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So I think continued personal attacks are not acceptable (which I think is already the policy?)

Also, I think comments that have absolutely nothing to do with the original post (and the person won’t come back and explain them) probably don’t add to the discussion either. For example, in this thread if I were to say “and we all know about asian carp travelling to Lake Michigan” without explaining how it had anything to do with the original post or other comments….

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Mostly, that is a matter of logic. Statements that describe universal conditions cannot be verified. Existential statements cannot be falsified.

But existential statements need merely be demonstrated to be proven true.

The famous example are Australia’s black swans, of course. Once we saw them, we knew that there are black swans (even though, Europeans might have had a difficult time to accept that discovery).

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Chino — lol.

Hellmut — let me clarify a little bit:

I am not interested in being right. Nobody can be right all the time. In fact, in the long run, we are all wrong. That’s the nature of scientific inquiry.

I agree, and my goal isn’t to be right all the time (or to convince myself that I’m right all the time or something). What I mean is that there are questions where one answer is a lot more right than another, and we have nothing to fear by putting all of the possibilities on the table and evaluating them.

Let me give an example to move this out of the controversial subject of religion to illustrate what I mean. Consider Jenny McCarthy’s claim that vaccines cause autism. From all the studies I’ve read so far, McCarthy’s claim is wrong. Figuring out whether or not she’s right about that is important because lives are at stake (specifically: the children who have died from preventable diseases because they chose not to vaccinate). It’s not a question where I want to embrace uncertainty, it’s a question where I want to have access to all of the evidence and make as unbiased an evaluation of it as possible, in order to come to an accurate conclusion.

There are other questions where I’m totally willing to embrace uncertainty and say “I don’t know the answer to that one, and probably never will.”

Trying to figure out accurate answers to questions when possible (and having confidence in the conclusions I’ve reached) isn’t the same thing as wanting to be right all the time (or assuming that I am right all the time). Rather, I assume that I probably do have beliefs/opinions that are wrong. But either way, I have nothing to lose from open dialog, and, indeed, I may well learn something…

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Chanson, please, stop provoking me and submit to the truth.

. . . right now.

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In fact, in the long run, I know that we will all be wrong.

I am not interested in being right. Nobody can be right all the time. In fact, in the long run, we are all wrong. That’s the nature of scientific inquiry.

All I can do is to be forthright and honest about my views and admit when logic and evidence prove me wrong.

That is a matter of humility. The ability to admit error is the ultimate prove of self-confidence rather than the assertion of superhuman qualities.

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There was a policy debate back when I was a regular at exmo-social. Some of the regulars argued for silent deletion (instead of moderator remarks) because they said that people feel humiliated by being chastized by moderators in a public way.

Personally, I felt that there’s absolutely no reason to feel humiliated by a moderator comment because different sites have different policies (so a comment that’s A-OK on one site may be out-of-bounds on another) — and people won’t think ill of you for not having every site’s particular quirks down.

In my experience, silent deletion often leads to a bunch of new posts and comments of the form “Hey mods, why’d you delete that comment?” — which themselves get deleted because the mods can’t explain the problem without reposting the offending comment.

I’d rather have the exchange be open because it helps newbies see what the policies are, and it allows people to dissent if they like. I’m open to comments of the form “hey Chanson, I think you were wrong to tell so-and-so not to say X” — it opens up a discussion of what policies we’d like to have at MSP. That’s why I’m opening up this discussion now: I don’t want it to be me unilaterally deciding “what we do at MSP” by default.

The only thing that has occasionally made me uncomfortable is when a conversation has turned into “testimony” vs. discussion. When I am having a dialogue with someone, having a testimony thrown back at me shuts down the conversation (often purposefully so on part of the testifier)

I think that’s totally true, except that it’s not necessarily always an intentional tactic for shutting down discussion. I think a lot of people who use a testimony to avoid hard questions haven’t really thought about how that looks from the other side. And I think the commenters here at MSP have a very impressive track record at explaining (in a considerate way) why testimony-bearing doesn’t always forward the discussion.

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