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The Head Shop... too popular, not popular enough?

  
  

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ONLY NICE THINGS
10:27 / 07.06.05
I've been largely absent from the Head Shop lately, in part because I've found being _in_ the Head Shop a bit depressing, and also to see how it functions without moderation. This seemed an apposite time to ask what people thought of the place at present. Traffic is still pretty low, at least compared to the Convo, although I guess traffic on Barbelith is a fair bit lower at present than it used to be anyway, but on the plus side a number of new posters are getting involved, sharing their thoughts etc.

But... the level of engagement of the posts is wildly variable, and I'm wondering whether the elasticity of the forum - its ability to get back on track after a pointless or off-topic interjection - is a s strong as it used to be. People seem to be less interested in following lines of argument and more focussed on contributing personal anecdotes and experiences without tying them in to the broader question of the thread. I was wondering about the efficacy of updating the Wiki, but I'm not sure how many people are actually reading it. At present, however, it's quite tricky to work out in many case what constitutes a Head Shop and what a Conversation thread sometimes.

Should moderators be shepherding people more in-thread? Or is this a cultural shift that shoudl be embraced, or am I just being unnecessarily nostalgic?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
10:42 / 07.06.05
I think personal anecdotes can still count as "on topic", as long as they illustrate something to with the topic in hand- some, at least, can be interesting and informative.

Perhaps we should all make an effort to show how what you say links in with the abstract? How the anecdote has influenced your views?

Further, what do we want from the Headshop? A place where an idea can be closely argued "to the bone", so to speak, or where an initial concept generates a wider, but related discussion?

I would favour the former, simply because there doesn't seem anywhere else on the Internet where the level of discussion we have here can be found, outside of deep (layman inaccessible) industry/science/academia.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:01 / 07.06.05
Yeah... that's my question, and probably my answer. For example, the "Most influential philosopher" thread is balanced oddly between a discussion of the virtues of various philosophers and philosophies a kind of knockabout "cheese or chocolate" fun thread.

Personal anecdote is of course perfectly reasonable as a way of informing the discussion. This has come up a fair few times, and we worked out how it functioned in policy terms on an old thread about androgyny.

My gold standard for Head Shop would be something like:

Does it show that the poster has read the preceding discussion?
Is it relevant to the discussion?
Is it advancing the discussion?
Is it engaging with the issues of the discussion, bringing a new line of argument or examining in more detail the implications of something said earlier?

However, ensuring that standard is going to take some effort, an amount of shepherding, and potentially moderation or deletion of posts...
 
 
Lurid Archive
12:02 / 07.06.05
My opinion is that, in the past, the Headshop has had too small a selection of posters contributing to it. Something about the place intimidated people, whether this was the quasi-academic and some might say Oxbridge tinged style of debate or a perceived hostility to posters trying to acclimatise I don't know. But there was less participation than I'd have liked. As a side note, I think the practice of encouraging people to use 3 year old threads instead of starting a new one on the same topic was absurd.

So I'm glad that there are new posters trying the place out. That said, much of the present activity makes the headshop not so different from the convo. While I think this is a price worth paying if it lets people get their feet wet, I'm not seeing much payoff in terms of interesting Headshop discussion. As to why that is, I'm not sure. In part, this may just be my imagination, especially given that Barbelith is a slower than it used to be. Recently, a couple of interesting threads have been moved to the lab which - despite Tom's protests - is bad news for the Headshop and the board since it is an established convention that careful discussion only really happens in the Headshop. But even so, I think that the Headshop could use more life.

Principally, I think moderators (and others) should be coming up with more topics. I thought that Flowers(?) scattergun approach a while back actually had something going for it, even though there was only a small effort put into each starting post - in fact, this may have been why it worked in that there was no *cost* if one of the threads sunk without a trace. What else? Hmmm. I remain wary at the principal of shepharding people, largely because I feel that in practice in tends to be counterproductive. That is, people who need to be shepharded are usually less likely to respond well to it, threads degenerate and that aura of "elitism", however misguided, is reinforced.

