What is your problem, Chronos?

The BBQ Pit
181

Do me! Do me! :slightly_smiling_face:

The following isn’t meant as harshly as it may sound, but we only know he is wrong when it is about a topic we have somewhat deep understanding of. If your areas of deep understanding overlap with his, then you may not run into it.

I hesitated a few days to post this, because really, I don’t want to pile on the guy, especially as this thread going the way it has has already made this place unfun enough for him that he is minimally taking a break … but seriously examples have been brought of where … there are opportunities for improvement.

The issue is when he is like asking ChatGTP - sounding absolutely authoritative but just posting hallucinatory stuff. Like the AI he will also also post good stuff that is on the money. Which makes it hard: he isn’t like some posters here with long lived Pit threads who are reliably confidently wrong.

Examples in this thread …

I don’t know anything about Santa Barbara but apparently quite a few posters here know quite a bit and it sounds like he was extremely confidently way off. And dug in when called on it.

The bit about the impact of replacing petrofuels having “a substantial continuous impact on global heating because water vapor is a potent if not persistent greenhouse gas” … just wrong. First of all because petrofuels already add water vapor to the system, and secondly because, no, water vapor is not in general a potent greenhouse gas (with possible exemptions in certain specific locations maybe?). You can read the old thread I had linked to for details.

The traumatic brain injury one? Maybe not completely off base but off the mark.

I’m not going to look for the various medical ones that had me going “huh?”, honestly some of them sound so very confident that I’ve questioned my own understanding some and wondered if he was aware of something I’m not. But not. One example easy to find is his answer to treating a wound - not everything he said was wrong but some was just … what? As my reply to his post noted.

Again I want to make very clear - I think overall he adds lots to this board and I am sad that this thread has had him stepping back from participation, at least for now. The are some whose absence I would not be saddened by, but him? I very much hope he returns. But that doesn’t mean that criticism of his overconfident misstatements is just sour grapes from those who have disagreed with him.

182

I very much like Stranger’s and Chronos’s contributions to these boards. If people, whose contributions I like a little less, have driven away either of them then I think it’s to our collective detriment.

183

Is there any evidence that that has happened? Chronos is alive and well and still posting. Stranger started this mess. No one went after him unjustly. No one ever Pitted him. I have trouble finding any sympathy here and I assure you he will be back, just like last time when he got that Warning or whatever it was that caused him to sulk.

184

Count me as one who thinks the SDMB would be a poorer place without @Stranger_On_A_Train and hope he returns soon. I always enjoy reading Stranger’s posts on various subjects, and when I click on a thread that I think he may have weighed in on, I’ll often fast-scroll down looking for that green ‘S’ avatar to see what his take is (sometimes it turns out to be @Shalmanese , but fortunately I enjoy their posts as well :smirking_face:).

I mean, I don’t minimize or dismiss the opinions or feelings of those who have criticized him here, but they don’t detract from my respect for Stranger as a contributor. He’s sometimes wrong, or overconfident that he’s right? Can be long-winded? Is a bit prickly sometimes? I can think of several Dopers who are guilty in all those regards at times (including me), but are still valuable members in good standing. I personally find the breadth and depth of his knowledge impressive, and appreciate the detail and thought he puts into his posts. I also enjoy his snarky takedowns of asshole public figures who richly deserve it, like trump and especially Elon Musk. Do I take his opnions on various subjects as gospel, or the final authority on the matter? No, but I don’t for anybody or anything I read online-- I form my own opinions and get alternate verification if I need to.

185

This appears to be the crux of the matter.

There’s general agreement Stranger is a good contributor to be board. But he is, at the same time, very thin skinned and sensitive to the least correction or criticism.

It’s not like we have banished him to the 9th circle or anything - he’s in a self-imposed break from the board, which he has previously taken from time to time, usually after being called out before on similar behavior.

So, while I agree I’d rather have Stranger around than not, that doesn’t mean he should get special kid glove treatment, either. We’re all (presumably) grown-ups, after all.

186

Yeah, mine was meant to be a pro-Stranger post, not an ‘everybody stop being so mean to Stranger’ post. As you say, he’s a big boy who should be able to take it. Anyone who posts as prolifically as Stranger does is bound to get some criticism and pushback on this board, warranted or not. I just hope he returns.

187

No one has driven anyone away. If you can’t take honest, legitimate, and (let’s face it) relatively mild criticism in a thread that you started in order to criticize someone else, then that’s on you.

188

I’d appreciate his take on that current thread about the Russian troll (the Yantar) ship in the north atlantic.

189

What do you expect he should do? Start a thread titled “Hey everybody, I’m back! It’s been a few weeks. Didja miss me?”

190

FWIW I think occasional breaks from here are a good thing, especially if participating here is getting aggravating for any reason. I did it for a bit during COVID and came back just ignoring QZ. No need to announce a flounce or look for a “Norm!” coming back through the door. Although it has to be flattering when your lack is noticed. (Don’t think mine was, but I’m no stranger here …) :grinning_face:

191

I take absences from the board for fairly long periods of time pretty routinely and have for as long as I’ve been a member. The last time I spent what, two years away? I never saw the point in announcing my coming or going. For one thing I can never tell if I need, like, a weekend off, or a year. I’m willing to bet people take time off here all the time and never say a word.

