Debate: You can't say anything "of substance" on this board

In an ATMB thread, this claim was made:

This statement seems on its face to be ludicrous. Is it really the case that nothing in Factual Questions or Great Debates contains “nothing of substance”? I don’t think so.

It seems to me that this is the kind of thing that someone says when E gets no traction with es arguments.

(And I’m putting this in the Pit not because I want anyone to insult anyone, but because I couldn’t really figure out whether this was a “Great Debate” or an MPSIMS, and also because I thought that this topic might attract criticism of a poster, which seems like a Pit type of topic.)

I don’t really say anything “of substance” here, but I don’t feel anything is preventing that, aside from me.

A lot of people have conflated being controversial with intelligence. They also tend to the same people with persecution fetishes. Throw in dash of incel “woe-is-me” and there you go.

Perhaps they are interpreting the expression “cite?” as hostility and invalidation?

I started to read that thread and gave it up as a bad job (theirs, not mine). Did they ever describe what they meant by “substance?”

Hello!

I understand the need for a succinct thread title, but I think you need my full sentence (which you did quote, thank you) in order to say what I wanted to say.

I have mostly posted here over the past 15 years in ways that wouldn’t attract the meat axe wielders. I.e., I post about just stuff that doesn’t draw strong opinions. Where I have done otherwise, I’ve paid the hostility and invalidation tax that the SDMB charges.

That’s really it. In my MPSIMS thread, I got plenty of good responses (which one can expect here as well), but also the standard kind of troublemakers that inhabit the Dope. Was it worth it? Perhaps, barely, in this case. And my thread wasn’t even very controversial in nature, IMO.

Now, people are going to come into the Pit now and tell me I’m wrong and an idiot. But that just makes my point for me. People who are aggressive and hostile think their behavior is totally fine. They enjoy taking other people down and out. I don’t. And people who don’t, in general, are not going to feel comfortable on this board.

I would say we frequently debate issues of substance including those that are charged.

As an example, @Babale’s thread in the wake of several prior mass shootings and concurrent with several very heated Gun threads:

I do wonder what the OP of the cited thread considers “of substance” although I fully grant this place has a more classic, adversarial debate style.

Yeah, the thread title is already generating misunderstandings. Unfortunate.

I think plenty of substance is debated here. I don’t enjoy dealing with the types of hostile and invalidating people that participate in such debates, however.

Fair enough, I consider it understandable, and I picked the thread I listed above as an example for a reason. I’ve participated in many gun threads as a moderate on the pro-gun side, and the overwhelming majority of the board leans towards gun control. And it’s an emotionally charged issue, where both sides can and do exaggerate what points the other posters are making in order to score points. And that leaves out certain well worn arguments that move neither side.

So again, if I understand correctly @Aeschines has a completely understandable aversion to participate in discussions for charged issues, because they feel they cannot do so without their arguments (or personality) being attacked. Which is fine, but, IMHO, is a matter of personal preference, rather than a problem with the board itself.

No one is wrong - see any of our cooking threads as an example, which is low stakes, but people are fighting over definitions and preferences regarding BBQ as a concurrent example, and while not Pit-worthy, people are flinging hate towards preferences that can be confrontational.

I said it in your ATMB thread though, “We are why we can’t have nice things.” It’s not the board, the rules, or the mods, but people being people. This is a place that insists you fight for your beliefs (the whole fighting ignorance thing board culture) and that confrontational attitude is part and parcel of all the styles. And since far too many of us (including you IMHO, and absolutely including me!) get emotionally involved in the debate, the snark and invective very quickly escalates.

This is not pitting of you, this is an observation of how the majority of the board argues, which is why I included myself. Heck, in a recent thread (not linking) I got one of my personal peeves get the best of me and since it was the Pit, I went to town on another poster. It was absolutely excessive. And it made the situation worse. I (and probably everyone else) would have been better off taking 24 hours away and doing something else.

But sometimes we don’t do that. And once the anger kicks in, common sense and good judgement often check out.

My interpretation of the original ATMB thread, and this one, is probably influenced by my own biases, but here is my view on the overall matter.

