It isn’t at all my intention to frame the position of the forum as one of gross irresponsibility, or to use the replies I’ll get to present the forum’s position as one which is pro climate change denialism (either in the sense that climate change isn’t happening, that it won’t be harmful, or that it shouldn’t be avoided).
I also won’t try to censor my post by including only statements that would be uncontroversial in a laymen discussion (I don’t like to use politically correct with that meaning), I believe this is one of the few sites where one can be both polite and accurate in his statements and also be perceived as so.
If you were instead worried that my question, the replies it got, or my planned future post, could be used by someone to attack the site or its users, I’d like to know more about it.
If it seems like a real risk, I’d take countermeasures such as avoid stating what the users beliefs are in my future post (NOTE: I’m not planning to link any beliefs I’d talk about to any specific users, my current plan is just to address the common beliefs about the subject and try to provide good informations and analysis about them) and prevent people from commenting on it. If what’s been already said could already be a likely source of damage, I could try to find ways to sink or delete this question and the replies I got.
So far the greatest potential risk I see is to create a toxic discussion between the members of this community.
I don’t want that to happen, of course, but feel that if the different positions aren’t explained and if any eventual errors in them aren’t corrected, toxic discussions could form every time related topics will be mentioned in the future in any post.
In another discussion that touched related topics, I wrote at least two comments that I still endorse and think have correct information and reasoning, but that I realised were unnecessarily angry in tone. Even worse, I realised my brain had switched on it’s “politic debate” mode as I was writing a third one. All around, the discussion felt to me as being remarkably more similar to the kind of discussion one can see on an average site rather than the level of discussion I usually see here, and I believe that an important part of that is that there wasn’t a diffused attempt to understand why people had different beliefs about the subject, and to figure out where the mistakes were.
The risk is of inciting a discussion that’s easy to exploit for a demagogue (whether they participate in the discussion or quote it long after the fact). You don’t have to personally be the demagogue, though many people get their inner demagogues awakened by an appropriate choice of topic. This indirectly creates a risk of motivated reasoning to self-censor the vulnerable aspects of the discussion. There’s also a conflict about acceptability and harm of self-censoring of any kind, though discussing this at a sufficient level of abstraction might be valuable.
My reply in the grandparent is half-motivated by noticing that I probably self-censored too much in the original comment on this post. When it’s just my own comment, however noncontroversial I expect its thesis to be, it’s not yet particularly exploitable. If it eventually turns into a recurring topic of discussion with well-written highly upvoted posts, or ideologically charged highly debated posts, that might be a problem.
(To be clear, I don’t know if the concern I’m discussing is close to what steven0461 was alluding to. Both the relevant aspect of truth and the harm that its discussion could cause might be different.)
I see. My current aim is to provide knowledge and reasoning that would actually lower the chances of such discussions happening, moving the subject of climate change away from ideology and political opinions.
I’ll try to think of ways to further reduce the likelihood of exploitable discussions and demagoguing happening in my post. Knowing what I plan to write, I don’t think such discussions would easily be created even if I didn’t, though.
For my attempt ending up as increasing the likelihood of future posts and that leading to harmful discussions… I think it would require people being so determined in arguing about this and ignoring all the points I’d try to make that the current lack of posts on the subject wouldn’t serve as a sufficient barrier to stop them from arguing about it now.
Lastly, the site seems to me as having been designed with very effective barriers about such things spiralling out of of control enough to make not trivial damage, though, since you have been on this site from a lot longer than me, I feel like I should value your intuition on the subject more than mine.
All considered, it feels to me that if I consider the risks in leaving the situation as it is and the benefits good reasoning on the subject could provide, what I should do is write my post and try to minimise the chances of the discussion on that turning out badly.
I’m not claiming that this is a likely scenario (it might be, but that’s not the point). It’s about the meaning, not the truth. The question is what kind of hazards specifically steven0461 might be referring to, regardless of whether such hazards are likely to occur in reality (“has the potential to cause great harm” is also not a claim about high credence, only about great harm).
Personally I feel the forum finds the topic uninteresting, so that it’s hard to spark a continuing discussion, even if someone decides to write a lot of good posts on it. I also don’t expect a nontrivial amount of toxic debate. But that’s the nature of risks, they can be a cause for concern even when unlikely to materialize.
