- INSULT
- RETORT
- COUNTER-RETORT
- RIPOSTE
- COUNTER-RIPOSTE
- NONSENSICAL STATEMENT INVOLVING PLANKTON
- RESPONSE TO RANDOM STATEMENT AND THREAT TO BAN OPPOSING SIDES
- WORDS OF PRAISE FOR FISHFOOD
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AND ACCEPTENCE OF TERMS
Also yungins might be surprised to learn that we had a distributed, open source communication network, where basically any dipshit with a static IP and a Pentium could start an IRC server and maybe get added to the network if they were reliable enough (I was one such dipshit).
So you are right in a sense that discord replace IRC as a means of communication for the majority, but in term of freedom it is a regression. If IRC had supported offline history keeping things could have been different, but for the people I know it was a major blocker for adoption. They didn't want to have to setup a server to bounce from or keep something running all the time.
Individual channels are dead, sure. 15 years ago, EFnet's #wow was quite busy and frequently had over 100 people in it. Now, it's down to just 20, with at least 7 of them being bots, the rest are idle. We went two weeks without a single message. I even unbanned the trolls just to get some excitement back, but they went silent (though didn't leave) once they realized the channel is indeed dead.
But EFnet's #geekissues is still very active.
If someone's willing to pay a PR firm to run a bot farm of any kind, this has to be taken into account. Such issues include fossil-fueled global warming, the efficacy of the latest patented FDA-approved pharmaceutical product, the role of virological gain-of-function research in the origins of the Covid pandemic, the necessity of government funding budgets for various purposes from public health to the provision of weapons to European and Middle Eastern conflicts, desirability of regulation of financial institutions (Glass-Steagall etc.), and possibly most relevant to HN, the wisdom of running Linux vs. Windows vs. Apple operating systems to meet your personal, business, and other computing needs.
How would one respond in such cases? "Well, I understand that your job requires you to amplify a certain set of talking points and play down others, and I sympathize with your need to earn a living by doing so, so have a nice day?"
Of course a bot will never admit to being a bot - but even if you're dealing with a good faith actor, there's also the issue of whether or not you have a shared information base, e.g. attempts to discuss evolutionary theory with someone who believes the universe was created 6000 years ago probably won't go well.
To be fair, though, online debates may have value for the readers even if they never convince the original poster. Since most users in a forum are lurkers[1] it's very hard to measure how effective is an argument and what extent is a particular debate even worth it.
Regarding this topic of people believing wrong and harmful things on the internet and spreading it around (mixed in with the 999 bots is 1 person's great aunt exposing her brain to unfiltered bot noise), I wonder, would the better solution be like the one from the novel, to completely annihilate the trustworthiness of the unfiltered internet, or, perhaps there's some other solution that counters the Oil and Gas bots, perhaps even following a strategy like in the OP article, politely Dale Carnegieing every single point with boundless energy, enthusiasm, politeness, and good faith?
I'm personally motivated by this because my belief system rests on a belief that power and knowledge should be freely distributed among humans equally, alongside responsibility, but for this to work we'd need a method for individuals to resist a much easier to produce tide of bullshit.
Any argument has some aim I think, and it's often implicit. It may be to achieve some aim that depends on the other person, or it may be to repair a relationship, or it might be to inflict some outcome in an organizational setting, it may be to work out something in your head, or it may be to convince bystanders of a position.
Sometimes you end up with bots, sometimes you end up with PR people, sometimes you end up with highly politically motivated people, sometimes you end up with people who are trying to sell their own book or paper or whatever. You just don't know and even though I do think a lot of people — maybe most — are acting in very good faith, some of them are not, and it varies in degree.
I also think social media systems are fundamentally broken at the moment, and ideally we should be moving to highly decentralized and/or federated platforms. That's a slightly different issue probably but maybe not — I think the subtle aims of platforms tend to trickle down into this too, and nudge different types of behaviors. In any given case it might be a tiny effect, but it accumulates I think.
I came to this realization after getting good at climate science arguments. I could take a denialist "did you consider" argument, go to the IPCC reports, find labs, find papers, and return with summaries and citations in relatively short order, and after delivering them with kid gloves I could move people off one denialist argument... and onto another. If I repeated the exercise, there would be a third in line.
