The new rhetoric

What Hacker News says

1. rufibarbatusJul 2011
   > Because your definition depends on the reader's expectations, and different readers will have different expectations [...] then we still can't reach true objectivity in "interesting" content.

   I took a course in Classical Rhetoric a couple years ago (it was terribly worth it), and in the first classes we learnt that at least since Aristotle this has been at the core of this art: the very definition of a good discourse is, that which is entirely crafted with its audience in mind.

   Two caveats:

   FIRST, as we grow used to certain schemata of how to perceive reality (that is, as these schemata become radical to our way of thinking), anything which is radically different from them, while it may still draw attention, is most likely going to evoke repulsion.

   This is a little bit veiled in the text because the author uses vision of a physical event as an analogy to the reception of a discourse. If you see a train crossing a wall, there's no denying it, so it'll draw your attention in a sporty manner. If you catch (still vision) your best (male) friend kissing another guy, and he never told you he was into that, there will be many ways you can wrap your head around it — to the point where gay males report feeling repulsion and betrayal when they find out their "straight buddy" was gay behind their backs! [1]

   Finally, if you hear someone propose an idea that is completely orthogonal (if not entirely opposite) to how you think, all else being equal, you're likely to experience anything from confusion to repulsion. Because in order to be interested in what is seemingly incongruous with your beliefs, you have to suspend them at least a little, and disbelief can usually only be suspended willingly.

   SECOND, it is interesting to turn the idea in its head and ask yourself "but what if I want to spike the interest of the 'every man', what if I wish my audience to be as wide as humanity?" You can't craft all kinds of discourse at this level, but you'll find that there are certain things which spike interest in us all (and conversely, you'll find that we share at least very similar beliefs about a host of things). This concept is named "universal audience" and discussed with great brilliance in a book by Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, called in English The New Rhetoric, which I much recommend.

   [1] Disclaimer: I'm using this example because it was discussed over a glass of beer in the bar, yesterday, and to my surprise, everyone at the table had one such story to share; my group of friends being what you may otherwise call diverse and accepting. No, I don't have a link, but I hope there are/will be studies about this.

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2. Alex3917Jul 2011
   "This concept is named 'universal audience' and discussed with great brilliance in a book by Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, called in English The New Rhetoric, which I much recommend."

   Thanks for the reference, I'll check this out. There are definitely certain things that are always universally interesting to people, e.g. new ways their children could be in danger. The cool thing about the Internet though is that we can do things like, say, download 1M+ comments tagged 'interesting' on Slashdot and look for patterns that other people have missed.

   This is also basically the way I created and validated this framework, e.g. every 'insightful' comment on Slashdot either fit into this framework, or else the framework had to be changed, or else I had to decide it wasn't really insightful. If I ever wanted to turn this into a PhD dissertation or something then I would actually do this transparently at a very large scale, so that people could easily see for themselves that it's actually a very robust and actionable model.

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