Dr Elizabeth Liddle conceived, created and grew this website to the success it is today. It was a new idea. Many other sites can be found where a particular worldview is being promoted or a particular sphere of interest draws people of like interest. TSZ was intended to address the problem that Lizzie saw first-hand at other sites I and many others watched her participate in. Her being turfed from one well-known ID blog was partly the catalyst to trigger this venture.
However Lizzie’s inclusiveness, readiness to put all her energy into taking all at face value in an attempt to achieve real understanding must have sapped her enthusiasm and she has been an elusive figure her in recent times. A huge distraction, I believe is that some participants don’t share her optimism that listening can be as effective as talking when promoting ideas. Dialogue has always been Lizzie’s aim; attempting to see and understand a different viewpoint.
To that end she framed a mission statement, supported by rules of engagement to facilitate productive discussion between people of widely differing opinion. She decided to be a benevolent dictator, inviting participation from anyone with an opinion to voice, news to bring for discussion, scientific discoveries to announce and explain, philosophical arguments to popularize, even religion to promote or criticise. Personally, I think this was a brave and worthwhile effort in view of the increasing polarisation that pervades modern politics and that entrains extremism, insult and ad hominem rather than reasoned argument.
During Lizzie’s absence there has been some dilution of these ideals and the signal to noise ratio has declined. I hope that Lizzie returns soon to reaffirm the ideals she set out originally. I suspect that the wrangles over moderation, argument over moderating decisions, enforcement and non-enforcement of rules don’t encourage her return. So I’m proposing a solution.
I invite ideas from anyone who shares Lizzie’s ideals on dialogue (or who doesn’t) to propose in the comments any suggestions that they think would help to improve how TSZ operates. The rules could possibly benefit from being collated in one place, as later amendments are scattered over several threads. What about a competition for the most concise and elegant summary of the aims, rules and guidelines? On her return, Lizzie could pick a winner, or she could cherry-pick from the best efforts and this would also save her time and hassle that she could better spend setting the World to rights.
So, ideas please!
My first plagiaristic attempt at a rules summary:
Attack ideas and not the people who hold them!
Another idea that Neil has suggested is to add a forum format. I also think this would be good to try. In fact I already did set up a forum using the Elkarte template to act as a demonstration. I invite all interested members to play around with the functionality. Anyone wanting to tweak it, just PM me for the permissions.
Edited 26/01/2018 17.41 CET to add an on-line poll:[democracy id=”2″]
Sal:
I repeat:
This ^^^^^^
Moved a comment to guano.
Moved comments to guano.
Specific complaints about moderation decisions belong in the moderation issues thread.
For continuity, replies to guanoed comments move there too. I’m available to discuss specific moderation complaints in the appropriate thread.
Given the many moderator abuses we’ve seen at TSZ — and mind you, I’m not mentioning any specific abuses at the moment, though that would be entirely appropriate here — let’s talk about ways in which those abuses might be curbed.
One might have hoped that this wouldn’t be necessary, but it’s clear that we need a set of rules governing moderator behavior.
High on the list should be a rule stating that “Moderators may not abuse their moderator privileges for their personal benefit.”
That was relaxed in a codicil. Another reason to relook the rules statement.
ALurker,
Not my decision. Appointment of additional admins is solely Lizzie’s choice. I’m soliciting offers to pass on for consideration is all.
ALurker: Making statements that are completely false should be against the rules.
Have you thought about this? There’s an important distinction between being mistaken or ignorant and being mendacious.
ALurker,
Well, there you go. I have a great deal of respect for Vincent, too. At least we have that in common. 🙂
ALurker,
Don’t like that word “Enforce”. What about “Encourage”?
‘‘Tis but a scratch ,I’ve had worse”
Some versions of God do not look kindly on fleecing the rubes in His name.
Where’s that written? 😯
“He said, “Come on over here son, let me show you around
Over there’s where we put the preachers, I never liked those clowns
They’re always blaming me for everything wrong under the sun
It ain’t that harder to do what’s right, it’s just maybe not as much fun
Then they walk around thinking they’re better than me and you
And then they get caught in a motel room
Doing what they said not to do”
Ray Wylie Hubbard – Conversation With The Devil Lyrics
That’s not a nice thing to say of charitable patrons who I’m trying to help better their own lives.
stcordova,
Sal, that photo could be interpreted as spam. I don’t think it is part of TSZ’s ethic to be promoting dentistry.
quote:
I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish every one with tears. And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified. I coveted no one’s silver or gold or apparel. You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my necessities and to those who were with me. In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.'”
(Act 20:29-35)
end quote:
peace
newton,
Played the whole song. Interesting philosophy!
That they are naive enough to be fleeced? You hang out in Vegas, everybody is rube given the right scam. On the other some versions might be good with it.
I could be wrong, how are you helping the donors to your favorite charity better their lives?
Now that is funny.
Indeed! The World needs more lerts.
Alan,
I haven’t received word yet if I got approved for the The Skeptical Forum you mentioned in the OP. I applied for an account.