Bad arguments take 1 unit of effort to generate and 1000 to refute. If you don't have a strategy for handling that asymmetry, you're toast, and the strategies for handling it do not involve kid gloves. Gish gallopers are gonna Gish gallop, and no amount of good faith is going to stop them if they don't want to stop. At some point you have to give up on the unbounded cost of good faith and call out the bad faith arguments. If you put them on blast, you might persuade spectators and that's about the best you can hope for on a finite budget.
Maybe you didn't read the article. They didn't suggest putting on kids gloves and siting your references. In fact, that was explicitly rejected as a good approach X) "Telling them their wrong" and X) "Telling them not to be rude".
So here I am, telling you you're wrong and that you're rude. The irony isn't lost on me, but I really don't have any idea how I'm supposed to "signal that I'm genuinely interested" in your argument here.
> There’s a misconception that good faith discussion only happens in close-knit communities like LessWrong or HackerNews.
I'll have to look at LessWrong, but I think it's a misconception that good faith discussion is common on Hacker News... Many (most?) comments here seem to be about inflating ones ego by showing how smart or virtuous one is.
I'd hope so? If the war is some subject worth arguing about, anyway. The fetish people have for polite discourse is itself bad-faith.
> The fetish people have for polite discourse is itself bad-faith.
Ok then, here goes: Your opinion on this is fucking childish. How'd I do?
The point of winning internet arguments isn't to convince the person you're arguing with, it's to convince the people who are watching.
It's just ice cream politics.
If one really did want to change the crowd for some polarizing current topic, I wonder how to go about it. It'd be easy to substitute Vi and Emacs for chocolate and vanilla, but I'm not seeing how to apply it for climate change, guns, abortion, free speech, the middle east, or really anything that people actually fight about.
But rarely is a topic so simple that "X is Y"; "no X is Z" provides enough information to move someone forward towards establishing a final truth. Even if "X is Z" is a true statement, it almost always lacks necessary context to fully satisfy what the other is in need of. It is hard for us to understand where the other person is coming from.
Furthermore, if you do end up truly convincing someone of something, the topic then becomes boring and they'll just stop engaging, so how do you even know whether the argument was 'productive' or if the other just ran out of free time? Of course, it doesn't actually matter, so...
Indeed, however the exception among a huge audience is a fair amount of people. Who, in turn, may convince other (cascading effect).
Moreover by debating one solidify his arguments and prepares re-usable answers (as a sort of FAQ), thus alleviating Brandolini's law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law ).
You can also cause enough psychic damage to eventually activate someone mentally unstable into doing something like bringing a gun to a pizza shop and threatening to kill people there.
Idk if polite conversation has a purpose on the internet, but seeding the internet with information can certainly serve a purpose. Idk if it's served good purposes yet. Specifically in terms of textual content and arguing. Images and video obviously had impact in revolutions.
The way I read the article it doesn’t talk about producing a better argument. It talks about being a better listener/reader such that the other party is more killed to listen to the argument you already have.
I do see it worth spending the 1000x effort at times, but not to convince someone else about topic A. I would spend that if I’m unsure of my standing on topic A.
The article presupposes interpersonal discussions, and assume possibility of good faith. It’s hard to make a case online, which covers all bases.
——-
To your point = YES!
It is INCREDIBLY frustrating and difficult to talk about this unless you are in some specific circles.
The best analogy currently I have is between Individual recycling vs company scale environmental harm.
Denialist arguments, misinformation campaigns - these are not conversations. These are campaigns. Someone wants to enact political change, influence the Overton window and drive votes or citizen behavior.
It’s absurd - and any intervention to stop this, will be branded as censorship. Then the usual solutions get pulled out; fact-checking, more free speech. All of which buys more space for the malignant campaigns.
Currently, misinformation research is specifically being targeted, which has incredible parallels to environmental research in the 80s/90s. You had cranks brought onto Fox and treated as experts. This created bills to thwart pro environment efforts. When scientists went onto Fox to debate, they were fed to the lions for spectacle.
The facts of online ecosystems end up being loaded - misinfo campaigns focus mostly on right and conservative groups. This leads to emotional responses and dismissals from people who aren’t steeped in this nonsense. You get arguments of both sides, or solutions that assume equal levels of harm and exposure.
Any actual effort to bring light to this is attacked. See what happened with the SIO. Right now the Censorship, and the censorship industrial complex are the terms being used.
It’s.. incredibly frustrating.
The rhetorical flourish "it's not my job to educate you" gets overused, and misused as the first fortified position someone retreats to when they're contradicted.
However, there is a place for it, and it's probably worth asking after the second objection presented by a denialist "how many of your assertions am I going to have to prove wrong before you find some dignity, and use the methods I just showed you on the rest of your own claims?"
