I wish every educator did this. Being a devil's advocate makes the discourse poorer and thinner and cheaper. You think you are being Robin Williams in Dead Poet's Society with some carbon copy of the socratic method. In reality, you are a Reddit reply-guy soldier an info war.
Learning to evaluate arguments is a skill. Learning to teach other people how to evaluate arguments is a meta-skill. You likely do not have the skill to do that and you certainly are not doing it in the architecture of media/platforms that does not allow that kind of skill.
A few notes on invoking 1) high school debate and 2) OED. 1) Ask any teacher who ACTUALLY teaches high school debate how much prep work and management it takes to establish an environment conducive to "devil's advocate" argumentation. Then ask yourself if you do that.
2) I don't even know where to start with you.
Using the DA method of interrogation takes a lot of deep care work for it be useful. That is the part most people want to ignore, almost as if their entire reason for valuing DA is to *not* demonstrate any care...
It requires a shared understanding of terms, a great deal of social trust, and an exit plan (with after care) for reconciling new information. Leave it to folks to strip away all of that and leave behind the contrarianism and competition.
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Literally never reading about whatever it is Bari has done. Thank you.
I just don’t get this whole cohort of people. What are they? Why are they? How come they get to be here? Who can stop them?
I will also tell you a secret: about 60% of the time I have to google who you are talking about when the internet blows up with one of these. I don’t know one from another.
I have serious decision fatigue. Every time someone asks me ANOTHER DAMN QUESTION I have to breathe so I don't snap. No one is *wrong*, I'm just tired.
Anyway, the absolute kindest thing you could do for me - if we have that kind of relationship - is to just take care of whatever it is yourself and tell me about it later. I would truly appreciate it!
These details on the most efficient and kindest way to get something to me might help! tressiemc.com/contact/
This is a very generative discussion. So, “social class” is supposed to resolve some of these tensions but it is worth asking if it does that for us in practice. It may have become too flat for a really dynamic process.
I have hoped that sociology would evolve this vocabulary by seriously theorizing platforms and power and race. Not that this other only use case. But I think its the best use case right now.
I won’t shamelessly plug my review article on platform capitalism and racial capitalism here but I can if you make me by behaving badly.
Either I just bombed this lecture on racial extraction, HBCU funding, UNC system expropriation and knowledge production platforms like Elsevier or I just scared the tee-total ish out of everybody. Because it was QUIET. Time will tell.
My shorter point is that debates about big uni systems cancelling Elsevier contracts obscures how even being able to have the debate obscures institutional privileges that necessitate extraction from non-white institutions & OA doesn’t address that, only introduces new politics
And now that I type it out, it’s a lot. Probably should just do this one thing all semester next time
Follow up questions on the internet, lord help me. I said “if you have leads on housing please share in comments”. So far it’s just people asking follow ups that don’t matter: “what do they want? Are they tall? Rent or buy or lease??” Just name the lead & stop pre-vetting
And if you answer the follow up? You almost always find that the person has no info to share. They just wanted to ask a question. Why are humans?
As I have said before, the problem with a mediated public is that people internalize that if they aren’t speaking then they don’t exist. So they just say nonsense.