The Skeptical Zone is not fit for its intended purpose.
Elizabeth created The Skeptical Zone with admirable and lofty goals:
My name is Elizabeth Liddle, and I started this site to be a place where people could discuss controversial positions about life, the universe and everything with minimal tribal rancour (pay no attention to the penguins….)
My motivation for starting the site has been the experience of trying to discuss religion, politics, evolution, the Mind/Brain problem, creationism, ethics, exit polls, probability, intelligent design, and many other topics in venues where positions are strongly held and feelings run high. In most venues, one view dominates, and there is a kind of “resident prior” about the integrity, intelligence and motivation of those who differ from the majority view.
That is why the strapline says: “Park your priors by the door”. They may be adjusted by the time you leave!
She provides more details on the Rules page:
So I’m going to start a bit vague, then get more specific as need arises.The principle is in the strapline: Park your priors by the door. Everyone has priors, they are crucial to way we make sense of the world. But the impetus behind this site is to be a place where they can be loosened and adjusted while you wait. So leave them by the door, and pick them up again as you leave!
There are plenty of blogs and forums where people with like priors can hang out and scoff at those who do not share them. There’s nothing wrong with those sites, and I’ve learned a lot from them. But the idea here is to provide a venue where people with very different priors can come to discover what common ground we share; what misunderstandings of other views we hold; and, having cleared away the straw men, find out where our real differences lie. In my experience, when you reach that point, who is right becomes obvious to both parties 🙂
It is painfully obvious that Elizabeth’s final sentence is not supported by the empirical evidence. Measured by its ability to achieve Elizabeth’s stated goals, The Skeptical Zone is broken. The reason for that is obvious: Elizabeth’s goals can only be achieved if all participants are genuinely supportive of them and willing to not just assume good faith but actually act in good faith. That is not the case here. It is clear that several members of the TSZ community are not at all interested in “find[ing] out where our real differences lie”, parking their priors at the door, or risking disconfirmation of their positions. These people add nothing to the discussion but disruption through the repetition of baseless, nonsensical claims even after multiple refutations.
The root cause of why TSZ cannot meet Elizabeth’s goals is the nature of one of the primary topics here, intelligent design creationism. IDC is a religiously-based political movement, not a scientific endeavor. There is no scientific hypothesis of IDC, there are no testable entailments, no one supports it because of evidence or reason. IDC is creationism dressed up in a costume lab coat. It is a fundamentally, inherently dishonest attempt to make an end run around the separation of church and state after the Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard.
IDC supporters are not interested in challenging their own religious beliefs. There is no evidence or logic that will sway them because their identities are too tightly tied to those beliefs. They are incapable of aligning with Elizabeth’s goals because they are waging Culture War. Evidence, reason, science, and truth are not what they value.
While there are interesting discussions on a wide variety of scientific and philosophical topics here, they are being increasingly crowded out by the high volume of comments containing little more than PRATT (Previously Refuted A Thousand Times) creationist tropes. We have a couple of participants suffering from aggressive, weaponized ignorance and a willingness to display it in a prodigious stream of comments. We have someone who aspires to be the clown prince of intelligent design creationism but only manages to be an attention whoring, dishonest, humorless troll. We have a presuppositionalist who can’t see out of the hole he was placed in as a child and pulled in after himself. We have a young earth creationist who uses the valuable input of working scientists solely to hone his ability to indoctrinate others with his anti-science beliefs. We have a number of seagull commenters who just fly in, crap all over everything, and leave. And we have a lot of people, myself included, who eventually respond to such prolonged stupidity with frustration.
So what, if anything, is a possible way to achieve Elizabeth’s goals for the site? How do we get to the point where we can “find out where our real differences lie” so that “who is right becomes obvious to both parties”?
One option is better tools. “Technical solutions to social problems rarely work.” is an engineering maxim, for good reason. In this case, though, it may be that better technology that reduces the noise generated by the anti-science participants could have a significant benefit, while respecting everyone’s freedom of expression.
TSZ does provide the ability to ignore specified participants. That reduces some of the volume from those who are not aligned with Elizabeth’s goals, but the sometimes large number of replies to those being ignored are not blocked. Usenet solved this problem decades ago through newsreaders that support threading of discussions and personalized killfiles to remove specific people or topics from the user’s feed.
