GD Tutorial for Real People, Like Me, Who Want To Participate

Great Debates
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Better posts reflect the ability to absorb, process and assimilate opposing points of view and formulate a response that reflects that processing. Sort of like the Borg.

Less interesting posts merely reflect the writer’s gut instincts. Indeed one occasionally spots posters who are all gut instinct: they appear incapable of backing up their assertions with evidence or structured argument.

(And actually, that’s not strictly the case. Some of the best posts are all POV - but they are clearly labeled, as it were.)

Some may think this is a matter of intuitive or nonintuitive approaches, but I don’t think so. Rather the issue turns on the extent to which the poster is inclined to test his or her first responses against evidence or alternative arguments or points of view --and how perturbed they are by the possibility that they are partially incorrect. Or more.

More generally, one should try to master one’s ignorance. By that I mean one should distinguish between what one knows, what one believes (at what level of certainty) and what one does not know. (For mortals, the latter set must predominate, even within one’s area of specialty). (See tomndebb’s helpful post.)

Part of mastering your ignorance involves understanding the difference between matters of fact, perception and belief, of course.

If you care about the particular topic, one fruitful analytic technique is to try to construct the strongest possible argument for your adversary that you can, then critique that. This approach is the direct opposite of the “strawman argument”, and is de rigueur in philosophic papers.

A particularly devastating debate technique is to concede a point your adversary makes and then show why it matters less to the central issue than it first appears. Oddly enough, this technique also advances knowledge.

Regarding Lamia’s Law: But, but, but… I like irony! :frowning:

Eris: Nice response on previous page. Permit me to chew on it for a while.

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There, you’re getting the hang of it! :cool: But be more forceful about how I’m avoiding the issue of providing evidence to back up my allegations! :wink:

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As do I! Lamia’s Law isn’t a prohibition against irony, just a warning that it’s likely to be misunderstood if you leave any room for doubt as to your true intent.

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Persephone

A point or two on mechanics of GD survival.

Type your responses in an off line text editor. (One with a spell checker is nice.) Don’t just slap that sucker back into the box, and submit. Take your time, and maybe let it cool down a tad bit before you cut and past over to the submit box.

It does a lot of nice things to your total perception by the world at large. Everyone thinks you spell well, and talk nice. You can delete the words “arrogant bastard” in a text editor. It gives you a chance to realize that maybe you don’t need to bold quite so much. You can delete the words “ignorant bastard” in a text editor.

You can save the text strings for the “how to link to a specific post” link, and make your counter points work much more impressively. You can keep a few pages of very good references on your favorite subjects complete with SDMB code brackets in place, in a special file, and call it up while you are working. You can decide to just delete the whole post, this time. You can delete the words “hate mongering cretin” in a text editor.

You can keep a file of really zippy quotes to use as pseudo sig lines after your posts. You can find and replace every incidence of the words “blithering idiots” with “uninformed citizenry” in a text editor.

I use one. Most of the time. The blithering idiots have already got me warned twice! Er, that is, the uninformed citizenry . . . well, you get the point.

Tris

“Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.” ~ Anonymous ~

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Polycarp:

Twice now I have asked you for cites to back up your preposterous assertion that anything can be debated here.

Twice now, you have blatantly ignored my humble requests.

How do you expect me to believe a single word that comes out of your mouth if you can’t respond to the simplest of requests?

Put up or shut up, pal. It’s time.
*How was that? *

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Two steps from the pit! :stuck_out_tongue:

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Persephone:

In this thread people are attempting to resolve the question of whether people who think they’re worshipping the same god as other people “really” are – if “really” can be applied here at all!

In this thread we attempt to decide whether one of our number can remember something accurately.

Whether things we cannot presently do can be done in the future to make interstellar travel possible is analyzed here.

Any description I could give of this thread would fall short of the truth.

And that’s only from the present page one. In the past, we’ve discussed whether atheists are religious, whether David B. meets the qualifications for being a god, and other topics even more bizarre.

