this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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The difference is intention. The intention of the sea lion is not to convince you that your claim is wrong or immoral; it's to shut you up, by draining your desire to make the claim, since every time that you do it, a sea lion pops up to annoy the shit out of you.
That's a problem because nobody knows the others' intentions - at most we lie that we know. We can at most guess it - but to guess it accurately, without assuming/making shit up, you need to expend even more "mental energy" engaging the user, or looking for further info (e.g. checking their profile).
No. I've seen sea lions in oldschool forums and in Reddit, even if in both you're encouraged to debate in the comments; so Lemmy is not immune by nature against that.
They're just "dressed" in a different way; in Reddit for example your typical sea lion says "I don't understand, [insert question making a straw man of your proposition]? I'm so confused..." instead of asking you to back up your claim.
Hexbear in a nutshell.
I don't know, really. But I feel that Hexbear is mostly misinterpreted - I don't think that they're trying to sealion, it's more like an out-of-place "debate me~" childish cringe. I might be wrong though, as I mentioned in the second paragraph nobody knows the others' intentions.
Hexbear has the same problem as Reddit: it's home to a handful of active, loud, incredibly toxic communities that like to go into other people's online spaces and be assholes.
Also: if you go there and do what they do elsewhere, you get banned.
If these spaces have a rule like “no talking if you’re a man” that’s understandable, but what other kinds of “other people’s” spaces are you referring to?
Yeah, Hexbear wants hearts and minds, they're just really bad at it.
To be honest, if someone is saying some bigoted shit that is exactly what I'm doing. I don't expect to change the bigots opinion. My intention is:
You made me notice that my comment is missing a key element: sealioning always includes a farce of a polite engagement. "Nooo, I don't want you to shut the fuck up, I just want you to reconsider your position. I'm being friendly, why are you [being rude|ignoring it]?"
That farce is simply not there on the way that you described that you do against people saying bigoted shit.
Do you believe that all disagreement that isn’t bitter and angry is farcical?
I'm not wasting my time answering all assumptions that you might come up with.
The underlying assumption on your part being that no one could genuinely want you to reconsider your position, or indeed that your position could be even slightly flawed. Think about what you're saying, "Sealioning is when people politely ask me questions to clarify a position that I took". So?
Not only are you not open to changing your position, you are offended by the very notion that even a small aspect of your position could ever be reconsidered. Incredible. I'm trying not to be too polite, otherwise you might claim that I'm sealioning you again 😂
This is it. The term “sealioning” seems purpose-built to enable people to escape situations where they are asked to demonstrate critical thinking.
As I told you in the other thread: if you want a meaningful reply, drop off the sealioning.
And yes, you're still sealioning, even if your façade of politeness dropped.
If I'm sealioning, you're walrusing. Which one of us is refusing to address the content of the discussion? It's now twice that you've done to me exactly what you claim that I'm doing to you. There was also a third time you didn't respond at all, which is actually preferable to your current walrusing. Btw walrusing is when you make an argument, and then claim that any response is in bad faith, thus bypassing your obligation to actually clarify or defend your position in any way.
You immediately claimed that I was sealioning after I made one single comment? That doesn't make any sense and you know it.
Respond to the person you are interacting with, not to your own personal insecurities. Read the words that I have written down, parse them, and compose a response.
Actually, it's fine, I'm not particularly curious about the content of your earlier comment anymore, because I no longer have any suspicion that it might have been anything of value. But you should still reflect on what I have told you because it's pretty silly to act like this, especially on Lemmy.
Your definition of sealioning, that it’s defined by intention, that it involves a mask, these are all non-falsifiable. You realize that right? They contain no mechanism for accepting new information from outside your ideology, and make your mind starve to death.
This overall approach to things — to operate on the basis that all is known and understood and that those who disagree or behave as if there might be incompleteness in the knowledge — is what the term “totalitarian” refers to.
A classic example of “totalitarian” thinking is if you solve a game like tic-tac-toe. Having a game 100% solved, ie having computed every move, and therefore having 100% certainty as to the optimal play strategy, is a situation where you’ve encapsulated the totality of the game in your mind.
The idea that the totality of existence, of real life situations, is already known and the optimal strategy already computed, is “totalitarian”.
A totalitarian dictatorship is one in which that totality of understanding, and the resulting certainty of optimal strategy, is used to justify stripping subjects of all freedom. Any deviation from the optimal is considered bad, so freedom is worthless.
And of course there are degrees of totalitarianism, expressed implicitly in aspects of culture.
Science, by its emphasis on putting empirical observation above theory in terms of trust, allows for external information to update itself. Science is not totalitarian in that sense.
The term “Sealioning”, by enabling people to decide that any interaction at any time possesses a particular intention (un-observable, non-falsifiable), or that a particular mask is being used (un-observable, non-falsifiable), that they can just ignore the interaction and cast aspersions on the person they’re interacting with.
