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.
Well, I’m not aware of a situation in which I was absolutely wrong yet never got around to admitting it. I have been absolutely wrong before, and painfully resistant to change, but I eventually admitted to it because I discovered I was wrong. I should note though, that I’m never wrong and know that I’m wrong yet keep arguing about it.
I think that, at worst, I’ve discovered I was wrong about something and just became silent on the issue.
In one instance I had a discussion with a guy about the logical form of some argument, and I was totally convinced I was right, to the point of getting frustrated he didn’t seem to get it. He tried to explain himself in different ways and eventually it dawned on me he was right, not me. I immediately admitted to my mistake and explained to him how he managed to show me. If I’m wrong about something, I’m wrong without knowing it.
No, not at all.
Personally, I disagree with the ideas that you present. But it is fine to debate them. And your debating style does not pose a problem for the site (in my opinion).
On this I disagree John. I think like beauty, “signal” and “noise” are subjective. I guess it has to do with expectations. I don’t expect serious scientific exchange with most, if any, of the creationists hereon, so I don’t see most of their responses as noise. And even some noise posts can be, to me anyway, a hoot and an half.
I admire Lizzie’s patience and perspective, and by association her intended goal. I just think that given some of the types of people out there and their underlying goals, her optimism was a bit naive or simply unrealistic. As I am fond of noting: you cannot argue effectively using logic and reason against someone who did not arrive at their position logically or reasonably.
See I can and have admitted a mistake when I was persuaded I was wrong.
I’m not Joey (Joe G), and I never insisted frequency = wavelength. I stick to my guns if I think I’m right, I retract when I think I’m wrong. You don’t understand my purpose of posting on the net, it’s to get editorial and technical review of my understanding.
A good example of where 3 people demanded I retract my position, but I didn’t fundamentally back down is here:
Where I discovered calculation errors, I admitted it in that thread, but my fundamental position was defended. You should read that thread and tell me if I was unequivocally shown my fundamental thesis was wrong.
I was having to deal with clown statements in that thread like this about thermodynamics:
Or
When it clearly does not as demonstrated by the fact that:
ΔH = Lf = L_effecitve = = L_f(Tm) – Integral [(c_w – c-I) dT]
and the graph in question below. Or when Keiths can’t answer a simple question on a sophomore chemistry exam about entropy change in an ice cube using his supposedly superior definitions of entropy.
So before you pontificate about me being unequivocally wrong, you might do well to see when guys on your side of the discussion just reflexively disagree with me and then can’t back down when I show them they are wrong.
Radical proposal: have a thread for each member/poster. When you respond to someone else’s post, the response shows up on your own thread, along with a snippet and link from the original.
Would require a different kind of software. Essentially a multi-author blog, with interaction between authors. Perhaps a feature allowing you to follow favored authors. A twitter blog.
Patrick says:
Then, amazingly, says this:
How will calling out perceived bad faith, willful ignorance and dishonesty not be “feeding the trolls” and serve to derail threads? How does a whole post about changing the rules and talking about the supposed “troll problem” help if we admit rules don’t work and agree that the best way to proceed is to show the restraint of not feeding the trolls and focusing on content you’d prefer to focus on?
Perhaps, Patrick, you should just focus yourself on ignoring what you consider to be trollish and bad faith posts, and on contributing in a positive way to posts you prefer, and just let the rest of us sort out our behaviors our own way according to the rules here and our own preferences. Surely you aren’t trying to impose your own personal preferences on the rest of us?
We are still waiting for Neil to support his claim- one reason TSZ is broken, mods make claims they cannot support
Brilliant!
Acartia:
Sal, who had previously misunderstood the request and offered examples of his admitting (minor) errors, goes for the Full Monty:
Followed by a revisitation of his Kirchhoff’s law errorfest.
So Sal, I hereby confirm that you have been wrong and doggedly stuck to your guns. But I think Acartia was looking for commenters to be willing to admit that this was the case
Absolutely Epic.
Strange, I don’t expect serious scientific exchange with most, if any, of the evolutionists hereon, so I don’t see most of their responses as noise. With evolutionists you cannot argue effectively using logic and reason against someone who did not arrive at their position logically or reasonably. And evolutionists did not arrive at their position using logic and reason. Heck they don’t even know how to test the claim that blind and mindless processes didit.
William J. Murray,
Ah, so you will extricate yourself from the Chrumptian circle jerk to synthesize an equation, not present in the OP, of trolling with “flagrant dishonesty and repeated, willful ignorance.” You are not a troll. You are flagrantly dishonest, and willfully ignorant.
🙁 Sorry to hear that.
Here is a howler of an error someone didn’t ever retract even after I pointed it out:
Entropy Change is represented by ΔS.
If “entropy change is temperature-independent”, then ΔS would be constant for all T, therefore TΔS vs. T would be a straight line, not a curved line. But if the TΔS vs. T plot is not straight, then this statement by DNA_Jock is false:
Which I demonstrated.
