Trolls are like ghosts

On the one hand, trolling messages contribute no meaningful content, being merely tediously predictable responses to certain situations. But on the other hand they are designed to provoke a certain effect - to harass and intimidate.

@adriandaub makes the interesting suggestion that trolls are like ghosts (WTCT p96). Or perhaps automatons.

An aggrieved white guy who has set up an alert for when Sarah Jeong tweets and then huddles over his phone to make some claim about racism and Roseanne using jagged grammar and vertiginous logic is functionally indistinguishable from a bot having been set up to do the same thing.

WTCT p94

Although he complains that practitioners of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) take the notion of programming literally (WTCT pp 144-5), the automatic response described by Professor Daub seems to involve a form of conditioning that might be regarded as functionally indistinguishable from programming. (As a computer scientist myself, it is not for me to argue with a professor of literature whether it is the practitioners of NLP or its critics who take the notion of programming literally.)

As I think I've stated elsewhere, I regard NLP as a syncretic collection of interesting ideas (strongly influenced by Bateson and others) and dubious snakeoil. Although the snakeoil elements are generally regarded as pseudoscience, I wouldn't want to lose the ideas. Daub mentions two important ones, which Bandler and Grinder didn't invent but did much to popularize - reframing and feedback.

In communication there are no mistakes - everything is feedback

WTCT p 145

Many years ago, I invoked a similar idea (the meaning of a communication is its effect) in a discussion on the signal/noise ratio with the blogger Ernie the Attorney, who had complained that What we have here is a failure to communicate.

In his chapter on Communication, drawing on earlier theorists including John Durham Peters, Daub argues not only that communication often falls short of its potential, but sometimes occupies a space of preordained, deliberately engineered disappointment (WTCT p 89). It's as if the troll actively wants to be misunderstood.

Or even to cease to be a subject. Daub mentions Sontag's interpretation of Freud: human aggression frequently flows from an unconscious desire to become inanimate (WTCT p95).

As I pointed out in an earlier post (November 2018), many of the speech acts that pollute the internet are not propositions but other rhetorical gestures. And even if the trolling message appears to be coded as a proposition, the metacommunication is otherwise. In his 2019 article for Logic Magazine, Peters notes that the aim of trolling is to goad someone else into getting upset, an act known as triggering, and describes the outgoing US president as an absolute master at metacommunicative messing. And of course framing/reframing.

Furthermore, the troll's targets often include the medium itself, as the cultural theorist Mark Fisher once observed.

The elementary Troll gesture is the disavowal of cyberspace itself. In a typical gesture of flailing impotence that nevertheless has effects — of energy-drain and demoralisation — the Troll spends a great deal of time on the web saying how debased, how unsophisticated, the web is.

Andrew Iliadis explains the information theory of Gilbert Simondon in terms that can be linked to the notion of reframing: 

Information is that that which, depending on the way that it comes into contact with another abstraction of itself, unlocks or clicks into another form of reality.

Reality, fiction functioning as truth, or just lulz?

To be a game, the participants have to agree on the frame that this is play. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once made this point brilliantly. Hazing rituals, he said, were governed by the frame is this play? Trolls like to claim the prerogative to define an interaction as play when their conduct makes that frame completely unclear.

Peters 2019

 

The play's the thing, someone once suggested, wherein to catch the conscience of the King. But what if the king has no conscience, no soul?

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Rachel Barney [Aristotle], On Trolling (Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (2):193-195, 2016)

Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2020) 

Mark Fisher, Fans, Vampires, Trolls, Masters (k-punk, 12 June 2009) 

Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern Press, 1974)

Andrew Iliadis, A New Individuation: Deleuze's Simondon Connection (MediaTropes Vol IV, No 1, 2013)

John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air (Chicago University Press, 1999) 

John Durham Peters, U-Mad (Logic Issue 6, 1 January 2019)

Susan Sontag, Fascinating Fascism (New York Review of Books, 6 February 1975)

Related posts: Failure to Communicate (July 2004), Good Ideas from Flaky Sources (December 2009), Ethical Communication in a Digital Age (November 2018), Can predictions create their own reality (August 2021)

Trespassers Will

David McCoy complains about a sign reading "No Dumping - Violators May Be Prosecuted". He objects to the permissive and non-threatening implications of the modal verb "May", and is nostalgic for the unequivocal days of right and wrong, of firm laws and firm enforcement of the laws, when cardboard signs read "Trespassers Will Be Shot". [Modal Verbs: The Words Behind the Loopholes ]

I want to make two points here. The first relates to the purpose of the sign - what is it trying to achieve, and what kind of language is appropriate to this purpose. The second point relates the nature of ambiguity - is May really more ambiguous than Will?

