Writing, Media & Blogs: September 2003 Archives

Passed on by my friend, The Art of Controversy, by Arthur Schopenhauer.

Controversial Dialectic is the art of disputing, and of disputing in such a way as to hold one's own, whether one is in the right or the wrong - per fas et nefas. A man may be objectively in the right, and nevertheless in the eyes of bystanders, and sometimes in his own, he may come off worst. For example, I may advance a proof of some assertion, and my adversary may refute the proof, and thus appear to have refuted the assertion, for which there may, nevertheless, be other proofs. In this case, of course, my adversary and I change places: he comes off best, although, as a matter of fact, he is in the wrong.

Stratagem I
The Extension. - This consists in carrying your opponent's proposition beyond its natural limits; in giving it as general a signification and as wide a sense as possible, so as to exaggerate it; and, on the other hand, in giving your own proposition as restricted a sense and as narrow limits as you can, because the more general a statement becomes, the more numerous are the objections to which it is open. The defence consists in an accurate statement of the point or essential question at issue.

Stratagem XIV
This, which is an impudent trick, is played as follows: When your opponent has answered several of your questions without the answers turning out favourable to the conclusion at which you are aiming, advance the desired conclusion, - although it does not in the least follow, - as though it had been proved, and proclaim it in a tone of triumph. If your opponent is shy or stupid, and you yourself possess a great deal of impudence and a good voice, the trick may easily succeed. It is akin to the fallacy non causae ut causae.

Daniel Drezner has made a good start of considering how blogs may fit in to academic writing. The key issue is the need for peer review. Blogs have comment sections, but there's no way to verify that any of the commenters know what they're talking about.

A really ambitious goal would be to implement a mathematical reputation system that could centrally store blogger/commenter reputation ratings by subject. It would work as such:

1. A blogger writes an entry and selects a subject matter category (and possibly one or more sub-categories). Example: Law -- Intellectual Property

2. A commenter gives the entry a score (and leaves some commentary), and the reputation database stores that scoring instance. Example: Author: John Smith; Rater: Bill Williams; Subject: Law; Sub: Intellectual Property; Score: +1

3. Other commenters may then comment on the original article, or on the comments written about the article. All these ratings are stored in a central database.

4. Here's the fun part. The central reputation server will perform clustering analysis to recognize groups of like-minded scholars (within each subject area), based on their exchange of comments and ratings. By analyzing the patterns of clusters, approvals, and disapprovals, it should be possible to properly weight the comments and ratings of each person involved in the system. That's why it's important to store an entire rating transaction, and not merely the score that's given: the weight of the score will be dependent on the reputation of the one doing the rating (within the subject matter in question).

The reputation system should have several qualities:

1. It should be difficult for a single person to manipulate someone else's reputation significantly in a short period of time.

2. Reputations should change slowly over time.

3. Scores by from raters with high reputations should be weighted much more strongly than those from raters with low reputations. Perhaps exponentially.

4. High scores given between people in the same cluster should count for less than high scores given from outside the cluster.

5. Low scores given between people from different clusters should count for less than low scores given from inside their clusters.

If everyone started at zero, it wouldn't take long to build up a database of scores that accurately reflected the knowledge and experience of the participants. The essential component would be performing proper clustering within each subject area, and getting enough people involved to collect a representative sample.

I am pleased to announce the first ever Spherewide Short Story Symposium! As you may know, I enjoy writing short stories and I think the short story format is underappreciated. Shakespeare suggested that brevity is the soul of wit, and the short story's strengths all stem from that central principle: it's short!

Anyone can write a short story. If you think about it, every time we talk to our friends and tell them about something funny that happened to us on the way to work, we're telling a short story. Every story that's worth telling can be told in short story form -- indeed, many books could be improved by cutting out the excess dross.

You are all invited to submit a short story to the Spherewide Short Story Symposium. There won't be any judging, per se, but as the name of the event suggests, I would love to foster discussions about the stories that are submitted.

How to enter: Simply write a short story and send me the link (mw at mwilliams dot info, include "[S4]" in the subject, please). Write about anything you want, fact or fiction, but preferably submit something that hasn't been previously published. I'll take submissions for a week, ending next Tuesday, September 23rd, 2003, and then publish a set of links to all the stories I've received. If the response looks like it will be particularly strong, I will set up an MT blog for hosting the stories and for facilitating discussion.

Tell your friends! And if you're considering writing a story, don't get discouraged if you don't think the quality level of your writing is "good enough". The purpose of this exercise is to take an hour and write something for the fun of it.

I've written about "Names, Power, and Intimacy" before, and the topic has come to mind again as I've been linking recently to the work of fellow bloggers and other types of writers.

When responding to my post about detecting uranium, Clayton Cramer called me "Mr. Williams". It was mildly discordant to me, because I don't really think of myself as "Mr. Williams"; it's a very formal style of address amongst peers these days, but still comes across as quite classy.

I often refer to Eugene, Glenn, SDB, Bill, Donald, and many other bloggers by their first names, and I have wondered if that's impolite considering that I don't really know them other than through the internet and their writings. When writing, I'll generally establish a person's identity by using their full name and a link, and from that point forward I'll use their first name. I realize it's overly familar, but the option of "Mr."-ing and "Ms."-ing everyone feels far too aloof.

So, as far as my blog-protocol goes, I've decided to operate as I would in "real life". If I have exchanged emails with someone or otherwise interacted with them other than through blog posts, I will generally refer to them by their first name, just as if we had met at a social function. Otherwise, I will use their full name and -- if required by the structure of my post -- their appropriate title and last name.

This is not to say that I find this arrangement ideal; I do not. As I wrote in the above-linked essay, I think it would be quite enjoyable and proper to return to more formal modes of address. Nevertheless, it feels awkward to do so myself, and I generally choose not to. Perhaps this feeling of awkwardness is the result of my informal blogging style; if I were writing an acedemic paper or a newspaper article I would certaily revert to the formal mode.