The First Troll: Identified!

And he looked like a troll, by all accounts.

At risk of there being no safe way to comment on this thread, Socrates completed two years of military training, served as a hoplite, and then distinguished himself in battle.

In the ideal thread, all trolls are philosophers.

I have read — probably not very attentively and a while ago — about 10% of the Socratic dialogues. Is there any point in them where Mr S the Heroic Hoplite ever says, “You know what? You’re right!” — or in any sense allows himself to be seen using the encounter to learn things himself?

If not: troll. Not mindless troll, of course — but it’s the mindful one’s do the most toxic damage, in my experience.

i think in the original greek it’s easier to distinguish the muops from the psyops.

I miss Usenet–the guys (including women) who’d keep up an exchange of phrase-by-phrase picking apart of each other’s post, several posts a day, for days at a time, periodically getting in jabs like “feminists are evil because they try to trick a man into putting a ring on their finger.”

@belle le triste: I’ll come to Socrates’s defense here, for fun.

In the Parmenides, Socrates acknowledges that his view has problems that he cannot answer (at least, that’s how I read it — there’s no consensus on the issue). Of course, in this dialogue, it is young Socrates we meet, so it may not really exonerate older Socrates.

In the Protagoras, on the other hand, Socrates admits that the position he began with was wrong and takes up his opponent’s initial view. The character of Protagoras, Socrates’ interlocutor, actually switches his view as well.

So perhaps that allows Socrates to escape the brand of Troll?

I miss Usenet—the guys (including women) who’d keep up an exchange of phrase-by-phrase picking apart of each other’s post, several posts a day, for days at a time

I think I know what you mean. I’ve never been on usenet, but I’ve seen it on blogs and message boards. I have to frequent some of the latter to keep up to date with software and hardware as part of my job and they are very useful, but there are people who hang out there all day and can get into bitter and drawn-out fights over the proper way of measuring the quality of motion blur generated by different render engines and suchlike.

Discussing worthy political and philosophical topics on blogs seems to have a bit more of a justification, but the rhetorical methods as well as the psychological driving forces are quite similar, so that I seriously wonder if all of this is not a colossal waste of time and instead we should fight global injustices or help out in our local soup kitchen.

“does a philosophy degree equip you to ask interesting questions?”

Not an interesting question.

Dear world (wide web): we’ve completely given up on the definition of “troll” that bears any resemblance to fishing, haven’t we.

“Troll” now means “aggressive interlocutory irritant with a billy club” and “begging the question” now means “prompting the question.” One of these decades I’ll get used to it. Sigh.

novakant, if this were Usenet, I’d have to say Really? … Then how could you possibly know what I mean?, and Just because you’re too ignorant of the subject matter to find the discussion interesting, doesn’t mean the people who do are psychopaths, and so on.

I miss the cascades.

Bianca @14, Novakant @18,

on Usenet, everybody is Comic Book Guy (regardless of the subject under discussion).

But since we’re on the topic of Usenet, “Serd*r Argic & The Criminal Armenian Grandparents” would be a great band name.

Never ascribe to malice, etc : I believe in nutters and idiots more than in trolls. Plus the “I was just trolling” is a face saving move for said nutters and idiots.

Also, if we are on the subject of Usenet folklore, I suppose this thread wouldn’t be complete without a link there.

Ferrous cranuses, I don’t miss you.

Well done old boy.

I win!

Trolling is actually kind of hard when you don’t feel any emotional investment in it, and I usually screw it up abominably, but yes, I was proud of that one. I liked the “billy” club, and the part about “begging the question” sounds both completely sincere and completely unaware that, y’know, maybe this thought had already occurred to someone somewhere.

(To anyone who didn’t snicker at it, I’m sorry. I’ll be good now.)

An effective troll puts their ignorance on display without revealing their awareness of their own ignorance, which is obtuseness and buffoonery manifest; they venture immediately from the topic at hand to something truly unrelated through some tenuous connection — and then they say something so obtuse, and so revealing of their own lack of self-awareness, that the irony begs for resolution. That’s what prompts people to respond: that desire to resolve the irony derived from a perceived discrepancy between the troll’s self-awareness and the reader’s orders-of-magnitude-larger awareness.

(This is why I think most trolls don’t conceptualize themselves as trolls: because this discrepancy in awareness is actual, not feigned by the troll.)

From the Plato I’ve read it’s easy to see Socrates as a troll, and an intentional troll, because he feigns ignorance. This feigned ignorance may be productive and useful, in his case, but the interactive dynamic’s the same.

Friends of mine – well, foaves of mine – used to practise trolling with intent, crossposting from froups like a.f.u and a.r.k to less savvy areas & making ridiculous statements guaranteed to get rebutted at great length. I remember someone arguing that ATMs *had* to be printing money, because otherwise they’d keep running out of money and someone would have to keep restocking them, and that just wouldn’t make *economic sense*. On a.f.u we were the snottiest and most pendantic of all rebutters, but we never let anyone troll us. We won, in other words.

Phil@34, So there really aren’t any libertarians who refuse to believe full-serve gasoline costs less in NJ than in PA because of supply and demand? And the feminist-ring guy couldn’t possibly have believed that, and was just trying to get Muffy Whatshername to waste time answering him? (If Muffy were fifteen years younger, she’d probably have Megan McArdle’s job.)

And Novakant, I didn’t mean to imply you were ignorant of what was being discussed, and I’m sorry if that came across wrong.

A troll is best defined as anyone whose arguments are outside whatever binary oppositions are favored by the majority (this being the anglophone web, binary oppositions are a given.