This board strives – correctly and appropriately, in my view – to maintain what is referred to as “civil discussion” outside the Pit. This usually works just fine, and we do have a great many substantive discussions all the time.

But occasionally it doesn’t quite work, because there’s a natural tendency for the rule-enforcers – the moderators – to get caught up in the technicalities of the rules they’re supposed to be enforcing, and lose sight of perspective and context.

There have been a number of examples of this in recent months and years, but I’ll just give an example from a long time ago that involves a moderator who is no longer with us.

At some point the SDMB established a rule against “accusations of lying”. Make sense? Sure! “You’re a liar” is a blatant personal attack against a poster’s character. There is no way it contributes to constructive debate.

But where have we gone with this? We’ve gone to extraordinarily convoluted far-fetched interpretations of posts to mean “you’re a liar” when the posts said no such thing or anything even close. My specific example is from a thread where a poster stated “facts” that clearly could not possibly be verifiable and were very likely untrue. So I said something along the lines of “you’re just making that up”. To which the poster responded that, yes, it wasn’t something that could actually be substantiated, so he really was just speculatively making it up.

But, hark! A moderator was right on it, accusing me of “making accusations of lying” by saying “you’re just making that up”. But dammit all, the poster himself admitted that he really was making it up. This caused the mod some inner turmoil and they finally decided to let it go with a mod note.

This is what I have called unnecessarily over-zealous moderating and, along with over-zealous closing of useful and informative threads instead of managing the problems within it, is one of the occasional issues we have with what is otherwise excellent moderation on this board, perhaps the best on any board anywhere. But it’s not perfect.

Thank you, you make many good points.

What you said above covers about 75% of the issue. There are other pitfalls. For example, in the MPSIMS thread, one person kept coming in and getting worked up over her misinterpretations of what I was saying (it was so bad in once instance that another poster corrected her). Now, if this happens by accident now and then, it can’t be helped. But people can (and I’m not saying she regularly does) adopt this as a kind of passive-aggressive strategy to stir shit and get attention.

It’s a problem with the internet in general, yes. But I do think the board culture has been one of hostility and invalidation from the beginning. It’s never been one where the attitude, “Hey, I understand your perspective but politely disagree.” It’s never been genteel or refined. If someone is wrong, you do your best to make them feel like a fucking idiot–and it’s fun, yay! The mods have never fought this tendency; indeed, especially during the Bad Old Days, they fanned the flames themselves. The Pit was a Get Out of Jail Free card for this type of thing. “Take it to the Pit–then, oh haha, destroy the idiots!”

I do definitely think it is both. Unless a board culture is established otherwise, people are going to be mean. But this board is still pretty mean (not as bad as it used to be), and that’s a choice of sorts.

I mostly have avoided it. I haven’t started a Pit thread against a regular poster since 2006 and had not been Pitted since 2008. I don’t really enjoy striking back at people, even when they want to hurt me (I suppose I am at least true to my New Age principles on this issue). Even if someone is being a massive dick to me, I don’t know what kind of pain and trouble they have in their own life.

It is good to be self-aware on these issues. A lot of posters are not.

Thanks again for your post!

Sadly, there are a few prolific posters who have a rhetorical strategy that consists of saying “You’re wrong” without contributing any actual information to the thread.

I’m going to mildly disagree with you here, in the sense of constructive criticism, not dragging you through the mud. I absolutely believe your intent is such, and that you’re being wise to your own preferences in avoiding the Pit and chunks of GD, but your own posts in the ATMB thread were absolutely striking back at posters.

Your (probably rule breaking) comment on ignoring posters being a really direct example. This is why I tried to be precise about how while we can absolutely intend our comments to be neutral, or at least, minimally attacking rebuttal snark, they can and do count as attacks both in fact and intent.

Again, I will absolutely accept your intent was within the lines, but I would equally absolutely consider it hitting back or an attack. Which is why I shared an example where I did the same.

And for that matter, I MYSELF did a similar thing, except worse in an ATMB thread where I felt certain posters were acting in bad faith and out and out said I was ignoring them (which is forbidden outside of the pit). Which (as a pretty new poster at that time) luckily only got me a strong note.

