Q&A, Feedback, Suggestions, Requests... - Page 6

May I just say I advocate Justin Time's position. I also don't understand why Chiro won't respond when Justin is acting in a seemingly perfectly mature manner, putting out ideas that are totally logical and support TL's theme of encouraging thoughtful discussion that welcomes diverse opinions and open minds. He obviously does not know how he has misrepresented any argument before him, and has obviously spent a lot of time and effort formulating his past couple posts..a response is only due respect.
Let's try not and turn this into something where we think we're against each other, because then we've become politicians. We should all want the betterment of the forum, so this shouldn't be about winning an argument but rather finding solutions.

On second thoughts, is it fair to lump the Evolution thread in with the Religion thread? Reading through them I realise I actually didn't care that the Religion thread was closed but more that the Evolution thread was closed.

Reading through it it was actually very interesting and far far less circular than the R&DGE thread. It's also notably different from R&DGE and Abortion in that those two are very semantics based and very nebulous moral subjects. They're totally arbitrary. Evolution is a scientific theory and I'm not sure it should be lumped in with those two. There is a massive potential for factual debates.

Is there any merit in the suggestion of at least reopening that one and keeping the other two relatively locked down? To me at least, this would return the forum to most of what it was

Well I don't know if it's vote based but if it is stick me down for evolution

ChiroVette

Your post says your position is in favor of completely eliminating all circular threads, and I replied as if your position was in favor of hosting circular threads one at a time as is current policy? Is that how I misrepresented you? If so it was an honest mistake, I guess I was unwilling to believe a Thinker's Lounge moderator would want to eliminate discussion on Abortion and Religion etc. If I am still misrepresenting you, please tell me so.

Wo_Daddy_Wo, I very much appreciate that. I don't have questions per se (besides the question of how I am misrepresenting Chiro, which we are discussing.), I do have a list of concerns though:

• Threads are being closed because the original poster did not provide their own opinion or quoted an outside site to support their views. If this is a strict policy, why is it not listed in the Forum Rules?

The rest of my concerns are not really meant for question format, but I will phrase them as such:

• Is it always a bad thing to open a discussion without stating your own opinion (neutral position)? Couldn't opening a discussion with a strong opinion bias the discussion towards the proving or disproving the points in the original post?

• Is it bad to open a discussion with a quote from an outside source (as per the third gender thread)? If an outside source sums up your current opinion very well, or simply has an interesting perspective you don't necessarily agree with, how would it be detrimental to discussion?

• Is having this much regulation of original posts encouraging a newbie accessible environment?

• Are so called circular threads really always "circular", and if so, are they actually the reason the Thinker's Lounge has seen less activity lately (assuming there has been less activity)?

• Is limiting when and how these most controversial topics are discussed beneficial to the open-minded and diverse environment of the Thinker's Lounge? Rephrased: Does limiting discussion on the most taboo topics promote a feeling of censorship?

• Are there objective methods for telling apart circular discussion and discussion that is moving the dialogue forward? Is there a way to keep the biases of moderators out of these decisions?

• Were these changes discussed at length with the larger community before being made policy? (genuinely curious, I have just come back after a short period of absence)

It is my personal belief that most complex discussions work in spirals, always looping back towards earlier points but moving towards a center nonetheless. And if you don't see the whole of a spiral it might be easy to mistake the discussion as circular. For example, starting on page four and ending on page eight of the third gender thread, would it not be easy to think that my conversation with DG was not only circular but getting off topic? But then on page nine it was pulled back together and completely related back to the original topic of Facebook and the discussion came to a sort of conclusion.

Complicating this even further, is that new members are always joining the discussions in the Thinker's Lounge; especially the controversial ones. And when they join, often times you have to catch them up on earlier debates that were similar.

I was always under the impression that the controversial threads were the ones that drew in the most fresh blood. Because let's face it, it is often times only on the internet that you can get in a discussion about the most serious clashes of values. You can bring up the topic of "G.E.D. vs High School Diploma" at your family reunion, but there are few of us that feel socially comfortable fully discussing abortion and religion with even some of our closest family and friends. I think that limiting these discussions not only keeps "fresh blood" from being drawn into the Thinker's Lounge, but also alienates and frustrates the veterans here who are used to a more free atmosphere of discussion.

Thank you very much for your time Chiro and Wo, I feel no animosity towards any one personally. It is easy to get passionate about a place we have all been a part of for so long.

My apologies, I didn't mean to make is sound like you were closing threads you didn't like. That first post was a weird mix of my feelings towards the policies and also a response to your post, so I might not have made it clear which parts specifically were directed towards you and which parts were against hypothetical moderators and policies in general.

Anyways, as for the 'compromise', I am getting the feeling that you are skewing the middle ground towards a more radical position than is actually the middle ground. As far as I know, you are the only person with a preference to "eliminate them altogether".

Hypothetical Example:

1 - eliminate all 50 - limit them 50 - free discussion

As you can see, the middle ground/compromise in the above scenario would actually be between "limit them" and "free discussion", since 50 people support the other two and only one supports the far left option. So unless there are more people that agree with you that those threads should be eliminated completely, it seems that the current policy isn't really the middle ground.

As for creating threads, for me it comes down to a question of which is worse?

Having a few basic openings vs possibly scaring off new posters and derailing (and possibly killing) discussions.

The numbers were not meant to represent the number of controversial threads, they were meant to represent the number of people in favor of certain policies:

1 person in favor of eliminating all those threads
50 people in favor of restricting those threads to certain times (current policy)
50 people in favor of free discussion

This illustrates that the middle policy is not a compromise policy, because it does not represent a policy made between the two majority viewpoints. A compromise policy in the above scenario would actually be something between "people in favor of restricting threads to certain times" and "people in favor of free discussion" because that policy would represent the most people.

Justin Time, That is only one way of representing the middle-ground. Not to mention the fact that even if we were to go by the raw statistical data of how many people were for a thing, how many people were against it, and then tried to extrapolate some formulaic response, there aren't fifty people in favor of ANYTHING in this forum. Whether you choose to accept our compromise as viable or not, it is a compromise. It is NOT an "even Steven" compromise, nor did we, at any time, ever claim it was. Suffice it to say that the forum mods, who make the decision, don't want circular discussion threads and some members don't either. Some want complete, unadulterated freedom to indulge in that sort of discourse.

The compromise is a middle-ground between those two positions NOT between some statistical median as determined by a sampling or a vote. This forum, though we like to try to be as flexible as possible, is NOT a democracy. The mods make the final decision and we try to allow a certain amount of flexibility in policy, but not complete freedom.

quote Arjy

Can we just have a referendum or something? Open to everyone? Just vote on it.

Everyone is welcome to chime in. That is, after all, what this thread is for, but as I said, this is not a democracy. We make the decisions, which is why we are here. To be brutally honest, I personally don't care if the policies we create are "out voted" by the forum. We are here to make these decisions as we see fit.