The Reasons (a lot of) Discourse Sucks
1. It's severly lacking in axioms.
An axiom or postulate is a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments.
The chance of having a fruitful debate with someone when you can't agree on fundamentals with them is close to zero.
2. Empirical Evidence > Anecdotes
An anecdote is a brief, revealing account of an individual person or an incident.
Empirical evidence is information that justifies the truth or falsity of a claim. In the empiricist view, one can claim to have knowledge only when based on empirical evidence. This stands in contrast to the rationalist view under which reason or reflection alone is considered evidence for the truth or falsity of some propositions. Empirical evidence is information acquired by observation or experimentation. This data is recorded and analyzed by scientists. This is the primary source of empirical evidence. Secondary sources describe, discuss, interpret, comment upon, analyze, evaluate, summarize, and process primary sources. Secondary source materials can be articles in newspapers or popular magazines, book or movie reviews, or articles found in scholarly journals that discuss or evaluate someone else's original research.
The chance of having a fruitful debate with someone when they value their own experience, reasoning and identity more than scientific fact is close to zero.
3. Source material is either not provided, or misunderstood.
I'll be very frank, and I encourage you to at least think about what I'm telling you: a great number of people don't know how to read legislative or scientific text. This is expected. It's very complicated – to some extent. Oftentimes people also fall victim to 'if it's written, it must be true'.
Take into consideration how every other week the media suggests how there's a new cure for cancer, or how nearly anything either increases cancer risk or decreases it (– or both). That's mostly due to the fact that (a number of) journalists would rather get you invested in a story than present you accurate information. It's also because people just do not understand that correlation and causation aren't the same thing.
Also keep in mind that some texts that you'll find (on the internet) are worded purposefully vague. I come across sentence structures like 'experts suggest', or 'sources say', or 'it's been known' much too frequently. Most of the time, anything that follows can be dismissed entirely. Start asking yourself questions in response to stumbling across these phrases:
Who are the experts?
What is an expert?
What are the sources?
Where are the sources?
Etc.
Do choose to take any information presented to you by anyone with a grain of salt, and do your own research. Also, here's a neat little tip: if the headline of an article ends in a question mark, it's likely garbage.
4. Ad Homindem Ad Infinitum
I'm just as guilty of endless polemics as the next person, but if you want to engage with anyone, do so respectfully – no matter how uncomfortable some of their positions make you. I acknowledge that sometimes you need to word your statements a certain way to get through to someone, but personally I reserve to do so only when I absolutely must, and when it's time to encourage someone to understand that I am very angry, and very serious.
I suppose you might consider this tone policing, and it is. I encourage you to police your tone. The general tone of discourse has become hostile and repulsive. That cannot be what we stand for. If you think of yourself as a kind person, be kind. If you think of yourself as a good person, be good. You cannot rely on association alone. It's not enough to stand with the people you think are good and right. Assuming you're morally superior doesn't enable you to be terrible to the people you assume are morally inferior to you, or the people you associate with.
