This approach to debating strikes me as exemplifying everything bad that I learned in high school policy debate. Specifically, it seems to me like debate distilled down to a status competition, with arguments as soldiers and the goal being for your side to win. For status competitions, signaling of intellectual ability, and demonstrating your blue or green allegiance, this works well. What it does not sound like, to me, is someone who is seeking the truth for herself. If you engaged in a debate with someone of lesser rhetorical skill, but who was also correct on an issue where you were incorrect (perhaps not even the main subject of the debate, but a small portion), would you notice? Would you give their argument proper attention, attempt to fix your opponent’s arguments, and learn from the result? Or would you simply be happy that you had out-debated them, supported all your soldiers, killed the enemy soldiers, and “won” the debate? Beware the prodigy of refutation.
Adversarial debates are not without their usefulness, such as in legal and political processes. It’s true that they are generally suboptimal as far as deliberative truth-seeking goes, but sometimes we really do care about refuting incorrect positions and arguments (“killing soldiers”) as clearly as possible.
I agree. I think it’s really important to be able to support a point when you really do have one. That some people were able to win debates—which takes a lot of skill—was required for humanity to progress. How else would we have left behind our superstitions? The problem isn’t trying to win the opponent over to the truth, the problem is trying to win the opponent over for other reasons. If a person was very good at debate, how would you make the distinction? Especially if everyone else is trying to win for the sake of ego? It’s not easy to tell the difference between a person who wins because they have more of the truth or are clever in the way they defending it, versus a person who wins because they’re more tenacious than their competitor.
A person who does have the most complete understanding of the truth can be attacked to the point of tedium with logical fallacies until they get bored and wander away. A group of people who are all debating for the sake of ego will not only be likely to insist that the debaters who are best at defending truth are wrong, but they will project their own motives onto that person and insist that they, too, are debating for the sake of ego. Add to that the fact that nobody believes something that they think is wrong, which leads to everybody thinking that they’re right, and it can get to be a pretty big mess.
I think that if someone defeated me in a debate, I would realize it—and that would be fine, because I’d develop an improved perspective afterward and that would be fun. This is why I’m itching for an ass-kicking.
I think you’re confusing “I am sick and tired of winning debates” for “I think all debates should be won.” I don’t know how this happened as the message I intended is very different from the one that you took.
I want to learn more during disagreements but I’m not because I keep winning.
I cannot wait until someone really kicks my ass.
If I meet someone who is not very good at rhetoric but has a great point, I am not sure what I would do. That’s a really good question, and an important thing to be aware of. I will think about that for a while. I’ll try harder to detect good points in bad wording.
I want to learn more during disagreements but I’m not because I keep winning.
I cannot wait until someone really kicks my ass.
Actually, you (you personally, not some general “you”) often don’t notice when you lose on this forum, because people give up on you and disengage, some explicitly, some silently. You might be misinterpreting this as winning, but, given that neither you nor they changed their minds, and since neither is better off, both parties lost.
You like metrics, so here is one. If you look back through your exchanges here, what is the ratio of the number of threads where people are convinced by your logic (or you are convinced by theirs) to the number of threads where people simply stopped replying or tapped out?
I regarded our exchange the exact same way. Unfortunately, that doesn’t give us any insight into the subject.
To your credit, you had a good point and I realized that there was an additional factor that supported your point that you may not know about, so I tossed it in:
Food: Now that you’ve said “a few hundred calories makes a difference”, I see that this could be a potential setback for them. That was a good point. I don’t know whether they eat a bit more or less, though I know that they can experience reactive hypoglycemia if they don’t space and balance their meals properly to avoid blood sugar crashes.
To my credit, you asserted that a person claiming an estimated IQ of 220 must be lying or from the future but completely failed to acknowledge my point when I said we have used IQ tests in recent decades that did give scores like those due to miscalibration, so people who can honesty claim an IQ score that high are not, by default, lying. You reacted as if I was assuming a perfectly accurate method was used and this guy’s true IQ was 220. However, I had stated that I was arguing that your assertion that the person must be “lying or from the future” was incorrect.
This is why I got irritated with you and wanted to write you off.
