Discussing Online Arguments

Discussing Online Arguments

We’ve seen an increasing number of online arguments in recent years.  Twitter battles and Facebook comment wars have sparked new problems and concerns regarding people’s well-being. One of the issues is a lack of face-to-face accountability for what is being said. A person can hide behind a screen while spewing hateful and derogatory remarks to another human without feeling empathy. The argument that I have chosen for today's post is regards to evolution.

The debate or conversation can be found here. 

In this discussion, I will not be putting my opinion on this topic, but instead a small analyzes of the debate/ conversation. And what I personally think would be a good way to approach the argument. I will also use OP for original poster.

Analysis and 5 rules that approach to Arguments

    When examining an argument, first rule is to analyze the argument being made, and see the purpose of the initial comment. Debating whether or not the conversation is worth engaging in. The argument I chose is now over, but this was the initial comment. "If we evolved from chimps or monkeys or whatever, how are they resistant to AIDS, but us more evolved version isn’t?"

    The second rule is to approach when examining an argument is seeing if people are using good arguments to inform their claim by giving good reasoning with support to the reasoning. A bad an example of this would be this example from someone trying to answer the OPs question. "Because HIV that causes AIDS only recently began infecting humans. It’s not clear how long the ancestor of HIV had been affecting monkeys and Chimps, but HIV isn’t even the same as those viruses since it jumped to humans. How exactly would have a defense against a virus that didn’t exist even 100 years ago?" This is a bad example, because they give an opinion with backing themselves up using resources. 

    The third rule is to see if the person is being serious about the actual conversation by their interaction with feedback of others. The OP in this situation may be trolling the person replying to their comment. Here is an example of this, "Oh, so maybe we had immunity before and lost it? We figured that maybe it isn’t that bad anymore, so we just decided to stop defending against it?" It's hard to tell if the OP is being honest with this response, and makes it challenge whether or not someone should engage, another individual claims that the OP is just messing with commentor of this post, but it is not clear until reading further comments from the OP and other commenters. The OP and the first commentor do go back and forth and do a great job at communicating effectively.

    The fourth rule is to keep calm and if you have something to say, make sure you have the evidence to back your information when you do decide to say something. That way the conversation is seen valid and with appropriate proof.

    The final rule is to know when to end the argument or debate. Sometimes it's not worth putting in the effort to a conversation that isn't going anywhere.