Sometimes I get into an online discussion with someone on another blog, and the person will assert a point, without any quantitative or qualitative supporting data. My normal tack is to demand that they offer some evidence to support their assertion, which usually results in irritation and annoyance (e.g., "I don't have an infinite amount of time to look stuff up, what do you think I am, a nerd?"). But sometimes I follow another tack, I just plainly contradict what the individual asserted without any evidence from my own end, and simply say "my impression is contrary to your impression." And strangely, I don't experience the same abuse or anger in these cases. Quite often I am on the receiving end of a shrug, and the response follows the form "Well, I guess we agree to disagree, you have your opinion and I have mine, and so be it...." Sometimes, I get bored, and I simply make shit up, stuff I know is incorrect, but the response is still the same, "Well, you have your opinion and I have mine."
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British scholars (Joan Robinson, among others) have commented on this as a trait of American academia. In Britain (specifically Oxford and Cambridge) academic debates are supposed to be death matches. You really want to defeat your adversary in front of a large audience and watch him [or her] slink away with his head down.
But in the US, right when a debate is about to reach the crunch (according to Robinson), the adversary will get vague, thank you for your interesting opinion, agree to disagree, and declare end of the debate.
This is a down side of equality-freedom-secularity. Starting with the Peace of Westphalia. There's a tendency to evade violent disputes by physical or geographical separation. Private property, for example, is autonomous compared to the days when customary law shackled landowners -- "It's mine and I can do what I want with it".
One of the things I don't like about academic disciplines is that sociology, psychology, poli sci, anthropology, and economics are all really talking about the same topic, but are allowed to refuse to talk to one another, on the fiction that they're talking about different things. The objects of study aren't really different, it's only the departments that are.
Well, is it all possible that scientists and academics can be elitist and uncompromising in their arguments?
People have different reactions to logical fisking because not everyone works from defined logic sets without resorting to experiential input.
For example, lets assume that you are 25 year old academic and get into an argument with a 50 year old woodcutter. You may insist that logically your argument makes sense because B follows A, but the woodcutter may have seen instances firsthand where B did not follow A.
No matter how smart you are IQ-wise, if the woodcutter is functionally smart(enough) and has not wasted his life (drugs, incarceration, religion) but worked long hours, read voraciously, and experienced war, famine, parenthood, unemployment and other such challenging thought problems (and not sustained a debilitating smack to the head), the woodcutter will recognize posturing from elitism and will become dismissive.
The woodcutter only needs to understand that while an academic may know the academic answer, he's still 25 years behind in firsthand understanding of human nature and interaction. Your quality of education as an academic may be exemplary (and even quality compressed), but you're in no position to judge the experiential qualities of the woodcutter.
Robert Anton Wilson talked about this and called it maybe logic. Instead of asserting the "is" substitute "seems" or "maybe" in place of "is" particularly if you want to avoid direct conflict and have further discourse. Their particular definition is:
So maybe you are evil.
And yes, I recognize that this is not real science as implemented by them (The maybe Logic Academy), but RAW and the people associated with this thing (like Ivan Stang) are interesting folk with interesting ideas.
I wouldn't say evil, just mildly sociopathic. Most eminent artists & scientists are this way (Caravaggio even killed a guy in a petty dispute over the score of a tennis match). The association with Newton-level eminence is based on impressions from biographies, but Rushton did a correlational study of Psychoticism on the EPQ and peer rating for eminence among a group of research psychologists. The ones who scored higher on Psychoticism were rated as more eminent, more creative, etc.
The idea is that they're less socialized and less inhibited, so they notice things others don't, explore known areas that are cordoned off by taboo by moral guardians, and so on.
I knew it!
*Next time I disagree with you in a blog comment section (which is usually, like, never) I am going to remember this.....
*The reason they don't get angry, maybe, is that they are not shown up in the second circumstance. They get to 'keep' their opinion or stated assertion. In the first, they have to prove it, and thusly, may lose it. Don't you like how I used thusly in a sentence?