Another alternative is a karma system like Reddit or Hacker News. Giving individuals the ability to configure their viewing preferences so that only comments above some threshold are displayed would reduce the ability of those not acting in good faith to disrupt discussion. This would also eliminate the need for admins to move rule-violating comments to Guano. One size does not fit all, so a karma system would have to take into account individual relationships. For example, the system might know that I generally agree with one person’s comment ratings and give their votes more weight in my personal view of the site. This could result in multiple disjoint sets of participants. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Unfortunately, no software with these capabilities is currently available for WordPress. We should adopt them if and when they are, but it’s not a near term solution.
Another option is increased censorship. (We could use nice euphemisms like “moderation” or “curating” but let’s be brutally honest.) Censorship can take many forms. We could make failure to act in accordance with the site goals a bannable offense. We could follow the After the Bar Closes approach of giving particularly disruptive participants their own thread and banning them from any others. One admin, if I understand him correctly, supports treating PRATTs as spam and moving comments containing them to Guano.
That last suggestion is one step on the path to curating every post and comment for quality. This is journal-style moderation where nothing gets posted without approval. While it might achieve Elizabeth’s goals, it is a very labor intensive approach.
We could maintain a list of PRATTs (the Talk Origins archive is a good start) and move all comments that repeat them without supporting evidence to a Guano-like thread. We could go further and heavily moderate comments that don’t contribute to the discussion.
All of these possibilities violate the principle of freedom of expression. They do not encourage the free and open exchange of ideas, they are vey likely to lead to significantly reduced participation, and they’ll definitely lead to more arguments and meta-discussion in Moderation Issues. I’m certainly not interested in playing the role of censor and I wouldn’t trust anyone who volunteered for it.
The only currently viable option I see is to let the TSZ community be what it wants to be. There are a large number of valuable posts and comments here by experienced scientists and philosophers that are worth preserving. Even with the noise from the anti-science crowd that signal isn’t completely drowned out. There is also value in honing arguments against those incapable of changing their minds, even when that doesn’t meet Elizabeth’s goals and distracts from discussions that are aligned with them. It seems that the community wants both.
If there are enough of us here who are aligned with Elizabeth’s goals, we can achieve them voluntarily. Elizabeth touched on this approach herself:
This post by Reciprocating Bill sums up the ethos of the site brilliantly so I’m quoting it here:
Participation at this site entails obligations similar to those that attend playing a game. While there is no objective moral obligation to answer questions, the site has aims, rules and informal stakeholders, just as football has same. When violations of those aims and rules are perceived and/or the enforcement of same is seen as arbitrary or inconsistent, differences and conflicts arise. No resort to objective morality, yet perfectly comprehensible and appropriate opprobrium.
The current rules don’t support this ethos. In the interests of taking off the gloves and giving opprobrium the chance to work, I suggest two rule modifications. First, the rule about assuming good faith should not require active stupidity in the face of bad faith. Calling out flagrant dishonesty and repeated, willful ignorance should not be against the rules. Second, I suggest eliminating the overhead of endless Moderation Issue discussions by no longer allowing admins to move comments to Guano. The bannable offenses should still be enforced since they provide legal protection to Elizabeth and the site.
My final suggestion is being the change we want to see. Rules and tools are not going to achieve Elizabeth’s goals. People acting individually and cooperating voluntarily can. That means having the discipline to stop feeding the trolls (or at least moving the slop bucket to Noyau). It means encouraging the quality posts and comments and ignoring the noise. I think a good percentage of the TSZ participants agree with what Elizabeth is trying to achieve. Let’s turn the free speech dial up to 11 and take responsibility for it.
“I have made this OP longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” (With apologies to Blaise Pascal.)
I’m curious to hear how people think TSZ can be improved.
Patrick:
I agree. The movement of comments to Guano, along with its concomitant effects, has been a net negative for TSZ.
The elimination of Guanoing would be the easiest way to improve TSZ while honoring Lizzie’s stated goals of neither controlling what people write, nor what they read.
However, she has also expressed a desire for ‘housekeeping’ so that those who dislike ‘guano’ would not be forced to wade through it. If that is still a strong desire, I have a proposal for how it could be implemented without infringing on participants’ ability to write and read what they desire. I’ve already described it elsewhere, but I’ll summarize it later in this thread.
My preference would be to eliminate Guanoing altogether, however.
I don’t agree that it is broken. I do agree that it is imperfect.
My suggestion:
Start your own site.
Use forum software, not blog software.
Neil:
That’s silly, when we gave the option of making TSZ better.