What we need to be asking here is not “Who irritates the most people during debates?”—people can be irritated by the difficulty of being made to grapple with good reasoning skills just as easily as the annoyance of tolerating poor reasoning skills. The question should not even be “Who gives up on their debates most frequently?” because if your opponent is just shooting logical fallacy silly string, it’s justified to end it—so you don’t always lose a precious learning opportunity when you cut it short. What I think we should be asking is “When we get frustrated in a debate, how can we tell where the problem is?”
You know, I think I’ve rested enough from our debate now that if you wanted to take me up on my open invitation to administer ass kickings to my ideas, I’d be up for another bout with you.
You know, I think I’ve rested enough from our debate now that if you wanted to take me up on my open invitation to administer ass kickings to my ideas, I’d be up for another bout with you.
Regardless of the merit of intellectual masochism it may be politically expedient for you to ease up on using this language to describe your interactions. If you already find it infuriating that shminux is able to quote you for the purpose of doing reputation damage then shame on you if he fools you twice. Be more careful with your words in order to not make yourself an easy target.
To put it another way, talking about how much you like ass kickings and inviting ‘bouts’ is not the optimal way for you to provoke the kind of quality intellectual challenge you desire.
Alright, I see that you probably have a good point Wedrifid. I would like your advice if you have some. Also, did you get the two emails I sent around 20 hours ago?
Actually, you (you personally, not some general “you”) often don’t notice when you lose on this forum, because people give up on you and disengage.
But how does anybody know who was ultimately right? In order to make a statement like this, you must first assume that you know who was right. If there was a debate about it, then it’s likely to have been the sort of topic where there’s some kind of ambiguity—either obvious ambiguity or some hidden pitfall that one person or the other is trying to point out—so what’s the chance you’re right about who won? If the debate was never finished, then there are points that haven’t been heard yet. Sometimes a good point very far into a debate can change the whole outcome. It seems to me that often the entire reason for a disagreement is that one or both people were missing some information that changes their perspective. As you’re aware, reality is very complex—there are a lot of different specializations that people can learn and it can take years to learn enough to have a good understanding. Sometimes applying the information or concepts from one specialization to a discussion with someone outside that specialization radically changes the outcome of the discussion. There can be a LOT of information to compare during a debate—and although it would be nice to know which pieces are missing from the other person’s perspective immediately, and although we can all make guesses, often this is not apparent until the topic has been discussed in depth. I bring specializations to this group that are different from the main specializations the group has. For example, I know a lot about psychology. Being a nerd, there are a lot of things I’ve researched and learned about that may be different—and here I am exchanging information with others who have all researched things that may be different from what’s common to the group. There is going to be a lot of information to exchange before it’s clear what perspective is best, and before an agreement is possible.
You might be misinterpreting this as winning, but, given that neither you nor they changed their minds, and since neither is better off, both parties lost.
I agree that it’s best if people agree after the debate. Coming to a point where people have exchanged enough information where they can actually agree can be very difficult. If people are giving up before the process is complete, I’m not sure what I can do about it. I have started to see a pattern where there are certain sets of information that I have which seem to be root causes for a large ratio of disagreements, so I have begun writing posts about them. Unfortunately nobody can unload all their relevant information in any small amount of time, and the fact that we have different information will cause disagreements until then. I am calibrating with you guys by reading the sequences and beginning to write some articles to bridge these gaps. It will take me some time.
If I’m wrong about something, I hope I’ll figure it out eventually. If you, or anybody else wants to be persistent with me, or recommend a specific article that you think will fill an ignorant patch in my head, I’d be happy to try to get further.
You ignored both my points: the definition of winning in a discussion (at least on this forum) as updating and a specific way of measuring it. We both lost. Tapping out.
An unusual fact: I think you are one of the few Lesswrongers to use ‘debate’ to refer to something other than formal debates. More specifically, I think that you are using the string ‘debate’ to refer to what most on this forum would call arguments or discussions or disagreements.
This is unfair to me, Shminux. I joined on August 12. That a lot of my debates are unfinished is probably due to the fact that debates can take time to reach a conclusion. It’s annoying that you and 13 voters seem to think that anything can be gleaned from taking an inventory of them at this time. That’s like giving a person a test that takes an hour and scoring them after five minutes.
It didn’t dawn on me that you might actually be serious about wanting me to go count up all my debates and see how many were unfinished until today—because that would be so ridiculously inconclusive.