So, leading by example and giving threads a chance before perhaps moving them to the convo seems like a good way to proceed to me.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:11 / 07.06.05
whether this was the quasi-academic and some might say Oxbridge tinged

All those times I punted the Dread Pirate Crunchy and Mister Disco down the Cam, gramophone and picnic lunch at the ready...
 
 
Lurid Archive
12:20 / 07.06.05
And, ironically, one of the only pictures of me and Mordant that has appeared on Barbelith is one where we were punting on the Cherwell drinking Pimms. But you know what I mean, right?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:44 / 07.06.05
Well... sort of, but no. Not really. One of the tensions of the Head Shop is certainly between making it interesting to thems as might have specific and informed perspectives and making it interesting to a wide readership, and generally I think in the olden days that was done quite well - people would cite sources, but they would take the time to explain why the person they were citing was relevant, and again relate that to the topic. If somebody just dropped a series of philosophers' names, they got called on that and asked either to relate those names to the issue in terms broadly comprehensible to a layman or to explain what they were saying without the references. Different people went different ways on this, but it broadly worked. I'd say that the major problems of the HS came not from being quasi-academic - behaving as if we were discussing in an academic context seems to me very sensible - but when people refused through simplicity or perversity to entertain the possibility that their viewpoints might be affected by responses to them (the prolonged non-argument over identification as a tree, say, in the discussion of the epicene pronoun) or reacted badly to requests that they substantiate claims they had made (the Picturesque Case of the Baby-Killing Bengalis of Whitechapel Town), or decided that the discussion was a backdrop to talk at length about themselves without any attempt to tie it in to what anyone else was saying - that is, when the HS did not behave enough like an academic environment, while acknowledging that its participants were not necessarily themselves academics.
 
 
alterity
13:35 / 07.06.05
I agree with Haus that the Head Shop is often not rigorous enough. I wanted to Join Barbelith because of places like the Head Shop (not to mention the Laboratory). However, too often the threads don't really go anywhere. The Deleuze and Guattari thread was quite good for a while, as was one or two others, but for the most part I find that they lack some kind of a punch. Much of this is personal preference no doubt. I have very little interest in discussing the topics of many of the most recent threads. Too often they take the form of "abortion--discuss!" or "the morality of x", or have descriptions that amount to questions with yes or no answers. Please note that I have no problem with these discussions, but don't really have anything to say about them. When I once tried to start a thread with a more open-ended topic (in the Laboratory, albeit), it went nowhere. I don't know how to solve this problem, and am not sure that any solution I could come up with would be very good. All of you have seen things like this before no doubt, so I will leave the heavy-lifting to you. I would be happy to try to create several new threads, however. If they go nowhere, fine. If they take off, great. I just have not wanted to do that for fear of upsetting the board. But if other people have concerns about the Head Shop similar to my own, I would be glad to help.
 
 
Jack Vincennes
13:42 / 07.06.05
Feel kind of bad writing about the Headshop, because I don't really contribute anything there (so do ignore me if I'm talking rubbish) -incidentally that's mainly because I don't feel particularly qualified to speak about a lot of the topics, so stay away in preference to asking silly questions...

I think the practice of encouraging people to use 3 year old threads nstead of starting a new one on the same topic was absurd

I think this is a good point. Obviously having the forum swamped with topics called (for example) "but why can't I call them chavs its an okay word" is counter productive, but I've read more than one thread on, for example, racist language (the 'Red Indian' and the 'but I'm on your *side*...' threads, if I'm thinking of the right forum) and they've both gone in interesting (and different) directions.
 
 
paranoidwriter waves hello
13:43 / 07.06.05
All this runs the risk of sounding very pretentious. Being able to understand different perspectives and methods of debate is just as important as making sure one communicates clearly. Indeed, I'd argue that if one can't explain one's 'theory' to a ten year old, then one has no theory, one has only sophistry. Of course we all need to support our claims, being careful not lower the standard of debate to emotional drivel, etc, but we have to give others credit even if they don't share our particular standards and sensibilities.

