The site culture treats serious adherence to supernatural beliefs associated with a religion as a disease. First it will try to cure you. If that doesn’t seem to be working, it will start quarantining you.
Actually, the behavior Risto_Saarelma described fits the standard pattern. People who cannot be helped are ignored or rejected. Take any stable community, online or offline, and that’s what you see.
For example, f someone comes to, say, the freenode ##physics IRC channel and starts questioning Relativity, they will be pointed out where their beliefs are mistaken, offered learning resources and have their basic questions answered. If they persist in their folly and keep pushing crackpot ideas, they will be asked to leave or take it to the satellite off-topic channel. If this doesn’t help, they get banned.
Again, this pattern appears in every case where a community (or even a living organism) is viable enough to survive.
There’s the difference between being wrong and being wrong as a member of a social group that derives its identity from being wrong in that particular way. Experience has taught to expect less from discussion in the latter case.
Keeping one’s identity small is hard, be it “Mormon” or “Rationalist” or “Brunette” or whatever. I don’t think we should discourage people from joining the site just because they haven’t fully mastered Bayes-Fu (tm) yet.
Why do you think so? It’s usual to express things in terms of one’s identity (for example, people often say “I don’t believe in God”, a property of the person, instead of asserting “There is no God”, a statement about the world), but this widespread tradition doesn’t necessarily indicate that it’s difficult to do otherwise, if people didn’t systematic try (in particular, in the form of a cultural tradition, so that conformity would push people to discard their identity).
We all live within a culture, though. Some of us live in several subcultures at the same time. But unless you are a hermit living in a cave somewhere, escaping that cultural pressure to conform would be very difficult.
A lot of things are culturally normal, but easy to change in yourself, so this alone doesn’t help to explain why one would believe that keeping one’s identity small would be difficult.
What are some examples of such things, specifically those things that contribute to a person’s identity within a culture ? By contrast, a preference for, say, yogurt instead of milk is culturally normal, is probably easy to acquire (or discard), but does not usually contribute to a person’s identity.
The site culture treats serious adherence to supernatural beliefs associated with a religion as a disease. First it will try to cure you. If that doesn’t seem to be working, it will start quarantining you.
Thanks for this honest assessment; it seems pretty accurate. (You also didn’t make any judgment as to the appropriateness of such a mindset.)
I think it’s a rather uncharitable assessment of the situation, though it’s possible some people do feel that way.
Being wrong is not the same thing as being a disease.
Actually, the behavior Risto_Saarelma described fits the standard pattern. People who cannot be helped are ignored or rejected. Take any stable community, online or offline, and that’s what you see.
For example, f someone comes to, say, the freenode ##physics IRC channel and starts questioning Relativity, they will be pointed out where their beliefs are mistaken, offered learning resources and have their basic questions answered. If they persist in their folly and keep pushing crackpot ideas, they will be asked to leave or take it to the satellite off-topic channel. If this doesn’t help, they get banned.
Again, this pattern appears in every case where a community (or even a living organism) is viable enough to survive.
Not being a disease. Having one.
Being wrong is not the same as having a disease, either.
There’s the difference between being wrong and being wrong as a member of a social group that derives its identity from being wrong in that particular way. Experience has taught to expect less from discussion in the latter case.
Keeping one’s identity small is hard, be it “Mormon” or “Rationalist” or “Brunette” or whatever. I don’t think we should discourage people from joining the site just because they haven’t fully mastered Bayes-Fu (tm) yet.
Why do you think so? It’s usual to express things in terms of one’s identity (for example, people often say “I don’t believe in God”, a property of the person, instead of asserting “There is no God”, a statement about the world), but this widespread tradition doesn’t necessarily indicate that it’s difficult to do otherwise, if people didn’t systematic try (in particular, in the form of a cultural tradition, so that conformity would push people to discard their identity).
We all live within a culture, though. Some of us live in several subcultures at the same time. But unless you are a hermit living in a cave somewhere, escaping that cultural pressure to conform would be very difficult.
A lot of things are culturally normal, but easy to change in yourself, so this alone doesn’t help to explain why one would believe that keeping one’s identity small would be difficult.
What are some examples of such things, specifically those things that contribute to a person’s identity within a culture ? By contrast, a preference for, say, yogurt instead of milk is culturally normal, is probably easy to acquire (or discard), but does not usually contribute to a person’s identity.