Trying to boil this down to the quality of the faith is also a rather immature response. To frame things this way isn't to accept that there are different viewpoints other than your own, it's just to assert a claim that your viewpoints are correct, and that while other view points might exist, they are wrong. Your assessment of what is a good faith or what is a bad faith argument likely has little to do with the quality of the arguments involved, and instead will somehow miraculously align with your own world view at a rather implausible rate.
If you want to argue with people in public, the only thing you should really be concerned about is stating your best case. If you do that then you've achieved the only mature goals that you could possibly attach to public arguing, and whether people are convinced by it or not is up to them.
Hitchen's Razor is a great defense for these amplified DoS attacks:
"what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence"
I still contend that the "yo momma's butt is flat" defense against flat earth claims is the Game Theory Optimal play
Best retort of them all: own the platform, make the rules, permaban.
"Pick your battles" is another phrasing of it.
As I've gotten older, I've come to realise that there are people (including offline, including close friends and/or family) with whom discussions simply turn into arguments ... and there's no logic that will prevail.
Increasingly I set boundaries, both for myself, and with those others. I've also realised that some things don't need to be arguments. I'll state my terms, request, proposal, plans, whatever (and even that only if necessary or plausibly considerate), and if there's some antagonistic response ... I ignore it.
If the person actively thwarts my doing something (often to help them, and why people get so combative about assistance I can't even begin to understand...), I'll simply lay down tools. "You don't want me to do X ..." or "You're going to make it more unpleasant / inconvenient for me to do X ... then you can do it yourself."
It's much easier to do this if you can walk (or otherwise) get away. A space you can control (walls, locking doors, or exit from location) helps tremendously.
Some of this transfers to online discussion. Mostly I communicate to share my own knowledge/experience, or to try to understand others. Rarely to convince. Occasionally to refute or show the inherent paradox or inconsistency of a statement, though that's usually aimed at other readers.
(The lurking audience is almost always far larger than the participating one.)
It sure would be nice to have a place where you could discuss ideas without it being an argument, or to offer helpful suggestions to people without them treating it like you insulted their intelligence.
100%
Arguments result in walking away, the relationship ends before hardly any information is exchanged. If either side wants an argument, it can be difficult to avoid. If both sides are seeking understanding, it becomes very easy to exchange a lot of information and for all to learn a great deal, even as they still disagree.
I would very much like to find (or create) forum(s) for discussions seeking understanding instead of arguments seeking to “win” wars or battles.
My own attempts have shown the potential audience is small to non existent, at least with the combinations of words I’ve tried.
The users on chatgpt.com are quite good at staying cordial and come off as if they want to seek a genuine understanding. Granted, its UI is a little different from the traditional forum, only occasionally seeing additional users reply but being mostly geared to one-on-one interaction. That said, most discussions on more traditional forums like this one end up branching off into one-on-one discussions anyway, so I am not sure that is a terribly meaningful difference at the end of the day.
> My own attempts have shown the potential audience is small to non existent
Said discussion community has quite possibly become the most popular place for online discussion, so I am not sure about that. Understandably bootstrapping such a service is hard, though. "If you build it, they will come" only happens in the movies.
"Be careful of what you wish for", though. While what you describe sounds nice in theory, it ends up feeling rather sterile when you don't have all the quirkiness of the so-called battles. That's what brings me back here, and deep down that is probably why you are here too.
But that means that the content will be tuned to what the author thinks will most likely produce a reaction. Some audiences respond well to insults, others not so much.
> There’s a misconception that good faith discussion only happens in close-knit communities like LessWrong or HackerNews.
In my experience, discussions about more controversial topics here are exactly as disgusting as they are on any other forum. Which makes sense, because technologically, this place is exactly like any other forum.
> The reality I’m looking at here is that ~everyone on the internet is rational AND is arguing in good faith. (...) "people suck/are bad/evil/stupid" (...) is a very difficult way to live life, it’s also just flat out false.
The approach I'm going to use for debuking this is going to be semantics-play and claiming that your examples are cherry-picked. I'll paraphrase 2 X (formerly Twitter) conversations for this that I just hit recently. I'm paraphrasing because I lost the links. You'll unfortunately just have to take my word for this.
Conversation #1:
OP: You should drink alcohol! When are you going to drink alcohol if not now? 18-29 are your prime drinking years, your body is made to process alcohol at this age. You should never abstinate. You should take at least 12 shots every week."
