Let me refresh your memory as to what transpired, in the hopes that it will quell your need for such a rule. In the thread you’re alluding to, I quoted your statement IN FULL in Post 28. Later in the discussion (which you find such a problem with) I said, " Your reasoning was that some of his positions were “too hostile, intolerant, and simplistic”. Note, I had still attached “too hostile, intolerant, and simplistic” to some of his positions, which included Freedom of Religion, which you mentioned in the initial post—and I had already quoted in full. I then went on to explain in detail why your statement was outlandish either with or without the “Freedom of Religion” mention.
To come in here and claim some great injustice was done you paints a woefully inaccurate picture. The way you laid out what transpired has only a passing relationship with reality. The only injustice I saw is you not defending yourself after I laid out my explanation in detail. I wonder why. Instead, you wanted to lecture me. I guess anything to not have to defend your position. Can’t say I blame you.
So, I’d like to propose a rule: that a poster can’t mischaracterize what happened in another thread and suggest a rule be instituted to bar that which never transpired.
I propose a board wide ban on any op that is just a link and “Talk about this”. In fact, not only should those types of threads be banned, those that post them should also be banned, and the nearest mod should then go over to the poster’s home and shatter their fingers with a sledgehammer. Maybe smack their computers with the hammer, too. Yeah! And kick em in the groin for good measure…
Changing a quote is already against the rules. Selectively editing for content, if malicious, would fall in that category. I did not see magellan01 being malicious in that thread. He extracted the part as he understood what you said. If he misunderstood, arguably much of the blame is on you for not writing more clearly.
Zoe, magellan01, isn’t hijacking one thread in ATMB enough? Let’s not make this thread about that, too.
Oakminster, if we ban “Talk about this” threads like you suggest, and ban the people who post in them, then does the mod have to ban himself for touching the thread?
I’m only for banning (and groin stomping) the threads and the OPs thereof. Posters replying to “Talk about this” threads and Mods hopefully locking, banning, and groin stomping the OPs are spared my wrath.
There seems to be a majority who think that GD would be improved with more civil discourse. There is a reluctance to impose rules that are subjective. Other forums don’t seem to mind giving warnings for “threadshitting”, which seems very subjective.
Maybe there’s the danger that longstanding and prolific posters will get banned? If this is the concern, why not have “debate rules” which are a step below board rules. Violations of these could be separate and only result in temporary loss of GD posting rights.
This would allow mods to apply debate standards without having to worry about bannings.
I have a specific suggestion, which does not require new groups or sub-groups.
This would need to be experimental at first to see if it worked, but a small-scale experiment would be easy to do.
The OP is allowed to set parameters for debate in a particular thread, and request mod-enforcement. Only x such threads could be active at any point in time, to avoid excess moderator load.
For example, I open a thread on a particular religious question, eg “critique and improve this particular argument for atheism”. I state that I do not want the thread hijacked by general discussion of religion or atheism. At the moment, it is guaranteed that someone will post a general pro-religion comment, atheists will pile-on refuting the evangelist, and only one or two serious people will debate the topic.
Under the new model, I could set a thread-rule that hijacks and off-topic posts will not be tolerated, and make it explicit what is considered on and off topic. I could request mod observation of the thread-rule. Mods would gently nudge those who don’t follow the thread-rule. Ignoring a gentle-mod nudge would result in the usual mod action in case of ignoring mods.
I am a bit OCD about my GD threas and specify some ground rules about what I want and not want on them. Some people might forget them and post what you don’t want but all it has taken me is a gentle reminder and they normally reply with an “sorry I forgot, never mind”. Only once the person was very insistent and I reported it and the mods came down quickly. Give it a try, we might not need new rules for that.
Here’s a complete random-ass thing I just had. Except, maybe, it would be awesome:
Thread-based-clean-slates. I think one of the things that certainly has a great effect on Debates is that people come in with a “persona” (per Username), a post-count, etc. I know this would require rewriting VBulletin (or maybe there’s a plugin!), but, yeah…what if you could have debates that hid a poster’s Username? For example, first person (the OP) is assigned, “Betty”, first responder is “Bob”, – and continues with this pseudonym throughout that thread.
Nooooo. I am imagining such a thread. I am attempting to imagine such a thread which covers contentious religious or political issues, in which the question, “who are you really?” is not asked of half of the posters, but I am not succeeding.
Broad general statements should be discouraged. Each poster should be treated with respect irregardless of their beliefs. In a forum for debates there is an assumed difference of opinion. Be kind and absolutely no personal attacks.
OK this is more extreme than I was going to go, but I do think some minimum qualifications for an OP should be in place. Specifically, I hate this kind of OP, where someone comes in, spews some data and doesn’t make an attempt to give an argument; effectively saying “debate this for me.” I think every OP in GD should be forced to, at the very least, give their opinion on the matter. And more than “I think this sucks.” If you can’t be bothered to form a coherent OP with your take on the subject, your thread shouldn’t be allowed to pollute GD.
