The Loud Debate and the Quiet Debate
Any time there’s a public debate about something, there are really two debates happening at the same time:
The Loud Debate usually doesn’t change anyone’s mind, and that’s not the point of it. The point is to form up with your team and do battle with the enemy, so you can make them look dumb, and prove your team is the best.
The Quiet Debate isn’t about posturing, it’s about understanding the nuances of every side, so you can actually change each other’s minds, or at least understand your own position better.
(This shouldn’t be conflated with centrism or tone policing: it can include radical views and big emotions. It doesn’t even need to be very quiet.)
Of course, there isn’t just one Quiet Debate on a given issue: there are lots of small, overlapping ones among people who mostly agree, and larger ones in those places where respectful conversation can reach across the ideological chasm. Although sometimes that gulf is too great a distance.
The two types of debates have always existed on every issue, but here’s the new thing: social media smashed them together.
It used to be easier to keep them separate. I mean, occasionally you’d be having a Quiet Debate with some friends at a bar and someone would overhear it and come over and turn it into a Loud Debate. But that was rare.
On social media, it’s the norm. And because of that, those of us who find a lot of value in the Quiet Debate often get dragged into the Loud Debate. But to the average person, it’s hard to tell the difference: it all starts to seem Loud.
The recent debate around “AI art” has felt this way
On the currently hot-topic of AI-ethics, the Loud Debate has swelled, and it demands that we choose a side: are you with the techbro art thieves, or the luddite artists? But over here at the Quiet Debate table, we’ve got all kinds of people having a much more nuanced conversation.
We’ve got artists whose art has been included in the training data and they love it. We’ve got AI engineers who want to create tools to empower artists rather than replace them. We’ve got IP experts who think we’re in completely uncharted waters and that we will need a whole new subdomain of case law. We’re all getting our hands dirty and exploring how to deal with this new technology ethically.
I’m going to continue to engage in the Quiet Debate because I think it’s so important to get this right, but I don’t want friends to get turned off from it because it keeps turning into a Loud Debate. So I’ve made the following request on Facebook:
If you think it’s a very black-and-white issue and you have a fixed position on it, I ask that you not engage on my posts about this. But there are plenty of public groups/forums hosting the Loud Debate right now, and of course you can use your own posts to make your voice heard!
Are you seeing mostly Loud Debates or Quiet Debates on this topic in your community (or none at all)? How’s it going? Let me know.
UPDATE: Artists are protesting on Artstation, and I should clarify that I don’t think of protest as a Loud Debate. It’s an action that has a direct strategy to influence outcomes. Sure there are sometimes counter-protesters and it literally turns into a Loud Debate, but that’s a side-effect.
So, I actually support these protesters, even though the message is lacking nuance (but that’s to be expected from meme protests). I think this kind of solidarity among artists could lead to good things.