Not sure about that. Sounds too black-and-white. I think the aim to facilitate rancour-free discussion across a wide range of viewpoints is well-nigh impossible. But I’ve not seen a better attempt and the activity level here has remained high. I agree that one loophole regarding the current rules is there is little provision to discourage repetitive and unresponsive comments. Not everyone has TSZ’s best interests at heart.
I certainly think there should be an option to deal with PRATT comments. I haven’t kept count but my impression is we’ve lost several participants who became exasperated over having to treat PRATT commenters as if posting in good faith. I don’t see why it would increase moderation activity having the sanction in place. I don’t equate moving comments with censorship but It would be great if interventions were unnecessary. I’ll say again, for the vast majority of members for most of the time, moderation is indeed unnecessary.
On the other hand, I do think there is redundancy in having guano and noyau. I’d be happier with moving comments (if, for arguments sake, a simpler set of rules were produced) to noyau rather than quarantining them in guano.
But frankly, I think we are limited by WordPress software. A forum-style venue allows more options such as the ones Patrick is suggesting.
Being in favour of experiments, I’d suggest setting up an associated forum and members could try it for size. We’d then also have the option of keeping TSZ blog as it is and a moderation-free regime for the forum. The previous forum didn’t work but that was because the software was completely crap and it was suspected of crashing the site, though the main problem was a cheap hosting package with a very cheap host. The current host,1&1, have provided an excellent service so far.
I’m not sure how to improve the site, but I think that part of the problem is simply that few IDists bother to interact with on any of these forums now other than especially ignorant and trollish types. We need better IDists/creationists, and while they were never very intellectual as a whole, there used to be a few that had some interest in doing something other than pounding the platitudes. Now there are very few of those indeed.
Nothing will be very satisfactory with the present bunch of IDists, because the smarter ones either quit the fraud (some of the Biologos people were IDists but got better) or insulated themselves from any meaningful criticisms of ID.
Glen Davidson
Unsupportable bullshit. That is a PRATT right there, Patrick
Then it strange that scientific hypotheses for ID have been presented. OTOH no one has presented any scientific hypotheses for evolution by means of blind and mindless processes. The testable entailments have also been presented for ID. Evolutionism not so much.
So the problem is people like Patrick who don’t know jack and think they can spew whatever they want
I see you posted the short version while I was typing. I agree that Patrick’s judgement is a bit harsh.
Forum software allows more options than WordPress blog software. Setting up an associated forum would allow everyone participating here to make their own choice.
I’m still doubtful that you agree much with Lizzie’s stated aims.
As I’ve remarked a few times now, ID has no reason to exist anymore. The Trump administration seems likely to let the religious right have its way regardless.
Right on cue.
*Fixed that for you!
LoL! I have supported my claims wrt evolutionism and science- you and yours not so much
Who cares what you say, Alan? You sure as hell cannot support the claims of evolution by means of blind and mindless processes. And ID isn’t going away until someone does,
I already said I would take on anyone here- the merits of ID vs the merits of evolution by means of blind and mindless processes. The fact that no one took me up on t\he offer tells me that you guys don’t have anything but your raw spewage
One big improvement would be to keep the people who were banned, banned. No blatantly obvious sock puppets.
That would clean up about 80% of the horseshit right off the bat.
Joe Gallien’s ban should be enforced. He can attention whore at his blog or any other fora he’s not been banned from.
What is the scientific hypothesis for blind and mindless processes producing a vision system? How about for producing any bacterial flagellum?
I’m responsible for what I write, Joe, not for what anyone else writes. If you think I’ve made some claim which you think is wrong or unsupported by evidence, you are welcome to point it out. You are responsible for what you write and you might pay more attention to supporting your claims with evidence. “I have done” should be followed by the link to where “I have done”.
I have more than a little sympathy for this view though I’m not in favour of capital punishment or lifetime bans without the opportunity for redemption. Second chances but not third chances!
I have. You make such claims all of the time and when I point them out you just leave and don’t respond. Patrick made unsupportable claims in this OP and I pointed them out.
Your entire position is unsupported by the evidence, Alan. You can’t even provide testable hypotheses.
Actually, no, you haven’t.
I can support my claim and I know that you cannot. So tell me what claims have I not supported?
I said that evolutionism posits blind and mindless processes and I supported that claim. I said that science cannot be governed by dogma and supported that claim. I said science requires testable claims and supported that.
The niche is indeed blind and mindless and is the designing agent that directs adaptation. Whilst I can’t give you a definitive list of every twist and turn of every line of descent from LUCA, there are some good examples of how evolution happens. The Giant Petri Dish Experiment being just one cool example.