Note that I am OK with things like “I don’t really know where I stand on this issue. On the one hand blah blah blah…” The key is I want to hear YOUR opinion, not some quoted text from some professor. This helps weed out those just regurgitating information that they haven’t bothered processing yet (not that I am accusing the OP of that thread of this, but I have seen it happen).
Look, I’m trying to get the Head Honchoes to let me do this to at least the spammers. So far, no dice. There’s one trolling spammer in particular who needs this treatment.
These are unofficial rules that are, I believe, fairly accepted. There’s no harm in making them official.
Readers must not have to click links in order to see an argument. The poster must summarize the argument as best he can, while of course still providing a link to his cite.
“What do you think of this, guys?” OPs are frowned upon. Describe why it interests you and what your thoughts are on the matter.
It is up to you to prove your assertion. If you can’t back it with a cite, stop yapping.
If you cannot get your OP down to under 700 words, don’t post it, or figure out how to split it into multiple topics that can be debated separately in different threads.
I have not been here very long, but The Straight Dope is the most intelligent and civil internet forum I have discovered. In time I may have complaints. Right now I think TSD should keep doing what it has been doing.
The strategy of moderating sentimental (non rational) expressions will not work, because it leads to regression - increasing sensitivity as a means of ostracizing people to the point where commenting becomes more an act of policing until the board declines. It increase the transaction cost of participation.
As someone who runs a large advertising agency that must help companies and groups understand ‘social interaction’, I spend a great deal of time trying to educate editorials that the ONLY thing people find interesting is CONFLICT. Talking head shows are either internally engaging in conflict (crossfire), or externally (oprah/hannity). Conflict leads to ratings and ratings to participation. WIthout conflict, in either a novel, sort story, or a talk show, there isn’t much to hold anyone’s attention. And the more attention that you hold (the more viewpoints included) the more likely one is to have a member of the audience identify with one of the participants, and become involved.
People learn by first identifying the SENTIMENTAL statements that they agree with, and then seeing those statements refuted. If you eliminate the religious nuts, or the racists, or the culture-ists, you’re actually killing off the social value as well as the attraction of your medium. Because all people operate by sentiments. They may learn to articulate those sentiments as mythology, as reason, as science, or as economics, but they are still, almost universally, articulating their sentiments - simply with a different degree of precision.
Personalities (contributors) cannot be allowed take over the board or its brand and become the show itself. That’s board-hijacking, rather than thread-hijacking. So if you have permanent troublemakers that begin to draw too much attention to themselves then it is better to heavily moderate them. But not because of the content and form of their arguments. You ban them because they dominate the conversation and make their own ‘show’ on your dime. Losing participants is dangerous for any medium. Even bad ones. Sanitizing a board usually ends up with no board at all.
Increasing the number of editors so that they split posts into new threads is better than banning or correcting. Remember - people are largely seeking attention for their niche fantasies. Ignoring people is the most effective means of negative reinforcement.
Sentiments (unarticulated expression) are the most common form of narrative. They are analogical arguments. Reason (to the degree that few people can actually articulate causal properties of categories), science (directly measurable subsets) and economics (indirectly measured supersets). Religion as we mean it, refers to scriptural command, or external non-human knowledge, in the monotheistic meaning. Polytheism and history are simply differences of degree. It is scripture.
it is particularly troubling to eliminate what is called hate-speech or inter-group expression of sentiments. That 's because the most important dialog of our age is the change in group sentiments now that the worldwide change in status and power hierarchies has come about because of the worldwide adoption of western economic and material technologies.
SOLUTION?
Editing and moderating are hard. It is very, very, difficult to ascertain the quality of an argument in the social sciences. We are fairly sure that the entire Marxist religion, masquerading as a political movement, is as irrational as the Islamic political movement masquerading as a religion, are both extremely dangerous to mankind. But since we live in a POLITY, and the member of that polity largely use SENTIMENTS rather than reason in debate, and that their beliefs and debates are highly influential upon the outcome (more than reason by a long shot), and that most people criticizing these sentimental arguments lack causal depth in their own arguments, then the best board, the best discussions, the best social outcome, is determined by keeping an argument on track, rather than censoring it.
An alternate solution, (and I have done a little work on this) categorizing posts in a debate as to whether they are 1) content free or off topic 2) sentimental expressions 3) mythical, Platonic, or scriptural reasoning 4) Objective rational arguments 5) scientific arguments (using survey data but which are very fragile in the social sciences) and 6) economic arguments (which because of scale and aggregation allow cultural comparison.) If you could filter conversations by these arguments, you would be able to stack them by methodology, and the reader could participate in a conversation of his own level of capacity.
