Trolling, Bullying, and Flame Wars: Humility and Online Discourse

Open up any online comments section and you’ll find them: internet trolls, from the mildly inflammatory to the viciously bullying. It seems that the ease of posting online leads many to abandon any semblance of intellectual humility. So can we have intellectual humility on an anonymous forum with little oversight and accountability? Does current online behavior portend the end of humility in the public domain? How do we encourage greater humility and less arrogance in any public discourse? The Philosophers open up the comments section for Michael Lynch from the University of Connecticut, author of The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data. Part of a six-part series on Intellectual Humility.