Secondly, that you quoted me out of context is making me look like an ass. Having “I want to learn more during disagreements but I’m not because I keep winning.” floating there is probably going to be interpreted as “I keep winning on this forum” when, in reality, I’ve only been here for a few weeks—I hadn’t had any wins or losses at that point—and a key reason I joined is because I was hoping to get my ass kicked.
You want to know the real situation? I’m not getting enough intellectual stimulation in real life. I’m in too small a pond. That’s the context in which I am saying “I keep winning.” I was really looking forward to losing some debates HERE for that reason. It looks to be a bigger pond.
You’re making me look like an ass, and there’s no good reason for it.
You want to talk about why you (and perhaps some of your friends) and I are frustrating one another? Let’s talk about it. But don’t lets mix up this frustration with a bunch of other things or go creating metrics that won’t accurately measure diddly and wouldn’t support your point (that a bunch of unfinished debates means I’m losing a bunch of debates) anyway.
Let’s focus on the frustration and see if we can figure out why it happens.
Actually, you (you personally, not some general “you”) often don’t notice when you lose on this forum, because people give up on you and disengage.
But how does anybody know who was ultimately right?
Outside view!
You’re a smart person on Less Wrong. So are your opponents. My prior for you being on the right side of the debate is < 50%, by symmetry. (I assign a nontrivial probability that both participants are wrong.)
I can know that something is happening statistically without being able to point to a single definite instance of it.
You should pay more attention to epistemic tools at this point and not particular points of debate. Disagreement should be parsed as being about the general reasoning tools you use, not the subject matter that triggered the problem. It doesn’t matter whether you win a debate, you might learn or fail to learn something useful about general reasoning tools in both cases, so a focus on winning/losing debates is wrong if you are trying to fix that particular problem. If you don’t pay enough attention to general reasoning methods, you may end up continuing to accept occasional defeats and celebrate frequent triumphs without getting significantly better at not generating new flawed arguments (that your opponents, given the general incompetence, won’t be pointing out to you).
My point is that you’re busy talking about winning and losing debates, as if they were some sort of contest. That view is quite different than viewing debates as an opportunity to seek truth. It places incentives on things like protecting arguments you’ve made, even when they’re wrong, and attacking your opponent’s arguments, even when they’re right. It lets you declare victory when you find a major flaw in your opponent’s argument, even if they were right and you were wrong.
Would you notice if your opponent had a sound piece of logic, but didn’t have the rhetoric to support it? Would you be able to extract that subset of their argument, and change your mind based on it, even if their conclusion was wrong? What if they evidence and argument they presented was enough to show that your position was subtly wrong, but you failed to notice because you were focused on the fact that their position was even wronger?
Would you notice if their logic and conclusion was flawed, but they had some evidence you hadn’t looked at before, which made your position more tenuous? Would you stop to properly reevaluate your whole position, and reduce your certainty in it? Or would it just be one more argument against an army? Or would you not even get that far, because you attacked the obvious flaw, without looking at the whole argument—because that one flaw was severe enough that it was the only thing you had to worry about to win?
I still maintain that winning and losing debates is about status, not truth-seeking. (Note that it’s not a zero-sum game for the participants; a well-fought contest will be positive-sum, a poorly-fought one negative sum, even if one participant comes out better in either one.) And you know what? That’s fine, and likely appropriate for getting what you want, in many contexts. But, if you’re here, I’m hoping it’s not all you want in every context. And I suspect that taking different approaches in different contexts will be epistemically hazardous; we don’t compartmentalize nearly as well as we’d like, sometimes.
I wouldn’t say it is either but it is true that “discussing things to find out the truth” is actively advocated as a norm over “arguing to win”. That makes a big difference. Enough that I only take breaks from lesswrong in disgust every couple of years whereas on, say, the MENSA discussion boards I have frequented my tolerance wears thin far more quickly. With ‘debating as sparring’ as the human default having active pressure against that tendency at least helps reduce the phenomenon to more tolerable levels without eliminating it.
On Less Wrong, people mostly seem to prefer “discussing things to find out the truth” instead of “arguing to win.”
I’m not sure that’s actually true.
The fact that so many LWers disengaged from Epiphany that she thinks she has never lost an argument strongly suggest that it is true (ETA: at least in some contexts), and also that the norm has a downside of making some newcomers highly overconfident. (I can’t resist pointing out that a feature suggestion of mine probably would have helped here.)