Apart from being blatantly terrible health advice, this is also logically unsound. The OP very clearly cannot prove or demonstrate that the body is made to process alcohol in this age range. What he could prove/demonstrate is that in this age range, the body handles it best, which is a very different thing.
Commenter 1: I disagree, it's really bad for your body, blah blah blah.
OP: You're a loser, and look at me I'm more fit than you (posts unsavory picture of commenter 1, and a "good" one of themselves).
Commenter 1: posts picture of themselves being visibly more fit than OP.
OP: <i don't remember, probably something asinine>
Commenter 2: yeah but you're a loser
If this article's author's takeaway from this is that Commenter 1 didn't try to argue in a good manner, that is profoundly depressing. Very clearly OP and Commenter 2 had zero intention in making a good faith argument, or recognizing themselves in the wrong. They were deliberately acting like "cool" assholes.
Conversation #2:
OP: post about Apple and privacy
Commenter 1: whenever I talk about <things> I get recommended them in ads immediately after. How can Apple have top notch privacy if this happens?
Commenter 2: argues that Commenter 1 searched for said <things> and just doesn't realize, therefore he's dumb, therefore Apple good
Once again, there was no attempt at a good faith conversation. Possibly from either of them. Join in, and you'll have to fend off two immature idiots instead of one.
What I'm trying to get at here is that regardless of whether these people are actual assholes or are just acting like one, it doesn't really matter. I'll go on these platforms and be hit with their misery regardless. Them being actually goody two shoes is unimportant, if all I can ever interact with is their asshole selves. Either the platform (X, formerly Twitter) gets this kind of behavior out of people, or being on the internet in general does. Regardless, these people are not worth anyone's time.
Despite this, I will say that I do highly agree that this view is on its own extremely miserable as well. I've been having an extreme difficulty connecting with people due to the many years of insufferable conversations like this, and have abandoned most platforms by this point also. Inviting me to put in even more effort isn't super tantalizing either.
I really don't think this is just a "language" thing people can or should just figure out. It's a bit like thinking that you can do hard drugs if you just control yourself - ignoring of course that controlling yourself is the very thing the more serious substances gradually disintegrate. Is it true that you can be super into, idk, heroin, if you just pay attention? Sure I guess. Is it what's overwhelmingly likely to happen? No. And it has very little to do with you the "person" inside. It's biochemistry.
I don't know - in my experience Hackernews seems most best faith I've seen anywhere. If I have controversial opinions on Reddit I easily get downvoted hard (even though it's against the Reddiquette), but here I might even get few plus points and a civil non hivemind response.
The second example is just wishful thinking. I bet even if KJ had responded with the author's way, axial would have still blocked them after several exchanges.
Of course I might be wrong. Perhaps I'm just not as good at argumenting as the author.
The second example is just a guy moving the goalpost, he went from "Where's the money?" to "Ok, that's where the money is, but are they using it?", and then gets mad when someone answered with sources. But according to the author KJ completely misunderstood the goalposts.
Not true! I'm trying to collect "success stories" here because I've done this dozens of times, even with the most troll-like internet strangers. It's very consistent. Nobody believes that it generalizes. What I'm working on now is writing down these techniques so that people can empirically try it for themselves. I want people to challenge this, prove me wrong. Because the techniques get more robust with every challenge.
https://github.com/DefenderOfBasic/in-good-faith-handbook/is...
Have you seen SE method? Do you use it as inspiration?
I have a minor gripe though, there’s a contradiction in the writing. “ There’s a misconception that good faith discussion only happens in close-knit…”
And then just a few paragraphs later
“If you’re not willing to do this, then you’re not arguing in good faith in my book.“ but this is generally the default behaviour of people on the internet and the article is trying to convince you, and teach you how not to be like that. So I think indeed, good faith arguments pretty much don’t happen on the internet with rare exceptions. It’s not a misconception unless the misconception is taken as good faith arguments literally never happen except in close knit communities, but who believes that?
In the end, I think everyone just wants to feel heard. It's difficult to remember that sometimes online, easy to forget there is a person behind the keyboard who came to think differently because of their experiences and exposures.
That's a pretty negative view of something I think is much simpler: Most people, on most topics, remember the conclusions (opinions) formed when learning about the topic, but either don't remember how they got there or only vaguely remember the details.
We have seen that during COVID and now we see that even more in those russians who are in favour of the war.
