Daily Bard Digest 2024-08-06

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Here's todays official post from the BARDCHIVE:

09/09/15 20:44:20 with a score of -7: https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3kayy8/til_men_and_women_experience_near_equal_levels_of/cuwb0dw/?context=8

It may help to define the types of adversarial discourse that people engage in. You get :

DH0, "Name Calling";

DH1, "ad hominem";

DH2, "criticising the tone";

DH3, "Flat contradiction";

DH4, "Counterargument";

DH5, "refutation"; and

DH6, "refuting the central point".

Men can all agree that DH0 has no value in settling an argument; they are just signifiers of emotional state.

DH1 is simply a (faulty) appeal to decide the argument through establishing social rank.

DH2, Criticising the Tone of the argument, is simply a signifier that the respondent has taken offense — or is trying to derail an argument. It includes Gaslighting and is a form of Changing the Subject.

DH3 is simply a challenge — it is a declaration of position. It isn't a settlement of an argument; it is the beginning of one.

DH4 is playing out the "hand" — setting out cards, and elaborating on one's position. It demonstrates confidence in the position — or a lack of confidence.

DH5 and DH6 are, respectively, persuading an audience and making a locked-air-tight justification that the other person's position is not tenable.

Men use this model in social challenges in order to establish social dominance. Most men recognise DH0-DH2 as simply trolling — a bunch of noise, or, at best, a Wikipedia entry.

DH3 and DH4 are seen by men as social, and make up the vast majority of "debate" in forums.

DH5 and DH6 are the things that get gilded — because someone demonstrated dominance of a subject by putting it forth persuasively and convincingly.

For women, and sometimes for men, DH5 and DH6 are the stages where stalking steps in. Someone — usually male, sometimes female — is invested in the social adversarial game being played out, to the point of needing to demonstrate dominance, that they begin trying to push the other person into submission.

This is the possible end-point of adversarial social-pecking-order-determining discourse on the Internet, for women: that it escalates to the point of someone transgressing social standards to show up on their doorstep to "win an argument".

Moreover, while men feel comfortable in this social dance, and use it to practice social hierarchies, women see it as valueless — because it doesn't actually establish their social order, it doesn't establish their sense of social hierarchy, the challenges are rarely escalated above the level of DH2 once the challenger knows they are female (they will get mansplained to, not engaged as an equal), and there is no payoff for them.

So all of this adversarial discourse — from experience of the way they are treated — is worthless to them in "mixed" company.

They are more likely to make their arguments to academia, where there is a sense of social equity, or to their established social circle — rather than to the public, which will inevitably draw bullshit noise they don't need.

That is why women are more likely to be upset by online harassment.