Seems like the boundary between “outrage porn” and “reporting that gets people highly motivated” can be gray at times (Assuming the outrage porn is actually honest reporting).
You are getting at the difference between outrage porn and constructive calls to action. When you read outrage porn, you don't actually do anything. You just sit there and nurse your outrage. And one sign that it is outrage porn is that there is no proposed set of steps to fix the problem.
That's my sense as well. The "porn" part of it indicates it is a consumer product designed for the (in this case perverse) "entertainment" of the consumer. The whole thing is an interesting mishmash of mass media, markets, and our strange human desires.
I first explored joining debate team like twenty years ago. Already at that point it was a complete farce.
In order to make judging "scientific" they would "graph" the arguments. Each "point" someone made was a line on the graph, and the opposition had to counter each "point". This led to a dominant strategy of "gerbil speech". Talking as fast as humanely possible to get as many points on the board as possible and hope your opponent misses one.
In short, debate got subject to the same ruthless systematization and optimization that ruins a lot of things.
That its gone from that to ideological nonsense isn't much of a loss.
"Gerbil speech" was particularly prominent in policy debate. Less true in Lincoln-Douglas debate at the time. However, even LD debate had this emphasis on being forced to respond to every argument that an opponent makes and if you didn't then you basically automatically lose. I thought it was silly then and silly now. High school debate is a timed event. It's not like a trial or something where people have as much time as they want to respond to arguments. If two academics did a public debate and one said you didn't respond to my argument and it's was a voting argument and I should win, most people would judge the argument in the context of everything else said during the debate. Not just on that one issue.
Anyway, since policy debate was obviously ridiculous, the league introduced a public policy debate format that was supposed to place some value on communication skills. I think maybe it got introduced my senior year, so it wasn't popular enough for me to try it.
I had ended up in Congress debate, which didn't have the same requirements as policy and LD as it's more like my side vs. their side rather than 1 on 1 or 2 on 2. Skills I learned ended up being very valuable. So I don't regret it, and I would probably be outraged if that event gets ruined by ideological nonsense.
That being said, ideology in judging debate is a tricky thing. I have since judged a few times, not a lot. It is usually pretty easy to determine who is better when the abilities are widely different. But if people are of similar skill and the debate is even, it can be a bit tricky. If one person made an argument that is inconsistent with my knowledge of how the world works, wouldn't I incorporate that somehow? It depends on the context of course. If someone argues that the US should adopt communism or something, then I feel like they should have a higher burden of proof given what I know about the poor economic performance of communism. If they argue that the economic performance is fine, then I would probably give them bad scores. However, if they acknowledge the poor performance, but start talking about values and the trade-off between poor economic performance and equality or something. I would be more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. And on the other hand, I don't think it is enough for the person who argues against them to just say capitalism gives better economic performance. They need to explain why. They need to make the argument as well.
Heh. I joined high school debate 40 years ago, and "gerbil speech" was well established even then, and LD debate was just being introduced to counter "gerbil speech".
I found the speedtalking to be only a moderate annoyance and one generally surmountable, and the process of actually participating in a formal debate to still be a useful exercise in syllogistic reasoning.
Spoken debate is inevitably somewhat performative though.
I honestly didn't intend to promote outrage, but rather highlighting some interesting dynamics in a fairly relaxed tone.. I honestly don't know how to fix it, and would be keen to hear ideas on how it might be tackled. Does my ignorance of ideal solutions mean I shouldn't comment? I don't think so?
You raise a good point. For a lot of topics with outrage porn potential, writing about the topic in a better tone than the alternatives on offer is cooling the outrage rather than intensifying it. Of course, whether that's the case or not in any particular instance depends on context.
"14% of young British men agree that a wife is her husband’s property."
I wonder if this might have something to do with the presence of a minority group in Britain whose religion holds rather anti-liberal, anti-modernist views, rather than the malign influence of some poseur like Andrew Tate.
Some things are actually outrageous... such as the depredations of the deep state documented by Taibi. To dismiss this as outrage porn is itself a kind of outrage porn. In fact, I am furious at Kling right now!
Porn is the key word because porn stimulates something meaningful but doesn't produce anything meaningful.
Good outrage porn highlights an example of a meaningful issue and spurs concrete and helpful action to fix that issue.
Bad outrage porn highlights a not meaningful issue and doesn't spur any concrete and helpful action to fix the issue.
Good outrage porn might be the abolition movement highlighting an indignity of slavery. Uncle Tom's Cabin is basically viral outrage porn.
Bad outrage porn would be a news story an about shark attacks (because its not a real issue) or BLM considering that they have no constructive solutions (and distort the importance of what they are outraged about).