192

I, too, hope Stranger returns. As a community we need to grow and not atrophy, and he was exceptionally knowledgeable. But in a better world one would hope he returns with an improved attitude and maybe even just a touch of humility. I don’t fault anyone for being wrong sometimes; we’ve all been wrong about something at some time. It’s a little annoying when bad information is delivered with supreme confidence, but even that is forgivable as an occasional lapse. When other posters get pitted for this sort of thing it’s generally when they’re wrong quite often and stubbornly insistent on doubling down on their errors.

With Stranger, my annoyance was based on something quite different. In response to a factual correction I made to one of his posts, he accused me falsely and with great hostility of quoting him dishonestly in order to “win” an argument, but couldn’t back up that claim because it wasn’t true. The statement I criticized was just flat-out wrong, period, no matter how you quote it. That’s where I draw the line and lose my patience. If he’s going to respond to even mild criticism with hostile accusations of dishonesty, then fuck him.

He’s also a little weird in that he has all private messages blocked, and when we were allowed to have hidden profiles, his was one of the few that was hidden. He also doesn’t give a shit about violating board protocols because he believes himself above that kind of stuff, and so has sulked off in a huff when receiving Warnings or mod notes.

Still, he’s been a valuable contributor, despite ironically having the same faults as ChatGPT which he contantly maligns, namely, sounding authoritative but not being reliably accurate, except probably in his specific areas of expertise.

193

OR, it could be that he was receiving obnoxious and/or harassing PMs and decided they weren’t worth his time.

194

Maybe. I just found it strange. Harassing PMs can be reported for moderation just like posts that violate board rules, though. Regardless, he definitely has what a teacher in grade school would call “an attitude problem”.

195

Doesn’t prevent the next one. He invokes strong feelings.

196

I think my longest absence was when the board switched to Discourse and I had the hardest time getting back into my account, and it was such a pain in the ass I stopped trying for a while. I wasn’t 100% sure I was going to bother coming back. I finally decided to do it.

I searched and basically between April and November 2020, I was just not on the site at all. Pretty much half the year.

Turns out the world didn’t end or anything.

197

If it was a cruller, that’s a hanging offense, imo.

198

It’s always a little bit different when I come back to it. Kind of an interesting way to see how it changes over time.

199

I expect that he graciously accept that he was wrong and continue to post on the board as normal.

I don’t think people remember how egregious Blake was. I dug up one of his threads where he was so confident that he had a cite that no animal was capable of jumping more than 1 meter from a standing start. When people chimed in with their own eye witness accounts of their personal pets clearly jumping two meters he managed to dismiss all of them as if they were mistaken perceptions on the scale of ghost sightings.

Somehow, no other cites was as good as his single cite, people pointing out that some animals were clearly capable of jumping at least 3 meters and that his cite was a generality that, in it’s very phrasing, allowed for exceptions, were all pooh poohed by him. This goes on for 100+ posts dedicated solely to the rest of the Dope trying to convince one man of one extremely obvious thing. Finally, @Desmostylus manages to find the absolute perfect cite that is now indisputable that Blake is wrong and Blake chooses this exact moment to take a board hiatus, coincidentally never having to acknowledge that his argument was obviously terrible from the start.

Funnily enough, after the entire debate ended, someone bothered to read the original piece Blake cited and discovered that the authors themselves stated that the one meter rule was on average but animals could differ by as much as threefold around the average, meaning cats jumping 2 meters was perfectly in line with their observational model.

I remember making a game of it, every time Blake got owned, to see if he would take a board hiatus to avoid taking accountability and he would reliably “coincidentally” stop posting at that exact time and then return a few weeks to months later.

Like Stranger, Blake had some genuinely interesting contributions to the board and he was filled with real knowledge. But also like Stranger, Blake was extraordinarily thin skinned and arrogant and would refuse to accept that other people also had legitimate expertise and would often confidently get way out over his skis and assert expertise he obviously didn’t have.

I can’t speak to anyone else but for me personally, I have absolutely no problem with people being wrong on the internet. I see people posting wrong stuff on the SDMB all the time and, for the most part, I let it go and occasionally I muster up the energy to correct someone. It’s not the being wrong that’s the sin, it’s how you handle the correction. If you refuse to learn and continue to bluster and gaslight, then I keep you in my memory banks as someone with a massive ego problem.

200

I’m glad I wasn’t part of that thread, it must’ve been like arguing with a brick wall. I’m surprised it went on as long as it did.
One thing I always find amusing in these old threads is how much longer everything took before youtube*. If he said that today, it would take all of 30 seconds to find a youtube video of a cat (or any number of other animals) jumping, from a stand still, well over a meter.

*Particularly in music threads. In fact, a few times I realized I was reading an old thread because people would link to midi files.