DIFFERENT IDEOLOGIES
Although, we should note, that as scripture, you will have a hard time actually arguing against catholic doctrine as it’s based upon natural law: the observation of what men actually do. WHich is, what appears to be, the general sentiment and strategy underlying most semi scientific argument on this board. (Which I admire).
If you want to argue using reason, the libertarian methodology will most likely lead you to correct conclusions. However, libertarianism consists of a set of branches, some of which do NOT correspond to reality, including 1) Rothbard’s principle of non-violence which is a silly argument, since the entire problem of social order is non-violence 2) free trade would lead in the end, to as state of affairs not any different from world-governance 3) libertarians have not included the cost-of-forgone-opportunities which is how we pay for the creation of some set of property rights, and therefore, failed to account for the cost of developing social order. As such, it’s a platonic fantasy counter to evidence.
Conservatism is the best strategy for preventing social destruction, revolution and un-meritous rotation of elites. It is very skeptical of power - power should be obtained by public service in the market, or in the military in the defense of the market. Any other grab at power is specious. That’s the sentimental origin of the western city-market building shareholder system we call ‘citizenship’. But conservative philosophy has not provided a solution to our vast increase in the division of knowledge and labor. It has not provided us with an updated set of institutions for the contemporary world.
And FWIW : Conservatism is largely an unarticulated sentiment that is more complex than left-liberalism, as conservatives rely on at least five axis the most important of which is group persistence, and liberals only one (harm/care). The combination of harm/care simplicity, egalitarian equality, Keynesian macroeconomic policy (statistics, full employment, liquidity) and democratic government, are ideal tools for competing with a sentiment thats primary purpose is to avoid hubris, and protect the group for the long term. In other words, consumption on the left versus capitalization on the right.
The balance between liberalism (Pareto’s Instinct for Recombination, or Machiavelli’s Foxes) and conservatism (Pareto’s Preservation of Aggregates, or Machiavelli’s Lions) is a necessary conflict between the forces of stability that must allow change, but not disruption, and those that desire change regardless of consequences - because both innovation and stability are valuable to a civilization This debate in sentiments is particularly useful because reason is insufficient for solving this problem, largely because we have failed to make the same progress in induction and the social sciences that we have in deduction and the physical sciences. Partly because the physical sciences are vastly less complex than the more heuristic social science governed by the properties of the human mind.
And just so we’re all living in rational reality not committing the error of confusing our own religion with neutral objective science, much of what is argued for on this board by well meaning products of our the past sixty years of western educational system, most often is doctrine of the RELIGION of Democratic Secular Humanism (which is a religion as it is contrary to the facts). Or of egalitarian equality, which is is a property of the Democratic Secular Humanist religion, and is also contrary to the facts. Or the assumption that freedom is the desire of the majority is counter to the facts.
That is, as long as we realize that people are racist, culture-ist, class-ist, nationalist, cultist, members of competing civilizations, and they all are, because they all act that way under DURESS, and that it’s advantageous both for elites and for the underclass to be ‘anything-ist’, and that these traits are beneficial to economic man, beneficial to individuals, and an enduring part of the human experience. And if one doesn’t think so, then truth isn’t one’s objective, platonism is. Truth is correspondence with reality.
Thank you for reposting your lovely blog article, Mr. Doolittle.
Could you perhaps make it a bit more specific towards our current needs? I admit, the article has some good points… and some completely moronic points… but it’s just a cut and paste from your website.
Assuming, of course, you are the CurtD who owns the site. It seems like you may be.
I don’t know if you’re still taking suggestions, but I would suggest a “No bringing up old business” rule.
What happens occasionally is that when a poster starts to lose a debate he says something like, “Oh yeah? Well back in this thread from three years ago you proved you were a real jackass,” in a desperate attempt to discredit his opponent.
I admit that I have been guilty of this in the past myself. I have also had it done to me. It serves no valid purpose, and only tends to inflame the discussion.
I don’t understand the rhetorical strategy that requires belittling an assertion, or point of view in a debate. I certainly see belittling persons making such assertions, or holding such points of view as the logical equivalent to stating “I have no cogent argument against this assertion, but I hate it and all who do not despise it along with me.” That would hold for religious, political, and even scientific assertions.
In other words, ad hominem argument is equivalent to accepting that the point addressed is intellectually unassailable, and can only be countered with emotional prejudice. More simply, “I lose, because I am a loser by nature.”
When you can assign that judgement to someone who agrees with you, you know you have reached a level of intellecutal discourse worth of being read. Let us strive for that, and ignore those who fail to offer actual arguments. Really ignore. Fail to respond. Page Down. Don’t even notice.
