Is it just me or is this site kind of soft?

The BBQ Pit
1

It seems like over the past several years, “General Questions” is almost 100% occupied by people who just want to be entertained by talking about weird, inconsequential stuff, people who want to tell other people “how it is” at any cost, and people who don’t really know anything first hand, but just reiterate what the current knowledge out there is? The site claims that it wants to fight ignorance and support truth, but really it seems that people just have their own unrelated agendas to be entertained and to puff their pride up and disseminate what the internet tells us all.

Nobody seems to care enough about the stuff that really matters to actually get down to the bottom of things. Research here merely consists of considering others’ knowledge that they have gotten from other people’s knowledge, and so on… in other words, no one here seems to have a habit of building their own knowledge from data, they just grab a box of it off the shelf and call it theirs. They just look for easy questions to answer and weird questions that they have never heard before (which I will admit is entertaining). Everybody in there is so “fat” off the easy access to information that the internet and current society provides that they no longer know how to approch a problem from a clean slate and gather the essential info to draw a preliminary inference. Milk is healthy, no ifs ands or buts. Phytochemicals? Who cares, freshly squeezed carrot or orange juice is no healthier than sugar water! Why older people have bigger (bloated) noses and ears? That is an important question to physiology, yet no one wants to deal with it. The list goes much farther on.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there is anything inherently wrong with this, and I am not necessarily disgruntled in any way, this is just a little thought I have had and wondered if anyone else felt the same way.

I understand that this site is a recreational site, but still, with all the PhD’s and education in the GQ, I don’t get the feeling that anyone is a quality judge of truth on this whole site. No one approaches scientific and technical knowledge and truth in an innocent way here.

No one else has sensed this probably, since everyone on SD seems to be only a slight variation of everyone else… I think it would be good for someone to come in there and shake things up a little. Get people to expand their minds for a change. I’m certainly not the person to do that, I’m just sayin’… but that won’t happen because if anyone were to challenge “the big dogs”, the thread would just drizzle down to the bottom of the page and fade away…

Solution: Have a really important, controversial, complex question as a sticky every month at the top of the GQ page which will serve to be a chosen question for which everyone will contribute research and thoughts to. By the end of the month, the SD will have actually DEALT with a question worthy of attention and the site WOULD ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING WORTHWHILE other than entertain and puff up!

2

The internet is a huge place my friend.

Out there somewhere is PRECISELY the messageboard you’re looking for.

3

What if I don’t want to give up on this board that easily?

4

Your view of what the Dope should be isn’t necessarily what other people want.

If you’re so keen on this idea of independent research projects, why not just start a few yourself? Or alternately, find / start a board dedicated to the empirical research of half-arsed questions, like the Old Folks With Big Noses one you mention.

5

Work a little, play a little, live up to the mantra of the site, is that too much to ask?

6

This is simply asinine. If you have actual evidence against any of those statements, present it or shut up. Dragging them out without any means of support makes you look like a loony and isn’t helping your case here.

7

omg everyone in the world is so ignorant and im so smart why cant they all just be like me

8

Can carrots and celery be used as an alternative to brushing teeth?

9

It’s because the facial structure stops growing when a person is an adult, but the ears and nose never stop growing.

10

That sounds very close to what I would say.

11

hauss old buddy, why would anyone here spend their free time doing home grown research on topics that have already been the subject of professional research? There are times when home research is valid, I myself did temperature experiments on Starbucks coffee for a thread here. Why? Because there was no actual research into that pathetically unimportant topic and I wanted a cup of joe. Important topics are generally the subject of numerous professionally conducted studies, performed over decades, peer reviewed for accuracy. Rather than have some internet joker claim to have performed an experiment, I’d like to see a reference to scientifically valid research.

You really think the SD could tackle a important, complex and controversial question in a single month when the rest of world has been unable to deal with it?

12

One assumption you seem to be making is that for any question, there exists a single, unequivocal answer. A week’s worth of lurking should disabuse you of that notion.

13

I’m astonished to read that coming from someone who is not a variation on anyone. Surely someone who is so thoroughly and uniquely you would realize that despite similarities, all the rest of us are thoroughly and uniquely us.

