This forum participant interrupted a cordial and collegial exchange among a number of more informed parties, jacked the thread, issued a string of the most bizarre pronouncements, adamantly maintained insupportable claims, sidestepped every polite invitation to provide evidence validating her extremist positions, flamed me — and neither the moderator (who’d asked me to participate in the first place) nor any of the forum participants took her task for any of that, or took her aside to correct her behavior, or responded at any length to even her most indefensible assertions. […]
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This challenge seemed to me a reasonable proposal, one that would require an equal amount of labor from both of us in her proving her point and me trying to disprove it, placing our resulting efforts in front of an impartial professional jury for evaluation. How better to engage with the question of what makes the opinion of a person who’s knowledgeable about a given subject more valid than that of someone who doesn’t know shit from Shinola about it than by putting it to the test? My interrogator would have none of it, however . . . […] Even the moderated forums I’ve observed or participated in have allowed entry to the inevitable person several notches below the rest in reference points and maturity (and, not infrequently, literacy), lacking any compensating modesty, who basically stopped the show by posting something excruciatingly naive, profoundly dumb, syntactically garbled, or some combination thereof. By tacit agreement, that individual gets to hijack the discussion, with no one — including the moderators — having the courage to intervene. […] |
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Forumization and Its Malcontent (2)
I frankly don’t know how to respond to the question “What makes the opinion of a certain highly informed person more valid than that of someone who is not informed?” To paraphrase, what makes the opinion of someone who knows something about a subject more valid than that of someone who knows nothing about it? This query seems to conflate the belief that everyone’s entitled to an opinion (with which I agree) with the notion that all opinions carry equal weight (with which I certainly disagree). […]