5 ms·

>try to take a scientific view >People start throwing link after link of facts You get upset when people present you with links to facts to respond to your pr

>try to take a scientific view >People start throwing link after link of facts You get upset when people present you with links to facts to respond to your proposed ideas? I can sympathize that it is definitely no fun if you feel like your ideas aren't getting the attention they deserve, but if you have trouble defending the ideas in the face of factual sources, maybe it's possible that one could reconsider those ideas in the face of new evidence? After all, that's the basis of scientific thinking.

Bartweiss 10y ago
I'm assuming "link after link" is pointing to a Courtier's Reply kind of issue - people throwing out thousands of pages of "required reading" to ensure that the bar for discussion is unreachably high. If you slog through it all and persist, they toss out another reading list instead of responding to the specific claims. There's no good fix for this, of course. Sometimes an idea has been rebutted so often that people aren't willing to digest and summarize the links (like "people didn't come from monkeys so evolution is false!") Sometimes the answer is genuinely subtle and there is a reading list to have useful views (lots of monetary economics, or relatively subtle biology like "how could eyes arise by chance?") Sometimes a person is just so wrong it's a category error and their claim can't be rebutted because it's meaningless. But it's also a real problem. There absolutely are people who stonewall valid points (or easily answered questions) by handing out endless obligations. And it's not particularly clear which one you're getting until you've done all the work - it's not even guaranteed that the other person is right about whether their content is relevant! So having been handed useless books as "required reading", I hugely sympathize with the complaint. But I don't really know a good answer except "stop debating people who pull this".
godshatter 10y ago
As a person who has a contrarian view on an issue that is highly politicized, it often turns out that those links of "facts" are links to web blogs that agree with the person that explain why the contrarian view is wrong. I suspect the original poster has looked at a few of the links before, found legitimate grounds to discuss possible flaws in their logic, and has been shut down. There is definitely a tendency (on both sides) to collect links to "approved" viewpoints and push them as fact without being able to back them up with valid argumentation.
drak0n1c 10y ago
If you're trying to have a discussion about political ideals, spamming factual current event news or pundit-curated facts is not really conductive to discussion. And if the goal is instead to have an argument, it's not a clincher either since both sides have stockpiles of anec-data links to play the game of inductive reasoning. The parent comment was referring to discussion of ideas, not one-off event X happened or didn't happen arguments.
mrkurt 10y ago
There are two kinds of listening, you can listen to understand and listen to respond. I read that comment as: "people overload me with facts before giving me a chance to communicate what I'm actually thinking". It's not fun for anyone to have a complicated set of thoughts, get up the courage to share them, and then get cut off before what they've said out loud matches what they think in their head. It takes a really good listener to help people get through that.
splintercell 10y ago
> After all, that's the basis of scientific thinking. No it isn't. Scientific thinking isn't just like how a film photograph is taken, i.e. you expose a fresh blank film with no impressions of its own to light and it captures an image. The unique thing about our minds is that we can analyze our own minds, we can analyze the interpretation of the input from the external world. Look at our own thought process and the way we perceive the world is known as Philosophy, and my main problem with the 'pro-scientific thinking' camp is that they have outright hostility towards philosophy. Take for example evolution vs creationism debate. Just to be clear, I believe that evolution is the correct explanation of how the world came into being. But it is mindblowing to me how much the pro-evolution side (technically the creationist side too, but I don't care about them) insists on evolution being true and how much they have betted on this. If tomorrow aliens land and they claim that earth is their landfill, dinosaur bones are their trash, and we are the equivalent of maggots living on their trash who came up with a consistent theory explaining how all the trash fits into our story. My point is that in that case, even though creationists aren't proven to be correct, scientific thinking would take a huge hit. I can promise you if I go out and post to 100 scientific communities "I don't believe that the theory of evolution is true" and post some clearly non-religious argument against it, nearly all of them will wanna know if I believe in God, whether I believe vaccines cause autism etc. Once I prove my credibility, then it's followed by link throwing. Remember the point I raised is philosophical, like could an alien life form have created us, can radiometric dating be wrong because we simply haven't observed any aging method to be correct over a million years. But it will be followed by link throwing, not even related to the topic I raised. These things have nothing to do with whether my argument has merit or not, which is why no amount of link throwing forces me to change my opinion. Changing my opinion relies upon hearing a rational argument, and link throwing does not always mean a rational argument.
- pcvarmint 10y ago
  Scientism is evil. Science isn't. [0] Yes, no amount of link throwing can change your opinion if it is based on your values which cannot be changed by any new facts. [0] https://mises.org/library/scientism-and-values https://mises.org/library/scientism-and-values
lkbm 10y ago
> >People start throwing link after link of facts > You get upset when people present you with links to facts to respond to your proposed ideas? Facts do not make an argument. Most scientists agree that GMOs are safe for human consumption as currently regulated in the US, but if you try to say that, many people will respond with a bunch of facts: * Some GMOs allow us to use more pesticides. * Monsanto patents seeds. * Government regulations are often skewed by corporate interests. * Genetic engineering can have dangerous side-effects. These are all facts. They're all true. They all should be considered when evaluating the safety of genetically modified foods. But they're not used in conjunction with the rest of the facts to come up with a measured, thoughtful position. They're used to shut down the discussion and "win". That's a problem. It's not just a problem for people who "have trouble defending the ideas in the face of factual sources". They're a problem for anyone interested in finding a truth or a reasonable position that extends beyond a collection of cherry-picked facts.

