Dan Luu
patreon
Relative vs. absolute
🕑 Added 2017-06-11 13:45:01 +0000 UTC Whenever I make a relative argument, e.g., "foo is larger than bar", one of the most common responses, often the most common response, is a response about the absolute value, e.g., "wrong. bar is large".I wonder if there's some way I can phrase arguments to avoid this problem. In my most recent post, I tried to avoid this by explicitly mentioning some incorrect absolute "rebuttals" as well as stating that I was making a relative statement and not an absolute statement. This didn't work. Or maybe it did work, and it reduced the number of bogus comments I got, but it didn't reduce the number to zero or even five.
Reading "ask metafilter" makes me think that this is a lost cause. If someone asks a question, looking for some specific thing with no conditions or caveats, "I want X", they might get good answers. But if they add any conditions, "I want X, but not Y" or "I want X, but please don't just say that your X is great, say why", the vast majority of answers will ignore the condition and respond to the "base" request. I've seen people employ a wide variety of strategies to try to head of this problem, but I haven't seen any of them work.
The core of a typical "ask metafilter" question is often one to three sentences long. The core of a blog post of mine might be two thousand words, interleaved with three thousand words of supporting statements. If people can't write an "ask metafilter" that conveys the request clearly to most commenters, maybe it's impossible to write a longer form post that conveys an argument with multiple parts clearly to most internet commenters?
