After thousands of posts it occurred to me that this blog needs a disclaimer. This disclaimer must amount to something like, I have no experience and know very little about anything and this is me trying to figure things out, and please keep that in mind, and it would be lovely if you’d occasionally remind me of that because I keep forgetting. I’m a little too ambitious to put it in those terms, however. For one thing, I want my disclaimer to come from a place of honest humility. I see all these bloggers putting up these very cute little disclaimers saying, oh, I’m so random and I contradict myself all the time, and they wear their young ages and relative lack of experience as badges of pride, but really they’re quite sure they’ve figured things out, and their humility is more like a check-mark in a list of cultural signifiers they want to make up their online personas than any heartfelt desire to warn people from taking them too seriously. I want my disclaimer not to actually disclaim responsibility for my screw-ups, nor to discourage people from actually engaging seriously with my ideas; rather, it should be an honest admission of objective facts and an invitation to be critical, to see through bullshit, but also to appreciate that which manages to transcend its unauthoritative origins. I think arguing from a place of unauthoritativeness — from a position where no one has any respect for your scholarly merits, where you have no reputation as someone who knows what they’re talking about — by necessity produces the best arguments.
The internet has, to some degree, brought me up. On the internet, nobody knows you’re thirteen and an idiot, unless you give them reason to suspect as much. I pretended to be an adult on the internet for so long. I’m sure many saw right through me and decided to humor me anyway, and for that I’m eternally grateful. I never told anyone I was forty-four, had a wife, three kids and a dog and owned a house with a picket fence in the suburbs; I simply neglected to mention that I was, say, 14 and typing out my explication on Pascal’s Wager or free will from my parents’ basement while waiting for my mom to finish making me dinner. I’d jump in and attempt to play by adult rules with zero respect for my elders. I can’t recall anyone calling me out on age. I’ve had my arguments ripped to shreds more times than I can count, but that’s ok. Internet forums, at least the ones I’d frequent, were pretty meritocratic. Respect was a function of the quality of your posts, which was a function not of age or experience but of logical force and, occasionally, tenure (which was measured not in years but in number of posts or, at times, join date, but it’s pretty easy to be an oldtimer on a forum because internet years are like dog years). My teachers would praise my ability to string together complicated arguments backed up by evidence; I developed those skills by getting an education at the University of the Internets, which doesn’t give you a break for being young and stupid.
All of this is really wonderful. I’m so grateful to all the internet people that have contributed to my education. I hope that when I’m forty and some 14-year-old kid on the internet tells me I’m wrong, and here’s why, that I’ll be as receptive and respectful and take their arguments as seriously as all the 40-year-olds I told were wrong when I was 14 did.
Part of the reason I’m reluctant to make the kind of disclaimer I feel I need is that I’m afraid it’ll destroy this meritocratic dynamic. Once you make explicit the “young and inexperienced and humble” angle, can you then go right back to ye ol’ meritocracy, without people taking you less seriously, either by giving your ideas less weight and thought than before or by precisely giving your ideas weight and thought and actually giving you a break for being “young and inexperienced and humble”? I don’t know how old and experienced you need to be to reach that equilibrium where people will take you seriously and not question you simply because you’re young and inexperienced but also not give you unmerited authority simply because you’re old and experienced, and where people will not assume you’re either part of “the old guard” and so immune to change or part of “the youth” and so addicted to it. Thirty-three, on your second marriage, having worked seven years in your fourth full-time job, mortgage, kids, cat, dog, two cars? Twenty-two, but having spent the last four years traveling the world and the years before that meditating in a cave in Nepal? Sixty-eight and nearing retirement, a lifetime of love and hate and working experience and experience being unemployed and and and behind you? It’s tricky.
All of this wouldn’t matter if age and experience and knowledge were irrelevant. Of course, they aren’t. Ad Hominem is a fallacy of irrelevance. You suck, therefore you’re wrong is fallacious, because personal characteristics such as degree of personal suckage aren’t relevant to the question at hand. Sometimes personal characteristics are relevant: you can’t expect someone who’s never been to Nepal to have the same perspective on the country as someone who’s lived there for fifteen years, you can’t expect someone who’s been in love once and it was in junior high and by the way they aren’t even out of junior high to have the same perspective on love as someone who’s gone through a dozen long-term relationships and just recently finalized their divorce. Being taken seriously by people twice your age and with twice as much life experience does a lot to instill self-confidence and hubris in someone relatively young and inexperienced. The problem arises when that same person then starts talking about things that actually require twice their life experience, or at any rate twice the experience in one particular area that they possess; and, being that this is on the internet, when nobody knows of their relative inexperience and so takes their word seriously.
I want my disclaimer to effectively shut down anything that resembles talking out of your ass about things you know nothing about, while at the same time inducing people to take everything else, everything for which argumentum ad hominem really is a fallacy, as seriously as they did before the disclaimer. I try, naturally, not to speak of things I lack the necessary perspective to accurately describe, but, you know us humans, right?We can’t help but have opinions on stuff, regardless of our relative authority on the subject. Being an occasional keyboard warrior/jockey/scholar is a disease that, I suspect, affects close to one hundred percent of the population.
How about this. Let’s mutually pretend we’ve reached that happy equilibrium where we’re comfortable calling each other out for talking out of our respective asses, but otherwise respect each other enough to let the arguments rather than the personal characteristics determine our evaluations of the other’s opinions, and where we assign neither negative nor positive predetermined “authority” to each other. So you’re a scientist? Great, but citation needed, scientist or not. So you’re barely 13? Great, but you provided citations, so you can hang anyway. Sound good?
Nov 1, 2010