Bartweiss 10y ago

I'm assuming "link after link" is pointing to a Courtier's Reply kind of issue - people throwing out thousands of pages of "required reading" to ensure that the bar for discussion is unreachably high. If you slog through it all and persist, they toss out another reading list instead of responding to the specific claims. There's no good fix for this, of course. Sometimes an idea has been rebutted so often that people aren't willing to digest and summarize the links (like "people didn't come from monkeys so evolution is false!") Sometimes the answer is genuinely subtle and there is a reading list to have useful views (lots of monetary economics, or relatively subtle biology like "how could eyes arise by chance?") Sometimes a person is just so wrong it's a category error and their claim can't be rebutted because it's meaningless. But it's also a real problem. There absolutely are people who stonewall valid points (or easily answered questions) by handing out endless obligations. And it's not particularly clear which one you're getting until you've done all the work - it's not even guaranteed that the other person is right about whether their content is relevant! So having been handed useless books as "required reading", I hugely sympathize with the complaint. But I don't really know a good answer except "stop debating people who pull this".

godshatter 10y ago

As a person who has a contrarian view on an issue that is highly politicized, it often turns out that those links of "facts" are links to web blogs that agree with the person that explain why the contrarian view is wrong. I suspect the original poster has looked at a few of the links before, found legitimate grounds to discuss possible flaws in their logic, and has been shut down. There is definitely a tendency (on both sides) to collect links to "approved" viewpoints and push them as fact without being able to back them up with valid argumentation.

drak0n1c 10y ago

If you're trying to have a discussion about political ideals, spamming factual current event news or pundit-curated facts is not really conductive to discussion. And if the goal is instead to have an argument, it's not a clincher either since both sides have stockpiles of anec-data links to play the game of inductive reasoning. The parent comment was referring to discussion of ideas, not one-off event X happened or didn't happen arguments.

mrkurt 10y ago

There are two kinds of listening, you can listen to understand and listen to respond. I read that comment as: "people overload me with facts before giving me a chance to communicate what I'm actually thinking". It's not fun for anyone to have a complicated set of thoughts, get up the courage to share them, and then get cut off before what they've said out loud matches what they think in their head. It takes a really good listener to help people get through that.

splintercell 10y ago

> After all, that's the basis of scientific thinking. No it isn't. Scientific thinking isn't just like how a film photograph is taken, i.e. you expose a fresh blank film with no impressions of its own to light and it captures an image. The unique thing about our minds is that we can analyze our own minds, we can analyze the interpretation of the input from the external world. Look at our own thought process and the way we perceive the world is known as Philosophy, and my main problem with the 'pro-scientific thinking' camp is that they have outright hostility towards philosophy. Take for example evolution vs creationism debate. Just to be clear, I believe that evolution is the correct explanation of how the world came into being. But it is mindblowing to me how much the pro-evolution side (technically the creationist side too, but I don't care about them) insists on evolution being true and how much they have betted on this. If tomorrow aliens land and they claim that earth is their landfill, dinosaur bones are their trash, and we are the equivalent of maggots living on their trash who came up with a consistent theory explaining how all the trash fits into our story. My point is that in that case, even though creationists aren't proven to be correct, scientific thinking would take a huge hit. I can promise you if I go out and post to 100 scientific communities "I don't believe that the theory of evolution is true" and post some clearly non-religious argument against it, nearly all of them will wanna know if I believe in God, whether I believe vaccines cause autism etc. Once I prove my credibility, then it's followed by link throwing. Remember the point I raised is philosophical, like could an alien life form have created us, can radiometric dating be wrong because we simply haven't observed any aging method to be correct over a million years. But it will be followed by link throwing, not even related to the topic I raised. These things have nothing to do with whether my argument has merit or not, which is why no amount of link throwing forces me to change my opinion. Changing my opinion relies upon hearing a rational argument, and link throwing does not always mean a rational argument.

pcvarmint 10y ago
Scientism is evil. Science isn't. [0] Yes, no amount of link throwing can change your opinion if it is based on your values which cannot be changed by any new facts. [0] https://mises.org/library/scientism-and-values https://mises.org/library/scientism-and-values

lkbm 10y ago

> >People start throwing link after link of facts > You get upset when people present you with links to facts to respond to your proposed ideas? Facts do not make an argument. Most scientists agree that GMOs are safe for human consumption as currently regulated in the US, but if you try to say that, many people will respond with a bunch of facts: * Some GMOs allow us to use more pesticides. * Monsanto patents seeds. * Government regulations are often skewed by corporate interests. * Genetic engineering can have dangerous side-effects. These are all facts. They're all true. They all should be considered when evaluating the safety of genetically modified foods. But they're not used in conjunction with the rest of the facts to come up with a measured, thoughtful position. They're used to shut down the discussion and "win". That's a problem. It's not just a problem for people who "have trouble defending the ideas in the face of factual sources". They're a problem for anyone interested in finding a truth or a reasonable position that extends beyond a collection of cherry-picked facts.