You are really not helping either Lust4Life or yourself, here.
Lust4Life made a claim that there was widespread ethnic cleansiing at the end of the Anglo-Irish War, (1921). You triumphantly provided a Wikipedia link to an event that occurred in 1969.
Lecturing another poster on their ignorance when you demonstrate that you have failed to grasp the topic is not the best way to make your point.
Hmmm… didn’t mean to open such a can of worms here.
But it does kind of emphasize my point that so many posters just aren’t inclined to find evidence to support their claims, and feel insulted and abused when asked to do so.
And BTW, tomndeb, our newbie has indeed started a Pit thread, which I don’t think is going to work out as expected.
Boyo: This is too important an issue to ban someone over. We need to develop boilerplate to address it. Over here greenslime and adaher argued that demanding citations to back up claims was so much flim flam. Over at Fox News O’Reilly and others routinely make shit up on the fly, as documented by Media Matters for America. There are also all manner of shoddy claims: the very idea that a weak grounding in fact makes your argument lame and an embarrassment is passed over in favor of almost wholly ideological categorization. This stance damages the cognitive habits of their audience. If we’re to fight ignorance in a meaningful matter, we have to get the meta arguments straight.
Some claims simply don’t stand up to scrutiny. Too many modern conservatives have difficulty grasping that notion: to them arguments are either “Liberal” or “Conservative”, as opposed to “Well grounded” or “Laughable”. Marxists used to work from a similar perspective. Liberals, moderates, patriots, traditional conservatives and those of good will need to sharpen their arguments rather than resorting to the ban hammer.
I’ve wondered whether an introductory page of guidelines might help. Something like this:
At the Straight Dope Message Board, it is expected that if you make a claim you have the wherewithal to back it up or at the very least re-characterize or clarify it. Empty claims are frowned upon: repeated failure to substantiate them causes members to draw conclusions about the reliability of the poster. But that’s turgid. Sigh. 
What do you mean by this? That it’s so important that we have to develop a paragraph that hardly anyone will read and can’t be enforced anyway? If it actually IS that important, then banning for repeated abuse of whatever policy is developed is the only sanction that makes any sense.
Repeated demands for cites are wearying, and snide refusals are irritating.
What’s wrong with a bit of honesty. “I would provide a cite if I could, but I see it as a basic issue of belief.” Or “I’ve Googled, and can’t really find a good cite.” Or “I read it in a book once, but, sorry, I’m not able to find it right now.”
I don’t think the paper based cite problem is very real. If you have a book and give the usual style of academic reference to it, and quote the relevant passage (which would be fair use) then I for one am going to believe you that you aren’t just making the cite up from whole cloth, unless I have a damn good reason to believe the contrary.
Yes it is irritating when you are asked for cites about stuff that is or should be obvious but too bad: people who posit stuff with no factual foundation are even worse and we can’t have one rule for guys we all think are probably trustworthy and another rule for those we suspect to be full of shit. The strong factual grounding of these boards is their outstanding feature.
Trinopus: I’ve done exactly that. I’ve seen others do that as well: Una routinely modulates the reliability of her various claims. No cite.* 
Some things need to be hashed out. The ban-stick is a crude instrument. While substantiation-dodging could rise to the level of jerkdom, it’s also the case that such posters would probably be banned for other reasons first.
Posters should be able to state forthrightly the fundamental importance of weighing and assessing evidence: no, one opinion is not as good as any other. There are arguments in need of sharpening: I struggled with their proper expression in another thread. Expecting the mods to fix everything is misguided.
When we consider either the history of opinion, or the ordinary conduct of human life, to what is it to be ascribed that the one and the other are no worse than they are? Not certainly to the inherent force of the human understanding… Why is it, then, that there is on the whole a preponderance among mankind of rational opinions and rational conduct? If there really is this preponderance – which there must be, unless human affairs are, and have always been, in an almost desperate state – it is owing to a quality of the human mind…namely, that his errors are corrigible. He is capable of rectifying his mistakes by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument: but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it.
- J.S. Mill
- Well… ok. Una distinguishes between claims backed by anecdotal and scholarly evidence in the CoCC/SR thread on the transgendered.
You’re talking out of your hat. And even if you weren’t, you might have held off on calling me a cunt and a disingenuous cocksucking fuck, just for asking for a cite. It’s not called gaming the system, it’s actually how this messageboard operates.
If you seriously want to wade into debate about topics you rightly call contentious then you better come armed with cites. Nothing Lust4life posted is so common knowledge as to not need a cite, and nothing you posted claiming to be a cite was actually relevant to what he said. It’s the lowest form of intellectual bullying to start hurling abuse at posters who ask for cites for non-obvious statements and it won’t typically play on this messageboard.
I made no statement in the original thread other than asking for a cite and I get a tirade of insults from the two of you for my trouble. Grow up, seriously, if you can’t back up what you say, don’t get angry when it is challenged, and you could also learn some manners while you’re at it.
I don’t intend to comment on the subject matter itself about which I know nothing. However, as a point of general principle I will say this: often when different sides have very different and very entrenched views, they also often have extremely different views on what is completely and utterly obvious. Again, I have no idea about the specific debate but as far as I’m concerned as soon as you start saying that you don’t need to give a cite and it’s offensive to ask you for one because it’s all so obvious, you no longer have credibility in my eyes, and I lose interest in your posts.
