Not a pitting so much as just as voicing disappointment in cases like this. Specifically I am writing in this instance about this thread, though moreso am addressing all instances of such.
To be sure, some topics have higher potential to degrade into debates and some topics are eyesores to those who aren’t secure enough in their religion (for instance) to venture into GD. But I’m not sure why that necessitates banishing these threads to GD even though no debate has entered the thread (and most often is only containing accurate, unbiased information, and does indeed have a factual answer), nor hiding factual personal histories from the eyes of those who do not want to see anything that challenges their beliefs–even on a bulletin board that has as its motto to “fight ignorance.”
Doing so, to me mostly just seems to be rather insulting to the thread starter. If they posted in GQ, they did so because they didn’t want a debate and knew that there was an unbiased factual answer. Though of course the instance it is in GD, there goes any hope for that. And if they are polling people in IMHO, then again, they were specifically looking for a poll. They wanted to collect factual information about what others thought. Perhaps that is to serve as fuel to debate it inside themselves–but putting it in GD just means that the number of possible opinions they can collect is going to drop and they’re going to be left with the back and forth of the raging dogs. And obviously they had already determined that to be more than they could handle at that time.
This is a common misperception. Moving a thread reflects not at all on the OP, it simply shows that a moderator thought the thread would be better served in a different forum. (Sometimes, as with the linked thread, even the OP is not sure where to put it.) As with so many other of our duties, it’s a judgement call.
In general, threads involving discussion of religion are going to wind up in GD. Not always, but mostly, just as most discussions of recipes will end up in CS, and discussions of how pretty one’s cat is will be put in MPSIMS.
I think you misunderstand the application of “factual.” While there is indeed a “factual” answer to the question explicit in that OP, that answer is gonna be different for every respondent. The “factual,” as it relates to GQ, means that we can reasonably expect there to be but a single truthful answer which is supportable by unbiased evidence. This doesn’t mean, however, that there is no room for speculation, or a multiplicity of contending factual answers. Rather, in those cases, the continuing discussions in GQ serve to weed out the weaker, and ultimately false (or non-factual) answers. In the case of the thread you linked, there’s no way to do that. Every answer has validity - but only at a personal level.
That OP is clearly best suited to either IMHO (since it is a poll, after all), or GD. My belief is, the mods, in standing with long SDMB tradition, chose GD because the thread is about religion - or more accurately, the process by which individuals divest themselves of their faith. Skald even made explicit in the first sentence of his OP, that he’s looking for anecdotes - personal experiences. Personal experiences simply are not expressible as “unbiased factual answers,” using the traditional GQ pplication of “factual.”
I have a problem with this policy, too. When I start a thread in IMHO, it’s because I want a light-hearted, back-and-forth conversation about a topic; if I wanted a heavy-handed, cite-filled example of pedanticry that is a Great Debates thread, I would have started the thread there, and made it an appropriate one. Once a thread of mine has gone to GD, it’s pretty much killed for me.
Certainly. However there was no discussion in the thread. Each post was it’s own individual and contained unit. That is to say, they were all proper responses to a poll.
There are certainly times where things are misplaced and a mod would be better to replace it. And while catching things pre-emptively isn’t “bad”, it still seems like you might as well wait until there is at least some sort of hint that things could derail.
The move comments said that the thread went to GD because it could be considered witnessing. It’s mild witnessing, but I can see the point, and a similar thread for theists might be moved in the same way. I think the move allows for more complete reasons to be given for giving up religion. It makes perfect sense to me.
I was gonna point out that this wasn’t the situation at all with the thread in question here, 'cuz it was started in GQ. But I’m a dumbass. I see now that it was started in IMHO. Which makes pretty much everything I said in my previous post irrelevant.
(And just to pre-empt all the self-styled wits here, perhaps my 11,000+ previous posts are irrelevant, too.)
No, not offended - it’s just, like, I threw a pool party, and then it got changed into a party that I didn’t have any interest in attending. I understand about moving things started in the wrong place, but I’m not sure I’m completely on board with moving threads that aren’t really out of place when the OP intended for them to be somewhere that they (the OP) felt more at home.
UncleBeer, I wasn’t actually talking about the linked thread; I was just making a more general comment about how I feel about threads getting moved.
Aren’t all of our posts irrelevant, in the grand scheme of things?
Exactly! My thread polling for opinion about changing the name of MPSIMS just got moved from IMHO to ATMB. I’d considered putting it in ATMB to begin with, but since it was polling the membership for opinions, and since IMHO appears to get way more traffic than ATMB, so that more Dopers would be likely to see it and, if so inclined, comment on it, into IMHO it went.
Obviously one can argue that it should have been started in ATMB, but it seemed to me that my reasons for starting it where I did were valid.
If the thread had merely counted those who had gone from believer to atheist I might have considered it a straight poll and left it in IMHO, but since it was in reality a “witnessing” thread, and witnessing is done in Great Debates, I moved it. It seems to be thriving there, btw.
Yeah, that’s the other side of the coin - once you throw an OP out there, you can’t direct how it’s going to go. I like to think I don’t serve crystal meth and bootleg cigarettes - more like I’m serving lemonade and incense, but people bring crystal meth and cigarettes anyway, and get us all tossed in with the big brains where they actually expect cites and rigourous debate.
I’m the OP of the thread in question. In the first line of the first post, I said that I didn’t mind if the thread was moved.
Know what? I was wrong.
As I think the first post makes pretty clear, I was looking for ANECDOTES, not arguments; and I made no effort to convince anyone to change his/her faith; nor, I think, has anyone else. I don’t think that the thread counts as witnessing, which is more than simply telling stories; witnessing has an implicit agenda of getting people to change their ways. I didn’t post to GD in the first place because I wanted to AVOID such a thing; I wanted people to simply tell their stories. The “apostate” thread is fundamentally no different than threads I currently have running on overdoing good things or experiences with being spanked as a child. But moving the thread to GD discourages persons who dislike arguing from contributing; they may not even see it.
Czarcasm, can you define “witnessing” in this context? Neither I nor any of the other posters I’ve read have exhorted others to abandon their faith or to convert to a new religion. Since it’s not a poll, I can see moving it to MPSIMS, but I don’t think it’s reached, or even APPROACHED, the point where it’s a debate.