I'd say that some techniques to argue with people on the far side do exist, but it takes time and a lot of effort.
The most important person in an internet argument is the uninvolved passer-by, at least in those cases that make me argue publicly at length with strangers.
I might never be able to convince the person I am discussing with, but I might convince the audience.
My grandma used to say that arguing something is the greatest concession.
Consider A:
-Earth is flat
- it is not, earth is round
- ya it is, john doe proved it
- ok sorry for not understanding could you please explain what john doe said?
Or B:
- earth is flat
- yo momma's butt is flat
Yes B, loses the battle for the one mind, but when you consider the readers, you are simply avoiding platforming an idiot and playing a dumb strawman to boot.
I guess it all comes down to whether you view the internet as the greek agora or the roman circus.
All of this rational debate and usage of latin phrases for fallacies brings back memories of teenage years of online debating. I get that it's election time at the homeland and some people are campaigning, but you get more votes making a strawman of your opponent and making a thread viral than going one by one changing minds. Who here thinks twitter is a platform for rational discourse? Ha!
In the contrary, deplattforming, doxxing and all the things people came up with are now an integral part of the rights toolkit.
Point is: when I talk to people on the street I get the impression Thant what most of them desire is just boring politics by upstanding people.
Maybe it’s time to change the way we discuss.
My takeaway from your comment is not so much that we need to change the way we discuss, but that we more regularly need to remind ourselves that computers and people are not the same thing. As you suggest, when people have discussions it usually goes well, with all parties more or less wanting "boring" discussion that goes somewhere meaningful. It is when people have discussions with computers but confuse them as being people when it all goes off the rails.
That's the elephant in the room here. The site formerly known as Twitter is optimised to maximise engagement, and conflict typically generates much more engagement than co-operation. It'd be like trying to have a friendly discussion to work out your differences with your opponent in a boxing ring, surrounded by large crowd who have been whipped up by the venue into baying for a fight. I sometimes wonder if it is even possible to build a sustainable internet platform which somehow rewards cordial good faith discourse and penalises the mean and intolerant (and by sustainable I mean immune to the tendency for these platforms to eventually pivot to maximising profits above all else).
Or
Something something LinkedIn.
I suppose both approaches have their own problems.
These site - twitter, facebook, etc... they aren't dividing humans per se by way of intent. They are black mirrors to human nature. The algorithms say, "human, what entices your attention?" "Drama!" "Fights" "Polarizing topics that people 50/50 disagree/agree on" . And so the algorithms delivered what the humans attention recommends - polarizing topics. And so we are now more polarized.
Because this is rooted in human nature, and you can't change human nature, the solution is something needs to be legislated. You can't ban free speech. You can't ban how long people spend online, also freedom, any more than you can ban gambling or alcohol or drug addiction. So then it comes down to something like recommendation algorithm ethics (hah! can you imagine? But why is that not a thing?!? we have an intense AI ethics community but that other AI that is the recommendation AIs that powers sites, it's all crickets as far as rules and ethics). Well, we all know why, money. But "medical ethics" while being a field is also legislated as to unethical medical practices lead to severe consequences, perhaps a "tech ethics" type field would help improve such algorithms, or "tethics" for short. Congress grilled Mark Cuckerburg for all the suicides his tech stack causing, I figure if we're talking literal deaths here maybe have a bit more regulation>?
The best summary I've ever read about the internet
“Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”
Of course on the Internet, no one ever thinks themselves an idiot, no matter how ridiculous their position is.
> "Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it" - George Bernard Shaw
> “Arguing with idiots is like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good you are, the bird is going to shit on the board and strut around like it won anyway.” - Shannon L. Alder
When considered in its entirety? No. Not at all. Within the curated segment of Twitter I have established? Yes! It is probably the most rational place on the internet that I know of. Those within that curated circle seem to genuinely want to share information in a productive manner without the silly vitriol.
That's the beauty of "the algorithm", I suppose. You can tune it to leave the garbage out.
Reading the comments around this blogpost here on in other places, I feel like I'm almost alone in not trying to convince anyone when I argue with strangers online (most of the times), neither the other person I'm discussing with, or others who might be reading.
I mostly reply because there are unanswered questions that if answered, might teach me something new. Most of the times I'm just seeking understanding from both sides, not convincing the other.
Do most people argue on the internet with strangers in order to convince others of something? If so, how does your success rate look like? I probably feel like aiming for that would be futile at best.
Rhetoric, dialectic, sophistry, trolling, slap fights, agitprop.