While I worry about making off-topic comments, there is a point when one can become tunnel visioned and not "see the wood for the trees". Sometimes something which looks irrelevant has more relevancy than one might suspect.

Maybe traffic would be higher in the Head Shop (and other forums for philosophical debate) if some people felt freer to speak without "minding their P's and Q's" or worrying that someone else will deliberately negate the argument in a vain attempt at displaying a superior intelligence and wealth of cultural knowledge. It is (arguably) impossible to be completely objective about anythin, so we therefore have a duty to consider as many subjective viewpoints as possible, despite the forms in which they come to us.

I'm reminded of Socrates and Einstein; two men who were devoted to simplicity, inclusion, and most of all truth.

Pretentious, moi?
 
 
w1rebaby
14:01 / 07.06.05
Actually, I've taken a look in the Headshop just now and my opinion is that it's better than it used to be. The level of anecdotery and irrelevance has always been high; I don't think it's any different now but at least it seems to have a wider variety of voices.

To be honest I have always had a stereotype of "The Head Shop Thread" with contents being a selection from

- first post asking some sort of vague question

- posts consisting almost entirely of some personal anecdote possibly related to thread topic (likelihood of relevance decreasing as thread size increase) and not addressing any existing question or proposing anything new - far by the most common

- posts referring to book by somebody I've never heard of, not available online, that don't explain the relevance or indeed anything about said book

- clueless questions by people who've not read the rest of the thread

- strange lengthy pompous flamefest about nothing at all

Certainly never thought of it as "too academic". If I was going to suggest something to encourage that might avoid even new posters such as alterity, above, thinking that "the threads don't really go anywhere", it would be making posts that (a) either ask a question or state something examinable or challengeable, and (b) simultaneously answer/examine/challenge someone else, instead of just being "well I think X". Otherwise you might as well read a load of individual blogs.

I do appreciate that the first few posts on a thread are often more anecdotal, as the actual theme of the thread has not yet been properly developed - the first post itself can't be expected to do everything, though it should at least try to be fairly definite, none of this "clearing house" stuff (unlike, and I don't mean to pick on anyone, this thread currently at the top of the HS). But carrying on for pages with a series of anecdotes that don't advance a discussion and don't serve any real purpose is a bit pointless.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
14:29 / 07.06.05
I think the Head Shop and the Switchboard need to be amalgamated myself. Back in the mists of prehistory the Head Shop/whatever the equivelent, got more action than the Switchboard/whatever the equivelent. I suspect that, back then, Flyboy's hoodies thread would have been in the Head Shop. The balance has shifted over time (helped along by 11/09/01) to the point where, while a distinction between the two areas exists, it's not one that I feel is particularly useful to make.

The Head Shop is turning into some kind of Pure Philosophy area, which I personally have little interest in and varying amounts of time to devote to. Everyone else's mileage may vary of course...
 
 
w1rebaby
14:42 / 07.06.05
I may have been a bit harsh about Legba's thread on reflection - it does at least ask some direct questions - but anything that starts out saying that it's meant to be vague is not starting well.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
14:43 / 07.06.05
Should moderators be shepherding people more in-thread? Or is this a cultural shift that shoudl be embraced, or am I just being unnecessarily nostalgic?