Go on? It seems to be the most approved of/most encouraged way to discuss things, and there seems to be a lot less arguing to win than on other forums.
This approach to debating strikes me as exemplifying everything bad that I learned in high school policy debate. Specifically, it seems to me like debate distilled down to a status competition, with arguments as soldiers and the goal being for your side to win. For status competitions, signaling of intellectual ability, and demonstrating your blue or green allegiance, this works well. What it does not sound like, to me, is someone who is seeking the truth for herself. If you engaged in a debate with someone of lesser rhetorical skill, but who was also correct on an issue where you were incorrect (perhaps not even the main subject of the debate, but a small portion), would you notice? Would you give their argument proper attention, attempt to fix your opponent’s arguments, and learn from the result? Or would you simply be happy that you had out-debated them, supported all your soldiers, killed the enemy soldiers, and “won” the debate? Beware the prodigy of refutation.
Adversarial debates are not without their usefulness, such as in legal and political processes. It’s true that they are generally suboptimal as far as deliberative truth-seeking goes, but sometimes we really do care about refuting incorrect positions and arguments (“killing soldiers”) as clearly as possible.
I agree. I think it’s really important to be able to support a point when you really do have one. That some people were able to win debates—which takes a lot of skill—was required for humanity to progress. How else would we have left behind our superstitions? The problem isn’t trying to win the opponent over to the truth, the problem is trying to win the opponent over for other reasons. If a person was very good at debate, how would you make the distinction? Especially if everyone else is trying to win for the sake of ego? It’s not easy to tell the difference between a person who wins because they have more of the truth or are clever in the way they defending it, versus a person who wins because they’re more tenacious than their competitor.
A person who does have the most complete understanding of the truth can be attacked to the point of tedium with logical fallacies until they get bored and wander away. A group of people who are all debating for the sake of ego will not only be likely to insist that the debaters who are best at defending truth are wrong, but they will project their own motives onto that person and insist that they, too, are debating for the sake of ego. Add to that the fact that nobody believes something that they think is wrong, which leads to everybody thinking that they’re right, and it can get to be a pretty big mess.
This gets very confusing.
I frequently make improvements when people point out flaws and admit to my mistakes.
Here is one
a much funnier one
I think that if someone defeated me in a debate, I would realize it—and that would be fine, because I’d develop an improved perspective afterward and that would be fun. This is why I’m itching for an ass-kicking.
I think you’re confusing “I am sick and tired of winning debates” for “I think all debates should be won.” I don’t know how this happened as the message I intended is very different from the one that you took.
I want to learn more during disagreements but I’m not because I keep winning.
I cannot wait until someone really kicks my ass.
If I meet someone who is not very good at rhetoric but has a great point, I am not sure what I would do. That’s a really good question, and an important thing to be aware of. I will think about that for a while. I’ll try harder to detect good points in bad wording.
Actually, you (you personally, not some general “you”) often don’t notice when you lose on this forum, because people give up on you and disengage, some explicitly, some silently. You might be misinterpreting this as winning, but, given that neither you nor they changed their minds, and since neither is better off, both parties lost.
You like metrics, so here is one. If you look back through your exchanges here, what is the ratio of the number of threads where people are convinced by your logic (or you are convinced by theirs) to the number of threads where people simply stopped replying or tapped out?
I regarded my exchange with Epiphany on intelligence & the gifted as an example of this.
I regarded our exchange the exact same way. Unfortunately, that doesn’t give us any insight into the subject.
To your credit, you had a good point and I realized that there was an additional factor that supported your point that you may not know about, so I tossed it in:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kk/why_are_individual_iq_differences_ok/77vs
To my credit, you asserted that a person claiming an estimated IQ of 220 must be lying or from the future but completely failed to acknowledge my point when I said we have used IQ tests in recent decades that did give scores like those due to miscalibration, so people who can honesty claim an IQ score that high are not, by default, lying. You reacted as if I was assuming a perfectly accurate method was used and this guy’s true IQ was 220. However, I had stated that I was arguing that your assertion that the person must be “lying or from the future” was incorrect.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kk/why_are_individual_iq_differences_ok/77f5
This is why I got irritated with you and wanted to write you off.
