John Nerst
""Erisology" is a made up word for a made up academic discipline I think should exist. Built from the name Eris, the greek goddess of discord, it refers to the study of disagreement. I introduced the term in a post in January 2016, but this is a condensed version, intended to give an overview to those not interested in reading a meandering essay.
"Disagreement" can mean many things, but this is what I have in mind: A lot of online discourse is hostile and often needlessly adversarial (I trust no one needs to be convinced of this). Specifically, a lot of this disagreement is dysfunctional, by which I mean that it results from (or is exacerbated by) one or both of the parties, intentionally or unintentionally, misunderstanding the other party's position or the nature of their differences.
I've got a lot of experience wasting time online and a lot of that experience is reading people arguing. Over the years I've come to the conclusion that the severe dysfunction so much of online discussion exhibits is at least partly the result of a limited set of pitfalls that people tend to fall into time and time and time again. The same things happen in meatspace and traditional media, but the dawn of the internet and social media turned it all up to 12.
Erisology is the study of this dysfunction and, theoretically, the attempt to fix some of it by making people more aware of how it happens and how it doesn't always need to happen.
To be extremely brief: for many reasons we don't understand each other nearly as well as we think we do."
""Erisology" is a made up word for a made up academic discipline I think should exist. Built from the name Eris, the greek goddess of discord, it refers to the study of disagreement. I introduced the term in a post in January 2016, but this is a condensed version, intended to give an overview to those not interested in reading a meandering essay.
"Disagreement" can mean many things, but this is what I have in mind: A lot of online discourse is hostile and often needlessly adversarial (I trust no one needs to be convinced of this). Specifically, a lot of this disagreement is dysfunctional, by which I mean that it results from (or is exacerbated by) one or both of the parties, intentionally or unintentionally, misunderstanding the other party's position or the nature of their differences.
I've got a lot of experience wasting time online and a lot of that experience is reading people arguing. Over the years I've come to the conclusion that the severe dysfunction so much of online discussion exhibits is at least partly the result of a limited set of pitfalls that people tend to fall into time and time and time again. The same things happen in meatspace and traditional media, but the dawn of the internet and social media turned it all up to 12.
Erisology is the study of this dysfunction and, theoretically, the attempt to fix some of it by making people more aware of how it happens and how it doesn't always need to happen.
To be extremely brief: for many reasons we don't understand each other nearly as well as we think we do."
Waco1947
