I just can’t recall seeing a mod do this before, simply tell someone they’re too ignorant to continue to post in a thread and tell them to leave. The thread in question is about evolution in GD.
I don’t spend a whole lot of time in GD, so maybe this is more common than I know. And I can’t say that tomndebb reasoning is flawed, but… I dunno. I find this disturbing. I thought engagement of the ignorant was supposed to be a good thing.
From what I read in the thread, the poster was asked to leave because he/she was being intentionally obtuse, refusing to do even the most basic research before posting more nonsensical questions. Indeed, the Dope is here in part to fight ignorance, but such ignorance has to want to be fought.
Well, come to think of it, I really can’t think of a similar case. But, then, I don’t make it to the Great Debates forum much. I have seen an unofficial warning for what I would call intentional obtuseness in GQ a while back. God, I wish I could remember the poster’s name, but the question was about why martial artists don’t teach groin attacks.
And the poster…
had and annoying habit…of
writing…like this…
He/she just wouldn’t accept the consensus answer in that thread. Finally, a mod stepped in and commented, something like “asked and answered. Move along.”
But being booted out of a thread? No, I guess I don’t know of any precedent being set.
[POST=8955479]Here[/POST] is an example of a thread that was shut down and the poster chastised for being obtuse to a seemingly intentional degree. There are several others I could point to, but I’d rather not give rise to the affinity of the offending posters to aggrandizement and drama.
Deliberate, aggressive ignorance, i.e. asking a seemingly honest question, getting an informed response, and rebutting by begging from ignorance or asking proof/disproof of the questioner’s conjecture, et cetera, is obnoxious, boorish, and unworthy of inclusion in civil discourse, especially on topics in which there are factual or falsifiable points to be discussed. Frankly, I wish the moderators would spend a little more time shutting down intentionally ignorant responses to well-considered answers. It is one thing to be genuinely unknowledgeable about a topic and seeking what answers may or may not exist. It is quite another to ask a question and then beat it back when the answer is at odds with the questioner’s predisposed view of the world. Such an approach makes one reluctant to offer information to people who are genuinely ill-informed but curious.
In addition to that one, I’ve also told a poster who was being intentionally obtuse in GQ that he had to provide cites for any additional statements if they were requested, or else stop posting to the threads.
While in principle I’m sympathetic to that (at least in GQ), it would be very time consuming. I tend to step in only in extreme cases, when a poster is being very persistently ignorant and disrupting a thread.
So do the mods have an actual way of preventing someone from posting in a particular thread? Is there a box or something they check to either prevent it, or disappear that thread from that particular user?
I don’t think there is any technology involved – certainly there wasn’t in this case. Tomndebb put the mod ‘hat’ on and told the poster to stop, with the implied threat of further action if he didn’t.
No, we can’t do that on an individual thread basis. The only thing (short of closing the thread) we can really do is give moderator instructions to a particular poster to confine themselves to factually supportable posts in a thread. We could then issue a warning for failure to follow instructions if the poster persisted in posting drivel. (We could in theory delete the posts in question manually, but we generally do that only in the case of spam or trolling posts.)
I understand that, and I’m not complaining (or at least, not much); it’s just that there are some posters (aside from the occasional obvious troll) who clearly ask a seemingly inquiring question only to reveal that their agenda is purely one of argumentation for its own sake, or will become embroiled in an ongoing thread just to satisfy a need for dramatic exchange. This sort of thing is perfectly acceptable in some forums, but poor behavior in ones like General Questions.
The stated purpose of the thread in question was to assemble a group of personal descriptions or definitions of evolution, (in an IMHO manner of just seeing what everyone knew on the topic), with the stipulation that once the initial offering was presented, those recalled definitions could be challenged by others, (hence providing enough “debate” cover to keep it in GD).
Silverstreak Wonder plopped into the thread with a series of fairly off-topic, and frankly silly, attacks on the theory of evolution. Had he at least based his challenges on those of Michael Behe or Philip Johnson I might have let him continue, (and even something along the misguided lines of William Dembski I would have probably held my nose and permitted). However, he waded right in with bullshit from Kent Hovind–even using Hovind’s stock methods of responding to a refutation with a change of topic–typically with more errors.
I have seen too many decent discussions among serious posters derailed when someone who is both ignorant and stubborn insisted on having his say. I have been shutting down that sort of interruption in GD for some time and will continue to do so.
The thread topic was “what is the theory of evolution?”, not “why is evolutionary theory false?” and I simply told SW to open a new thread if he needed to attack evolution.