Is that sufficient evidence for you?

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Poly:

I was prepared to demand more evidence. I really, really was.

I was going to say “Grr!” and call you a piker. I mean, c’mon. God? Interstellar travel? **Lib’s ** memory? Everyone debates those. Nothing spectacular there.

Then I read that last one. Ummm…ooooookay…

This time, I will concede to you. But watch your back. I’ve got my eye on you…

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<<Considers, scratches head, back peddles a little>>

Well we’ve come a little distance from “don’t get into an evidence war”. I would guess that the result from such an IMHO exercise would come down on the side of “argument”. Though the exercise is a little unclear since “argument” can distinguish itself from evidence or encompass evidence, depending upon your taxonomy (a point which you seem to agree with).

Furthermore, people would tend to recall the big paradigm-shifting experiences they have had, which would probably not be representative of your typical GD thread. (Though paradigm-shifting experiences admittedly are of interest in and of themselves.)

Now then. I’m going to mumble a little about influential memes, then go back to the argument.

Gratuitous tangent about influential memes
One of the more influential memes that I know if is, “Munich”. “Munich” means 2 things. 1) It can refer to Chamberlain’s meeting with Hitler in the 1930s where Chamberlain reportedly carried out a policy of appeasement, much to the our later chagrin.

Morale: Appeasement doesn’t work. We conclude this, we know this, based upon a single highly stylized historical example. (I happen to agree with this POV, btw.)

The other Munich example refers to the 1972 Olympics: masked men from the PLO kill Israeli athletes. Morale: PLO=terrorism. The point: certain images (another might be of a smiling Arafat waiving an assault weapon in the air) are highly effective in framing an issue.

Stylized facts can also be influential. For example, there’s the graph of GDP growth, showing great volatility (and economic instability) prior to 1945 and shallower business cycles afterwards. For years, this was thought to suggest (though not prove) that post-war counter-cyclical policy was effective. Certainly, something had changed.*

Back to the point
Some debates turn upon logic, others argument (whatever that is), others evidence. At any rate that is my (rather unexceptional) hypothesis. Permit me to provide a half-assed test. I will look at 4 consecutive GDs from a couple of days ago. To prevent needless obnoxiousness, I will only look at the OP.

Dead Thread 1: “Give me your best case defending the idea of the supernatural”
Well, this is a request for evidence, methinks. I suppose one could argue from first principles that ghosts do not exist, but that seems odd.

Dead Thread 2: :“Boy, that Bush tax cut really lit a fire under the economy, huh?”
Huh. Well there 3 components. 1) What exactly happened? (evidence). 2) What are the qualitative effects of a tax cut on the economy (theory) 3) What is the quantitative estimate of that qualitative effect (Estimation, mostly beyond the scope of the SDMB, though not entirely).

Dead Thread 3: “Someone needs to slap some straight dope into our leaders…”
Actually, this was more like a pit thread, one where everybody probably (not definitely) agreed with the OP.

Dead Thread 4: “Chicken vs Egg”
Answered with Cecil’s column. Hey! That’s evidence! Victory is mine!!! :wink:

*As it happened, what had changed was the data: during the 1930s, data collection had been overhauled so that pre-war estimates of GDP were based on pre-existing data, not data gathered for the express purpose of estimating GDP. This pre-existing data tended to be more volatile. This correction was only discovered in the 1980s. Ah well.

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Thanks to Persephone for starting this thread.

Thanks to all the dopers who replied to this thread. Whether the post was in jest, informative, or both, all were enlightening.

But you all forgot to address one thing…and I get to use an anecdote :slight_smile:
I have, on several occasions, attempted to join a GD thread. What ends up happening that, while I’m diligently reading the 20 posts already on the subject, another posts have appeared. I spend my entire coffee break or lunch trying to catch up on what’s been said so as not to impede or regress the thread and, as a result, end up having no opportunity to post.

How do you all do it? Do I have to quit work…cuz I will :smiley: