5.9 KiB
[RT][FF][HF] Marked for Death, Ch. 108: Never Split the Party
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Author: u/oliwhail Omake-Maximizing AGI*
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Score: 11
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Created: 2017-03-06T02:02:03
Post:
Comments:
u/eaglejarl [+5] (12 hours later)
The initial panic in the thread was delicious, but I've been really impressed at how quickly people have steadied down and started generating useful ideas.
u/Cariyaga [+3] Kyubey did nothing wrong (a day later)
The hivemind's specialty is panic. :D
u/zzzyxas [+2] (2 days later)
So, SV's banned spaghetti posting. The thread would prefer to be able to continue spaghetti posting, but in banning spaghetti posting, SV has robbed us of our most potent tool for explaining why we would like to continue. However, my Reddit name is different from my MFD name, so I can.
Spaghetti posting is simple
Then, by Occam's razor, it's probably the best.
It's what happens when you break someone's post down into a wide variety of little chunks and address them one at a time
Addressing someone's points one at a time? The horror. The horror!
the result is a massive tangle of words.
Close. The result is a tangle of words that facilitates following a series of complex arguments.
Sometimes, the poster goes as far as to break apart individual sentences into clauses or words and then quotes them individually to respond to them.
Sometimes, individuals sentences have clauses that each merit their own response.
Unfortunately because the way the forum spaces out quote blocks, any kind of 'readable' spaghetti will spread arguments over an enormous sprawl of forum landscape, taking up huge amounts of vertical space.
A similar argument explains why the programming languages considered the most beautiful minimize vertical space in favor of expanding horizontally.
Another similar argument explains why, even after the internet made whitespace free, we continued tabbing paragraphs instead of putting a blank line in between.
It's annoying for readers who aren't interested - because they have to scroll past endless reams of space
Unless said readers have a working page down key. In that case, its syntax makes a spaghetti post easily-identifiable, and if there's a second, non-sphagetti part to the post, it's easy for a reader to identify and just read that.
In a moment, your point will be that posters should post just the second part, but when you're debating something complex, it really helps to be able to break it down and look at factors individually. Humans only have so much working memory, so we need all the help we can keeping track of a complex debate (which should be four levels deep before we add the complexity of the arguments).
And this is, at its heart, why spaghetti posting is right and good. It lets you break complex things into simpler things, which increases the complexity of the conversations you can have.
spaghetti arguments tend to devolve into pedantry of the highest order
That can absolutely happen.
But spaghetti posting also facilitates someone admitting that they're wrong about one small thing without having to commit to changing their mind about everything, which is how minds get changed and how intellectual edifices can be built and refined. In fact, the most productive and intellectually-stimulating conversation I have online is spaghetti for this exact reason.
So, while I absolutely, 100% agree that spaghetti posting also facilitates pedantry, it's not essential; you can have spaghetti without the pedantry.
And people get pedantry. People are capable of noticing pedantry and saying "knock it off."
There's a real problem her, but spaghetti posting is neither necessary nor sufficient for the problem to occur.
Our best tool for reducing the complexity of an argument and letting people change their mind about just a small thing is breaking things down point-by-point. The best way of doing that (at least, that I've seen) is spaghetti posting. Indeed, breaking things down into their smallest components and quoting what someone said directly, so as to not mischaracterize them, necessitates spaghetti posting.
(No one is good enough at empathy to not mischaracterize them at some point, no matter how hard they try. Directly quoting them is essential.)
Spaghetti posting didn't crop up by accident. It came about because it was the best tool for accomplishing the job.
There is a long and storied (and rhetorically effective) history of responding to monographs with monographs, rather than slicing and dicing specific words.
Yes, but now we have the technology to break a monograph into its component pieces and address them individually. Since each break, properly done, reduces complexity, we want to do this as much as possible.
If you need to divide your opponent's argument into more than two or three separate issues and respond to them separately, you're doing something badly wrong.
We must be having vastly different discussions if (a) you characterize the person you're responding to as "your opponent" and (b) if you've become accustomed to being able to dividing their arguments into two or three separate issues.
Spaghetti posting is disruptive to threads
At least the threads I participate in, being unable to spaghetti post is extremely disruptive, insofar as it greatly reduces the complexity of the discussions we can have.