Precisely my point, ThelmaLou.
I can read CS boards all day long and not get a fraction of the entertainment and information that I get here.
Can we firmly state that Straight Dope Community is more educated than any other internet community?
We’re mostly liberal and atheist it seems. So we got that going for us.
Oooo! Are we going somewhere? Goody!
Arrogant and painfully not true. “Debate” almost always is replaced by pedantry and shouting at each other. Politics threads are next to pointless, there is absolutely no political discussion on this forum, just lots of people shouting and not listening to anyone else.
The smartest people usually don’t care about how smart they appear and definitely don’t keep asking questions about it.
What would be your definition of “most educated” ? I have multiple university degrees, as do many others here, but I am not sure that is much of a measure.
No, but we’re definitely more self-congratulatory than most.
No.
Not really.
But maybe, if we could solve:
14 k of g in a f p d
Reddit and Something Awful have just as wide a net of topics they cover, and I don’t follow Reddit so I don’t know about them, but Something Awful has successfully avoided the unattractive “aren’t we so smart for posting on a message board” vibe.
Agreed.
It sounds like you could do with a little additional English education.
Freddy, he’s learning English as a second language. He’s stated that he’s fine with people correcting his grammar/spelling usage, but there’s no need to snark at him.
taskmgr.exe, it would probably be better to say “What are we basing it upon, that we can say this?”
I had no right to murder the English language. I sincerely apologize for what I did to your precious language.
I knows I’se got t’ smarts in buckets, yo. BUCKETS!
I look for things …
If this message board is supposed to be more educated than any other, then why is Great Debates such a complete and utter cesspool?
By that new metric, I agree. No matter how arcane the reference, someone here gets it. Plenty of someones in fact. And any subtle joke I come up with after reading post N in a thread has been stolen by someone else by post N + 5. :mad:
I think if you restrict the field to general interest internet communities, it might be in the running. Obviously forums dedicated to some specific PHD level subject matter would beat it.
I think most of us are at least smart enough to know how dumb we are…know what we don’t know and are willing to admit it.
What we have here is a collection of mostly intellectually curious people. People who question, and enjoy learning new things, and mostly don’t get too butt hurt when they find out they believed, or were taught was wrong. On many message boards, the membership would have no idea what “cite?” even means, and you couldn’t explain it to them if you tried. You post something in GQ, you better be prepared to defend it, and there is no sense that the truth should be decided by vote or popularity of the poster.
We also distinguish between fact and opinion. Many message boards fail on this point.
We also have decent moderation that is mostly fairly applied. It seldom changes the outcome, but people don’t even get banned for saying a mod was wrong. (in the right forum, without insults, etc.) Pretty much every other board (but one) I have been a member of, the mods will ban people for petty personal reasons, while the “cool kids” get to do whatever they please.
We also value spelling and grammar. Being a regular on this board has improved mine over the years. Most places, they don’t even try, and may even ban you if you mention it.
Nah, that’s easy. Anything liberal or Democratic or atheist is truth, anything conservative or Republican or libertarian or religious is opinion, and false , evil opinion at that. Duh!