on derailment

[piranha]

i wasn't going to get sucked into racefail II, the thirteenth child, but it happened anyway, so i might as well write about it.

i don't like to call what always happens in such discussion summarily "derailment", because hey, i cut my teeth on usenet, where thread drift was both an inherent bug and a feature, and i know from my own intentions at the time that i didn't mean to derail anything, i was just focussed on a subset of the issue, and especially when facts were in dispute, OMG SOMEBODY IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET, and i must set them straight. *rolls eyes at self*.

but it is of course derailment, intent or not. it distracts people from the main point of the thread, and quite often takes over completely. i know this too, because many a thread i would have liked to continue died under a load of fluff, or some side issue that was unimportant to the main points. and i think this is much more destructive in "flat" discussion (sites that don't offer threaded discussion irk me something fierce).

this has been something important for me to learn, and it so happens to be closely associated with GAS (geek answer syndrome): if i am ever so eager to make a small side point in a discussion about something vastly more important -- such as race -- i might want to restrain myself and not post it right then and there. if i think it's semi-important to the main argument (because bad facts undercut it), i must at the very least also contribute something to the main point.

i'm also thinking about how to narrow down the possibility for derailment from the start (my previous post got totally derailed immediately, and i know why). i think i might try and only talk about one subject at a time instead of letting loose half brain salad that's being tossed together as i speak.

Comments

[tablesaw]

"Thread drift" is a libertarian concept of discourse. If a topic is discussed it is more important, and if a topic is not discussed or abandoned than it is not important. Supposedly this "free market" maintains a healthy economy of a discussion. Topics are abandoned when they are exhausted and picked up again when there are new things to say about them.

Like most libertarian models, it ignores the differences of agency among the participants.

[flarenut]

Huh. I always thought of it as more of a brownian thing, that even with the best of intentions many people are unable to remain completely focused on one topic. Or perhaps a genetic-recombination thing. So nothing about markets or "worth" in there, just entropy.

Which has a different sort of denial of agency, but one that in many cases seems accurate to me. Derailment, otoh...