It’s worth asking to what extent outrage porn needs a message of action to be worthwhile.
Let’s take Libs of Tik Tok. Like the obvious constructive take on that is what De Santis is doing down in Florida. But your tik tok video isn’t going to lay out an entire legislative plan.
What it is going to do is remind you “letting these people control your kids all day insane and you need to prioritize it over other concerns and overcome the massive entrenched resistance to change you are going to encounter.”
Same with videos of toddlers being miserable in masks. It isn’t “the great barrington declaration”. But it’s a reminder that it’s wrong and you need to stop it.
Videos of people not being able to hug loved ones at funerals also highlight how damaging social distancing was.
I think there is a role to be played by short form audiovisual content because “pictures say a thousand words” and remind people that sometimes you have to sacrifice to change a status quo.
It's easy to fall into this trap in many areas. If you read certain outlets, you would think that New York City is a violent hellscape with dangerous criminals preying on everyone. You would think that Israel is a dangerous place where people are being attacked and murdered left and right. You would think that all the nation's children are becoming trans. Outrage porn is part of it, but the other part is taking a small scale event and then describing it as a major trend.
It sounds reasonable to make high school debate less political, but why all are the examples of extremist judges liberal? Are there no biased conservative judges? Or are they secretly biased instead of publicly so?
Everyone needs a very sensitive BS detector these days. So much of today's content is about people talking their book. AI is just going to make it worse.
The first thing I do is to discount anything written by an activist. They can be good at raising issues, but they're frequently not very good at persuading. I'm willing to accept some 'deep state' stuff. Yet when I try to read Taibbi or Shellenbarger I am almost always disappointed. And I put that disappointment in my memory bank the next time I read them.
The next thing is to try to focus on good writers. Something like the FITs. Substack seems to be pretty good at serving up interesting content in the 'Explore' feed and Notes.
Here Munger pours water on the debt ceiling outrage porn in a way that even most low information voters should be able to understand...
I meant to write a comment on the idea that "I have cited high school debate as a model of how arguments ought to be conducted" on an earlier post where you reviewed a book that sought to explain conservative thought and liberal thought to the opposite sides.
I get what you are aiming to emphasize but I think the focus on 'debate' is too a certain degree misplaced. It's true that formal debate provides a good model for how constructive arguments are conducted. I think, however, the implied emphasis that a debate will be scored and 'won' (since we're talking about the views of a debate judge) gives the feeling that the objective of the conversation is not developing an agreeable solution but getting the other side to capitulate to your views. This would also seem to help drive the 'outrage porn' phenomenon in terms of making every conflict feel existential in nature.
Aspirations don't count for much in the real world, Mike. They are mostly used as a mask to fool people. I might be too cynical, but it is how I feel about claims of objectivity.
ABSOLUTELY we should resist. An activated amygdala (source of strong emotional response and, therefore, fight or flight) strives to overcome the reasoning capacity of the frontal lobes.
Or, if you like, Kahnemann's Type I thinking, -rapid-response, instinctive- on steroids hindering the more deliberate Type II thinking.
Outrage porn activates the amygdala/injects steroids into Type I thinking.
Porn is something we think should not be looked at. But we should have the strength and self control not to turn a blind eye to things steadily getting worse in our culture, even if there is not much we can do about it in the near term.
After one sees enough of it, one begins to take a clinical attitude toward it. Instead of giving in to one's own feelings of outrage, focus on understanding the sickness, and maintaining cognitive empathy with the sufferer. (Not the same as sympathizing).
It may be that a steady stream of outrage material is what it takes to slowly start to turn the ship of public opinion by breaking through the huge inertial force of complacency. Indeed, there are already signs that this is happening.
The use of outrage material is in part what got the Left into positions of power. Maybe countervailing outrage material will undermine their sway.
Seems like the boundary between “outrage porn” and “reporting that gets people highly motivated” can be gray at times (Assuming the outrage porn is actually honest reporting).
You are getting at the difference between outrage porn and constructive calls to action. When you read outrage porn, you don't actually do anything. You just sit there and nurse your outrage. And one sign that it is outrage porn is that there is no proposed set of steps to fix the problem.
That's my sense as well. The "porn" part of it indicates it is a consumer product designed for the (in this case perverse) "entertainment" of the consumer. The whole thing is an interesting mishmash of mass media, markets, and our strange human desires.
I first explored joining debate team like twenty years ago. Already at that point it was a complete farce.
In order to make judging "scientific" they would "graph" the arguments. Each "point" someone made was a line on the graph, and the opposition had to counter each "point". This led to a dominant strategy of "gerbil speech". Talking as fast as humanely possible to get as many points on the board as possible and hope your opponent misses one.
