THIS IS HOW I WISH MY TRACKING SHOULD BE AT FPS

Please stand by.

Here is a discussion I had in /r/Murica about what motivates out troops. It's rare to pull anything other than "damn commies" out of that sub, so I suppose I'll let you guys see what I found. What do you think?

Intro: This is the second in a series of curated interviews with redditors who have played a key role in helping to deepen the level of critical discussion on Reddit. Two weeks ago, we featured an interview with /u/blackstar9000, one of the key architects of subs with unique submission guidelines, subs that elevate noteworthy instances of substantive conversation, rulesets that can apply to networks of subs sharing a similar ethos, and subs dedicated to meta conversation about the Reddit community as a whole.

This time, we asked the mods of /r/Rhetoric to speak to the matter of how to generate and sustain substantive, pointed dialog on Reddit. As one of the few subs explicitly focused on building a toolkit for critical thinking, their perspective is instructive on the state of this community as a whole when it comes to its ability to critically think. Both /u/QuintilianTheEskimo and /u/ampersand117 contributed to this discussion; so, we'll use the shorthand of "M/r/R" to refer to them collectively below.

BD - There are a lot of forums for public dialog geared towards promoting substantive, rational conversation. What's the particular promise of a forum like Reddit for such a goal? Is there a unique contribution to be made or experienced here when it comes to utilizing rhetoric or shop talk about rhetoric?

M/r/R - I'll be honest, I'm not sure we necessarily need to promote "rational" discourse as the highest form of interaction. Rhetorical theory makes room for things that might be considered "irrational," like personal experiences, anecdotes, deeply held opinions, to be valid and useful in discussion. In a democracy we are meant to have a democracy of the people, not of the logical or the rational. And people, quite honestly, are not always logical/rational (and that's a good thing).

BD - Are there forms of irrationality, logical fallacy, or just rhetorically "bad form" that afflict Reddit for some reason in your view? In other words, are there ways that online discussion in contexts like Reddit are particularly prone to certain forms of superficiality or logical breakdown, and what can be done about that?

M/r/R - This is hopelessly broad, I know, but it is incredibly important to have subreddit rules and enforce them. There is strong rhetorical theory to back up the idea that unregulated "conversation" will not ever be robust enough to faciliate a meaningful interaction. Meaningful debate is often uncomfortable, as we confront and engage opinions other than our own, and if we're merely chatting with one another this discomfort usually devolves into fighting or ends altogether.

BD - Let's focus the discussion a bit more to /r/Rhetoric itself. What's the history of the sub, and what are it's goals? What got you interested in serving as a mod, and how can /r/Rhetoric help deepen discussion on Reddit and elsewhere?

M/r/R - This [sub]reddit is somewhat of a melting pot. There are scholars, students, practitioners, and experts who regularly contribute and comment, and the discussion here is generally relatively scholarly in nature.

BD - Based on your experience on Reddit, what are some of the most trustworthy ways you have found for a user to share more in depth, logically driven discourse with others? How can various subreddits organize themselves to promote this sort of discourse collectively?

M/r/R - There are a few ways I've noticed that reddit users can engage in more meaningful discourse with one another, and it happens all the time all across the site:

1. respond directly to ideas, using the direct quote feature, i.e. ">".

2. Ask sincere questions

3. cite your sources

4. respond substantively to others' questions and assertions.

BD - /r/BeyondDebate tries to create a contest for analyzing debates while exploring the nuts and bolts of applied logic and critical thinking in order to harvest information to everybody's ultimate benefit. There are several different subreddits that are similarly focused on elevating discussion and debate beyond an immature obsession with merely "scoring points." How might you encourage Redditors who want to grow in areas like these to do so? Do any particularly good resources or rules of thumb come to mind? Are there any subreddits that stand out as exemplary platforms for great discussion you might recommend users check out beyond any mentioned so far?

M/r/R - I would definitely recommend /r/Eli5. The reason I like this is its focus on questions--I really do believe that the best discussions happen as a result of honest questions.

##We'd like thank the good mods of /r/Rhetoric for sharing their thoughts at such length. Keep a lookout for similar interviews with noteworthy redditors on the topic of promoting great, pointed discussion right here on /r/BeyondDebate!