14

I don’t understand, hauss. Are you proposing that people conduct research, such as going out and measuring the ears and noses of a sample of people? Somehow conducting experiments to determine the composition of a carrot and whether it is associated with better health when consumed in certain quantities? This is absurd. The only way for us to have information on these topics is to “pull it off the shelf,” unless we happen to already be trained and working in areas that pertain to the question at hand.

15

Disagree.

GQ is about questions which have well-defined answers. Sometimes the questions are mundane, but not if it gets your car or computer up and running again or stops you turning your house into a deathtrap. Just telling someone why Word has gone into Overtype mode and how to change it back can save someone from wasting a day.

There is a wealth of personal experience and varied expertise on the board, much of which turns up in GQ answers. In a recent thread on Hollywood torches, a burning torch juggler and a historical re-enactment participant chimed in with first hand knowledge, incidently shooting down my own, theory-based answer. Which is the way it should be. Nothing soft about it.

16

The number of people at the frontiers of knowledge is very small and the frontier is growing larger every day. The number of people who voluantarily choose to be at the frontier of knowledge without receiving and financial reward are even fewer. Therefore, the chances of finding a group of likeminded people who are willing to do genuine research which they aren’t being paid for is going to be very slim. GQ represents something far more obtainable which is a giant sieve for the huge amounts of knowledge that’s already present. I don’t think your going to find anything much better than this unless you drastically restrict the scope of your enquiries and start haunting professional hangouts.

17

hauss, it seems that you’re interested in tackling questions from first principles. That’s a great approach to want to take, and sometimes it’s absolutely necessary. I have the feeling, though, that you’ve never actually done any scientific research yourself, because if you had, you would know that most scientists regularly build upon the information and ideas already available. Reasons for that include:

  • Someone’s already tackled that question or something similar to it, and it’s a bit of a waste to essentially re-invent the wheel.

  • Some questions appear deceptively simple to answer, until you start getting into the complexities of how to objectively measure/observe what you need, what other kinds of information you need to have on hand to interpret your findings and feel reasonably confident of the validity of your interpretation, the limitations of your ability to measure/observe to a degree appropriate for addressing your question, and so on.

“Simple” questions can readily blow up into major efforts requiring long time commitments of multiple people and maybe not a small amount of money to keep the ball rolling. So while your suggestion to tackle a controversial, complex question each month shows a lot of desire, it’s not very realistic.

I don’t really know what to make of your comment about people here not approaching science and truth in an “innocent way.” There are quite a few people here, well educated and with long experience in their fields, who go into GQ to answer questions to the best of their ability and to a level that non-specialists can understand. Maybe that comes across to you as too fluffy, or perhaps glossing over stuff you think is important. It’s not intended to be like that; it’s just an acknowledgement that not everyone is working with the same levels of knowledge, because advanced knowledge in any field takes years to acquire. I try my best not to be overly technical in talking about geology, for example, and I appreciate it in turn when someone with a better grasp of engineering, say, can break it down for me, because that approach is fair to everyone who might be reading the thread.

If you want it to be some other way, the only thing I can suggest is that you look for some specialist boards to talk more about your favorite topics at an advanced level… but don’t expect people there to expend a lot of time engaging in original research at your request, either.

18

I’m not. I am exactly like everyone else, and all of my knowledge and smartiness is derived from lurking and learning from all you smart people, who - it turns out aren’t all that smart after all.

19

The value of GQ, hauss, is exactly the wealth of off-the-shelf knowledge – we’ve all got access to different shelves. If you actually want people to do original research, you’re going to have to pay for it, because it costs money and takes huge gobs of time. Instead, this board is a place to pose a question to a wealth of folks with diverse education, any of whom are happy to spend 20 minutes to shoot the shit about it, and none of whom are willing to spend weeks to do an involved, clinical examination that is going to take time away from the careers that but bread on their table.

In other words, the SDMB isn’t here to do your homework for you.

–Cliffy

20

Hauss, you seem to be completely unaware of the cultural and historical origins of all this. The Straight Dope began as a question-and-answer column in a weekly free alternative newspaper, and its purpose was to entertain as well as to fight ignorance. What you call weird inconsequential stuff, or in kinder words, the topics that provoke curiousity but are too obscure or narrowly defined to have generated easily accessible reference works, are a big part of what this place is about.