What we need to be asking here is not “Who irritates the most people during debates?”—people can be irritated by the difficulty of being made to grapple with good reasoning skills just as easily as the annoyance of tolerating poor reasoning skills. The question should not even be “Who gives up on their debates most frequently?” because if your opponent is just shooting logical fallacy silly string, it’s justified to end it—so you don’t always lose a precious learning opportunity when you cut it short. What I think we should be asking is “When we get frustrated in a debate, how can we tell where the problem is?”
You know, I think I’ve rested enough from our debate now that if you wanted to take me up on my open invitation to administer ass kickings to my ideas, I’d be up for another bout with you.
Regardless of the merit of intellectual masochism it may be politically expedient for you to ease up on using this language to describe your interactions. If you already find it infuriating that shminux is able to quote you for the purpose of doing reputation damage then shame on you if he fools you twice. Be more careful with your words in order to not make yourself an easy target.
To put it another way, talking about how much you like ass kickings and inviting ‘bouts’ is not the optimal way for you to provoke the kind of quality intellectual challenge you desire.
Alright, I see that you probably have a good point Wedrifid. I would like your advice if you have some. Also, did you get the two emails I sent around 20 hours ago?
But how does anybody know who was ultimately right? In order to make a statement like this, you must first assume that you know who was right. If there was a debate about it, then it’s likely to have been the sort of topic where there’s some kind of ambiguity—either obvious ambiguity or some hidden pitfall that one person or the other is trying to point out—so what’s the chance you’re right about who won? If the debate was never finished, then there are points that haven’t been heard yet. Sometimes a good point very far into a debate can change the whole outcome. It seems to me that often the entire reason for a disagreement is that one or both people were missing some information that changes their perspective. As you’re aware, reality is very complex—there are a lot of different specializations that people can learn and it can take years to learn enough to have a good understanding. Sometimes applying the information or concepts from one specialization to a discussion with someone outside that specialization radically changes the outcome of the discussion. There can be a LOT of information to compare during a debate—and although it would be nice to know which pieces are missing from the other person’s perspective immediately, and although we can all make guesses, often this is not apparent until the topic has been discussed in depth. I bring specializations to this group that are different from the main specializations the group has. For example, I know a lot about psychology. Being a nerd, there are a lot of things I’ve researched and learned about that may be different—and here I am exchanging information with others who have all researched things that may be different from what’s common to the group. There is going to be a lot of information to exchange before it’s clear what perspective is best, and before an agreement is possible.
I agree that it’s best if people agree after the debate. Coming to a point where people have exchanged enough information where they can actually agree can be very difficult. If people are giving up before the process is complete, I’m not sure what I can do about it. I have started to see a pattern where there are certain sets of information that I have which seem to be root causes for a large ratio of disagreements, so I have begun writing posts about them. Unfortunately nobody can unload all their relevant information in any small amount of time, and the fact that we have different information will cause disagreements until then. I am calibrating with you guys by reading the sequences and beginning to write some articles to bridge these gaps. It will take me some time.
If I’m wrong about something, I hope I’ll figure it out eventually. If you, or anybody else wants to be persistent with me, or recommend a specific article that you think will fill an ignorant patch in my head, I’d be happy to try to get further.
You ignored both my points: the definition of winning in a discussion (at least on this forum) as updating and a specific way of measuring it. We both lost. Tapping out.
That’s all right here: I agree that it’s best if people agree after the debate.
An unusual fact: I think you are one of the few Lesswrongers to use ‘debate’ to refer to something other than formal debates. More specifically, I think that you are using the string ‘debate’ to refer to what most on this forum would call arguments or discussions or disagreements.
This is unfair to me, Shminux. I joined on August 12. That a lot of my debates are unfinished is probably due to the fact that debates can take time to reach a conclusion. It’s annoying that you and 13 voters seem to think that anything can be gleaned from taking an inventory of them at this time. That’s like giving a person a test that takes an hour and scoring them after five minutes.
It didn’t dawn on me that you might actually be serious about wanting me to go count up all my debates and see how many were unfinished until today—because that would be so ridiculously inconclusive.
Secondly, that you quoted me out of context is making me look like an ass. Having “I want to learn more during disagreements but I’m not because I keep winning.” floating there is probably going to be interpreted as “I keep winning on this forum” when, in reality, I’ve only been here for a few weeks—I hadn’t had any wins or losses at that point—and a key reason I joined is because I was hoping to get my ass kicked.