In short, debate got subject to the same ruthless systematization and optimization that ruins a lot of things.
That its gone from that to ideological nonsense isn't much of a loss.
I did join high school debate 20 years ago!
"Gerbil speech" was particularly prominent in policy debate. Less true in Lincoln-Douglas debate at the time. However, even LD debate had this emphasis on being forced to respond to every argument that an opponent makes and if you didn't then you basically automatically lose. I thought it was silly then and silly now. High school debate is a timed event. It's not like a trial or something where people have as much time as they want to respond to arguments. If two academics did a public debate and one said you didn't respond to my argument and it's was a voting argument and I should win, most people would judge the argument in the context of everything else said during the debate. Not just on that one issue.
Anyway, since policy debate was obviously ridiculous, the league introduced a public policy debate format that was supposed to place some value on communication skills. I think maybe it got introduced my senior year, so it wasn't popular enough for me to try it.
I had ended up in Congress debate, which didn't have the same requirements as policy and LD as it's more like my side vs. their side rather than 1 on 1 or 2 on 2. Skills I learned ended up being very valuable. So I don't regret it, and I would probably be outraged if that event gets ruined by ideological nonsense.
That being said, ideology in judging debate is a tricky thing. I have since judged a few times, not a lot. It is usually pretty easy to determine who is better when the abilities are widely different. But if people are of similar skill and the debate is even, it can be a bit tricky. If one person made an argument that is inconsistent with my knowledge of how the world works, wouldn't I incorporate that somehow? It depends on the context of course. If someone argues that the US should adopt communism or something, then I feel like they should have a higher burden of proof given what I know about the poor economic performance of communism. If they argue that the economic performance is fine, then I would probably give them bad scores. However, if they acknowledge the poor performance, but start talking about values and the trade-off between poor economic performance and equality or something. I would be more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. And on the other hand, I don't think it is enough for the person who argues against them to just say capitalism gives better economic performance. They need to explain why. They need to make the argument as well.
Heh. I joined high school debate 40 years ago, and "gerbil speech" was well established even then, and LD debate was just being introduced to counter "gerbil speech".
Looks like the treadmill continued....
I found the speedtalking to be only a moderate annoyance and one generally surmountable, and the process of actually participating in a formal debate to still be a useful exercise in syllogistic reasoning.
Spoken debate is inevitably somewhat performative though.
I never realised I wrote 'outrage porn'...
I honestly didn't intend to promote outrage, but rather highlighting some interesting dynamics in a fairly relaxed tone.. I honestly don't know how to fix it, and would be keen to hear ideas on how it might be tackled. Does my ignorance of ideal solutions mean I shouldn't comment? I don't think so?
@ArnoldKling, let me ask constructively, not out of self-defence, but just curiousity for what I could do differently..
Would it be better if I ended the piece with a couple of untested ideas?
So what are the options?
1) Raise the age of internet adulthood, so that young boys and girls can't access this material.
But that wouldn't address the problem that clearly exists among adults.
2) Social media companies voluntarily ban anyone who says anything sexist, eg women are men's property.
3) Social media companies voluntarily change their algorithms so that they no longer respond to users' pre-existing preferences.
4) Self-regulation is unlikely, since it would lead to user attrition. So perhaps you may want government to regulate to stop filter bubbles?
5) Impose a digital tax, to make these companies less profitable (as suggested by Acemoglu and Johnson 2023)
What do you think?
You raise a good point. For a lot of topics with outrage porn potential, writing about the topic in a better tone than the alternatives on offer is cooling the outrage rather than intensifying it. Of course, whether that's the case or not in any particular instance depends on context.
"14% of young British men agree that a wife is her husband’s property."
I wonder if this might have something to do with the presence of a minority group in Britain whose religion holds rather anti-liberal, anti-modernist views, rather than the malign influence of some poseur like Andrew Tate.
Some things are actually outrageous... such as the depredations of the deep state documented by Taibi. To dismiss this as outrage porn is itself a kind of outrage porn. In fact, I am furious at Kling right now!
LOL!
What is the difference between outrage porn and a story that justifiably outrages us?
It is outrage porn if the focus is on making you feel angry, without making a call to action with specific steps to solve the problem.
It does not seem to be the news' place to provide specific steps on how to solve problems.
Porn is the key word because porn stimulates something meaningful but doesn't produce anything meaningful.
Good outrage porn highlights an example of a meaningful issue and spurs concrete and helpful action to fix that issue.
Bad outrage porn highlights a not meaningful issue and doesn't spur any concrete and helpful action to fix the issue.
