GQ is what brought me to the SDMB, and it’s still my favorite place. When I have time on my hands, though, GD can be fun.
My first few excursions into participating in GD, however, got my butt handed to me because I wasn’t adequately rigorous in my posts. Every now and then I forget and it happens again.
I try to stay out of the political threads because there are too many people who will never admit that there might be something good about the other party or bad about their own. There’s very little mind-changing going on in political threads.
In the religious and supernatural threads, I do see people changing their minds from time to time, but it’s clear there will never be a resolution when the two points of view are: “Nobody has ever proven XXX, so it must be bunk” and “Nobody has ever disproven XXX, so it must be true.”
It would be nice to have a little “I changed my mind on this issue because of this thread” tag, just to know it happens sometimes.
I don’t feel stupid; I feel humbled. There are some seriously smart people in GD, and some seriously knowledgeable people there too. And there are those gods who combine the two.
I typically don’t bother with GD. It always struck me as a place for people who enjoy arguing for the sake of arguing. NTTAWTT, but it’s not my style. I find it exhausting.
I used to feel stupid with GD, but then I realized that a fair chunk of the so-called intelligent posting is just arrogant puffery. Well, I still feel stupid a lot of the times honestly, but I feel qualified to be able to play my hand there.
I almost never do though, for two reasons. One, I always read the religious ones and I’ve gotten very burned out from doing so. Note my recent 14 page pit thread which didn’t resolve anything… Two, it takes so long to read GD and come away with anything more than a brain stupor.
Yes. I especially love the picayune wordplay and the Wars of the Dictionaries–which is so middle school. I find it tiresome, really. Most people really only want to be heard, not castigated or slapped down. I like this place a lot, but there are plenty of folks who are just itching to score off someone else (or so it seems lately). I feel the same way about the Pit, where no matter what personal tragedy has happened to you, you are WRONG in some fundamental way about it. But I’m digressing…
IMO, the whole Mika thing in this very thread is a microcosm of the pedantry of GD. There are lots of folks who aren’t going to open their minds up and listen or witness another’s POV or experience. I don’t think it’s wrong of her to say her mind’s made up re being pro-choice*.
From that statement, I assume that if some new information or technology came along and made abortion unnecessary, that any reasonable, rational person would change their mind. But given that that’s so unlikely as to be laughable, it makes sense for her to say “never”. Surely, this is obvious, Priceguy? People use words like never and always frequently for these issues. Stuff like this, where 2 posters end up micro-analyzing a simple phrase drives me nuts. :rolleyes: **
*and I’m right with her: pro-choice forever! <militant fist bump>
** no offensive to either party in this thread meant.
Once every so often I will start feeling big enough that I’ll actually start posting in GD, which will continue for a few weeks until I utterly cover myself with humiliation (in my own mind - no one else ever notices my existence) and don’t even dare look at GD for several months, let alone post in it. My biggest problem is that I’m too lazy to come up with cites, so if someone actually notices my post enough to challenge it, I got nothin’.
I was thinking of something more along the lines of a “physical-response-to stimuli into speech” translator where you could hear an infant’s thoughts while in utero- would make it pretty hard to support the right to choose in the face of digitized baby talk.
well, that notion blew my mind, but it doesn’t change my opinion re abortion. It won’t be technology (not direct tech) that does it–abortion is a human issue. Until each and everyone of us is willing to cope with the demands of every other human on the planet, we need abortion.
Since I started here,I’ve always kind of felt intimidated by GD, but now mostly it’s irritating. Some guy somewhere is going to tell me how I should feel/vote/think about guns/government/social issues/ethics? Maybe I’m just exceptionally crabby today and am fed to the back teeth with people telling me what I “should” do or not do I don’t think so. Someone is going to tell me, whilst patronizingly putting me in my place, that my word usage is incorrect so now go out and play? WTF?
It seems to me that it’s a pulpit for the same old character actors doing the same ole soft shoe through a dog and pony show. And god forbid anyone new attempt to contribute.
Ok, I’m getting way too indignant for this thread. Sorry. GD should be open to anyone, not some sort of tribulation or trial by internet posting, IMO. Of course, having said that, I understand why it’s not and even (strangely enough, given my resentment of it) agree with the premise.