You want to know the real situation? I’m not getting enough intellectual stimulation in real life. I’m in too small a pond. That’s the context in which I am saying “I keep winning.” I was really looking forward to losing some debates HERE for that reason. It looks to be a bigger pond.
You’re making me look like an ass, and there’s no good reason for it.
You want to talk about why you (and perhaps some of your friends) and I are frustrating one another? Let’s talk about it. But don’t lets mix up this frustration with a bunch of other things or go creating metrics that won’t accurately measure diddly and wouldn’t support your point (that a bunch of unfinished debates means I’m losing a bunch of debates) anyway.
Let’s focus on the frustration and see if we can figure out why it happens.
Outside view!
You’re a smart person on Less Wrong. So are your opponents. My prior for you being on the right side of the debate is < 50%, by symmetry. (I assign a nontrivial probability that both participants are wrong.)
I can know that something is happening statistically without being able to point to a single definite instance of it.
Thanks, now we’ll see whether anything worthwhile results from this.
You should pay more attention to epistemic tools at this point and not particular points of debate. Disagreement should be parsed as being about the general reasoning tools you use, not the subject matter that triggered the problem. It doesn’t matter whether you win a debate, you might learn or fail to learn something useful about general reasoning tools in both cases, so a focus on winning/losing debates is wrong if you are trying to fix that particular problem. If you don’t pay enough attention to general reasoning methods, you may end up continuing to accept occasional defeats and celebrate frequent triumphs without getting significantly better at not generating new flawed arguments (that your opponents, given the general incompetence, won’t be pointing out to you).
(You may learn something useful from the sequence on words. See also this post and its dependencies: A Rational Argument.)
My point is that you’re busy talking about winning and losing debates, as if they were some sort of contest. That view is quite different than viewing debates as an opportunity to seek truth. It places incentives on things like protecting arguments you’ve made, even when they’re wrong, and attacking your opponent’s arguments, even when they’re right. It lets you declare victory when you find a major flaw in your opponent’s argument, even if they were right and you were wrong.
Would you notice if your opponent had a sound piece of logic, but didn’t have the rhetoric to support it? Would you be able to extract that subset of their argument, and change your mind based on it, even if their conclusion was wrong? What if they evidence and argument they presented was enough to show that your position was subtly wrong, but you failed to notice because you were focused on the fact that their position was even wronger?
Would you notice if their logic and conclusion was flawed, but they had some evidence you hadn’t looked at before, which made your position more tenuous? Would you stop to properly reevaluate your whole position, and reduce your certainty in it? Or would it just be one more argument against an army? Or would you not even get that far, because you attacked the obvious flaw, without looking at the whole argument—because that one flaw was severe enough that it was the only thing you had to worry about to win?
I still maintain that winning and losing debates is about status, not truth-seeking. (Note that it’s not a zero-sum game for the participants; a well-fought contest will be positive-sum, a poorly-fought one negative sum, even if one participant comes out better in either one.) And you know what? That’s fine, and likely appropriate for getting what you want, in many contexts. But, if you’re here, I’m hoping it’s not all you want in every context. And I suspect that taking different approaches in different contexts will be epistemically hazardous; we don’t compartmentalize nearly as well as we’d like, sometimes.
On Less Wrong, people mostly seem to prefer “discussing things to find out the truth” instead of “arguing to win.” See this post here:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ecz/whats_your_rationalist_arguing_origin_story/#comments.
My impression is that people will be more willing to discuss things with you, if you use the discussion style that’s mostly used on this site.
I’m not sure that’s actually true.
I wouldn’t say it is either but it is true that “discussing things to find out the truth” is actively advocated as a norm over “arguing to win”. That makes a big difference. Enough that I only take breaks from lesswrong in disgust every couple of years whereas on, say, the MENSA discussion boards I have frequented my tolerance wears thin far more quickly. With ‘debating as sparring’ as the human default having active pressure against that tendency at least helps reduce the phenomenon to more tolerable levels without eliminating it.
The fact that so many LWers disengaged from Epiphany that she thinks she has never lost an argument strongly suggest that it is true (ETA: at least in some contexts), and also that the norm has a downside of making some newcomers highly overconfident. (I can’t resist pointing out that a feature suggestion of mine probably would have helped here.)
Go on? It seems to be the most approved of/most encouraged way to discuss things, and there seems to be a lot less arguing to win than on other forums.