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The purpose of signs like these is of course admonitory - they are designed to dissuade people from doing something. You might think that an uncertain sanction (may be prosecuted) is less of a disincentive than a certain sanction (will be shot).

But then which of the following warning signs do you find most persuasive? Perhaps it depends on your national culture. We British are a nation of accountants, so we like to be told what the maximum fine is.

• British: If you climb on this electricity pylon you will be fined £100
• German/American: It is a Federal Offence to climb on this electricity pylon.
• Italian: If you climb on this pylon you may die.

(I inherited this joke from my father, but I don't know whether it was his own observation or he got it from somewhere else. I think there may have been a French one as well. Please comment if you have a source, or any other nationalities.)

Based on the simple linguistic analysis David recommends, the possibility of death is not as strong a sanction as the certainty of a fine. Like Hermione's joke in the first Harry Potter book - "We could all have been killed - or worse, expelled."

David likes warnings to be proper threatening. When I was growing up, parents and teachers said things like "Don't do that or else": that was regarded as proper threatening in the days of "unequivocal days of right and wrong, of firm laws and firm enforcement of the laws". So we usually did what we were told and didn't find out what the punishment would have been.

Following David's logic, parents should say things like "Don't do that or else you will be grounded for three days and fined 2 weeks pocket money." But is precise specification of the sanction really more effective in encouraging good behaviour? Or does it merely encourage calculated risk-taking?

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Meanwhile, “Trespassers Will” is still pretty indefinite. Does it mean ALL trespassers or SOME? Immediately or later? If I trespass and I am not shot, is that a counter-example or a stay of execution? If no trespassers have ever been shot, what should I conclude from that? Do I want to be the first?

Perhaps it would be better to have a sign, like road safety signs, saying “341 trespassers have been shot this year. Some of them survived. Please take your litter home.”

Or perhaps this …

Next to his house was a piece of broken board which had: “TRESPASSERS W” on it. When Christopher Robin asked the Piglet what it meant, he said it was his grandfather’s name…it was short for Trespassers Will, which was short for Trespassers William. And his grandfather had had two names in case he lost one—Trespassers after an uncle, and William after Trespassers.

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I agree with David that the English language is tricky. But I think he is wrong to blame modal verbs - may, can, shall, might, etc. - which he identifies as "the words that power loopholes." These words tend to be used consciously, not to create inadvertent loopholes but to deliberately underspecify some outcome. In David's example, the rule is pretty clear ("No Dumping") but the sanction is underspecified ("Violators May").

Meanwhile, "Trespassers Will" is a false universal, with no modal word to draw your attention to the ambiguity. In my opinion, this kind of ambiguity is much more dangerous - both when used deliberately, to mislead or persuade, or when used inadvertently.

Some people find the NLP metamodel useful for identifying structural ambiguities in English speech. (Other people think NLP is the work of the devil, but of course the devil is in the detail.) All structural ambiguities, or just some? I suspect there is no assured method for eliminating all possible ambiguity.

See also Unambiguous Threat (September 2005), Good Ideas from Flaky Sources (December 2009)

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Update: Here's a great example, found by @ShawnCallahan


Updated 8 June 2014

Positive Intentions

NLP practitioners sometimes talk about discovering The Positive Intention. For example, if a person drives a car into a tree, NLP will ask what purpose this action might possibly serve (for example, escaping a difficult domestic or work situation) and then find a less destructive way of achieving the same outcome. This approach, which was pioneered by Virginia Satir, is a clear application of the POSIWID principle. 

Instead of labelling people as “stupid” or “obstinate” or “narrow-minded” or “bureaucratic”, this principle suggests we look for a way of framing the situation in which their behaviour makes sense. 