[ which is one of the rules that I could see being excessive, but that’s another thread, and could argue both sides of ]

This is a locution which might be interpreted in more than one way.

What I am getting from your further remarks is that you mean that any thread here that discusses matters of substance will always have some responses that contain (what you call) hostility and invalidation, done by “the standard kind of troublemakers that inhabit the Dope”. These words, especially “hostility and invalidation” and “troublemakers” are judgments on your part. Other people of good will may not share your interpretation of those posters’ behavior. Disagreeing with you and arguing against you is not hostility towards you. If the arguments are properly aimed at the subject matter and not the poster, that is not aggressiveness. If the arguments are directed towards the poster, that is not allowed and it is the job of the moderators to step in and stop it (and the job of other posters to report it).

This last sentence I absolutely disagree with. There are lots of heated arguments here that are conducted in good faith, and plenty of good posters who participate in them. Are they all “aggressive and hostile?”

If you don’t wish to have people argue with you, that’s your prerogative. I don’t think you should make your dislike of argumentation into a moral high ground, from which you snipe at the rest of us.

Aww, shucks, it’s awfully flattering that one of my threads came to mind when you were thinking of something “of substance”!

They don’t bother me all that much. Easy to scroll by.

However, there are some posters who think that they are always, every time, on almost any topic, right. And they will not back off, concede or even grudgingly say that they’ll think about the issue. Almost always, a lot of posters show up and correct them, provide cites, link to good sources. But the damage is done and the thread gets derailed for too long.
n.b. This is not an accusation of them trolling. They are sincere but for some reason they think that admitting an error will turn the whole internet against them. Or something.

Did you once go by a different name, @Aeschines ? I feel bad that I don’t remember you, but I have enjoyed your thread, even though I didn’t agree with everything you said.

From my perspective, there were more than a few posters that felt like they were crossing a line in that thread.

But it was overall a civil thread.

I think it’s true that some people, and it’s not even always the same people, are going to take offense when you try to say something that might be controversial. That is kind of a fact of life. We might give a fair amount of leeway towards snappishness on this board, but that’s really all it is. When we say, “I can’t say anything of substance without someone attacking me” it feels kind of self-evident, doesn’t it? If you have something of substance to say then we can assume someone’s going to react negatively. And within board rules those people have just as much right to speak up as anyone else.

If you want to say something of substance, I think you have to be prepared for some pushback.

You might not like receiving pushback, but that’s not really the fault of the board. It’s a natural consequence of honest social discourse. And I think we do honest social discourse really well here.

I think this is a key point. Unless we have some specific examples, it seems like what is being complained of is vigorous disagreement, and there’s nothing wrong with that so long as you aren’t getting into personal insults.

And the distinct impression I got from the ATMB thread is a wish to engage in insulting behavior, but only to the degree that this person likes es insults. It’s like E just wants to redraw the line so it’s behind em instead of in for of em, and E has no really good argument for iwhy it should be so, other than “this is the kind of insulting behavior I’m good at.”

You are of course right, which is why I said I felt dirty in the ATMB thread. I think I have largely avoided such behavior over the past 15 years.

Yes, it’s why I have become what I call a (mostly) “anodyne poster” here. Anything that is likely to result in controversy or draw mod attention is not worth it.

That is certainly true.

Right. I am not complaining about genuine debate, even chilly and somewhat unfriendly debate. I am talking about having to deal with other stuff.

The conceit here–and it sounds like stuff people were saying 15 - 20 years ago–is, “We engage in tough debate here. If you can’t take it, too bad!” The problem is that there are too many mean people here who, if have a choice of correcting you nicely or correcting you and making you feel like dogshit, they will definitely prefer the latter.

But I wasn’t even complaining about debating styles. I was talking about all the other stuff one has to put up with here. Yeah, you can call the mods on it, but I don’t like having to deal with it in the first place.

LOL, that is such a distortion of what I’m talking about and… yeah, that’s another thing I don’t like dealing with here. But your post was polite, so thank you.