To the OC's point, while the affordances of hot mediums like social media and message boards tend towards juicing dopamine, with some investment they can also be used for discourse. As OC Defender advocates. As moderators like u/dang facilitate.
--
My meager "yes and" contributions to Defender's post are...
> how to make the world a better place
Since at least Socrates, humans have been arguing about what it means to be a good person, how to live a good life, what is true and beautiful. aka moral philosophy. I praise and appreciate Defender for continuing this distinctly human tradition.
> This shows a genuine interest in understanding because it cannot be faked.
TMI: Maybe 6-7 years ago, I heard the advice
"When something (or someone) doesn't make sense to you, get curious."
By fits and starts, but mostly backsliding, I've been trying to embrace this advice. Hard as it is, doing so has helped, a lot.> Yes, this is a lot of work.
True.
--
PS: affordances in the Donald Norman sense; hot/cold mediums in the Marshall McLuhan sense.
Exactly.
Correia’s Law: "Internet arguing is a spectator sport. You argue to convince the undecided and give ammo to those on your side. Do not expect to change your opponent’s mind as you cannot sway the willfully ignorant. Internet arguing is only worth it when there is an audience. The contestants do not get a vote, the audience decides who wins."
I dont think it is possible to have a debate in good faith without putting the opponent first.
You may have convinced the audience, but you ended up with a solution that doesn't work and is divorced from the real world.
Is it worth it in the end?
This also applies to any _public_ offline argument, doesn't it?
The guy who says climate change is a Chinese Hoax is 50/50 for President as a result.
So the answer seems to be a decades long campaign of misinformation to achieve power to get money to fund another decade of misinformation.
Yes, the duped marks you recruit into this will become pitiful shells of their former selves, paranoid losers abandoned by any educated member of their family who watch in horror as their loving father descends into hateful insanity.
Yes, the only people you'll be able to find to carry out this work will be sociopaths, leaving a trail of sexual and physical abuse behind them, as they help you destroy the country.
But you have to admit it's effective.
it's more about the arguer re-enforcing their beliefs of being correct, and therefore morally righteous and powerful, to themselves. If you can argue your point successfully or at least cause your opponent to secede or give up and ragequit or block you, you won, because it isn't about correctness but power to remove or eliminate their influence from the argument, and if taken to the farthest conclusion, society at large.
you begin noticing that all these conversations are about power over the opponent and if they could humiliate them enough- either with numbers by ratioing them with chatgpt bot replies or reddit downvotes or whatever- they will be silenced and you can pretend it was your power that did it.
It reminds me of catcalling on the street. The guy catcalling a girl knows very well they won't turn her on, she isn't going to be receptive, she isn't going to fuck him. She might just shoot him an angry look. But it doesn't matter because that wasn't the goal, the goal was to get a temporary sexual power trip- you just made that girl think about you against her will!! you were powerful enough to occupy her mind for that moment. You win!
you also see it in the sort of cultish thinking of all kinds of ideological things like wild flat earthers or MRAs or pickup artists or pizzagaters or whatever stupid shit. It's never about the thing they say they're all about, they don't really care about the earth being flat, or men's rights, or manipulating girls, or child abuse- they care about feeling like heroes to themselves and their peers- culturally righteous and powerful.
Is online the same? It's possible to talk to someone new every time. Will this long process happen for each person?
There's a reason why first impressions matter. Yes, someone who left a bad first impression could be a diamond in the rough. Except, why not just chat with the other diamonds instead?
If that's your goal, I agree it's usually pretty easy to avoid flame wars and get people to talk in respectful ways.
For me it often isn't worth it to spend time trying to build understanding of anonymous actors online. But, I think some of these recommendations carry into IRL discussions too. The central question for me is typically not "how can I make this civil" but rather "how much effort do I want to put into this argument?"
I've found different attitudes to truth. a distant nebulous ideal to orient and navigate with and hand to mouth political survival each create cognitive species so separate we wouldn't really miss each other if we were gone.
I don't really care about someone's specific opinions enough to make them "wrong," I'm usually only talking to them to find out if they have any interesting axioms of existence.
Absolutely not, there are trolls and people who make a living from arguing in bad faith.
In the example axial's perspective is just an assumption, could actually really be in bad faith.
Is there an example for the gold medal and still getting a "wow, a civil interaction, how rare!"?
BTW a public discussion most of the time isn't about the people discussing but about the audience.
It's rare to change someone's opinion but you can easier help create one in the undecided.