ID virtually has gone away. Dembski has officially abandoned ID and Behe has been quiet on ID since, well for a while. You don’t need it any more. Trump has opened the door to the destruction of science education.
IMHO allowing “Frankie” was the second chance. We got exactly the same regurgitated IDiot talking points, distraction, and insults he’s been posting for the last ten years. Time to pull the plug.
You keep saying that but you never support it.
Nope, not even close. Look Alan, your position has nothing- no testable hypotheses, no supporting evidence and no predictions based on the mechanisms. And unless that changes ID isn’t going anywhere
Alan:
Um, no:
I agree that allowing JoeG to sock-puppet as Frankie was not the way to have gone. There should have been an acknowledgement over the wrong-doing and an undertaking to respect the rules before a reinstatement. I was surprised when Lizzie allowed the current situation to happen.
I think it’s overdue but it’s not my sole decision.
I can only speak for myself in as much as I don’t plan to be around TSZ much as I’m moving on. You’ll hear from me sporadically here, but hopefully not much.
So my moving on is my little contribution to easing some of the TSZ problems, but I can’t speak for the other IDists and creationists obviously.
It’s obvious I have different values and goals than most of the regulars, it’s amazing we got along as well as we did.
I want to thank Alan, Neil and Elizabeth for hosting so many of my comments and threads while I was in exile from UD since Summer of 2015.
Good grief! I sit corrected! A whole hour? They must have been expecting a Clinton win!
ETA correcting run time
Frankie/Joe’s main ‘crime’ is the delivery of unutterable tedium.
Evolutionists main crime is lying for evolutionism.
You have to appreciate how the OP makes it appear to all be the fault of “the other guys.”
“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”
I currently have seven commenters on Ignore with two or three more hovering at the edge of going there (or back there). So one of my contributions to improving the site is to put the people who spew the most crap on Ignore so I am not tempted to respond to them.
One of Elizabeth’s goals was that the site not become “an echo chamber.” Yet that sounds precisely like what is being proposed in the OP. Who wants to go first with the list of things not to be spoken here?
Here’s my suggestion. Let’s take one thing at a time and see if any agreement at all can be reached. How about Guano. What should be done? If the mods stop sending posts to Guano there’s no reason to have Frankie or phoodoo in moderation screening.
My own opinion is that Guano causes more trouble than it’s worth and that it doesn’t work anyways. So I am in favor of no more sending posts to Guano.
And of course, if there is no Guanoable comment there’s no real need for Noyau either. Though I suppose we could leave it there for the grown-ups to use when they don’t want to perhaps muck up an existing thread with nasty comments that just can’t go without being said. But no forced movements to Noyau.
That’s probably enough for now.
The part I think is broken is TSZ’s support for Lizzie’s goal of finding out where our differences lie and thereby being able to see who is right. That’s just not happening. It’s hard enough with good faith participants. It’s impossible with creationists.
AmericaTSZ, love it or leave it? What’s wrong with trying to improve it? Treating people like Frankie and Mung (80% of the time) as if they are posting in good faith is just stupid.While I agree that Frankie is a problem that is easily fixed by permaban (and that’s the recommended solution), note that Patrick says “several members” and he has a number of suggestions that have a sweeping effect on everyone, such as karma system and voting individual posts up and down. In Patrick’s opinion, everyone is the problem.
Having had discussions about rules with him before, it’s known that he thinks the rules themselves problematic. To discuss rules and other admin/off-topic stuff, there were instituted the sections Noyau and Moderation issues. By posting this OP, Patrick is bordering on rule-breaking himself right now. This is not the first time.
TSZ is not broken (only) because of the behavior of one or some particular members, but because of mods inability to stick to the rules. It’s mods’ duty to facilitate the rules by their own example. This is particularly important when the atmosphere is generally unruly. The atmosphere is unruly here, but Patrick does not understand mod’s duty. He is setting a bad example and thus he is making this worse.
I submit that Liz’s rules have been working quite okay. The rules have worked amazingly well given her own negligence to manage the place in person. In fact, the rules are few and simple and don’t require any personal responsibility at all – perfect for hired mods to follow Whereas Patrick’s propositions would give more power to the mods, proportionately also demanding more mental and moral investment from them, but with the character flaws he himself has, this would be a highway to Patrick’s libertarian utopia-land where he gets to overrule others nevermind the rules – because, as noted, rules are the problem in his view.
