“Engagement”
This is nicely put by Marco, who was a few years ahead of me at school.
It’s Cunningham’s “Law” (somebody comments). Wikipedia:
And mightn’t it matter in what institutional setting the lie is asserted? Police interrogators lie to elicit the truth, with society’s blessing. And if I publish an academic paper that asserts a thesis that’s almost certainly false – so that other scholars in this publish-or-perish economy are spurred to publish rebuttals explaining why the thesis is false – am I doing a bad thing? Don’t I advance respectable epistemic goals? (And is it so terrible if I elicit the truth in this manner for non-epistemic reasons: to get hired, promoted, grant-funded, etc. – i.e., for money – so that I can feed my children and mentor college students, who are as innocent as babes?)
But I see what Marco means. I do encounter the sort of thing he describes. I found a particularly shameless example tonight.
Most of the commenters were like, What happened to the state of New York? The Ivy League is dumb.
They made some troll richer by commenting, is what happened.
It’s Cunningham’s “Law” (somebody comments). Wikipedia:
[Ward] Cunningham is credited with the idea: “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.” This refers to the observation that people are quicker to correct a wrong answer than to answer an unanswered question.It’s (kind of?) interesting to ponder the ethics of asserting a falsehood in order to elicit the truth. Lying is wrong. (Ditto for other kinds of dishonesty.) But, plausibly, there are exceptions (e.g., to keep persecutors from tracking down their victims). What about the following case? A lie sparks crowd-sourced inquiry and, thereby, is predictably truth-conducive in the long run.
And mightn’t it matter in what institutional setting the lie is asserted? Police interrogators lie to elicit the truth, with society’s blessing. And if I publish an academic paper that asserts a thesis that’s almost certainly false – so that other scholars in this publish-or-perish economy are spurred to publish rebuttals explaining why the thesis is false – am I doing a bad thing? Don’t I advance respectable epistemic goals? (And is it so terrible if I elicit the truth in this manner for non-epistemic reasons: to get hired, promoted, grant-funded, etc. – i.e., for money – so that I can feed my children and mentor college students, who are as innocent as babes?)
But I see what Marco means. I do encounter the sort of thing he describes. I found a particularly shameless example tonight.
Most of the commenters were like, What happened to the state of New York? The Ivy League is dumb.
They made some troll richer by commenting, is what happened.