dr of our entire exchange:
NKB - How not to waste others' time online requires brevity, you're thinking of how not to waste others time in academia.
Psood - Baloney!

P.S. I figured out why I'm nagging you about this. You write like my sister talks. I always end up zoning out and/or requesting she condense whatever she's saying down to two sentences.

 

[psood0nym]

^Fair enough. I do, for instance, wholly agree with your pointing out that "totally" was genuinely superfluous in a sentence that already employs "all," though in my defense that mistake had to do with re-writing that sentence and making a simple copy-editing error. I still contend that, whatever your appraisal of my style is, my intent is not inclusivity but to inspire the like-minded, and that means rhetoric -- it means hoping to spark empathy by relating my own voice, which is highly qualified. If popular sympathies find such qualification distasteful it's irrelevant because I'm not trying to be popular.

I consider wasting one's time here not a matter of brevity but of quality of discussion. I don't see how or what we teach each other by keeping things short. Little more can be hoped to be captured by such a strategy than parroting the summaries of others, not the sharing of unique ideas among individuals (granted, it makes the job of moderators far easier ). Extreme qualification is required to articulate novel sorts of meaning because in order to point at it we need to distinguish it from everything else that came before it but that it's not. Little that is both new and sophisticated, and which constitutes most rich learning opportunities in online discussion forums, can be said or read quickly. The fact is, we are not really communicating with each other well. We're posting our thoughts online and assuming the lack of recognition we get is all that's to be expected. For a potential partial explanation, read my reply to TheAppleCore.

Huge walls of text are formidable enemies of the computer generation's attention span. This may not be ideal, but it's just a fact that must be dealt with - get too verbose and everything you say goes unnoticed.

Heh, don't I know it. That's probably why my old thread, "Are We the Dumbest Generation?" in P&S got pruned out of existence (the title is borrowed from a book called "The Dumbest Generation" that makes many of the same observations). My thread reviewed eye tracking studies and the increasing contentions of surveyed older English faculty members that imply the habits of internet reading are behind a substantial dip in reading comprehension among the younger classmen on campuses across the US and Canada (presumably because these younger readers have been more thoroughly socialized through internet-mediated communications). I'm 31, by the way, and even though I'm not THAT old I very much notice these problems in younger students, and it's clearly symptomatic of constantly multi-tasking and thinking they're learning more by doing so when the empirical evidence indicates those who think they're the best at multi-tasking are, in fact, the worst, and in any case multi-tasking cannot be reliably done by humans. It's just a way of feeling like we're busy when we should be focusing on and contemplating one thing at a time the way deep thought has always been accomplished. It's a way to distract ourselves into a state of lower cognitive demand. We've habituated ourselves to a behavior default that breeds impatience and shallow thought.

The same text materials are understood better (as measured by reading comprehension tests) if they are printed out on paper than if they are read on a computer monitor. This has nothing to do with screen reading versus print reading, however. Rather, it's because we merely associate screen reading with quick Google searches for precisely what we're shopping for and Wikipedia summaries. This mere association translates into the expectations of readers online and makes us impatient with the sort of high-quality long form texts that have historically underpinned human knowledge and civilization. Arguments can be made that this simply reflects a "change" in intelligence, and not a cultural crisis, which it may. But the problem is this sort of change of intelligence cannot be cultivated like those intelligences that preceded it because possessing it doesn't help us access challenging knowledge, it just helps us seek out easy to swallow pablum and more conveniently confirm our preconceptions by building customized knowledge bubbles via our use of content filters and highly specified social forums online (for more on this see Cass Sunstein's "Republic 2.0"). For example, despite their relative unfamiliarity with the internet, people from older generations are far more effective researchers of topics online as measured by empirical assessments. This is theorized to be because they were taught the old methods of using a library card catalog and reading through material, which required them to draw connections between content that the Google generation simply searches for, effectively allowing an algorithm to think for them. Older people are better more thoughtful researchers simply because they had to be. We may be impatient with long form writing online, but to a large degree our impatience stems from unexamined assumptions that are highly arbitrary and destructive and should therefore be resisted, not made concession to.

 

[psood0nym]

^Fair enough. I do, for instance, wholly agree with your pointing out that "totally" was genuinely superfluous in a sentence that already employs "all," though in my defense that mistake had to do with re-writing that sentence and making a simple copy-editing error. I still contend that, whatever your appraisal of my style is, my intent is not inclusivity but to inspire the like-minded, and that means rhetoric -- it means hoping to spark empathy by relating my own voice, which is highly qualified. If popular sympathies find such qualification distasteful it's irrelevant because I'm not trying to be popular.

I consider wasting one's time here not a matter of brevity but of quality of discussion. I don't see how or what we teach each other by keeping things short. Little more can be hoped to be captured by such a strategy than parroting the summaries of others, not the sharing of unique ideas among individuals. Extreme qualification is required to specify novel sorts of meaning because in order to point at it we need to distinguish it from everything else that came before it but that it's not. Little that is both novel and sophisticated, and that largely constitutes was is worthwhile to learn from online discussion, can be said or read quickly.

Huge walls of text are formidable enemies of the computer generation's attention span. This may not be ideal, but it's just a fact that must be dealt with - get too verbose and everything you say goes unnoticed.

Heh, don't I know it. That's probably why my old thread, "Are We the Dumbest Generation?" in P&S got pruned out of existence (the title is borrowed from a book called "The Dumbest Generation" that makes many of the same observations). My thread reviewed eye tracking studies and the increasing contentions of surveyed older English faculty members that imply the habits of internet reading are behind a substantial dip in reading comprehension among the younger classmen on campuses across the US and Canada (presumably because these younger readers have been more thoroughly socialized through internet-mediated communications). I'm 31, by the way, and even though I'm not THAT old I very much notice these problems in younger students, and it's clearly symptomatic of constantly multi-tasking and thinking they're learning more by doing so when the empirical evidence indicates those who think they're the best at multi-tasking are, in fact, the worst, and in any case multi-tasking cannot be reliably done by humans. It's just a way of feeling like we're busy when we should be focusing and contemplating on one thing at a time. It's a way of distracting ourselves into a more comfortable state of lower cognitive demand that wasn't possible to access before and that functions to undermine our role as sophisticated communicators in an increasingly complex society. We've habituated ourselves to a behavioral default that breeds inattentiveness and shallow perception and reflection.

The same text materials are understood better (as measured by reading comprehension tests) if they are printed out on paper than if they are read on a computer monitor. This has nothing to do with screen reading versus print reading, however. Rather, it's because we merely associate screen reading with quick Google searches for precisely what we're shopping for and Wikipedia summaries. This mere association translates into the expectations of readers online and makes us impatient with the sort of high-quality long form texts that have historically underpinned human knowledge and civilization. Arguments can be made that this simply reflects a "change" in intelligence, and not a cultural crisis, which it may. But the problem is this sort of change of intelligence cannot be cultivated like those intelligences that preceded it because possessing it doesn't help us access challenging knowledge, it just helps us seek out easy to swallow pablum and more conveniently confirm our preconceptions by building customized knowledge bubbles via our use of content filters and highly specified social forums online. Also, the largest ostensible boon to intelligence the internet may be thought to provide is clearly to multi-tasking ability, but multi-tasking ability has been demonstrated exhaustively not to exist. People may be impatient with long form writing online, but to a large degree our impatience stems from unexamined assumptions that are highly arbitrary and destructive and should therefore be resisted, not made concession to.

 

[Thorns Have Roses]

Extreme qualification is required to articulate novel sorts of meaning because in order to point at it we need to distinguish it from everything else that came before it but that it's not.

I admit, this would have merit in P&S, and would be a godsend in CE&P.

 

[Foreigner]

People may be impatient with long form writing online, but to a large degree our impatience stems from unexamined assumptions that are highly arbitrary and destructive and should therefore be resisted, not made concession to.

Can't argue with this, in most cases.

My earlier request for a tl;dr version had nothing to do with laziness as I personally read everything you wrote. I was just trying to encourage higher participation; however, it seems that you only want participation from those "qualified" (as above), which is fine. Just don't be disappointed when you get fewer replies.

I agree with what you've said about multi-tasking... it seems like the younger generation is not capable of single-point focus as much as the pre-internet boom generation. I read that in our parents generation, holding a single job or maybe having 2-3 jobs in one's whole lifetime was the norm, whereas now it is common for young people to have had many different jobs by the time they are 30, with no single specialization forming out of that. Does this make our society less effective?

I also suspect that unbridled individualism has grown a lot since the internet age because of all the social networking which puts the focus on performance and personal showcasing. Everyone is entitled to their opinion no matter how innaccurate, because the internet is not a venue where only the approved and qualified can speak. (This has its pros and cons.) With way more information available, choice is broadened to an absurd degree. There seems to be a growing disloyalty to collectivity with a shift toward individualism... i.e. "I can reinvent myself as many times as I want in this life!" Although I'm fairly anti-establishment, I do recognize that there has to be some kind of cohesion to maintain some kind of collective benefit. If you compare the western world to Asian countries like China in terms of selfishness, the western nations are degenerating.

But then... what do you think of the "race to the bottom" happening in the U.S., which is mostly fueled by corporate powers wanting to have a more competitive edge on Asia? It has resulted in the gutting of unions, devaluing of education (even scorning it), and lowered wages. Can we really scorn multi-tasking when young people are increasingly no longer being encouraged to have focus?