I've never had a problem with moderators shepherding people in-thread but I think a balance needs to be struck. I don't have a problem with people giving their personal feeling in the form of an anecdote. Headshop has never quite worked for me as a forum- I don't have a good memory, when I remember something about a philosopher it tends to be the opinion of their work rather than their words and I can't afford to buy a lot of philosophy so I can't consult the work to find out why that opinion was formed. Likewise if you're talking about childbirth you can hold fact over opinion but it's a very emotive subject and it seems absurd, to me at least, to ignore emotion in a thread on it.

whether this was the quasi-academic and some might say Oxbridge tinged style of debate or a perceived hostility to posters trying to acclimatise I don't know

In addition I might add this... Oxbridge Universities, of which there are a number of graduates among the people posting here, pick students in part for their retention of fact. The emphasis in the exams at those Universities is on the ability to memorise. This is supported by the 'A' level and GCSE exam boards that refuse to allow students to take English texts into their exam halls as well as the Universities themselves. In Headshop the style of debate was tilted towards people who could recall such things and so anyone with that type of memory was bound to have a much easier time with the level of debate in the forum, making it very difficult for the rest of us to contribute good posts of the same standard.

I would like to continue to post in Headshop but to be reduced to pure fact and simple analysis means I can post about once in every other thread and always in criticism of another poster. I don't want to have my intellect reduced to what I can recall, so although I do think that Headshop needs shepherding I don't want to go back to a forum with standards that exclude... well, me.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
14:50 / 07.06.05
Indeed, I'd argue that if one can't explain one's 'theory' to a ten year old, then one has no theory, one has only sophistry.

I imagine that a sufficiently bright ten-year old would be able to understand an awful lot of things. However, there are people on Barbelith whose grasp of matters is less well-developed than a bright ten-year old's, in various ways. for example, a ten-year old would be unlikely to dismiss anything he or she could not follow as "sophistry" or "pretention" straight off, because a ten-year-old would not have the mindset that anything that they could not immediately follow had something wrong with it.

Fridge: Actually, "Watched vs Unwatched" strikes me as in some ways quite interesting, but it''s a good example of something which needs the people involved to work out exactly what they are discussing. I'd like to get to it sooner rather than later on that one, but by marking out its field - the culture of surveillance - while allowing a degree of flexibility on how the discussion evolves. I think the current response - which assumes that the division of "watched and unwatched" is uncomplicated - is misisng a step, but then I have the opportunity to go in and raise that.

Flowers: Oooooh... interesting. Certainly a lot of things occupy both areas of interest, potentially - like DPC posting about a transgendered person being arrested for using a particular washroom, which is the springboard both for a discussion on gender and on civil rights and legislative systems. Other discussions I think fall much more easily into Head Shop or Switchboard territory - there's not a lot of Switchboard interest in a discussion on the epicene pronoun, say - but almost anything could be given a Head Shop slant; question is, woudl you want, say, the media representation of Saddam Hussein to be discussed in the same thread as a discussion of the specific charges brought against him. I don't really understand what you mean by "pure philosophy" - Head Shop certainly isn't a place where you will, for example, see many threads on particular philosophers or examining particular, purely philosophical subjects (like, say, Wittgensteinian linguistics or Piercean reality), although certainly if there were such a thread it woudl go in the Head Shop. I'm not sure I see an argument for hybridisation.
 
 
paranoidwriter waves hello
15:04 / 07.06.05
I imagine that a sufficiently bright ten-year old would be able to understand an awful lot of things. However, there are people on Barbelith whose grasp of matters is less well-developed than a bright ten-year old's, in various ways. for example, a ten-year old would be unlikely to dismiss anything he or she could not follow as "sophistry" or "pretention" straight off, because a ten-year-old would not have the mindset that anything that they could not immediately follow had something wrong with it.