I was referring in particular to phoodoo’s comment about Jerry Coyne. There are certain statements that are clearly false based on readily available evidence. If you want a site where quality discussion takes place, you should move that kind of thing elsewhere.
I agree completely. The purpose of this site is to encourage discussion between people with different views. Sal’s suggestion would Balkanize it.
stcordova,
try now
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
You find that offensive but think it’s perfectly fine to tell other people what they believe and know.
Or you could leave your priors at the door. Or you could support your claims, for once.
You’ve tried “encouraging” and you get more phoodoos and J-Macs. If you want a place for rational discussion, you’re going to need to enforce some rules. We’ve seen what happens when you rely on their good faith.
ALurker:
I strongly disagree. It would be bad enough to have wise and honest moderators making that sort of judgment. With guys like Alan and Neil it would be a disaster.
The best way to deal with false claims is to refute them, or to ignore them when they are so obviously false (as is often true in the case of phoodoo’s statements).
ALurker,
Well, I disagree to the extent that I don’t see the exclusivity.
Gotta say, you DO sound an awful lot like Patrick.
keiths:
Another should be that moderators are required to actually monitor — and not merely rubber-stamp — the actions of other moderators, to avoid crap like this.
I’m not suggesting we abandon ALL rules. There have to be some way to deal with things like ad-spammers, people who post child-porn, instigate violence, death-threats, outing people who want to remain anonymous and giving their real world addresses and so on. There should be rules for dealing with that.
But this lofty ideal about how-we-should-think-of-each-other is just not practical, and far too much time is spent obsessing about whether something was a personal insult, or stated in good faith.
I’m not entirely sure on the personal insult-point. I’ve been called a deluded idiot plenty of times(elsewhere), and I’ve given from the same drawer even without having received first. I’m no saint, but I generally don’t get butt-hurt about it either. It sorta comes with the territory in my view.
I guess I would be okay with a rule against direct insults (“you are an idiot”), but that allows indirectly insulting speech like “That fantastically brainless statement you made is wrong because XYZ…”.
Agreed.
I believe the call to censor “false” statements is completely counterproductive, particularly on a debate-forum where the whole purpose of it is to debate ideas and claims where both sides disagree on it’s factual status.
If no-one can make false statements, then if I was a moderator and was supposed to enforce such a rule, I’d have to literally (re)move every claim or statement contradicting evolution, as I happen to accept it as a proven fact. But then the very idea of this as a forum to debate, among other things evolution, goes out the window.
We and many IDcreationists and various brands of theists obviously disagree on what the facts are, so we should be allowed to state what we think they are and then debate them. I’m here to do that, not artifically silence people I disagree with.
Suppose someone who was a completely convinced gnostic atheist also had a moderation job, and then a theist claimed: God exists! Well, the moderator happens to think that is factually incorrect, so now s/he has to guano the comment? That’s idiotic.
I’m here to argue against claims I believe are wrong, and to show as best I can with reason and evidence that they are wrong. Not to prevent such claims from being made in the first place.
I’ll repost my reply to that same statement of ALurker’s:
That would be easiest on the moderators for sure. I’m not sure it would result in improved discussions, but it wouldn’t be worse than now.
I apologize for overstating what you said.
That sounds very reasonable. I suspect that the quality of discussion won’t necessarily improve, but it won’t get worse than what we have now with the way the rules are enforced. It is also less like to discourage quality commenters who get rightfully frustrated with some of the nonsense from the UD crowd.
In my ideal world there would be some means to structure debates. I’ve been looking at argument maps that I think could be useful for that. It’s a lot to ask from volunteer moderators, though.
I would not go so far as to say that Dog Almighty has preordained that you will suffer eternal perdition. But eternal shame is another matter. While all of the other souls in the great Bow-Haus in the Sky are wolfing down their angel food cake, you’ll be getting your nose rubbed in this stinking pile that you have deposited on the carpet, with the Hounds of Heaven thundering, over and over and over, “Bad dog. Bad dog. Very bad dog!”
(Thanks for what, literally, is the best laugh I’ve had this year. You play an important role in the Zone, part of which is to have nary a clue as to what your role is.)
He did accept, actually. Wrong as usual, Gregory.
No, I have no clear idea what you’re talking about. Here you drop a few vague and disconnected hints, and I wonder if that’s on purpose. Do you not want me to know what you’re doing?
Having to deal with Franken-JoeGallien insulting people like Joe Felsenstein and John Harshman repeatedly isn’t fostering discussion. I could say the same of having other ID proponents on my threads. I wouldn’t want that around a discussion if Dennis Venema or Joshua Swamidass ever showed up along with Paul Nelson.
There isn’t one-size fits all moderation. I’m not on TSZ to promote myself, I’m here to have fun and get discussion. Once I had the ability to put people on ignore, I got what I needed.
A lot of my finished materials are direct marketed to ID authors. For example, the stuff on Alu’s and Chromatin is slowly matriculating in ID writings. Some of the stuff on nylonases will probably get around eventually. And then there is the home school market and college apologetics market where I get sponsored to deliver talks and teaching, etc. I was blessed to get a little funding from a private foundation to supplement my work in the investment field.
