Level Minus One

[roozle]

I'm a little late to Paul Graham's essay on How To Disagree.  Apparently lots of people have seen it before me, but if you haven't seen it, check it out.  A useful thing to have in mind when you are thinking about what to say to the Person Being Wrong on The Internet.

Graham's level 0 for disagreement is name-calling.  And I think we can all agree

Comments

[dda]

From the Wikipedia article, the pyramid shows both the level and, it seems, the approximate number of each type of comment. Plus it is an SVG which is pretty cool. :-)

[spacehawk]

Rape threats and death threats aren't even limited to internet "arguments" -- they're employed by some people as an automatic response simply because they believe the speaker's identity is an abomination to them in the first place, and that people like that should not exist. A simple "I exist, and people like me exist too" is enough to trigger it. (The link is to a Huffington Post article about asexuality, but there are other examples.)

[achinhibitor]

It's all depressing. But I smile when I remember
Those were the good ole days; I could post something offensive and get death threats. No more. -- Tiekbane

[thewronghands]

Sure, I've had this explicited to me by someone in that position. There was a fellow who went around a hacking conference several years back making rape and death threats towards any speaker he thought was too white-hat. He wanted to "return hacking to its evil roots". I was one of four people he picked for his self-appointed campaign, and it was because I was a woman with no arrest record. He explicitly said that he wanted to drive us out of the field so that he'd never have to encounter us again. I wasn't the person that he actually did assault, though -- he picked the Christian guy for that, hoping that he'd either turn the other cheek or just somehow cease to be a hacker.

It is depressing that some people still think this counts as speech.