Nope, still disagree. Sometimes the answer is in the personal experience. As in, from my personal experience, I’ve learned… It would be silly and pointless to leave that out, whatever board you’re on.
On an anonymous message board, there’s no good way to evaluate whether the poster is mistaken, misremembering, or making stuff up. I stand by my post.
If you are having a discussion about access to medical care, and someone says “In the US, no is dying because they don’t have healthcare”, you’re saying it’s not valid to respond “That isn’t true. Here’s how a family member did”? I mean, honestly, you’re putting a lot of trust into our institutions if you feel like we should ignore perople’s lived experience when it contradicts the party line.
Exactly. If we don’t wander into absolute conspiracy land, personal experience, anonymous or not, can add to the conversation. Also, you have the internet to verify what people are saying is true.
Completely unworkable, given the text-only nature of the medium. Picture someone writes out what they believe is a detailed, well-reasoned, well-articulated summary of their thoughts on a subject and someone responds, in total:
“Thank you for your opinion, I found it very interesting and useful.”
Now, is that a sincere expression of appreciation, or is it dripping in multilayered sarcasm and implied eyerolls? I’m confident we’ve all seen or even been on the receiving end of the wrath of someone wildly projecting motivations onto short snippets of text, accusing the writer of using a hostile “tone” and, yes, sometimes those projections are pretty accurate. All your proposal does is shift the burden to the moderators to police for “tone” and try to determine if civility has been breached. They have enough to do already, looking for obvious phrases like racial slurs and “you are a troll”. Your proposal would have them trying to determine if sarcasm is present and it meets some arbitrary standard of “inflammatory”, going only on how burnt someone feels, or more accurately, how burnt they claim to feel, and meantime the person who sincerely expressed appreciation is wondering where the fuck all this chaos is coming from.
Frankly, anyone who finds the current standards of this place are *already *too rough-and-tumble should bail *now *before the 2020 election cycle ramps up in full.
And I anticipate at least one respondent will think it hilarious to quote this entire post and add only “Thank you for your opinion, I found it very interesting and useful.” Yes, well-played, ha-to-the-power-of-ha. I sincerely appreciate the dry wit.
Now, am I sincere when I say “I sincerely appreciate the dry wit” ? Because I actually do appreciate that kind of flippant irony and I’m fond of using it myself on many occasions. At what point, though, should a moderator be called in to judge if someone is being uncivil? I suggest it be “never”, since we’re all supposed to be adults, here.
Posters have histories here. Yes sometimes people sign up and lie, pretending they someone and something they are not. And some are widely felt to have a tendency to at least tell tall tales. Yes anecdotes should be taken with a skeptical read. As should uncited claims of any sort.
But if the subject is what bodybuilders do, or how people in wheelchairs perceive how they are treated, I will take Ambivalid’s posts on personal experience as meaningful inputs, for example. And QtM’s personal experiences on healthcare in prisons. And many others on the experiences they share. The personal stories of course work best if they are backed up with data that shows the larger context. But the numbers, citing statistics, tend to not sway unless accompanied by the up close view of a real person or people impacted. Why do you think politicians have so many stories about the person they talked to on the trail?
I think it does more harm than good. The pool of posters here is pretty large. For every anecdote you can share to support your point of view, there’s another poster or ten who can rattle off an anecdote supporting the opposite side. And then where do you go? If my personal experience cancels out yours, what’s the next step? As far as I can see, the only way to break the stalemate is to consult the statistics to see whose experience is more common. And if you can do that, you might as well go straight to the numbers in the first place rather than dredge up painful personal experiences.
Personal experience is a conversation stopper. More often than not, people expect others to just accept it without question. That alone is stupid, because personal testimony just isn’t reliable. People often exaggerate their experiences and remember things as being worse than they really were, or they conveniently forget that, actually, they were at least partly to blame for what happened. There are loads of reasons why an honest person might doubt another’s experience.
Then, if their experience is questioned, people get all offended. At that point, the conversation is effectively over, because most people would rather cut their own throats than listen to someone who’s offended them.
Far better to just stick to numbers, IMO.
“Break the stalemate” is a revealing statement here. I don’t perceive myself as playing chess in a debate–I am not trying to win. I may be trying to convince or explain, and I am often trying to learn. I don’t have to absolutely decide who is wrong or right, or even if someone is telling the truth. I read a debate, I participate in a debate, to squirrel away knowledge and insights and examples that I will process slowly over time, integrating new knowledge and insights as I come across them. So I welcome personal anecdotes that contradict the official data, or that aren’t represented in the current data, because I am watching this matter, this topic, evolve.
For example, body cams have made it clear to me that the anecdotal stories of minorities being unjustly harassed and disproportionately assaulted by police and other authority figures have made it clear to me that there were a lot of anecdotes I should have been taking much more seriously. That experience alone has lead me to want to collect more personal stories and, at the very least, remain agnostic about their truth value.
I agree with Chronos. I’ve never really felt the non-Pit forums were froth-filled. I accept that trolling goes on, but not to the point where I’ve ever said to myself “We need a kindler-gentler forum.”