Here’s an example. A colleague was running a course with sixteen students. At the end of the course, only fifteen evaluation forms could be found. The administrator got very anxious about the missing form, and insisted on a new form being produced. My colleague couldn’t see what the fuss was about, assumed that the missing form probably wouldn’t provide any additional information, and attributed the anxiety to a mindless procedural rigidity.

But let’s try and construct a different frame for the administrator. Perhaps he imagined that my colleague had destroyed one form because it had contained especially critical comments. So the concern about the missing form might have stemmed not from a bureaucratic mindset but from a lack of trust. (In any case, these two explanations are not so far apart - bureaucracies emerged historically as a solution to certain forms of corruption, and are often specifically designed to reduce reliance on personal trust.) The new form had a positive intention – it served to reassure the administrator that my colleague hadn’t acted dishonestly.

However, I have a quibble with how NLP practitioners sometimes talk about positive intentions. (The founders of NLP were very alert to small details of language that revealed habits of thought, but their followers aren’t always so careful.) The word “the” seems to imply that once you have found a frame in which the behaviour seems to make sense, you can stop your analysis because you have found the truth: The Positive Intention. But I prefer to regard this as a hypothesis rather than a truth: A Positive Intention. Sometimes when a person drives a car into a tree, it really is just an accident. As Freud said: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. 

Some people never stop looking for alternative frames; arguably these people are the true systems thinkers.

 

See also Good Ideas from Flaky Sources (December 2009)

Brain Gym

Feature on BBC Newsnight this evening about Brain Gym. According to the website of Brain Gym International of Ventura, California

Brain Gym is a program of physical movements that enhance learning and performance in ALL areas. 

Brain Gym develops the brain's neural pathways the way nature does – through movement.

 

The Newsnight package followed a typical dialectic progression.

• Thesis. Brain Gym is popular in UK primary schools. Here is a Brain Gym workout in one school. Here are some teachers and pupils and other interested parties enthusing about it

• Antithesis. Brain Gym is regarded with scepticism or scorn by scientists. Brain Gym cannot possibly work in the way that its proponents claim. While exercise may indeed be beneficial, it is entirely wrong to teach children such pseudoscientific rubbish.

• Synthesis. Jeremy Paxman speaks on a faulty satellite link to the founder of Brain Gym. Paxman challenges, founder waffles: game, set and match to Newsnight. Surprise, surprise.

 

Many scientific breakthroughs were not fully understood by their founders. If you want to throw out psychoanalysis as pseudoscience just because some of the things Freud said were rubbish (see Karl Popper), then you'd better not look too closely at some of the things Galileo and Newton said (see Paul Feyerabend). So we might look tolerantly at the fact that the Brain Gym people have some rather strange explanations for why Brain Gym works. (Compare NLP, another California export.) Surely the important question is whether Brain Gym actually works. 

 But it seems there isn't much scientific evidence of that either. There are two obvious points. 

Firstly, any gentle exercise is probably beneficial. When teachers and pupils do the exercise together, this probably has social benefits (enhancing the relationship) as well. 

Secondly, any change tends to produce a short-term improvement - this is known as the Hawthorne Effect, from an analysis of a series of experiments at the Western Electric factory in Hawthorne, Illinois. 

So does this mean we shouldn't have to send lots of money to Brain Gym International? Is taxpayer's money (my money) being wasted? 

 But what the Brain Gym people have done is create a narrative, and it is this narrative that generates the enthusiasm, the motivation, the commitment, and therefore the benefits. Don't let's judge whether the Brain Gym people are talking Truth or Rubbish, let's judge them on the Effects they produce. 

Come on, if it wasn't for the fancy name and the weird pseudoscience, if it was just called Daily Exercise, nobody would bother doing it, or they'd do it under protest. It is the fancy name and the weird pseudoscience that produce the real benefits. Isn't it?  

 

Wikipedia: Brain Gym, NLP 

Teaching and Learning Research Programme: Neuroscience and Education (pdf) 

Guardian: Brain Gym exercises do pupils no favours, Exercise the brain without this transparent nonsense, Keep your pupils stretched and watered

See also Good Ideas from Flaky Sources (December 2009) 

Quick Fix and White Lies

Some overweight people eat too much, and could use some help stopping eating. Nowadays you can get a pill that fills your stomach, so you feel sated. Why do we feel that there’s something wrong with this idea, or perhaps something wrong with a world in which this kind of idea thrives? Gianpaolo writes “Am I the only one preferring to go after the causes rather than the symptoms?”

