Taking positions that go against the general grain of a certain ideology that you believe in for the most part, and then presenting those positions to those who share most of your views, but without having established yourself as a trustworthy member of that ideological community, is a recipe for being misunderstood.
No big surprise there. But it is frustrating, sometimes. I never feel like reading conservative blogs, or anti-feminist blogs, or anti-singularity blogs, for instance. I only like reading blogs that I agree with 80+% of the time. That way, when I argue over the remaining 20%, it’s engaging and constructive. Incidentally, I think that if one wants to expand the ideological spectrum of one’s blogroll, the thing to do isn’t to change the percentage, but to look for discussion at a higher level. I could talk to a conservative about secular moral philosophy, for instance, even if discussions about abortion would be entirely fruitless. Because at the higher levels, eventually you reach logical principles and/or universally common experiences, which will eventually reach 80% agreement.
The downside of all this is that it’s easy to be perceived as not being as friendly and understanding as you really are to the positions that you’re criticising, because people assume that you’re criticizing more than you actually are. They assume that you’re one of “the other” instead of someone with minor differences in opinion. It’s especially hard to be the kind of person that thinks a lot about meta issues, like me, and therefore doesn’t have much to say on the substance of many articles, even if one enjoys them a lot, but instead prefers to point out logical errors in arguments that can probably stand anyway, or on other legs. Pointing out those errors is seen as a hostile action.
I think it boils down to this. It’s really easy to attribute positions commonly held by group A to an individual commenter who appears to resemble group A, even when the commenter really avoids saying anything that explicitly identifies them as being in group A. Part of this is justified, of course. If one is unaware of how a person could reconcile their A-style belief with their wider ideology of B, how their A-style belief could really be consistent with B, then one is justified in identifying the person as a member of group A. But one shouldn’t put much stock in this identification, and this is where I think many people fall short. They cling to that preliminary identification. If the person tries to identify themselves more with B, others will suspect dishonesty. And it’s possible for a commenter to avoid this, to some degree, with careful phrasing and proper ordering and good framing.
This general tendency to confuse a person with a wider group manifests in other ways, too. I see very often where liberals will denigrate conservatives because of some supposed hypocricy in, e.g. being pro-life yet anti-gun-control. But it’s a mistake to accuse a group of people of hypocricy unless the hypocritical actions have been observed together in enough individual members of the group to know that those members are representative of the group.
In particular, it’s patently unfair to take two separate groups of people (say, moral values conservatives versus big business consevatives) with two different behaviors that, in a single person, would be hypocritical, and combine those two groups (say, conservatives), and call that single group hypocritical. For example, it’s a fallacy to say that anti-feminists are hypocritical in argumentation because they’re either saying you’re too shrill or saying you’re getting too technical. Because it’s likely that the group of people that would say the first has a small overlap with the group of people that would say the second, even if both are contained within the larger group of anti-feminists.
This fallacy happens because of the homogenizing effects of intellectual tribalism on the other side. It becomes easier to merge and conflate separate and disparate instances of an opposing viewpoint, perceiving them as being concomitant in individual representatives of the other viewpoint.
Case in point (although this is one of millions): is this comment.
