Nit-picking free riders

In what sounds like his valedictory post Steven Den Beste writes about the weariness that has set in after years of blogging. It is not the writing itself that has worn him down, it is reading the emails that his posts generate.

I'm finding that it's quite a relief not to receive a constant flow of email griping about everything I post. No matter what I write, and no matter what I say, there are always people who either think I was wrong, or think that there were things I left out and should have included. I've been putting up with that for two years, and I guess I'd gotten used to living with a low-level throbbing headache all that time.

The attempt to "refute" an argument by finding trivial errors in the facts that are marshaled is juvenile. When it works, it blinds us to understanding the big issues at stake.

If you allow carpers to shoo you away from every generalization before you have time to explore it, you have no hope of coming to grips with basic questions about modern America. David Gelernter, Drawing Life

Not to mention that this sort of nit picking is the beloved tool of both tyrants and petty bureaucrats. It is an odd sort of mindset that thinks that an argument is "refuted" if any small errors are detected. In the real world, we have to use adductive reasoning, which David Hackett Fischer describes as the process "of adducing answers to specific questions, so that a satisfactory explanatory 'fit' is obtained."

SDB is not the only blogger to discover the dark side of interaction. Mindless posted this over at Asymmetrical Information:

We have a few comment-terriers who only come to put their mark on our posts. They will pick some detail of the post and scoff, or pronounce how we are not qualified, or offer that 'you obviously don't understand the statistics' or 'you obviously aren't well-versed in the subject'. One wonders why they bother, until you see that these comments are designed to make the commenter feel a little better about him/herself. One of them ridiculed Jane for not having read an essay that turned out to support her argument (guess he hadn't either). I remember another series of posts where I took the time to clarify a lot of facts to satisfy commenters' objections, and our terrier finally claimed that a rhetorical flourish I used at the end of a post invalidated all the prior detail. Sometimes they check in just to climb on top of the other commenters and assert dominance.
Given the density of Steven's posts and his willingness to contradict polite 'conventional wisdom', I suspect it is one hundred times worse for him.
Many of us post in our very limited spare time and move on to something else. It should be only a small annoyance when one returns to a nitpick (relevant or not), even if it is dripping with self-serving rhetorical condescension. Mosquitoes are small and relatively harmless, but when one whines in your ear at night it can provoke a rage, or at least make you hit yourself in the head. (straighten out your metaphors, insect or canine? - Ed.)

In his book The Fifth Discipline Peter Senge distinguishes between discussion and dialogue. Discussion (which is linguistically related to concussion and percussion) is about scoring points, winning, having our viewpoint prevail. Dialogue is a means of learning together.

Reading the comment threads on popular blogs makes it pretty clear that the goal of many commenters is scoring points, not joint learning. Even worse, as Mindless noted, just playing the game sucks up the blogger's scarce time. Which gets back to SDB's point: who wants to waste time playing a game chosen by someone else --a game that often has nothing to do with the original post.

What makes this problem especially insidious is that the playing field is sharply tilted. The blogger has to write the original post; the malicious commenter can simply snipe and snark. The blogger has to produce a steady stream of posts if they want to maintain readership; the commenter can cherry pick which blogs and which posts they snipe at. The blogger's name is attached to the site and the post-it reflects on them personally; commenters are visitors who are not tied to the site and whose words are unlikely to be traced back to them in the real world.

In short, we have a free rider problem. Not all commenters exploit this. Many actually offer thoughtful arguments, new facts, and additional insights. But it only takes a few free riders to mess everything up.

I'll go farther. In some cases, commenters are like vandals spraying graffiti on the side of someone's house.

For most people, seeing "you are a pig" painted on the garage doors is disconcerting. No one likes to be insulted. Seeing the equivalent on your website or in your email is a powerful incentive to stop posting.

Hugh Hewitt argues that lawyer/bloggers beat journalists on the Swift Boat story because of their training:

It is no surprise to me, then, when lawyers/law professors like those at Powerline and Instapundit prove to be far more adept at exposing the "Christmas-in-Cambodia" lie and other Kerry absurdities than old-school journalists. The big advantage is in research skills, of course, and in an eye for inconsistencies which make or break cases and arguments. Lawyers turned amateur journalists are going to be much better at it than time-serving scribblers

He has a point. And no one can deny that the ranks of big bloggers is dominated by lawyers and law professors. I wonder if part of the reason is that their training and experience makes them hard-shelled and better able to ignore the insults. Their job is to present a case and make an argument. However, they are not emotionally tied to either one. In addition, in every trial one set of lawyers lose. That's just life and the successful attorneys learn to deal with it.



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