Here are two hypothetical situations that might clarify your blatant confusion regarding the usage of the word "sealion", and exemplify the usage of behaviour instead of "intentions" to demarcate sealioning.
Situation A:
Situation B:
Even if both Alice and Bob are conveying the same stupid discourse ("water is poisonous"), only one of them is sealioning - Bob. Why?
[Feel free to analyse this through mind/intention/etc. or behaviour. Refer to the sealion comic for reference.]
[EDIT reason: clipping and rewording for less verbosity.]
TL;DR: sealioning is about either how or why you convey a discourse, not the discourse itself. Over your whole comment, you're treating it as the later, thus making a fool of yourself and wasting my time.
No shit Sherlock. Otherwise I wouldn't have myself said that "That’s a problem because nobody knows the others’ intentions - at most we lie that we know."
However, the concept is still useful once you rework it to rely on behaviour (that is observable and falsifiable). And effectively, that's what people should do; alongside weighting out some risk that their claim might be wrong.
I said "farce", not "mask". That said: farces are mostly behaviour, and your point regarding "mask" is secondary and moot.
That's like complaining against an orange tree for containing no mechanism to squeeze juice.
Sealioning is not the discourse itself being conveyed, but how [if based on behaviour] or why [if based on intentions]; mechanisms regarding acceptance or rejection of new info relate to the later, not to the former.
Regarding "ideology": sealioning is not just used with ideological discourses.
You're opposing the concept of sealioning based on its reliance on something non-falsifiable, like "intentions"... and its effect on something equally non-falsifiable, someone's "mind". Congratulations for shooting your own foot.
You're babbling yet another assumption. That is false, usage of the concept of sealioning does not imply or require such approach. Stop assuming = making shit up.
All your babble (yup) from the 2nd to 5th paragraphs is built under the assumption that this idiotic statement is true, so I can safely skip to the part where you're talking about science.
Already addressed: sealioning being how or why a discourse is being conveyed, not the discourse itself.
Side note: let us not pretend (or worse, assume) that falsificationism is not the only scientific method out there.
Besides being a fallacy / irrationality known as "appeal to consequences", this chunk of babble relies on things already contradicted.
From your other comment:
I'm going to require you a source on that. Over and over and over and over and over, ad nauseam. If you can't provide it, follow your own advice and shut up. /s
If you can provide it, don't worry - I'll ask for source on something else, preferably some triviality, and the cycle repeats. Recursively.
Are you getting the picture? Your comment works under the assumption/idiocy that people not sourcing their claims do it because of inability to do so; sealioning exploits the fact that countering bullshit wastes your time and patience, so even if you can rebuke it, you'll eventually give up out of sheer annoyance.
And before you babble "but in syense lol lmao" - even in an academic environment, if you're dragging discussion down by asking questions that you're expected to know the answer of, someone is bound to "politely" tell you to "please inform yourself beforehand on those trivial matters, if you want to engage in this discussion" aka "fuck off".
finally, someone took the time to unpack the lie of sealioning
I'll be blunt: the fact that you and @intensely_human@lemm.ee
makes me a bit suspicious that you're the same person agreeing with themself.
If you are not the same person I apologise. But even then you can see how fishy it is.
tell me which of my comments are 200 words with correct capitalization.
you are paranoid
If I were to be paranoid I'd be claiming that you're coming "after me". I don't - my hypothesis is simply that it's a single muppet trying to reinforce the standing of their own opinion, based on the coincidences that I've listed.
And, again: if you are indeed two different individuals, I apologise. The differences in capitalisation and text length are a fair point.
You know I think I would modify that intention. I've found it's better not to argue sort of, for some third party observer, or, to argue just to wear them down, but I think it's better to argue just for yourself, for your own sake. It still kind of requires a good ability for discernment, but if you can find a sealion that can keep you sharp, that's probably good enough. Less noble is maybe just arguing with them because you personally find it amusing, which is also probably not a terrible thing.
Generally, though, I always kind of wonder generally why it is that the time-tested and great advice of "don't feed the trolls" has tended to fall by the wayside over the years, if it was ever really followed at all. I suppose only one person needs to falter to register as an engagement, but it's pretty hard for an uncoordinated effort to end up flooding a site with propaganda, because people just tend to give up (or in lots of instances, self-isolate, which is maybe a different problem) if they get ignored enough.
I find "Don't feed the trolls" is less of a concern on a site like Lemmy that filters by up and down votes. The trolls get filtered to the bottom and don't clutter everyone's feeds. The more of the troll's time I waste the less they can spend trolling other people.
Something like Steam Community Forums where a thread gets bumped to the top every time it receives a new reply, dear God stop feeding the trolls! It makes it an unusable mess.
I would argue, probably poorly, that this also happens to a much, much lesser extent when you feed a troll on a site like lemmy.