Take your words and apply them to someone expounding their very strong and deeply held belief in some complete woo nonsense and see how they sound.
And I find the people who ask for cites as a way of deflecting the argument to be equally jerkish.
“I think people should take more responsibility for themselves. I feel that if we cut back social programs, we’d have more responsible citizens.”
“:rolleyes: cite?”
Calls for cites are, IMO, more often than not an excuse to shut down a discussion of principles and ideas.
And when it comes down to it, we really, really, really don’t need more rules.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to give warnings just for refusing to cite an argument. I think there have been a few instances where I told a poster to either cite a claim or stop making it because of overall obnoxious behavior, but in general I think the best way to handle these situations is for other posters to just note that the person isn’t citing their argument. If the person won’t argue at all, the thread might get closed.
That’s not what I mean. Not that particular cite by Greenslime, but rather cites in general as having any epistemological weight. You really can find just about anything on the internet to support any claim you want. So by insisting that someone provide one, (someone who’s otherwise not offering one), what are you actually insisting?
Finally. Common sense returns to the argument. We certainly don’t need mods wasting their time following each request for a cite to resolution, or donning their mod fedora and issuing warnings for lack there of. What a chilling effect that would have on the free exchange of ideas here.
You’re insisting they provide a credible source of support for what they’ve said. An assertion gets made, then someone asks for a cite, then the cite is posted and people either agree it supports the assertion or discuss why it doesn’t and what might be wrong with it. I’ve seen only a couple of very bad SDMB debaters treat cites as a “someone on the internet agrees with me, so I win” contest.
Good points, unsurprisingly.
There are several reasons people cry “cite?” [ul]
[li]A point is genuinely in dispute.[/li][li]The poster knows perfectly well the assertion is false, and has a devastating counter-cite at the ready[/li][li]The poster doesn’t like the way the discussion is trending, and is trying to change the subject.[/li][/ul]But, again, Fenris is right - we don’t need any more rules. A certain amount of thread-shitting is inevitable on a board as polarized (and polarizing) as this one. And most of us can spot the usual “cite that the sky is blue” BS when it gets pitched. If the BS-er wants to declare victory, meh - an idiot is still an idiot no matter what he says to himself.
Not that this has much to do with greenslime-whatever it was. Once you declare that you aren’t going to do cites, that triggers the avalanche, especially for a newbie, and everyone starts piling on the “citecitecitecitecite” ad infinitum, whether justified or not. Plus he was a fairly obvious troll. Big hairy deal if he stalks off in a huff.
But ISTM that the problem of people who won’t cite takes care of itself. Either it becomes clear the poster isn’t capable of backing up what they say when it is in dispute, or it becomes clear that those crying “citecitecitecite” are just thread-shitting. Both alternatives inform as to who should be taken seriously, and who should not.
My $.02 worth, and cheap at twice the price.
Regards,
Shodan
You are insisting that the person making the claim show what ground they stand on. They may be standing on bedrock or may be standing on quicksand, but either way it advances the debate to make somone admit it. If you call on me for a cite and I cite Conservapedia or some lunatic blogger, then that doesn’t mean I win simply because I gave a cite. It means it’s now made plain that I’m full of shit.
Only if you assume an audience that perceives Conservapedia as “full of shit.” While that probably is indeed the case in this instance, there’s no intrinsic true value to the act of providing a cite itself, and more often it won’t be so cut and dried. So not providing a cite doesn’t invalidate a point any more than providing a cite in and of itself validates one. If I say the world is round and I don’t provide a cite after you repeatedly insist upon one, that doesn’t invalidate my point any more than a reference to Conservapedia can substantiate one. That’s all I mean to say. Insisting upon a cite is meaningful only when a particular audience is predicated. The cite itself is not the issue.
There are no absolutes in debate, there are only things to help us each form a conclusion. Cites have that intrinsic value. Your “world is round” analogy only works because neither of us doubt your proposition. If we did, then cites would assist with reaching a conclusion about the shape of the world.
Sometimes the only cite I know of for something is a book a read some time ago, which I no longer have or can’t find or don’t happen to have available near me at the moment. Those are the time when the calls for “cite?” are really frustrating.
Also, I read a lot of non-fiction so it’s sometimes just plain difficult for me to remember where I read something.
IMO, asking for cites is pointless. I go and find out for myself if I see a fact I haven’t heard before. 100% of the time, I find sources for the fact, since as a rule, posters do not tend to just make things up. Then I judge for myself whether the fact is valid or not and proceed with the debate from there.
Now that doesn’t mean I think we shouldn’t have to provide cites. I provide them whenever I think I’m telling people something they may not know, and I generally assume I don’t need one if I believe that what I’m posting is well known already. And if challenged, I try to find the original source for my claim.
However, unsupported assertions are made all the time here. Cites are asked for rather selectively, and are usually motivated by a poster not liking the fact in question. Few ask for cites when they like the fact. Providing the cite neither makes them like it any better, nor does it make them accept it. I still try to do it, but it’s pretty annoying.
Unsupported assertions will tend to be treated as credible by all who already agree with the unsupported assertions, or want to believe them, while cited facts will also be treated as credible by all who already agree and treated as an unreliable cite by all who don’t agree. As other posters have said, the act of providing a cite doesn’t back up an argument any more than the lack of a cite invalidates an argument. Whether it does or not is up to the individual observer. Who BTW can, with seconds of effort, usually check a fact themselves rather than accosting a poster who might not even be online.