I agree. Indeed, abstracted or taken out of context, anything can be seen as having "something wrong with it". e.g incompleteness. Sorry, am I being pedantic? ; )
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
15:30 / 07.06.05
No, I don't think so. What you are doing is using two terms that, if you had been around Barbelith a bit longer, you might have realised are rather more complex in terms of meaning and interpretation than you imagine - "pretension" and "sophistry". These terms are often used to express unhappiness that people are discussing things in a way that the person using them is not happy with - often that, because the level of discourse is referencing things of which they hav e no knowledge or no desire to go and find out more about, it is obviously doing so not because it is useful but because the people involved in it are somehow being perverse - they are, that is, pretentious or sophists. Interestingly, of course, Socrates was accused of being a sophist by the good burghers of Athens; clearly, they felt that what you perceive as dedication to the truth was actually nothing of the sort. As the son of a stonemason hanging out with aristocrats, he was also no doubt seen as pretentious.

So, to accuse people who are not discussing things in the way you want them to operate at of pretension and sophistry, while simultaneously saying that a failure to tolerate lots of different ways and means of self-expression is a sign of pretension and sophistry, is a position that has HNDs to sit before it can register as hypocrisy.

Case in point; at the age of ten I knew a bit about Socrates. However, I did not, for example, speak a word of Ancient Greek, as far as I remember. So, any discussion of Socrates I happened to overhear which referenced, say to on would make no sense to me. I would, as a ten-year-old, have the option of asking one of the people what to on was, and they would be able to explain certain parts of it to me, and other parts I might learn and understand better as my understanding of the language around to on developed. Or, I could have decided that, because I could not understand the word, or because I did not have access to the entire context of the language in which the world existed (which I do not have now, and which I will go to my grave not having), the two people who were discussing it were somehow pretentious and sophists, and I now had a hall pass excusing me from ever having to feel like I ought to know something or want to know something that I did not, and I would have stayed as a ten-year-old. I am very glad I did not.

I would not normally spend this much time on this fairly regular incoherence, but I think it's possibly quite useful to consider what it suggests the Head Shop would benefit from: a variance of voices, and a tolereance of all those voices, as long as they are useful to the discussion. What constitutes usefulness to the discussion is one of the things we are looking at here.
 
 
paranoidwriter waves hello
16:14 / 07.06.05
So, to accuse people who are not discussing things in the way you want them to operate at of pretension and sophistry, while simultaneously saying that a failure to tolerate lots of different ways and means of self-expression is a sign of pretension and sophistry, is a position that has HNDs to sit before it can register as hypocrisy.

LOL. And you wonder why people may not be posting? I haven't "accused" anyone of anything. Read my words. Please?

And really: sentences like the following don't help newbies like myself to feel endeared or (for that matter) welcome; know what I mean?

What you are doing is using two terms that, if you had been around Barbelith a bit longer, you might have realised are rather more complex in terms of meaning and interpretation than you imagine - "pretension" and "sophistry".

Peace.
 
 
Lurid Archive
16:29 / 07.06.05
strange lengthy pompous flamefest about nothing at all

Sounds pretty similar to academic debate to me.

But actually, what I meant by my "quasi-academic" comment is illustrated by Nina's post. Nina is both a moderator and a regular contributer to the Headshop and yet she says she doesn't ...want to go back to a forum with standards that exclude... well, me. OK, that may be in jest, but I think it reflects the reputation the Headshop has with some and prevents people from contributing. Rather than worrying too much about the odd idiot, I think the main concern should be to encourage intelligent posters with different points of view to contribute. There are lots of interesting people here, after all.

Of course, that leaves open the question of what to do with the more difficult posters. Part of the problem seems to me to be our - generally the moderators - reaction to them. That is, we often let them take over the thread by giving them a disproportionate amount of attention. I know I've done it. I think we already have the mechanisms in place to deal with difficulty, and it needn't be overly disruptive to announce and then propose a deletion/move. Not everyone may agree, of course, but I'm perfectly happy with the other moderators in the Headshop and their decisions.
 