Good outrage porn might be the abolition movement highlighting an indignity of slavery. Uncle Tom's Cabin is basically viral outrage porn.
Bad outrage porn would be a news story an about shark attacks (because its not a real issue) or BLM considering that they have no constructive solutions (and distort the importance of what they are outraged about).
It’s worth asking to what extent outrage porn needs a message of action to be worthwhile.
Let’s take Libs of Tik Tok. Like the obvious constructive take on that is what De Santis is doing down in Florida. But your tik tok video isn’t going to lay out an entire legislative plan.
What it is going to do is remind you “letting these people control your kids all day insane and you need to prioritize it over other concerns and overcome the massive entrenched resistance to change you are going to encounter.”
Same with videos of toddlers being miserable in masks. It isn’t “the great barrington declaration”. But it’s a reminder that it’s wrong and you need to stop it.
Videos of people not being able to hug loved ones at funerals also highlight how damaging social distancing was.
I think there is a role to be played by short form audiovisual content because “pictures say a thousand words” and remind people that sometimes you have to sacrifice to change a status quo.
It's easy to fall into this trap in many areas. If you read certain outlets, you would think that New York City is a violent hellscape with dangerous criminals preying on everyone. You would think that Israel is a dangerous place where people are being attacked and murdered left and right. You would think that all the nation's children are becoming trans. Outrage porn is part of it, but the other part is taking a small scale event and then describing it as a major trend.
Outage porn just pushes all my buttons! So do semi-ironic meta-points!
I am volunteering this post as one you will dislike.
https://draliceevans.substack.com/p/can-social-media-undo-sexism
It sounds reasonable to make high school debate less political, but why all are the examples of extremist judges liberal? Are there no biased conservative judges? Or are they secretly biased instead of publicly so?
Everyone needs a very sensitive BS detector these days. So much of today's content is about people talking their book. AI is just going to make it worse.
The first thing I do is to discount anything written by an activist. They can be good at raising issues, but they're frequently not very good at persuading. I'm willing to accept some 'deep state' stuff. Yet when I try to read Taibbi or Shellenbarger I am almost always disappointed. And I put that disappointment in my memory bank the next time I read them.
The next thing is to try to focus on good writers. Something like the FITs. Substack seems to be pretty good at serving up interesting content in the 'Explore' feed and Notes.
Here Munger pours water on the debt ceiling outrage porn in a way that even most low information voters should be able to understand...
https://www.aier.org/article/playing-chicken-with-a-stack-of-steering-wheels/
I meant to write a comment on the idea that "I have cited high school debate as a model of how arguments ought to be conducted" on an earlier post where you reviewed a book that sought to explain conservative thought and liberal thought to the opposite sides.
I get what you are aiming to emphasize but I think the focus on 'debate' is too a certain degree misplaced. It's true that formal debate provides a good model for how constructive arguments are conducted. I think, however, the implied emphasis that a debate will be scored and 'won' (since we're talking about the views of a debate judge) gives the feeling that the objective of the conversation is not developing an agreeable solution but getting the other side to capitulate to your views. This would also seem to help drive the 'outrage porn' phenomenon in terms of making every conflict feel existential in nature.
"Fishback gives several other examples of high school debate judges who promise to score debates in part based on their political biases."
Well, it doesn't stir outrage in me. I found Ms. Lavender's stance refreshingly honest. Most judges of any kind lie about being objective.
Nonetheless, it's something we should at least aspire to.
Aspirations don't count for much in the real world, Mike. They are mostly used as a mask to fool people. I might be too cynical, but it is how I feel about claims of objectivity.
There is truth to that, of course, but as they say, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. It's still important.
ABSOLUTELY we should resist. An activated amygdala (source of strong emotional response and, therefore, fight or flight) strives to overcome the reasoning capacity of the frontal lobes.
Or, if you like, Kahnemann's Type I thinking, -rapid-response, instinctive- on steroids hindering the more deliberate Type II thinking.
Outrage porn activates the amygdala/injects steroids into Type I thinking.
Porn is something we think should not be looked at. But we should have the strength and self control not to turn a blind eye to things steadily getting worse in our culture, even if there is not much we can do about it in the near term.
After one sees enough of it, one begins to take a clinical attitude toward it. Instead of giving in to one's own feelings of outrage, focus on understanding the sickness, and maintaining cognitive empathy with the sufferer. (Not the same as sympathizing).
It may be that a steady stream of outrage material is what it takes to slowly start to turn the ship of public opinion by breaking through the huge inertial force of complacency. Indeed, there are already signs that this is happening.
The use of outrage material is in part what got the Left into positions of power. Maybe countervailing outrage material will undermine their sway.