"One of the reasons I spend so much time engaging with people in my comments is to remind myself that smart, reasonable people can and do disagree with me. "
Hate to be the bearer, Steve, but this part is not working out so well. Most of these reported discussions are with dramatically dishonest and unstable people who all end up blockin…
"One of the reasons I spend so much time engaging with people in my comments is to remind myself that smart, reasonable people can and do disagree with me. "
Hate to be the bearer, Steve, but this part is not working out so well. Most of these reported discussions are with dramatically dishonest and unstable people who all end up blocking you. You have noble impulses here but you are trying to debate with people who have no interest in reachint truth or finding common ground, only in scoring gotcha points, which they do ineptly.
This Tessa person is one of the worst yet, presuming you to be an AGW denier.
Am I right to presume these discussions are on Medium? That place is going downhill with the accelerator pressed to the floor. I mostly read the software articles and their quality is abyssal. Truly awful. Actually I don't see this on Medium, did Tessa delete the whole thing?
"Hate to be the bearer, Steve, but this part is not working out so well. Most of these reported discussions are with dramatically dishonest and unstable people who all end up blocking you."
Actually, only a tiny percentage of my conversations end with the person blocking me. I'd guess less than 1 or 2%. And Medium, as toxic as it can sometimes be, is far better than somewhere like Twitter, for example. Plenty of people there have an interest in more than scoring gotcha points.
Online discourse is difficult. No sane person would deny that. But it takes two people to have a fight. The way people talk to you is absolutely a reflection of the way you talk to them. And when you come across the occasional, inevitable idiot, somebody has to be the grown up in the room. Either that, or recognise the conversation really is a waste of time and just don't bother replying.
But yeah, though people rarely change their minds dramatically mid-conversation, I have quite a few commenters who started out antagonistic and have slowly become more reasonable and thoughtful. Or who have understood that there's more to consider about an issue than they initially thought. And some of them have done the same for me of course.
This is possible. No matter how many times you try to tell me that it's not. 😄
"And it seems to me, not keeping count mind you, that a lot of your reported conversations on here end in blocks."
I decided to have a search after you said this as I had no idea! I think 5 of the conversations I've mentioned here ended in blocks. Plus one where I blocked the guy. And two of those weren't even conversations. They were replies to other people's articles where I got blocked because my criticism of what they wrote was true and got too popular.
A lot of the time people don't reply if they realise they're wrong. Again, it's vanishingly rare that somebody admits it during a conversation, but those people never block me.
How do you find this out? In my last Medium backup in the Blocked folder there's a list of people who I'd blocked (less than ten) but nothing about who blocked me. How can you tell?
You can't get a direct count as far as I know, but you always know when somebody has blocked you because you get the "Unknown User" notification on Medium.
I always go back to copy/paste the conversations that I paste here, so I'd know if any of them had blocked me. But it happens really rarely. I think Tessa just blocked me because she realised she was being silly and her ego couldn't cope.
No, there are a lot of intelligent, rational people on Medium who disagree with folks like Steve as well. I used to get them too. There were some I had tagged in my brain as, "I disagree with this person a lot but s/he is worth taking seriously." Elle Beau was one of them. She's too far-left feminist for me and too much a tool of the trans-patriarchy but her articles on patriarchy and misogyny were usually pretty good and well-researched so I always took her fairly seriously, except when she parroted trans-whacko talking points. Another was Argumentative Penguin, I still miss him :)
"One of the reasons I spend so much time engaging with people in my comments is to remind myself that smart, reasonable people can and do disagree with me. "
Hate to be the bearer, Steve, but this part is not working out so well. Most of these reported discussions are with dramatically dishonest and unstable people who all end up blocking you. You have noble impulses here but you are trying to debate with people who have no interest in reachint truth or finding common ground, only in scoring gotcha points, which they do ineptly.
This Tessa person is one of the worst yet, presuming you to be an AGW denier.
Am I right to presume these discussions are on Medium? That place is going downhill with the accelerator pressed to the floor. I mostly read the software articles and their quality is abyssal. Truly awful. Actually I don't see this on Medium, did Tessa delete the whole thing?
"Hate to be the bearer, Steve, but this part is not working out so well. Most of these reported discussions are with dramatically dishonest and unstable people who all end up blocking you."
Actually, only a tiny percentage of my conversations end with the person blocking me. I'd guess less than 1 or 2%. And Medium, as toxic as it can sometimes be, is far better than somewhere like Twitter, for example. Plenty of people there have an interest in more than scoring gotcha points.
Online discourse is difficult. No sane person would deny that. But it takes two people to have a fight. The way people talk to you is absolutely a reflection of the way you talk to them. And when you come across the occasional, inevitable idiot, somebody has to be the grown up in the room. Either that, or recognise the conversation really is a waste of time and just don't bother replying.
But yeah, though people rarely change their minds dramatically mid-conversation, I have quite a few commenters who started out antagonistic and have slowly become more reasonable and thoughtful. Or who have understood that there's more to consider about an issue than they initially thought. And some of them have done the same for me of course.
This is possible. No matter how many times you try to tell me that it's not. 😄
Yes it is possible and I have had my own successes but most of the time they turn out to be correcting presumptions, not changing minds.
And it seems to me, not keeping count mind you, that a lot of your reported conversations on here end in blocks.
"And it seems to me, not keeping count mind you, that a lot of your reported conversations on here end in blocks."
I decided to have a search after you said this as I had no idea! I think 5 of the conversations I've mentioned here ended in blocks. Plus one where I blocked the guy. And two of those weren't even conversations. They were replies to other people's articles where I got blocked because my criticism of what they wrote was true and got too popular.
A lot of the time people don't reply if they realise they're wrong. Again, it's vanishingly rare that somebody admits it during a conversation, but those people never block me.
How do you find this out? In my last Medium backup in the Blocked folder there's a list of people who I'd blocked (less than ten) but nothing about who blocked me. How can you tell?
You can't get a direct count as far as I know, but you always know when somebody has blocked you because you get the "Unknown User" notification on Medium.
I always go back to copy/paste the conversations that I paste here, so I'd know if any of them had blocked me. But it happens really rarely. I think Tessa just blocked me because she realised she was being silly and her ego couldn't cope.
No, there are a lot of intelligent, rational people on Medium who disagree with folks like Steve as well. I used to get them too. There were some I had tagged in my brain as, "I disagree with this person a lot but s/he is worth taking seriously." Elle Beau was one of them. She's too far-left feminist for me and too much a tool of the trans-patriarchy but her articles on patriarchy and misogyny were usually pretty good and well-researched so I always took her fairly seriously, except when she parroted trans-whacko talking points. Another was Argumentative Penguin, I still miss him :)