 
paranoidwriter waves hello
16:31 / 07.06.05
I'll get my coat...
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
16:33 / 07.06.05
I think I just said something about the importance of reading things and taking them in. Without that, there's not a lot of _point_ in you contributing to the Head Shop. The aim is not to get as many people to contribute as possible - it is to get good contributions. If your current level of posting is not going to add value - and describing discussions at a level of complexity higher than what you feel is acceptable (which is _precisely_ what you said - I'm not getting drawn into some shadow-play about whether you accused a particular individual) as "sophistry" is something which has already long ago been identified as something that is not helpful or useful, either in Barbelith or actually in conversations between reasonably intelligent people - then I see no problem with you not feeling like posting until you are more confident in the value of your contributions. . I wrote quite a lot about Socrates, who was, by the way, accused of sophistry. I'd suggest that you indulge your interest in Socrates and read it.
 
 
paranoidwriter waves hello
16:42 / 07.06.05
Irony is mocking us both, my friend. Seriously, don't make this personal and stop treading on my tail...

Off to take a cold shower.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
17:00 / 07.06.05
I would like to continue to post in Headshop but to be reduced to pure fact and simple analysis means I can post about once in every other thread and always in criticism of another poster.

OK, so that's a definite shout-out against reduction to pure fact and simple analysis... but I don't think that as a proposal was likely to get off the ground. I think this Oxbridge thing is a bit of a false trail, personally, for two reasons:

1) There were never that many Oxford or Cambridge graduates posting to the Headshop, and certainly the number of people posting to the Head Shop with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge has always been dwarfed by those without. Ithink it's a bit of a mania, and also a very _English_ mania - it ignores the enormous contribution to the Head Shop done over time by posters as diverse as Fred, Alas, DPC, Mister Disco, Persephone - these are just a few names off the top of my head who have at various times been in very real danger of me marrying them for their Shoppy goodness. Did they go to elite academic institutions? I have no idea. I've certainly never heard any complaints about the Ivy League tendency in the Head Shop...

2) Retention of fact is to a very great extent trumped by existence of Internet. The two are by no means directly comaparable, but a huge amount of information is now available online - if you know where to start looking, which might be a more useful skill imparted by less recall-based degrees.

So, if you feel you have something to add but don't want just to criticise another poster, maybe a quick brush-up on Wikipedia and then a tangent? I mean, as a way of varying the interaction. Having said which, I don't think recall needs to be perfect - I'm about to talk about the panopticon (again) in watched vs unwatched, and I'll do my best to explain the concept in a way that somebody coming to it without having read anytihng about the panopticon before will be OK with it, and for that matter somebody who knows more about it than I do can come in and correct a couple of misapprehensions, provide some more ways of thinking about the panopticon which will then feed back into a broader discussion of the watched vs the unwatched society, and so on.

So, I'd argue that the ideal is a situation in which someone like Sleazenation can talk about technical and practical issues with computer surveillance, somebody else can talk about the panopticon, Bentham and Foucault, somebody else can maybe look at the psychology of observation - and people who are interested in these areas can mix and match their responses. OTOH, a simple "I don't like feeling watched", while it's a perfectly good thing to _include_ in a comment if it is relevant, isn't a great comment in itself, because it doesn't tell us anything about being watched except that (poster) doesn't liek the feeling. Is that a comprehensible distinction?
 
 
alterity
17:33 / 07.06.05
And really: sentences like the following don't help newbies like myself to feel endeared or (for that matter) welcome; know what I mean?

What you are doing is using two terms that, if you had been around Barbelith a bit longer, you might have realized are rather more complex in terms of meaning and interpretation than you imagine - "pretension" and "sophistry".

I think one of the issues that clearly needs to be addressed here is the idea that everyone deserves to contribute. As Haus says,

The aim is not to get as many people to contribute as possible - it is to get good contributions.

Sorry, but not everyone is going to be able to contribute well to all topics, or necessarily to any topic. I have very little--actually nothing--to say in the relatively recent Heidegger thread. I have never read him, and don't plan to right now. Having never read him, I don't expect to be able to walk in and say something useful or intelligent. OS I stay out. Some subjects I can contribute to. Other subjects I want to contribute to so I try to take the time to read the thread and then, if necessary, to do some more work to make a good contribution. (Sorry, this is not meant to be a hooray for me post.) My point is simply that just because it happened to doesn't make it interesting.