For example, in the OP, Patrick accuses “several members” of failure to be “interested in “find[ing] out where our real differences lie”, parking their priors at the door, or risking disconfirmation of their positions. These people add nothing to the discussion but disruption through the repetition of baseless, nonsensical claims even after multiple refutations.” Can Patrick be himself counted among such members? Yes, most definitely, but this is a beam he doesn’t see in his own eye and that’s where his OP is coming from. The real solution is for Patrick to grow the skin of a true mod and have the tolerance of difference of opinion that the current rules require of him.
I may have been deliberately emphatic to encourage discussion. 😉
I agree completely. I’d like to take of the handcuffs of the “always assume good faith” rule so that those people can be addressed directly.
The biggest issue with your suggestion is that it will increase the amount of meta-discussion in Moderation Issues. That’s already too high.
If Lizzie won’t support eliminating moderation entirely, I’d definitely agree with merging Guano and Noyau.
In many cases, perhaps even in most cases, there is no “fact of the matter” about who is right or wrong. It also seems to me that the belief that there is always such a fact of the matter has got to be one of the most theistic-centric ideas going at this site.
It sounds admirable, but I don’t think we should focus on it when deciding how to improve the site because it is utterly unrealistic. The problem isn’t so much with the people here but with the unrealistic ideal that Patrick’s proposing.
Expecting perfection from people? How Godly of us. 🙂
That’s a limited solution because you’ll still see replies to those people cluttering up your feed. When it’s someone as prolific as Frankie, the ignore function doesn’t work unless you can convince everyone else to ignore him too.
Your reading comprehension is not impressive. I explicitly said I didn’t want to be involved in increased censorship and I proposed rule changes to eliminate the existing moderation.
There’s no reason to have phoodoo in screening in that case. Frankie, on the other hand, has committed one of the bannable offenses in the past and I see no reason to trust that he won’t in the future.
We’re in agreement. Good for you.
Noyau serves a purpose as a place to take off topic discussions, at the very least. I agree with not allowing admins to move comments there.
Perhaps your motion then is brought prematurely.
The mods need to get together and decide whether or not they are willing to make changes without Elizabeth’s approval. Otherwise there’s not much point to this exercise.
Everyone is someone’s problem. In case I wasn’t clear, I favor a karma system that takes into account how closely each person’s decisions align with each other person’s. If you generally disagree with my assessment of a comment, my down vote would have no impact on what you see. If you generally agree with, say, KN then his votes would be given more weight in your view of the site. The algorithm is similar to the recommendation systems you see on shopping sites.
For the record, I may be the only person who doesn’t favor permabanning Frankie. I don’t know why Lizzie let him back, but I support freedom of expression for him just as much as for anyone else here. That very important principle aside, banning people just creates online martyrs.
WoW. See how much agreement we already have? 😀
Of course moderation should remain for bannable offenses. But other than that, what would be left in the way of moderation?
Where am I expecting perfection? I think that voluntary interactions among people here with no censorship will be a messy, variable system with both benefits and costs. I also think we can’t do better.
I’m willing for some other people to be martyred. 😉
I’m not willing to do so. Lizzie’s site, Lizzie’s rules.
I’m sure you’ll be in Expelled 2
I will go away if and when evolutionists start posting testable hypotheses for evolution by means of blind and mindless processes, test and confirm them.
Stop hurling feces at ID and IDists and start leading by example. If you are going to say that ID doesn’t have X then show us that evolutionism does. Show us the testable hypotheses for the evolution of vision systems via blind and mindless processes and then we can compare it to the testable hypotheses for ID wrt the design of vision systems. Show us the evidence that supports evolution by blind and mindless processes. Show us something beyond equivocation.
And if you are going to attack ID at least take the time to read what IDists really say. I learned about evolutionism by reading darwin, Dawkins, Mayr, Gould- all of the alleged experts. That is why I cite them when people say that I have it wrong. Strange how often it contradicts what my opponents say.
Except that we have two classes of people: mods and members. No matter how generally disliked you may be, you won’t disappear into oblivion, while intensely hated downvoted regular members will pass the threshold to limbo at some point. Let’s grant that they probably deserve it, but then again, so do you, but you get to stay active due to mod status. You see no problem with that? Evidently not, because this is what you proposed.
My bad. I thought you were proposing changes to the rules. Are you then just proposing that some rules not be enforced? But we already have that, so what exactly would change?