I couldn’t decide whether to post this in ATMB (which I don’t think I’ve ever once visited) or here. I erred on the side of ‘who cares’ and decided to post it here. But please feel free to move.
I think it would be interesting to see the GD, at least as an experiment, never display usernames for the posts. Why you ask? Well, me being human, reading the username of the person who wrote a post colors that post for me. It puts me either in a defensive or agreeable mood depending on what I think of the author. I don’t like that it does, I recognize that it does, and sometimes I try not to read the username of the post but that is easier said than done.
If I see a post by Shodan, I ignore it, if I see a post by Kanicbird I automattically expect it to be batshit crazy, if I see a post by Bricker, I assume it will drag the thread down into a discussion of legal precedents of the topic, if I see a post by Hurricane Ditka, I’ll assume it’s a stubborn defense of the rightwing, if I see a post by AHunter3 I color it about some uncommon sexual relation even if the post has nothing to do with that, if I see a post by Wesley Clarke I just assume he is saying what I’m thinking better than I could say it… I could go on and on.
I’d love to be able to read some of these GD threads without knowing who posted what message and I think it would take some of the ego out of posts and allow more fruitful discussions.
I think you could do something like that with userscripts, via Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey—that way, each user could decide for themselves whether to hide or see the usernames. No idea how difficult this would be, but I know we have some users on the forum that have already done wonders with such scripts.
…since you’ve actively called out posts by one poster as "batshit crazy, and posts by another poster as often about “uncommon sexual relations” perhaps the best place to post this would be in the pit? You don’t see the irony in wanting post authors to be unidentified, but you have no problems calling people out and accusing them of stuff?
Without pitting any person you mention specifically, I will comment that some of these posters are just never going to change. Certain posters seem to be right-wing trolls who post the most inflammatory messages possible and then abandon the thread. Others just won’t meaningfully engage with you. (there don’t seem to be any left wing trolls that I’ve seen. Nobody calling for a formalized system of ‘victims points’ where you get money added to your tax return and special privileges by how much of a victim you are. )
Occasionally a great debate topic will have an overwhelmingly well supported, factual answer. But certain posters will just pretend that isn’t true or insist it can’t be true.
I hate to put it this way, since by popular vote I’d be on the same ban list, but if you really wanted to make this a high quality source of discussion you would need to either ban certain posters from starting an OP in great debates or go to a curation system where only a limited number of topics ever become public.
IMO the solution is: get good. What you’re doing is something you can simply choose to do differently - debate the argument as presented, not the person asserting it. If your argument has merit, it should stand on that merit - if your opponent’s argument is flawed, it should be easy to say why.
It shouldn’t be very hard for any reasonable person to do this.
I think that most reasonable persons grossly overestimate their ability to separate argument from the person making the argument. Really, most arguments we bring forward are rather more post-hoc rationalizations of prior gut-feelings, and those gut-feelings are very much more influenced by the person we’re addressing than we realize.
I know I have found ways to justify opinions that I would otherwise have likely rejected based on them being opinions of people I consider friends (less so, I think, the other way around).
<shrug> Maybe it’s just me then - but (with a very few exceptions), I have no particular fixed ideas about the background views of any particular member of this board.
I cannot, for example, call to mind right now whether you and I have ever violently agreed or disagreed on any particular topic - I’d have to go back and look. I would remember it while the debate is happening, and maybe modify my views (or not) as we go along, then it’s history, but not in the actively-remembered sense.
I don’t think it’s that hard to set aside emotion.
The OP isn’t calling for them to change, he’s saying that if we were unnamed in that forum he wouldn’t go into the discussion with a certain mindset. There’s a handful of posters on here that I won’t respond to. If it’s their OP, I won’t click on it, if they’ve taken over a thread, I move on to the next one.
The question is, what if we didn’t have names in GD?
In the OPs case, he wouldn’t know that one of those people is in the thread.
Certain posters put people on the defense for no reason other than their reputation precedes them.
Banning people just because they annoy some people won’t make the discussion any better, it’ll turn this place into an echo chamber (more so than it already is). Nothing changes when a group never here’s an opinion they don’t like.
If the characters already in the debate affect your mindset on entry (presumably making you say something stupid that you would not otherwise say, then that sounds like it ought to be a self-correcting problem. You say something stupid; everybody points and laughs; you are embarrassed and realise how stupid it was.
a) If I were participating in a GD thread, I would want to know that post #136 is the same person as the author of post #129, replying to the author of post# 127 with whom they’d been arguing. Otherwise it would be hell to follow the thread and make sense of things. The context of what’s being said, and to whom, and as a followup to what, would be lost.
b) When I post, I want people to bring with them their familiarity of things I’ve said in the past. Since the OP brought up the association of me with gender issues (“uncommon sexual relation”), yeah, sure, if I post something like “I see we once again attribute observed behavioral differences to built-in biological factors. People adjust to expectations as part of their environment, you know”, I hope people who have already read things I wrote in other threads will remember longer explanations and the short bit hooks up with that so I don’t have to re-explain.
c) Yes, there are people who make some kind of judgment about Poster X and never again read anything written by Poster X with anything approaching an open mind. Removing the user names won’t really fix that. They’ll have the same kind of closeminded attitudes towards the use of phrase A or argument B — “Oh, that’s that ‘climate change’ thing, therefore this person is one of those liberals who believe we need to protect the spotted skunk worm so don’t you build that electrical plant here we’d rather freeze in the dark with our spotted skunk worms”, or “Yeesh, they said ‘agenda’ in the same sentence as ‘transgender’ and wrote ‘transwoman’ instead of ‘trans woman’, so this is one of those cisgender homophobic bigoted asswipes, I’ve read all that I have to”, or whatever. In other words, you can’t fix the kind of brain-dead nonthought that makes a single judgement and never again listens to something that appears to come from that perspective with anything approaching an open mind.
Actually, no, but the concept is familiar. Personally, I try to avoid it anywhere that matters.
I mean, if the discussion here is really just ‘people are generally shit at honest debate’, then anonymising their opponents probably isn’t going to address that problem.
I agree that this is worth doing, though I think you overestimate how easy it is. After all, few other venues where you encounter people’s arguments are anonymous.
Let me just add that you’ve got most of the thread-killers pegged pretty well. Ignoring Shodan or taking Ditka with a grain of salt is a valuable feature of seeing posters’ names.
I find myself getting upset or panicked reading a post, then I scroll back up and realize “Whew, it’s just him… cheerleader for the ‘No Collusion!’ crowd, no need to take this seriously.”
Whenever I post on this board I am aware that I am posting on a public forum.
Although I’m not posting under my real name, there is information out there that would enable me to be identified. And I don’t really care.
Because I believe what I post and I OWN what I post.
And I wouldn’t much care if everyone I knew in real life saw every single thing I ever posted on this board. Because I’m posting on a public forum.
But if I was allowed to post anonymously, that filter ( and it’s a big one ) would be gone. The level of civilization in my discourse would rapidly drop. That said, it might be fun. But it isn’t going to make the forum less contentious.