So keiths is wrong to presume I’m here in the same capacity that I was at UD (which is promotion site, and which I didn’t like, and that’s why I had a falling out with Arrington as I was pressured to agree with stuff I didn’t agree with).
Seriously, what creationist should expect to get any promotion of his ideas at TSZ? Not me. My main reason for visiting here is interacting with guys like Allan Miller and Rumraket and John Harshman, and occasional interaction with Tom English and Joe Felsenstein. Joe Felsenstein’s discussion of Absolute Fitness and Drifting Weasel were priceless.
That said, few of my major threads here were much in the way of promotion. Here is a sampling:
One on methylation marks and embryogenesis:
And then my thread on Alu’s which was highly contentious:
Or philosophy threads:
Or threads critical of ID (by me):
Hey! Thanks. My first reply/comment there was an attempt to test latex capability.
It was nice that I was made a GLOBAL MODERATOR there, but, well, I have no intention of using those powers, I don’t need the headaches.
Important point, I had a forum at CreationEvolutionUniversity, and hackers were able to break in an set up accounts until I suspended all registrations and would manually add people myself. Soooo, thanks for not letting just any passerby join.
I don’t recall how I enabled latex in my forum anymore or if I actually had to do anything.
I’ve seen this from him before. He actually does believe that everyone in the Zone has been paying attention to him. I, for one, have not been. When he did his first OP, I learned, after wasting a fair amount of time and energy interacting with him, that he tosses around concepts from the theory of computation that he does not understand. It was as obvious to me that he did not grasp the concepts as it is obvious to you, from the comment you’re responding to, that he does not grasp statistical hypothesis testing. I made an honest effort at explaining things to him, and found that he was uninterested in learning.
For what it is worth, here is my suggestion.
I believe there should be only one rule: all comments must be written in E-Prime.
I don’t have ideas.
I have ben on a host and heap of origin blogs/forums in the last ten years or so.
Almost all become censorship flagships rejecting free thought, conclusions, investigation and so on. They are dumb and dumber. (but you didn’t hear it from me)
on all blogs/forums the people are kind, malicious, dumb, smart, accusatory, not accusatory, and generally like people everywhere. on these matters it tends to be the more intelligent people and thus more prideful. less open to criticism as if its a attack on their intelligence.
Then the bog/forum loses people, which is small circles to begin with, and most cease to exist.
TSZ , must be few bosses doing all the work, has survived.
its better hjere.
I think TSZ does a excellent job of allowing contention, dosagreement, on important issues. only important ones are done here.
TSZ deals with malice, hurt feelings, and survives.
I cringe at the malice i read by some and how they aim at the bosses.
I have been disciplined, rightly or wrongly, but it’s okay.
I see no need for improvement.
They send the ugly comments to guano. I never had any of mine yet so figure out if your doing bad.
I wish Lizzie was back. I hope her dignity was not hurt by some clowns comments.
Intellectual contentions are a contact sport.
TSZ is excellent because history shows how people can’t get along when disagreeing about important things.
The hosts of the blogs/forumas are to blame for censorship and declining involvement.
Therefore this TSZ hosts must be doing a great job.
Its a line of reasoning.
Free speech but no tolerance for malice. its not malice in presenting assorted conclusions. Everyone knows malice when they see it.
That’s the winning equation in the search for truth and the intellectual tools used in that search.
Byers:
TSZ improvement:
Have sigs so that comments like the above can be immortalized.
ALurker,
I agree that individual discussions won’t necessarily improve in quality, but that’s not the intent. The idea instead is to take the energy that is wasted on moderation, moderator screwups and abuses, moderation meta-discussions, etc., and redirect it toward the discussion of controversial issues, which is TSZ’s raison d’être, after all.
Yes. They should be just as free to respond honestly and open to that stuff, without restriction, as the UDoids are to produce it.
Rumraket:
Amen.
And guanoing, whether of “false” statements or of rule-violating ones,
is a form of censorship. It’s a lesser form of censorship than the outright deletion of comments, sure — but it’s still censorship. At a site dedicated to the free exchange of ideas, censorship is out of place and should be resorted to only when truly needed.
The current moderators don’t understand this, often guanoing gratuitously and/or for their personal benefit. They’ve shown it in this very thread, guanoing comments that absolutely belonged here.
Alan started a thread soliciting ideas for improvements to TSZ. What could possibly be more appropriate in such a thread than a discussion of what has gone wrong in the past and how to prevent it from happening in the future?
If TSZ is to have moderators at all, they should be moderators who are interested in promoting open discussion, not suppressing or controlling it.
Here’s the first of my three proposals (I’m not presenting them in any particular order). I think of this one as the “opt-in” proposal.
The “opt-in” proposal:
This scheme would require software changes, of course. They’d have to be done by someone here or outsourced to a WordPress expert.
More in the morning.
I might as well describe the second proposal now, since it’s so similar to the first. I think of this as the “choose your own moderators” proposal, or CYOM for short.
The “choose-your-own-moderators” proposal: