Good old George Lakoff says (approximately) we mostly think using hardware and circuits overloaded with structures--thinking patterns--that are metaphors that we already have wiring for. If the metaphor is battle, the battle circuits are running even if we're sitting at a keyboard. If the metaphor is exploration, those neurosomatic elements are what are active as we read and type. [Addendum: What he means is that to a great extent, figures of speech are actually embodied. A fascinating prospect when he first proposed it in his Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, since somewhat sidetracked by Lakoff's celebrity consultancies among other factors.]
Lately I've wondered again: Are comment threads here on Winds arguments, battles, or are they conversations, explorations? What should they be, in what proportion?
What kind of "bar" do we run here?
In the comments guidelines and associated thread, Joe Katzman mentions "backchannel discussion". But what if there's no backchannel available? I contend that it leads to more battle, less exploration. Let's talk about that.
At the Overcoming Bias site, Norman Siebrasse speaking in a different context puts a big portion of my thesis well...
I think many (or most) discussions, particularly public discussions, are not an attempt to come to a common understanding between the parties. They are aimed at third party observers, and the main goal is to gain personal support for the participant, as opposed to support for the participant's position, by signaling cleverness, moral superiority etc. Arguments are not means to reach agreement, but signals to third parties....
Most discussions are not about truth, they are about signaling personal virtues. Precision is a narrow strategy, as it only signals cleverness; the cost of precision is high; and many observers find it to be an unreliable signal. So, for many audiences, precision may be a very poor strategy.
This is why we Marshals like to see folks include real email addresses on posts.
Other blogs have other rules. Some fairly prominent ones have member registration, post-by-post email confirmation, or moderators' vetting of each post. All of those policies-procedures can have a chilling effect or foster an "echo chamber".
Removing too much of the opportunity for battle, it seems, can leave one with an ingrown place that doesn't support true exploration. Too much battle, with all talk in plain view to everyone, can spiral out to utter distraction.
No one in the Winds of Change crew has time or inclination to implement member registration, let alone full-on moderation of every post. Apart from the hassle for us, we really don't want to install more speed bumps, and cut our chances getting substance, however provocative, from a shy participant.
So here's one of my rules of thumb. If I see people drop in and "act out", especially off topic, I just might ask them on list why they have what looks like a bogus email address. Some of you might notice that I've been doing that lately. I might also invite them to contact me if the email address they provide doesn't work, or is patently absurd.
My email address, along with AL's and others', can be found over in the right margin. Look for the "The Winds Crew" header. Seek and ye shall find; append @windsofchange.net and there you go.
If my asking for email in public bugs or shames someone, I regret that. My intention is not to throw weight around. I'm just the bartender. But I can't get that guy with the turned-off hearing aid to have a quiet conversation with me without saying "HEY, CAN WE TALK PRIVATELY?" loud enough for the whole barroom to hear.
If friction continues with little reward, eventually there are predictable consequences.
This blog is not about dramas, even if it's about rhetorical battling as well as intellectual explorations. People who seem to have drama or smug capsule posturing as their objectives will be shown the door soon enough, just as spammers and overt bigots have their posts zapped as promptly as we catch them (believe me, some of those drive-bys I sweep into the dustbin are doozies) .
On the other hand: If you think this blog is an echo chamber already, you can propose a guest entry to AL or me (or any other founder or Marshal). You could win a chance to be Dictator for Life of your very own comments thread and subvert the dominant paradigm here among the wingnuts [sic]. The power is breathtaking :) .
But to do that... you'll need to be able to carry on an email conversation with us. Are you up to it? I invite you to be upstanding.
(Thanks to AMac, celebrim, Mr Blue and Glen among others, for motivating me to post this)
Norman Siebrasse is referring to POLEMIC, a very common form of political discussion. Quite possibly the dominant form, in fact, given the near-negligible chance of actually changing the mind of someone with a strongly-held opposing view.
Owen Harries is the best source for guidance on the conduct of a polemic; the key thing to remember is that there are major negative penalties to approaching a polemic as a discussion. In contrast, there are far fewer negative penalties to approaching a discussion as a polemic.
That simple incentive ratchet explains a lot about political discourse, including why normal people tend to treat "political weenies" as something to be avoided.
Unfortunately, the public address I use for blogging is one I know longer check frequently. If messages are sent to it, don't expect me to respond promptly.
Celebrim: Noted. Thanks.
I post here very infrequently, but even the few times I have posted have resulted in the addresses I've used becomming such spam-magnets that I finally had to configure the domain to discard everything sent to those addresses a long time ago. Sometimes I'll unblock it after posting, but I usually end up blocking it again. Fortunately, since I own the domain, I used addresses tailored specifically to this site, so there was no collateral damage.
I don't know how the addresses were harvested, but I only use them at this site, and only very infrequently. But it is hard to get into a conversation if you have to discard eveything you receive.
StargazerA5
Stargazer:
Interesting -- thanks for the report. I'll review that with the tech support here at Winds to see what mitigation might be possible in future. Of course once an email address is "burned", it stays that way. I agree that it's a problem.
I have found the monicker I use combined with gmail's spam filtering to do virtually a perfect job for me -- at most one or two spams per month getting past the filter; but of course there are a lot of reasons to not bother creating such an address just to post at places like here. And I can't prove that the spam filters haven't eaten some email from a real thread participant. I'll try to dial up my critical filters on this point. What do I only think I know?
Contrariwise: If a Marshal asks on-list for someone to email, the address of that email is not going to be going through any part of Movable Type (the blog engine), just regular email channels. That good thing trades off against the bad thing: a Marshal making that request is going to "send signals" to third parties, whether the Marshal wants it to do that or not. And it's a natural human reaction to resist anything that seems like a summons.
"Ain't nothin' simple."
Yes, it is primarily for anti-spam reasons that I too use a phoney email address. However, I don't know that the spam originated from posts here, elsewhere, or both.