Intro: As an Internet discussion forum, Reddit supports multiple levels of community moderation with a clear set of guidelines for discussion via reddiquette. Nevertheless, the richness of our conversation frequently breaks down when a lot of people join the discussion or the subject matter gets pointed--circlejerking and downvote brigades are so common, we have our own terms for those activities. And while several erstwhile redditors have attempted to light a candle rather than curse the darkness, few have done so with as much persistance as /u/blackstar9000 (henceforth "bs9k"), who has not only called out the abandonment of critical thinking and good form on subs that should know better but also contributed concrete solutions for addressing the problems of superficiality and poor logic in discussion.

You can find bs9k experimenting with methods to deepen discussion on subs through unique submission guidelines (/r/Excelsior) while also creating forums to elevate noteworthy instances of substantive conversation (/r/DepthHub). In addition, bs9k has assisted in the development of rulesets that can apply to networks of subs sharing a similar ethos (/r/RepublicOfReddit) while contributing to meta conversation about the community as a whole (/r/TheoryOfReddit). In fact, this sub utilizes their custom theme schema to identify as a "service" community.

We asked bs9k to share their perspective on the development of discussion on Reddit, including how to promote edifying, pointed dialog and why rich conversation so often dwindles over time on otherwise great subs.

BD - There are a lot of forums for public dialog geared towards promoting substantive, rational conversation. What's the particular promise of a forum like Reddit for such a goal? Is there a unique contribution to be made or experienced here?

bs9k - I'd actually say Reddit has a lot going against it when it comes to encouraging conversation. The biggest thing conversation has going in its favor here is the way that the site serves as a hub for connecting all sorts of content from across the Web. So Reddit can serve as a proxy for the comment sections of pretty much any page you can link to, which allows for a wide-ranging set of topics. And that makes it easier for people who are interested in carrying on strong, cross-disciplinary conversations to encounter one another around topics they find interesting.

From that perspective, submitted links end up working like prompts for discussion, but that in itself doesn't necessarily lend itself to good discussion, anymore than providing a comment section on your website will encourage people to engage in thoughtful discussion. I'm always a little skeptical when redditors say that the real appeal of any particular sub its its conversation. There may be great conversations going on there, but I doubt they'd happen as often without some really strong prompts, usually in the form of a link. The ability to comment is an invitation to talk, yeah, but there's no shortage of evidence to the effect that people talking on the internet will sometimes blather on without saying anything worth engaging.

So recognizing the strength of Reddit as a forum is a start. It helps hone us in on mechanisms that can be tweaked to do more to encourage the sorts of discussions we want to have. But there's nothing about Reddit that makes it more likely to host great conversations. Getting to those conversations takes effort.

BD - Are there forms of irrationality, logical fallacy, or just rhetorically "bad form" that afflict Reddit for some reason? In other words, are there ways that online discussion in contexts like Reddit are particularly prone to certain forms of superficiality or logical breakdown, and what can be done about that?

bs9k - Well, starting at a high level, there's the tendency for more easily digestible content to float to the top. I've talked about that a lot over at /r/TheoryOfReddit, and we've called it a lot of different things, like Low Investment Material. The gist is that the queue works introduces an element of time into how we encounter submissions, and the amount of time that any given submission has to hook readers before it slips off of the queue drops significantly the more active a sub becomes. So in a sub like /r/AskReddit, a new post has about an hour to catch as much attention as it can before it drops off of page one of the new queue, and less than a day before it slips past the last page. If it doesn't get enough votes to make it onto the front page of the sub in relatively short order, then most people will never see it at all. That privileges content that can be assessed and judged in seconds, and anything that takes too long to assess will necessarily start out at a disadvantage, right?

Now, as many people have argued as nauseam, you can make a good conversation out of nearly any post, if you have the will and talent to do so. Nevertheless, the more active a sub becomes, the more quickly it's bound to lose out on some of the more challenging and complex conversation prompts. Image macros can give rise to good discussions, but I'd hazard to say that they're more likely to attract one-liners and shoddy arguments.

Beyond that, though, I don't really think there's anything in particular about Reddit that would encourage bad form. Most of what derails conversation on the site boils down to the problems of scaling for the millions of users that have crowded on in the past few years. No doubt the site suffers from the same logical deficiencies of most discussion platforms, so the more productive question may be, "What can the site do to encourage more reasonable discussions?"