I disagree. Therefore, I think what I am going to do with my life, beginning now, is attempt to follow in the footsteps of giant Harry Frankfort: pursue a philosophy Ph.D. with emphasis in moral philosophy and philosophy of mind and eventually write a searching but lighthearted paper, On Trolling, which will be converted into a book at just the right time for a receptive audience and will become the next surprise crossover bestseller. It should only take, what, amplifying my insight somehow and investing a few decades of dedicated work?

I am going to do this because someone is wrong on the Internet.

About trolling.

…

Such a book could be taken on from any number of angles. On Trolling; Troll Management: Theory and Best Practices; The Joy of Trolling; The Five Trolls You Meet In Limbo (bonus relevancy points because one of them would surely be Socrates); Pride and Prejudice and Trolls.

More seriously (before I get nicked under section 21 of the SSA), I think trolling is one of the most interesting social phenomena to emerge from the transition to substantial Internet communication in the developed world, and have from time to time been deeply disappointed to find (for example) that an essay promisingly titled “Who Is a Troll? Not a Simple Answer” concerned itself with patent law. (This begs the question of whether the term ‘troll’ derived from this usage, since apparently the term ‘patent troll’ has been around since pre-Internet days.)

So, thank you Henry for cuing us in to Morin and Claudel. Their strict definition of a troll precludes anyone who doesn’t intend to troll, that is, it excludes people who might be acting like trolls without being aware of it, but I like how they finesse the restrictions that definition imposes in the “Argumentation gone wild” section. Hopefully this can be extended further to explore the relationship between argumentation and righteousness. Consider the intricate relationship between trolling, rumor-mongering, and denunciation of kitten killers:
http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2008/10/false-witnesses-2.html
(Ignore the first three paragraphs or so.)

I’ve got to say, I miss Mark V Shaney’s Usenet “trolls” most of all.

Gee whiz, some people are automating trolling to this very day.

“I do not think the English literature web HAS the importance of its equivalents in Farsi or Mandarin.”

A troll is someone who insists on standing outside a social network while peppering its membership with questions.
That’s all.

I’ll leave this discussion to Emerson, if he’s interested.

bianca – argh, the gas price in New Jersey! I think that was another sub-species of troll, though – the guy (usually) who cross-posts Urgent and Important Information to a bunch of groups and watches to see if the locals to say Thankyou. Sometimes they say something other than Thankyou and hilarity ensues.

O my Usenet of old. There are functioning newsgroups out there – I was a regular on soc.history.what-if for several years, and that still seems to be going – but a.f.u is full of tumbleweed these days.

Bob, where’s your self-respect, man?

Don’t worry, Bianca. If I understood you correctly, you were arguing that things have gotten better since the usenet days. Should that be the case, I’m glad I thought back then that it was something for quasi-autistic geeks and never took part in it. (Though I have to be a bit of a geek to do my job, I’m not one by nature really and had my first computer at the ripe age of 25, lol).

This shouldn’t be so difficult:
Let’s play alternate history for a minute: pretend the internet was up an running in 1955:
A chatroom or listserv or whatever for classical musicians and discussion of theory, technique, job offers etc. But one violinist, let’s call him Louis Farrakhan, insists on talking only about the fact that he can’t get a job, because he’s black.
Except for mention of the internet, the rest is all true.

1971. A feminist website for discussion and organization, fundraising and strategy etc. Except for one or two women who won’t shut up about Betty Friedan’s anti–lesbian bigotry.

In technical discussion you have collegiality among experts, and you can have relatively simple divisions between expert and non-expert, insider and outsider. But wider culture, even the wider intellectual culture is never a culture of expertise. Most of what anyone writes whether academic or not, within 20 years will become historicized, periodized, or dated. Dated not in the sense that there’s been any advancement, only change.
Some things evolve, others devolve.

“A troll is someone who insists on standing outside a social network while peppering its membership with questions. That’s all.” That’s the best least ideological definition of a troll there is; any other simply picks sides. And if you think that in 2009 we’ve reached the age where history, for the truly morally and intellectually serious [as opposed to the rest, and we know who they are], has stopped…

You’re wrong.

That’s not to say that inside/outside (expert/nonexpert) is a matter only of invidious distinctions–sociology, group dynamics, psychological needs to feel belonging by contrast to those who don’t belong–which could be overcome with different social arrangements, people getting over the need to exclude others, and so forth. (Excluding those who exclude others by making invidious dintinctions is not the same thing at all, though sometimes it seems difficult to figure out which elements of their speech indicate that they belong to the group in question.)

Salient, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, and I don’t mean to suggest that “like” in your @55 is no more than aesthetic, but given your caginess about whether you’re a man or a woman, and given your so emphatic defense of women’s speech rights a little while ago: The statement, as you read it, of course denies that women ought to be led by men, as (barring theories of reincarnation) no man has ever belonged to womankind. With which sentiment I heartily agree. But given your past history here it may have resonances you did not intend to be considered as your opinion.

Briefly back to the subject:
I was thinking about the recent “vaguely passive-aggressive post on commenters.”

Any community is a community because of shared values and assumptions. And in an open community there will always be a tension between members and outsiders. But a fondness for binary distinctions and every community’s inflated sense of place make communities built on a foundational association of intellectualism with science more fraught than most. Every man likes the sound of their own bullshit. But as someone once said. “Fact Value! Value Fact!”
Intellectualism should never be defined as purely technical. Sometimes, but only sometimes, annoying outsiders are right.