Ah. Our support for legalized abortion comes from entirely opposite places. IMHO, a f(o)etus isn’t a person (or even really alive) until it becomes self-sustaining, ie. you can take it out of the womb and it has a chance of survival… so I don’t give a shit what you do until then, as it were.
Agreed. There are times I’ve felt humbled, and there are a few GD posters over the years I have boundless respect for - but often I tend to come away having a increased opinion of my own intelligence - and often that comes because I leave the conversation or don’t engage in it to start with.
Of course not, and I never said it was. My mind’s made up too.
If it is the case that her mind cannot be changed by anything that wouldn’t change the mind of “any reasonable, rational person”, then yeah, I guess. That’s basically the same thing as having closed your mind, which is what I was talking about in the first place.
Well, that one seems easy enough to answer. A fair proportion of what passes for debate in GD is just that: polemic, and that’s pretty much why I don’t bother to post there much. That and that I prefer to post only when I’m sure of my facts, and in the religious/political threads that predominate, there may not be a whole lot of the factual goin’ on.
Otherwise, I agree with some of the previous posters on how airless the place can get at times. There is a rather small group that posts regularly there, everyone pretty much knows what positions they are likely to to take on a given subject, and they all seem to have much more time to compose lengthy posts than I do.
I felt like a super bad-ass when I started a (really lame) GD topic that actually went to 2 pages. And it only went to 2 pages because two people who had a MUCH better grasp on the topic than I went back and forth. So really, I suck…
p.s it’s always fascinating to watch people debate there (that is, when there’s true debating going on) I’m not a good debater so I try to learn.
I try, sometimes, and I always end up feeling stupid. I think maybe three times I’ve posted in there, once an OP on existentialism. It was well-received, but the posters went on to discuss things that made my brain hurt trying to comprehend. One thing that is really difficult is to post about a subject you hold very dear to your heart and then discover that you know absolutely nothing about it.
Of the threads I’ve started there, I regret not becoming further engaged in every one, I regret letting that feeling of inferiority get the best of me and have come up with all sorts of responses that will never be posted.
I believe about myself that I am capable of understanding almost anything if I put my mind to it. Indeed, I cherish learning new things, especially if they are a little tough to get the hang of. But the level of constant mental energy it requires me to keep up in Great Debates is exhausting. Not to mention I can go through 20 threads in any other forum in the same amount of time it takes for one GD thread. I am not a genius, and what intellect I have is bent toward the artistic. I have had to work hard on logic and reason; it doesn’t come naturally.
The other problem is twofold. Either,
People are arrogant jerks over there
or
I am an oversensitive ninny
or, more likely, both things are true. It’s hard for me to not take harshly worded rebuttal as a personal attack. I never had a formal debate class and I don’t know the rules. I am destined to make a fool of myself in a forum where people delight in calling others fools.
Oh, and then
3) I’m a sucker for a good argument. I see good points everywhere I turn. Often I enter with some fundamental belief and leave not knowing what my truth is. That drives me up the fucking wall.
But I have noticed myself getting a little more comfortable on the boards in general, and I do have the long-term goal of eventually integrating into Great Debates. I know if I do, I will learn a lot. In the meantime I am waiting for the love of learning to overcome the horror of looking like a damned moron.
To be fair, I felt the same way about the boards in general when I first joined. Now I’m still nervous whenever I post a strong opinion, but I’ve learned that it’s worth taking the risk.
I remember seeing one multipage thread in GD that almost seemed to parody the intellectual nature with which so many use to characterize the entire SDMB. The posts read like peer-reviewed papers for a postmodernism journal, with references to various French philosophers, deconstructionism, and so on. It was an outstanding example of mental masturbation.
Having ventured warily into a couple of threads in GD this spring, I doubt I will do so again. Many of the posters there aren’t really interested in attempting to understand opposing viewpoints as much as they are in shouting out their positions loudly, repeatedly, and claiming victory when the opposing person eventually stops trying to get someone, anyone, to signal that they understand. I sometimes read over there but that’s as far as it goes.