BD - Our subreddit tries to create a contest for analyzing debates while exploring the nuts and bolts of applied logic and critical thinking in order to harvest information to everybody's ultimate benefit. There are several different subreddits that are similarly focused on elevating discussion and debate beyond an immature obsession with merely "scoring points." How might you encourage Redditors who want to grow in areas like these to do so? Do any particularly good resources or rules of thumb come to mind?

bs9k - Good discussion is a bit like engineering: the best way to learn the basics is to take apart every argument you see and figure how how the good ones work and how the bad ones don't. It isn't enough to simply say, "Okay, that makes sense to me." You have to work your way past agreement and disagreement, and figure out why an argument is compelling. Ultimately, that means turning on yourself a little.

If you're honest, you're going to sometimes find that you were convinced by an argument for all the wrong reasons. It's important to learn how to distinguish between agreeing because an argument restated something you already believed, and agreeing because it's founded on solid reasoning.

BD - You've spent a lot of time not only exercising critical thinking in your discussions on Reddit but actually developing subreddits whose rule sets themselves promote in depth discussion.

bs9k - Yeah, well, I tried, anyway.

BD - Based on this experience, what are some of the most trustworthy ways you have found for a given part of the Reddit community to concretely promote more in depth, logically driven discourse among themselves collectively?

bs9k - Probably the most important thing is to start by cultivating a sense of respect. Without necessarily saying it, you have to build around the idea that everyone's position warrants respect for at least as long as it takes them to explain it. Granted, I haven't always lived up to that ideal, but I tried to be especially consistent about it when I was moderating. If you're sufficiently involved as a moderator, others will look to you to set the tone, and they'll do their best to follow suit—most of the time, at least.

I'm not really big on setting a bunch of rules that try to directly enforce standards of discussion. They tend to create a lot of work, and I'm not convinced that the payoff justifies all the stress and effort. Generally, what I've preferred are rules that concentrate on keeping posts on-topic, and that indirectly promote better discussions. That said, I never really modded a sub with more than 20 thousand or so subscribers, so I'm not really in a position to fault mods that have. As I said before, things change the more active a sub grows.

BD - You've begun to spend less time on Reddit lately than was the case in the past. Are there any parts of the community that are just too awesome to leave behind completely when it comes to rational, substantive discourse that you wish more people knew about?

bs9k - I keep tabs on most of the subs I created, as well as on a few of the more academically based subs, like /r/history and /r/academicphilosophy. I'm also a fan of /r/ImaginaryMonsters and /r/ImaginaryTechnology, though I don't really pay attention to the discussions there. Honestly, subreddits have been less at the center of my browsing strategy with Reddit over the course of the last year, and I'm finding more and more interesting stuff through links from outside the site.

Part of my rationale when I created /r/DepthHub was that, as the site grows, it becomes more and more difficult to find the content you want, even when it's divided off into topic-oriented subs, and that certainly seems to grow truer every year. If there were more well-designed hub-subs, I'd probably lean much more heavily on those than on Reddit's own algorithms for serving up submissions from my own subscription list.

##We'd like thank bs9k for sharing their thoughts at such length. Keep a lookout for similar interviews with noteworthy redditors on the topic of promoting great, pointed discussion right here on /r/BeyondDebate!

My last two submissions on the topic of applied logic and rhetoric have focused on particularly irritating logical fallacies afflicting Reddit, such as the fallacy of personal incredulity and the perfectionist fallacy. This time around, I thought I would try to light one candle rather than curse the darkness. If I were forced to reduce the difference between mutually enriching, pointed dialog and merely "scoring points," I would start right here with the principle of charity.

From a top level view, the principle of charity is more about a posture towards one's conversation partner than it is a singular line of reasoning. As such, it helps one avoid a scope of fallacies rather than a single fallacy, although the principle of charity works especially well to avoid an argument from fallacy, straw men, and a fallacious dodging of the burden of proof. The principle of charity in action makes at least two determinations about one's conversation partner as well as that partner's arguments:

1. The principle of charity gives my dialog partner the benefit of the doubt of rationality. It says, "I'm going to treat them with respect as somebody trying to communicate something that possesses at least a degree of internal logic. As far as an alleged abuse of rationality is concerned, they are innocent until proven guilty."

2. The principle of charity gives my dialog partner's arguments the benefit of the doubt of coherence and soundness. It says, "I am going to try to understand their point of view in their strongest and most persuasive form even while evaluating it rather than leaping immediately to finding chinks in the armor of their rational defense."