What are the causes of overeating? One of the problems is that some people don’t have an effective STOP signal. So taking a pill that triggers a STOP signal could introduce an effective control mechanism [footnote]. The pill acts as a proxy for food. The brain receives a message that it interprets as “stomach full of food” – this interpretation is untrue but helps to produce a good outcome – what we sometimes call a white lie.

One reason we might be uneasy about a mechanism that is based on a white lie is that it may not be sustainable. How long is it going to take the brain to learn that the message is untrue, to distrust and ignore it? Are there situations where the brain needs to distinguish between the proxy and the real thing? What happens when the pill stops working?

From a system engineering perspective, this unease corresponds to a principle that information flows or control flows ought to be true. There are countless systems where this principle has been breached – usually to force some subsystem to do something it wasn’t originally designed for. Systems engineers are wary of the complications that can ensue from proxies and automated white lies – but also appreciate how such mechanisms provide a powerful way to solve problems quickly.

But sometimes it’s okay to have a mechanism that works for a while, even if it isn’t going to work for ever. If people are committed to changing their lifestyle – whether this involves over-eating or smoking or any other bad habit – then there may be nothing wrong with a pill that helps them through the transitional period.

Thus it seems we may sometimes combine a “quick fix” with longer term change. But there is a strong risk that some people will just take the quick fix - or even a long succession of quick fixes. and fail to do anything else. And (perhaps as a consequence of this) there are many people who object to “quick fix” solutions on principle. For example, brief therapies (such as hypnotherapy and NLP) are scorned by practitioners of psychotherapy, who hold that deep problems require lengthy intervention.

It is certainly true that some deep and messy problems require deep and lengthy and costly intervention. And it is also true that some people (especially politicians) are too easily seduced by quick fix solutions that create more problems than they solve. So it is wise to be cautious of relying on the quick fix. But the principled objection to the quick fix goes beyond sensible caution, to an outright refusal to consider its merits in any circumstances. So where does this aversion to the quick fix come from?

One possible answer can be found in Albert Borgmann’s analysis of technology; the quick fix belongs to a technologically distorted view of the world, which Borgmann calls the Device Paradigm. According to Borgmann, we expect technology to deliver things to us quickly, safely, conveniently, and ubiquitously; technology presents us with a series of devices that disconnect us from the real world of cause and effect. (The quick fix pill sets up a fantasy that the pill is all you need.) Borgmann’s answer to this is something he calls Focal Things and Practices: engaging (or reengaging) deeply with chosen aspects of the world.

Ultimately, the objection to the quick fix pill is an ethical one - not just the belief that people ought to be able to control their own behaviour without the need for pills, but the belief that there is some positive value in engaging with the world in certain ways. I feel sorry for people that need (or think they need) the stomach-filling pill, because it seems to take something away from what makes us human.

[Footnote] In terms of Donella Meadows’ “Places to Intervene in a System”, this mechanism appears to qualify either as Negative Feedback (Level 8) or Material Flow producing Information Flow (Level 6/5).

Failure to Communicate (Ernie the Attorney)

I have just stumbled across a great blog by Ernie the Attorney. 

In a post entitled What've got here is a failure to communicate, he discusses the signal/noise ratio in email and blogging. 

As we all know, apparent failure to communicate is a very common pattern of social interaction. Sometimes the POSIWID principle starts to look like the only explanation - the purpose of a communication is the effect it produces. Followers of Bateson (including the founders of NLP) sometimes make a related claim: the meaning of a communication is its effect. For example, although there are many blogs that contain good material (including Ernie's), it sometimes seems as if the various sociotechnical amplifiers that we use to link blogs together are only designed to produce noise. That's a great pity. 

 

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Update: Ernie now has four posts on communication failure.

• What we've got here is a failure to communicate (July 2004) 
• What we have here is an inability to communicate (October 2005)
  
• Failure to communicate (January 2009)
• What we (usually) have is a failure to communicate (May 2010)
  

My related posts

• Wifi in New Orleans - Katrina (October 2005)