It isn’t at all my intention to frame the position of the forum as one of gross irresponsibility, or to use the replies I’ll get to present the forum’s position as one which is pro climate change denialism (either in the sense that climate change isn’t happening, that it won’t be harmful, or that it shouldn’t be avoided).
I also won’t try to censor my post by including only statements that would be uncontroversial in a laymen discussion (I don’t like to use politically correct with that meaning), I believe this is one of the few sites where one can be both polite and accurate in his statements and also be perceived as so.
If you were instead worried that my question, the replies it got, or my planned future post, could be used by someone to attack the site or its users, I’d like to know more about it.
If it seems like a real risk, I’d take countermeasures such as avoid stating what the users beliefs are in my future post (NOTE: I’m not planning to link any beliefs I’d talk about to any specific users, my current plan is just to address the common beliefs about the subject and try to provide good informations and analysis about them) and prevent people from commenting on it. If what’s been already said could already be a likely source of damage, I could try to find ways to sink or delete this question and the replies I got.
So far the greatest potential risk I see is to create a toxic discussion between the members of this community.
I don’t want that to happen, of course, but feel that if the different positions aren’t explained and if any eventual errors in them aren’t corrected, toxic discussions could form every time related topics will be mentioned in the future in any post.
In another discussion that touched related topics, I wrote at least two comments that I still endorse and think have correct information and reasoning, but that I realised were unnecessarily angry in tone. Even worse, I realised my brain had switched on it’s “politic debate” mode as I was writing a third one. All around, the discussion felt to me as being remarkably more similar to the kind of discussion one can see on an average site rather than the level of discussion I usually see here, and I believe that an important part of that is that there wasn’t a diffused attempt to understand why people had different beliefs about the subject, and to figure out where the mistakes were.
The risk is of inciting a discussion that’s easy to exploit for a demagogue (whether they participate in the discussion or quote it long after the fact). You don’t have to personally be the demagogue, though many people get their inner demagogues awakened by an appropriate choice of topic. This indirectly creates a risk of motivated reasoning to self-censor the vulnerable aspects of the discussion. There’s also a conflict about acceptability and harm of self-censoring of any kind, though discussing this at a sufficient level of abstraction might be valuable.
My reply in the grandparent is half-motivated by noticing that I probably self-censored too much in the original comment on this post. When it’s just my own comment, however noncontroversial I expect its thesis to be, it’s not yet particularly exploitable. If it eventually turns into a recurring topic of discussion with well-written highly upvoted posts, or ideologically charged highly debated posts, that might be a problem.
(To be clear, I don’t know if the concern I’m discussing is close to what steven0461 was alluding to. Both the relevant aspect of truth and the harm that its discussion could cause might be different.)
I see. My current aim is to provide knowledge and reasoning that would actually lower the chances of such discussions happening, moving the subject of climate change away from ideology and political opinions.
I’ll try to think of ways to further reduce the likelihood of exploitable discussions and demagoguing happening in my post. Knowing what I plan to write, I don’t think such discussions would easily be created even if I didn’t, though.
For my attempt ending up as increasing the likelihood of future posts and that leading to harmful discussions… I think it would require people being so determined in arguing about this and ignoring all the points I’d try to make that the current lack of posts on the subject wouldn’t serve as a sufficient barrier to stop them from arguing about it now.
Lastly, the site seems to me as having been designed with very effective barriers about such things spiralling out of of control enough to make not trivial damage, though, since you have been on this site from a lot longer than me, I feel like I should value your intuition on the subject more than mine.
All considered, it feels to me that if I consider the risks in leaving the situation as it is and the benefits good reasoning on the subject could provide, what I should do is write my post and try to minimise the chances of the discussion on that turning out badly.
I’m not claiming that this is a likely scenario (it might be, but that’s not the point). It’s about the meaning, not the truth. The question is what kind of hazards specifically steven0461 might be referring to, regardless of whether such hazards are likely to occur in reality (“has the potential to cause great harm” is also not a claim about high credence, only about great harm).
Personally I feel the forum finds the topic uninteresting, so that it’s hard to spark a continuing discussion, even if someone decides to write a lot of good posts on it. I also don’t expect a nontrivial amount of toxic debate. But that’s the nature of risks, they can be a cause for concern even when unlikely to materialize.