Functionally, the principle of charity treats the input of one's dialog partner as less of an obstacle to be overcome and as more of a contribution to the greater goal of identifying the truth of a given matter. A debater working from the principle of charity would prefer to lose a debate while gaining more insight than to win a debate at the expense of such insight. Rather than list off a bunch of examples of this principle in play, I thought I would highlight two different sorts of thinkers who frequently utilized it:

• Socrates in his Platonic dialogs provides probably the most clear example of the use of the principle of charity in debate. Even though Socrates always winds up being the "winner" and hero of Plato's stories, he achieves that position with a plodding, humble, and generous approach to debate. Rarely does Socrates leap straight to an indictment of somebody else's position. Rather, he will help them unpack their position, even help strengthen that position before interrogating it and broaching whatever alternative he thinks is more meritorious. Further, Socrates is perfectly happy to retain a good result from somebody else's line of argument rather than substituting his own at every turn because he is ultimately interested in acquiring greater knowledge than simply winning debates. As a literary figure in Plato's writing, Socrates inevitably winds up both winning virtually all debates and digging up virtually all of the most precious bits of knowledge, and while that may be quite contrived, there's some truth to this depiction if only from a psychological angle. People ultimately interested in a charitable engagement with a dialog partner don't take offense as swiftly, don't resort to ad hominem or straw men as much, don't fixate on a somewhat flimsy aspect of their partner's argument when the argument as a whole is actually rather strong, and so forth.

• Bertrand Russel provides another great illustration of someone who exercised the principle of charity. Russel is an even more interesting character to me than Socrates because he was so much more irascible. There's an anecdote about a time that Russel hassled a young Ludwig Wittgenstein for an entire class on the latter's insistence that "all existential propositions are meaningless." But in the long run, Russel recognized Wittgenstein's genius and became a key supporter of his rise to philosophical prominence. More generally, Russel advocated the practice of reading any philosophical work twice--the first time in order to give the view advanced by the work the most charitable reading possible and the second time in order to analyze the living daylights out of that same work. Unlike Plato's version of Socrates, Russel quite obviously wanted to win. But he cared about establishing fact even more. He illustrated this in his own words in response to a question posed during a 1959 interview with the BBC, "Suppose Lord Russell, this film were to be looked at by our descendants, like a dead sea scroll in a thousand years time. What would you think it's worth telling that generation about the life you've lived and the lessons you've learned from it?" The first part of Russel's response is telling, "When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only: What are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out? Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts."

Personally, I think most of the dissatisfying arguments that occur on Reddit would be resolved with a more consistent application of the principle of charity. What are your thoughts on this matter?

Now that the basic look, feel, and goals of the sub have been established over the past week, as detailed in our February 2013 community suggestion thread, this little sub is ready to roll. Consequently, I am now tendering input from anybody interested in serving as an active mod.

Ideally, prospective mods should be willing and able to do at least two out of the following three core operations:

1. Continue to develop the user interface of the sub through the appropriate application of .css, sidebar tweaking, as-of-yet untouched wiki generation, and so forth.

2. Continue to build the robustness of the sub by promoting it elsewhere, submitting quality content, and weighing in on requests for debate analysis--the final matter being one of the most unique contributions of this sub to the broader Reddit community.

3. General housekeeping by way of checking the mod queue, attending to reported links, nipping egregious transgressions of reddiquette in the bud, answering mod mail, and so forth.

Anything beyond that is icing on the cake, and I'm looking to beef up the mod team with at least two more as many kick-ass, frequently contributing users we can work with at this time. If interested, feel free to reply here articulating why you want to serve as a mod and what you bring to the table; alternatively, you can send me send me and the other mods a pm. Thanks!

Edit 1: Welcome /u/Seraph_Grymm to the team! They have a back ground in literature, composition, and veteran subreddit moderation; check out their sweet work on /r/Poetry.

Edit 2: Welcome /u/dancon25 to the team! They have more experience in formal debate along the lines of Lincoln-Douglas, Public Forum, Policy Debate, etc. than anybody else contributing to the sub so far.

Edit 3: Welcome /u/Jason_Zarri to the team! He possesses a background in symbolic logic and academic philosophy; in fact, he wrote the sidebar resource "A Primer on Logic" currently posted on scholardarity.com--check it out!