Nah, my concern is kind of more that trolls, truly bad faith arguers, should ideally be handled more by functions like spam filters and good moderation, than being this sort of thing that we constantly have to juggle around, shaking keys in front of their faces in order to distract them from responding to one person. In a trolling war, where you have to troll the trolls, the trolls always win. There's some blogpost that I can no longer dig up from my internet history, about how similar lessons were learned in EVE Online, by people trying to win wars of attrition against the Goonswarm, the in-game SomethingAwful board users.
The takeaway from the writeup was kinda that the only effective countermeasures is basically just to kind of, have more effective moderation, and banning people who would take it too far.
Edit: browsing down a little more, your approach to just, have them suffer death by a million papercuts, and maybe just kind of expose them and publically shame them, rather than engage in a protracted counter-trolling kind of thing, that makes sense to me as a strategy I hadn't really considered. Probably an effective one, too, especially as multiple strategies tend to increase in efficacy as they lend themselves to one another. So, neat.
The drawback of wanting to use software to handle the people who disagree with you is … hopefully obvious. I’m too tired to write it up.
But like you see the obvious problem with that, and why having human intelligence interacting with “the set of people I’m calling trolls” is necessary long term right?
Straight up, no, I don't. I think that free speech online is kind of a perpetual techno-libertarian pipe dream that gets pushed at the behest of (mostly) corporate interests onto the optimistic and naive. If you let the trolls take an inch, they take a mile. I don't even necessarily just mean like, white supremacist ideologues, or whatever, either, right, but I also mean like, corporate propaganda. Anyone with outstanding resources online can pretty easily sway public sentiment. People reported that you could buy upvotes on reddit, you can likewise buy comments, and if you play it correctly you can consistently dominate the front page. You can do this not only with reddit, but basically any other form of social media engagement as well.
This isn't to advocate in favor of people self-isolating into echo chambers, right, it's more to advocate for people just making more conscious decisions on who they engage with, which I think nobody tends to regularly do, because how social media works is that it preys on your base instincts and weaknesses. If you are to engage with a troll, a bad faith actor, you need to be getting something out of the exchange. You, personally. Maybe social shaming also works as a strategy for content moderation like that guy was saying, I dunno. But I think most people aren't consciously making these decisions when they decide to engage with trolls, they're just arguing nonsense points with someone who doesn't give a shit about them, and then, you know, big shocker when they get frustrated and mad.
That's not helping anyone to see alternative perspectives. If anything, it's gonna cause people to become more reaffirmed in their own ideology, if they see that their only opposition is like, horrible dicks, basically. It's not steel-manning the opposition, when that occurs. I mean, in some sense, that's why trolling tends to happen most consistently, right? It's because people want to venture outside their echo chamber, and get fresh meat, but then they do so in such a way that they're engaging adversely, not putting in any effort, whatever, and then they just end up making everyone around them mad, and probably themselves, and then they fall deeper into their own ideology. Especially when their in-group has, knowingly or not, given them a kind of memetic scent that they (the troll) doesn't fully understand, a marker that they're someone from the outside. See: every time someone is able to explain communism to their conservative co-workers, who like it, so long as they don't use the word "communism". Million other examples along those lines. It's like a mormon going door-to-door, or something
I think it's probably a better case if you're just letting everyone stay in their own zone, using heavy handed moderation to prevent this sort of dumb shit from occurring, and then occasionally you let people in if they're showing that they're acting in good faith, and are capable of like, actually offering good counterarguments and good viewpoints. If you're wanting to have an actually good time on the internet then I think it's probably gonna be better to hand those decisions off to someone else. Obviously that's something you have to take on faith, but it's much, much easier to actually engage with the stuff you want to, if you're not falling victim to obvious rage bait every 10 posts.
For the same reason “if you see something, say something” would stop getting adhered to if people got sloppy, or self-serving, with their interpretations of the word “something”.
The concept of “troll” used to mean: Inducing a person to spend lots of effort responding to some nonsense, as a way of messing with them.
Now the word “troll” refers to: Any and all bad actors online. Which includes people who ask me politely for sources when I make bold claims. They’re the baddies, and I know because of this baddie checklist:
This is true of me too. When I ask for a source, I’m about 95% sure it’s not going to be provided because it doesn’t exist, and that is my way of demonstrating the falsity of the claim.
A big component of sealioning, as I think you've pointed out, is one party pretending to not understand the intent or argument behind your reasoning and rephrasing it in a way to make it sound ridiculous, but in the form of a question. The goal is to counter someone's argument by hoping that they don't have the argumentative or expressive capacity to succinctly clarify themselves or identify that you're asking questions in bad faith.
Yup. That's called a strawman. Strawmen are really common when sealioning, as they increase the effort necessary for a meaningful reply - because first you'll need to dismantle the strawman, then counter-argument.
It isn't a key component though. You can achieve the same effect through a red herring, tu/ille quoque (aka what-about-ism), or even a false dichotomy.
I like this explanation.
If every time you make a claim, someone pops up and asks you for a source and you can’t provide it, you should stop.