The Dialectic is Dead

Introduction

We’ve all gotten caught in an internet debate. It’s not fun, at least personally speaking.  

As a kid, I was enamored with the intellectual promise of the internet. I watched Wikipedia, Youtube, Google and other platforms mature in front of my eyes, so I naturally bought into the quixotic dream of the internet’s founders. 

They envisioned a creative and productive collaboration environment, a place for the world to come together and start putting nails into the proverbial coffin of our problems. This obviously did not happen.

Nowadays, the internet can’t find consensus on the most trivial of issues, much less world peace. It’s become a dopamine slot machine with ads between pulls. It’s a mess of anger and division and misinformation. So it’s clearly in our best interests to figure out why this all happened, and why it persists. 

The old guard of internet optimism will be moving on soon, so young people like me must take responsibility for this vision. As such, I think a cool-headed analysis of how the internet has affected public discourse is critical.  

“The Death of the Dialectic '' refers to a common belief that humanity's capacity for respectful, productive debate is crumbling. It’s easy to fall into this idea while browsing the web, watching the endless scroll of the toxic comments and click-bait. 

I argue that discourse is not crumbling, the internet just makes it seem that way. 

Specifically, I will discuss the mechanics of an online debate, aiming to show why the people who argue on the net are unlikely to change their minds. Furthermore, I will show that these people are not a representative sample of the general population, and thus we should not generalize their behavior to the whole.

Background

The dialectic is an argument structure consisting of 3 stages: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. First employed by Socrates circa 300BC, the method has since become a cornerstone of western philosophy. 

Two individuals engaged in a dialectic begin with contradictory ideas and slowly reconcile them through careful argument. The goal is to discover truth through conversation, which is different from a “debate” where one must pick between arguments, or an “erelectic”, where you aim to prove someone wrong at all costs.

In the context of an internet forum, a dialectic would look like a long thread of nuanced, respectful conversation. You’d see participants happily acknowledge their errors, since a dialectic won't go anywhere otherwise. 

You rarely see this sort of interaction on the open web, which is the source of the “Death of the Dialectic” argument.

A tiny fascet

The distribution of internet contributors follows Zipf’s Law, a type of power law similar to the Pareto Distribution. The rule of thumb is that in any online community, 1% create content, 9% comment, and 90% “lurk”. A lurker is someone who only browses, never adding to the conversation. This suggests the ideas propagating through the internet only represent a tiny subset of its users.

Moreover, it seems these users are outliers on the ideological spectrum. Even in the docile forums, for example, the subreddit devoted to trees (r/trees), only those especially knowledgeable on the subject get involved. Internet communities self-select for those who are passionate about the issue, which is fantastic in many cases. In more contentious domains, however, this leads to the “ring leaders” of a community to be far more radicalized than the whole. To a Lurker, it may seem that the ideas and mannerisms of active users are representative of the whole community, but Zipf’s law implies that’s not true.

Emotion

There’s another mechanism at play here, as well. John Mill described it best in 1875:

“So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it.”

It’s well understood that emotion strongly influences decision making. Especially now that the issues we face are so complex, it is hard to come to a staunch, solid position based purely on fact. There is rarely a 100% correct opinion from a rational standpoint, so anyone who feels so strongly must appeal to emotion. This is evident from the emotional tension found in most ideologically driven debates.

This means, according to Mill, that pounding these pundits with fact and reason is counterproductive. Arguments rooted in feeling just fortify under attack, no matter how justified. Therefore, two hard heads arguing on the internet leads to a “feedback loop” dynamic. Every counter-argument just strengthens resolve. A wedge is driven between already polarized parties, giving the appearance of a diverging society.

However, we must remember that the Mill Effect only applies to opinions “strongly rooted in the feelings”. Very few people are emotionally attached enough to an ideology, at least enough to go to war on the internet. 

Research by MIT social scientist David Rand suggests that people are generally open minded. He demonstrates that participants are capable, even willing, to effectively engage with challenging ideas if presented in a non-threatening environment.

 Thus, the fear of conflict, fueled by Trump tweets and “cancel culture”, is scaring people into abstention. If you believe a debate will end in anger, it’s attractive to bury your head in the sand with ideas you’re comfortable with. If you believe a debate is futile, this behavior is actually rational. 

Our society is in the dangerous place where getting involved feels irrational, so this perception that the dialectic is dead is counterproductive as well unfounded. It seems the capacity for nuanced, respectful conversation is alive and well in the real world, it’s just repressed by the 1% of internet users. 

Alternative Argument

This is about dialectic, so I should probably present a counter argument.

In a 2006 interview, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg reflected on her relationship with fellow Justice Antonin Scalia. She mentioned the court used to be rather docile, but around the 80's it started to get rowdy. If you listen to chamber recordings from the 60’s you’ll notice the justices let arguing parties talk, to lay out their argument cleanly and clearly, only interrupting for glaring errors. 

Listen to a recent recording, however, the poor lawyer can barely get a sentence off before the bench starts peppering. This is a bizarre turn of events, we tend to think of the Supreme Court as a slow, wise institution, not a manic debate hall. Yet, that’s what it’s become. Why?

Ginsberg amusedly points out the correlation with Scalia's appointment. Justice Scalia is famously raucous, so it’s plausible he caused the degeneration of discourse on the court. It’s the classic

“One bad apple spoils the bunch” argument. 

This is a suggestive counterexample because it shows that a respectful conversation can be derailed by one bad actor, and even the Supreme Court is not immune.

 I argued that discourse is not dead because the toxic internet arguments everyone sees is not representative of the general population, but this suggests an alternate explanation. The  internet is infamous for the “Troll”,  the strongest archetype of belligerent debater. Trolls often derail discussions and stoke anger just for fun. If you account for the fact that the quality of a debate degenerates to the lowest common denominator, it is plausible that dialectic is dead because it’s ruined by a small subset of hard heads. It’s impossible to be productive at scale when disruption is part of human nature. 

I heed this, and vehemently agree. As previously mentioned, discourse on the internet scares people from getting involved. This is a facet of that. The trolls can and will pounce on a well meaning internet citizen. 

However, generalizing the troll to all discourse is unfounded. While the bad apple effect is certainly real, it cannot account for a global degeneration. The troll plays a role in the escalation of individual conversations, but most conversations don’t have trolls, especially when offline.

Conclusion

From the third person, it’s easy to interpret the degeneration of internet discourse as the degeneration of discourse in general. I argue that this is not the case, which should be encouraging for the future of human thought. 

The tendency to dehumanize others online enables toxicity, but it also enables this “sky is falling, dialectic is dead” perception. As shown, the generalization of online behavior crumbles when you think about who these people actually are, the minds behind the keyboard. 

As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time browsing the internet, I tend to forget that the ideas presented are not a representative sample. Whenever I get wrapped up in an argument, it’s usually helpful to step back and find a broader perspective. In my Facebook days, I counted the number of “friends” who talk politics and compared it to my total friend count. It was a tiny fraction, on the order of… you guessed it … 1%.

The vast majority of people are reasonable, and even the online hard-heads are nicer in person. So the take-away is that if you approach your conversations non-confrontationally, a productive dialectic can follow. In the end, the world is not just an “IRL” forum. Thank God.