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Comment by johnminter | Hacker News Reader

The parent article reminded me of a quote from Gordon Fee, a professor of Theology, who had seen many disagreements during his career. Fee put it like this [1]:

A student is not bound to reproduce slavishly the interpretations of others, but you are bound to assess critically what you read.

Before you can say, "I disagree," you must be able to say, "I understand." It is axiomatic that before you level criticism you should be able to state an author's position in terms that he or she would find acceptable. After that, you may proceed in any of six directions:

a. Show where the author is misinformed.

b. Show where the author is uninformed.

c. Show where the author is inconsistent.

d. Show where the author's treatment is incomplete.

e. Show where the author misinterprets through faulty assumptions or procedures.

f. Show where the author makes valuable contributions to the discussion at hand.

[1] Gordon Fee, Exegesis, 3rd edition 2002 p.33

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> Before you can say, "I disagree," you must be able to say, "I understand." It is axiomatic that before you level criticism you should be able to state an author's position in terms that he or she would find acceptable. After that, you may proceed in any of six directions:

This assumes that the assumption of good faith is well founded. Life is too short to critically refute every single crackpot theory out there. For better or worse, if someone sufficiently damages their ethos, I will choose to not spend my time critically evaluating everything they say.

[edit]

One place where my argument does not apply is when large numbers of people hold a particular opinion. If e.g. 80% of Republicans or 80% of Democrats hold a view, we are talking about 1/3 of the population of the US. Understanding why they hold that view, no matter how non-sensical it may seem is vital to understanding the world we live in.

It is insufficient to just say "well then insert large group here are all idiots" because that is clearly not true.I have two family members who each got perfect SAT scores and one is about as hippy-left as you can get and the other is a card-carrying republican and Trump supporter. They are (in my opinion) both wrong about a lot of things, but dismissing them as idiots is not possible.

> Life is too short to critically refute every single crackpot theory out there.

In this case, rather than claiming you disagree (which should imply understanding), you can just say you don't know enough about the issue to comment on it.

The spirit of the above argument is that, if you're going to vehemently disagree or argue with someone, you should understand— not that you need to understand every issue, nor agree or disagree with every issue.

> In this case, rather than claiming you disagree (which should imply understanding), you can just say you don't know enough about the issue to comment on it.

aidenn0 is making a subtlety different point: this form of rational argument depends on good-faith. If you think that has been violated, you would not say "I don't know enough about the issue to comment on it," but rather "I don't think this person is arguing in good-faith."

I agree with the principle of charity, and your claim that you should understand before disagreeing. But it is also true that you will encounter people who are not arguing in good-faith, in which case it is sometimes a mistake to even engage.

Totally agree– I was responding to "crackpot theory" which sounds more like wild conspiracy theories that people truly believe, rather than arguing in bad faith, but after re-reading, I think that is the point aidenn0 was trying to make.

Sorry for the late reply:

On the internet (which is where the quality of rhetoric could most use the principle of charity these days), it is hard or even impossible to tell the difference between a troll or a crackpot.

But all evidence suggests everyone is indeed an idiot.

I've heard a lot of discussions of the glory of formal argumentation but I've seen some compelling arguments against it.

The issue is that these rules can be exploited by a bad faith actor. Just throw arguments at somebody rapid fire, a gish gallop, and it basically works like a DOS attack. Eventually your opponent will stop responding after which you can declare victory since your opponent was unable to refute your argument. This incidentally is an argument against free speech absolutist positions.

I feel a lot of these rules assume you're debating an academic acting in good faith who wouldn't want to resort to such tactics for fear of hurting their own reputation. They're for people who argur with eachother by writing books about how their opponents are wrong. They're not adapted to the pseudoanonymous low barrier to entry environment of the internet.

You're best off taking shortcuts that result in you making weak arguments to avoid getting bogged down in discussions with bad faith/unintelligent actors and that allows you to be the among the first to opine on an issue which grants you a wider audience. At least to some extent.

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