Bricker
September 4, 2013, 6:12pm
28
Left_Hand_of_Dorkness:
Bricker , if you think that specific liberal posters have a track record of making confident, incorrect predictions, by all means hold them accountable. Be the change you want to see.
In the thread that prompted this thread’s birth, I related the following:
Because merely showing it produces almost complete lack of concern.
When Virginia was considering passing a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, it was a topic of hot debate here. One poster argued that Virginia should not adopt the amendment, because, said he, it would have an unintended effect on domestic violence prosecutions. According to him, a similar outcome had happened in Ohio, and by re-defining marriage under state law, certain victims of domestic violence would be unable to see their attackers punished in court, or at the very least have some additional hurdles to go through. “I consider it a matter of established fact, based on what happened in Ohio, that many victims of domestic violence would (at best) find it necessary to go through an extra wringer to obtain those protections or (at worst) be denied them altogether.”
Naturally, I disagreed with him on the point. And naturally, after Virginia passed the amendment in question, no such effect emerged.
So after nearly a year went by, I posted a follow-up thread, pointing out the error, and another one after three years, because several people objected in the first thread that not quite a full year had gone by.
The reactions were decidedly (although admittedly not unanimously) one-sided – and the side of ‘acknowledging the error’ was not the winning one. As mentioned, some posts leapt on the fact that it hadn’t yet been a calendar year. Others demanded I assemble every DV case from the year to prove that none had been affected. Still others were more direct:
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“Be the change,” did not produce meaningful results.
In my estimation, the culture of the board shields a “…specific liberal poster…” from much in the way of criticism for their confident, wrong predictions. The feeling seems to be that while they were wrong, it was acceptable, because it was wrong in the right way. Their heart was in the right place.
A confident conservative prediction is gleefully recalled and held up when wrong.
Betting levels that playing field. It creates a tangible consequence for the confident predictions that are wrong, and causes those predictions to get made with much more attention to actual accuracy.