But even after I spoon fed my prospective student trying to learn thermodynamics, he couldn’t comprehend. I even showed him a graph of TΔS vs T to show him TΔS is not a straight line by drawing a straight GREEN line to contrast against the dashed RED line which is clearly curved – as in not straight, as in not linear, as in falsifying this idiotic Darwin-award winning claim “entropy change is temperature-independent”.
So who is to blame in this case for the Skeptical Zone being broken in this case? Not me, because I can distinguish a straight line on a graph from one that is something clearly not straight. Heck a 2nd grader could probably do that, but that seems to be something beyond DNA_Jock’s ability to do. Now why is that? If you can answer that, then you can start answering the question as to why TSZ is broken.
That’s me. Drama queen.
I find it absolutely amazing how many times I have to repeat myself here over even the simplest things. Calling someone else a liar, or calling them dishonest, does nothing to demonstrate to anyone that they actually are lying or being dishonest.
Otoh, if you actually demonstrate by way of argument and evidence that they lied or were dishonest, it’s easy enough for others to see and doesn’t require any evidence-free name calling at all.
That’s the sort of site I think Lizzie wants. That’s the sort of site many people here claim to want. One where evidence is presented. It’s the sort of site Patrick certainly claims to want.
And no one has ever said that if you feel compelled to break the rules that you cannot do so in Noyau. Ever.
So you don’t want the kind of site that Lizzie desires, Just admit it.
Better yet. Go elsewhere.
Why do evolutionists insist on projecting?
I’d like to know who the three people were that demanded a retraction from him.
ETA: You sure know how to derail a thread!
I am still waiting for a post in which acartia was right and was not being immature. 😛
I know that I have no problem acknowledging when others are wrong.
And that’s what’s important, after all.
Glen Davidson
I am never wrong. Just occasionally factually challenged.
It is impolite to ridicule disabilities,
Allan:
Oh, sure, but Acartia was asking specifically about blog posts:
Allan:
I’m actually working on an OP about the relations between past, present and future selves, so thanks for the example.
Note to fellow Mericans: “skip” = “dumpster”. I had to Google it.
Well, duh.
It’s your behavior that demonstrates your dishonesty, Mung.
This is an example of a year-long kerfuffle between me and the TSZ regulars over a trivial question about 500 fair coins emerging 100% heads (or alternatively a fair coin being flipped 500 times and coming up heads 100% of the time).
TSZ regular:
I said that was stupid to say so, but Keiths took huge exception to my claim and we argued for over a year about it. I described my point of view here:
And then this argument culminated in this exchange here:
Strictly speaking these exchanges weren’t solely about ID but about statistics and physical processes and expected outcomes. The heated debate lasted over a year.
You ask why is Skeptical Zone Broken? Look at the bickering over trivial crap like the behavior of 500 fair coins!
Then your posts accusing me of dishonesty are just so much added noise and completely unnecessary.
You’ve kindly provided yet another example of why the premise of the OP is false. It’s also people like you who muck up the site and contribute to its brokenness.
KN: “I agree that The Skeptical Zone has not fulfilled its intended purpose, and that’s the fault of pretty much everyone here…”
That includes Patrick and keiths, the two people least likely to take a look at and modify their own behavior. Two peas in a pod.
Usually, when we are persistently wrong and refuse to admit it, we don’t admit it. It’s up to others to point that sort of thing out. Tropical mammoths come to mind at the moment. Young fossils buried in old rocks. Pseudofossils mistaken for real fossils. I could go on.
These also come to mine- Blind and mindless processes producing the diversity of life. Blind and mindless processes producing the genetic code. Blind and mindless processes producing life. Blind and mindless processes predicting a nested hierarchy. I could go on
Designed life.
Yes, people should be called on complete bollocks. Especially once it’s clear that they’ll never admit errors that extend from the surface to the core of their “worldviews.”
Glen Davidson
What? No one has demonstrated life can arise from matter and energy via blind and mindless processes. And of course no one has demonstrated that matter and energy can arise via blind and mindless processes.
Clearly Glen’s worldview is to his core and to remove it could be fatal
Takes two to tango.
Um, Sal, linking to two threads at UD is probably not the most effective way to argue that TSZ is broken.
The pertinent question is, why did you drag out the discussion for so long when eigenstate was clearly correct and you were obviously wrong?
keiths:
Mung:
To the contrary, they serve an important purpose, which is to make you feel very uncomfortable when you lie. To ignore your dishonesty would only encourage more of it, to the detriment of TSZ.
It clearly gets under your skin when someone points out your dishonesty, and that’s a good thing.
Mung, it’s fairly obvious that you crave respect and approval from your fellow commenters. If you want those things, then earn them.
Your current approach — trying to lie and bluff your way to respect — is backfiring.
I think we are all pretty much aware of the cause of many of our differences, they stem from our worldview.
I’m a theist. I believe God exists. Critics of theism here don’t spend much effort trying to demonstrate that God does not exist. So why should I change my mind about it? Do people who mock theists for for their belief in God think their mocking is an argument against the existence of God?
I’m also a Christian. I believe Jesus existed. I see mocking of Christianity, what I don’t see are arguments that Christianity is false. I see mocking of the belief that Jesus existed, what I don’t see are arguments that he didn’t exist. So why should I change my mind?
That pattern repeats itself over and over. The site is not a site of skeptics, it’s a site for mockers. And mockers will mock. It’s what they do. So I mock the mockers. Guilty as charged.
Monkey see, monkey do.
keiths, I can think of no evidence that would disconfirm your hypothesis. Typical evolutionist bullshit. 🙂
Mung,
You see plenty of them, but you’re in denial.
Want to test that hypothesis? Start a thread asking for arguments against Christianity. You’ll get an earful.
Pretending that we haven’t argued against Christianity is a lot easier than responding to our arguments, isn’t it?
Thank you, thank you very much. I’m here til Thursday — try the veal!
</Shrek>
Mung,
Not that you’re prejudiced or nuffink.
I am the most open-minded closed-minded person I know.
You need to re-read what I’m suggesting. I’d prefer the admins to have fewer privileges. In particular, I recommend eliminating the ability to move comments to Guano. The only authority the admins should have is to enforce the bannable offenses (spamming, doxing, and porn, basically). Aside from that, admins would focus on the mechanics of keeping the site up and running.
Well summarized. Unfortunately, in the U.S. we’re still seeing creationists trying to force their dogma into public schools using some of the arguments from the IDC movement. Being prepared for those by seeing them here has some value.
Yes, you do, even when it isn’t happening…
I agree with much of what you write here, but I don’t think everyone is unwilling to consider challenges to their priors. While I definitely am at fault as much as anyone in not achieving Lizzie’s goals, I would be fascinated to learn about a design detection method that actually works. I’d be very interested in a scientific hypothesis of intelligent design with testable entailments. I would happily engage in good faith with anyone who presented either of those.
The problem for Lizzie’s goals is that we never see any such thing. All we get from the IDCists here are PRATTS, ignorant critiques of science, and arguments of the quality of “Well, you can’t prove that an invisible, omnipotent being didn’t do something!”
Even a hypothetical perfectly rational being who parked her priors at the door every day would eventually conclude that there is no there there in Intelligent Design. Changing our attitudes isn’t going to make it less vacuous.
I agree completely. I’d like to see Lizzie’s goals become more guidelines and let TSZ become what the community is interested in. I think most are aligned with you.
I agree with this as well and would like to encourage more of that kind of material here.
The high noise, low signal material from the IDCists does interfere with the quality comments, unfortunately.
True. It’s too bad the tools to prevent the damage they do to the discussion don’t exist for WordPress.
Those have been presented, Patrick, and you just rejected them out-of-hand. And yet you cannot show that evolutionism has those. You won’t even try as you incorrectly believe others have done so.
So, Patrick, if you ever actually ante up and post scientific hypotheses of evolution by means of blind and mindless processes with testable entailments or tell us of the methodology used to determine life and its diversity are the result of said processes, you would have a point.
All we get from the evolutionists here are PRATTS, ignorant critiques of science, and arguments of the quality of “Well, you can’t prove that an invisible, omnipotent being did something!”
I’m not a JoeG sock, but I’ll take a turn. I have numerous examples both online and off of defending technical decisions past the point of where I should have seen my error. The most recent non-technical example might be of more interest here.
I was in a discussion with an extreme SJW in an email group. I have very little respect for this woman’s views. Most of the time I consider her a caricature of herself. The topic in this case was the use of the word “bitch” as an insult. She was making the case that it is a gendered insult that is much worse than “dick”, despite both being arguably gendered.
Her point that finally got through to me was “Bitch is what you call a man acting like a woman and a woman acting like a man.” It took a while for me to see the issue in those terms.
It’s a shame I lost that word. Some guys really do act like whiney little bitches.
The first half may have a point. The second half is not even wrong. When a woman is trying to act like a man I would say stop trying to be a dick.
For years I had defended evolutionists as honest people seeking scientific answers to the question of how did we get here. Holy shit was I ever wrong about that. Nothing could be further from the truth. I was so embarrassed by my actions that I gave up trying to defend groups of people.
This thread is working out well.
Everything Is Broken
As a former special ed major I find it interesting that people who would never use the C word or the N word or the B word will freely use tard.
Not to mention words like Fascist or Nazi.
I’m amazed at how name calling has slipped in as a substitute for argument.
Exactly. It’s as if it’s simply not possible to show “opprobrium” by argument or without name calling.