Posting in GD is how people learn to pass tests like that. As Bricker might put it, the poster’s understanding of logic and reasoning goes to the weight of his arguments, not their admissibility. Besides, some “logical fallacies” are administrative rules for debating, not indicators of validity. I don’t have a problem with people pointing out that Source X is a paid shill for Big Whatever. Do you?
I scored a 70 on the test, so I’m okay with it.
Had I failed, it would prove the test was meaningless.
Eh, I don’t think an intellectual understanding of logical fallacies really keeps people from engaging in the same. Plenty of people who know what a “strawman” is, for example, still use them.
Why would we want people that can compress reading?
I scored 32% because I don’t have a good understanding of how the terms are used. I feel I do however recognize when an arguement is being presented on some kind of wrong premise.
Make Great Debates read only for guest with members putting up a CC or cash card deposit and then charge for each post. Requesting a cite would be free.
A simple fee of 25 cents per post, but make it double every time you answer with a quote. Money saved is money earned have it go to SD board or Cecil’s favorite charity.
All the other forums would still be free
Do we have a user named Crazy?
Take a look in the pit, there are a couple threads right now naming posters from GD ranting about their inability to pick up the clue phone, including the one that started here and moved to the pit about pit bulls. Not one of these posters seems even remotely capable of getting the concept at all. I don’t think its totally out of line to ask these guys to take a break. In the pit its kinda fun because you can actually stop being polite with them but here it gets tedious sometimes.
Every single thing on wiki is unreliable?
Most of it? Some of it? The wiki article on frog sperm counts in some remote village in Afghanistan may or may not be on target but it is still a sound starting point the vast majority of the time.
Prior restraint is a really bad idea when it comes to the exchange of ideas. If someone is abusive, the solution is to ignore them and ban them thereafter.
The worst effect (though maybe not the most noticeable) of restricting posting privileges to people who can effectively argue is that people who have an earnest desire to learn and debate—but do not yet have the skills they need to properly participate—are shut out of the discussion and will never acquire those skills.
It’s not like it’s hard to figure out who the blowhards are and hit the ignore button. And it’s worth putting up with doing so if it means that a few newbies will learn something and become contributing members.
Will it require registration? What if I can’t produce a government-issued photo ID?
What if I don’t want to be a member of any club that would have me as a member?
My test is: can the OP properly use the subjunctive in the title?
[;):D:p]
Or all thread-titles with misspellings or grammatical errors are automatically discarded by the system ?
I don’t care about posting mistakes, but geez, if you can’t get the title right…
It sure isn’t in my experience.
Posters shouldn’t treat Wikipedia the same as a real encyclopedia or some other widely acknowledged reliable source because it fails to meet the criteria for being a reliable source in two obvious ways. First of all, there’s the issue of trustworthiness. Articles in Britannica, Columbia, the Jewish Encyclopedia, this month’s issue of The Journal of Topology, or the Economist are guaranteed to be written by a knowledgable person and then reviewed by at least one other knowledgable person. Wikipedia articles come with no such guarantee, even if some articles are written by knowledgable people. A citation to a real encyclopedia guarantees that the statement is true to the best available expert opinion. A citation to Wikipedia only proves that there’s one person with internet access who wants us to think it’s true.
The other problem is that Wikipedia can change from day to day, while the 2000 edition of Britannica or last week’s Economist cannot.
There have been numerous studies that compare the accuracy of Wikipedia with traditional encyclopedias. Generally, Wikipedia comes out on par (better or worse in certain areas). I think it’s a mistake to claim that the process of creating Wikipedia makes it a substandard resource and ignore that fact that it is not substandard when you measure the results. It indicates that you’re clinging to an a priori understanding of how to produce a quality encyclopedia rather than adjusting to experimental reality.
If you’d told me, 20 years ago, that an open sourced anonymously edited website would produce an encyclopedia of comparable quality to the standard peer-reviewed process, I would have laughed at the thought. Clearly that idea is nonsense. But reality proved differently. Pointing to the previous hypothesis, that such an approach is useless, when the result is obviously otherwise in order to claim that Wikipedia is substandard is just circular reasoning.
This has both good sides and bad sides. Wikipedia is way more up to date than those other publications, at the cost of stability.
You can always cite the time you accessed Wikipedia if you want to which provides the version you saw. I bet there’s a place for a “long term stable” release of wikipedia that allows fewer edits and captures a more stable image of Wikipedia for citation purposes.
I hear he’s ill.
I really liked your answer here. I would fall into that category. I have made a fool of myself a few times but try to learn from it. I have become a little better about researching things and usually after I do I see no need to post.
Have you used wiki in the last decade? Because this is simply untrue; really, go look something up on wiki. You’ll find wiki entries have far more extensive notes, citations, and bibliographies than your 2000 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. A citation to a wiki entry does not mean “there’s one person with internet access who wants us to think it’s true.” Fears that this might be the case were viable when wiki was first getting off of the ground, but considering wiki an unreliable source today is absurd. Here, have a look at the entries on Vandalism on Wikipedia and Reliability of Wikipedia:
Feel free to click on the footnotes.