Part and parcel of this issue is the idea that anyone can understand anything, so long as it is written about in what is called a clear and concise manner. Well, there is no such thing as transparent communication. More importantly, however, is the fact that there are some things that require a great deal of work to understand. I doubt that any ten year old (Doogie Howser notwithstanding) could understand the intricacies of string theory, no matter how long Brian Greene spends trying to talk to the child in a clear and concise manner. Does that make string theory bunk? Absolutely not. Greene's books are very well written, and convey a great deal of information to even a layperson such as myself. However, I will never get the math. I will also never understand a foreign language. I have tried mightily, but always fail. Does this constitute a failure on the part of my teachers? I don't think so. Some people won't get everything. Now, this is not say that people cannot learn, but simply that one must learn in order to be intelligent on a subject.

There is such a thing as expert knowledge, which is by definition knowledge that is not readily handed out in short bursts. It requires study. Now, the Head Shop is never going to be a place for experts only (I hope). But if someone is an expert, they should be teated as such. Haus, it seems, was not trying to be a jerk when s/he discussed the meaning of sophistry and pretension. S/he was simply offering a bit of expert knowledge (or at least knowledge of a very high level; I am in awe of Haus' knowledge on language and antiquity, btw). This discussion was not (I think) meant to make anyone feel unwelcome, but simply to say, "If you are going to use a word, use it properly. Understand what it means." The failure to do so is your own.

In terms of the Head Shop, it seems to me that it should be a place where everyone is free to contribute, but only if you know what your talking about. Questions should be freely asked by those who do not know, and those who do should be helpful and not spiteful. If you don't get something, you should not take your ball and go home. It may mean that you need to do more work to understand, and not that those who claim to understand are a bunch of charlatans. That claim is the refuge of the willfully ignorant. (which is not to say that sophistry does not exist, but it should never simply be dismissed. If someone is engaging a discussion in a manner that you know to be full of shit, call hir on it. Be specific and refute the argument with knowledge and logic. Do not simply say, "Bah! What a bunch of crap!")
 
 
HCE
18:13 / 07.06.05
You're going to give me a heart attack!

I post in Head Shop as little as I do because:

1) Somebody else (usually alas) often says what I would've said, and says it better.
2) I am generally online when I'm at the office, and it is an atmosphere conducive to smarmy one-liners rather than the kind of thoughtfulness I think HS deserves.
3) The few things I come up with that I think are worth anything are often very nebulous and undeveloped, and wouldn't further discussion so much as derail it.

For what it's worth, I have very little in the way of formal education, nothing beyond what's compulsory in the US.
 
 
paranoidwriter waves hello
18:39 / 07.06.05
OK, I didn't want to do this but I've been accused of "taking my ball and going home", so now I feel like Marty McFly when the Red Hot Chilli Peppers called him a chicken...Vrrooom, Vrrroooom...

First of all I was very careful in how I phrased my points in my initial post in this thread.

e.g. "All this runs the risk of sounding pretentious..."

It was never my intention to pick on any individual or institution. My points were general points about what is considered a valid contribution to any discussion, and indeed, what it means to set any form of restriction on such discussions. If there's been any confusion, I apologise for my part in this.

However, Haus, you know full well you have been baiting me in this thread and a couple of others today. Indeed, a more paranoid person might think your choice of using the "panopticon" in your previous post, was a thinly veiled reference to an even older thread: the only thread I have started in Head Shop since I joined Barbelith -- seeing as I was honest enough to admit in the thread that I didn't know much about it.

Haus, it seems, was not trying to be a jerk when s/he discussed the meaning of sophistry and pretension. S/he was simply offering a bit of expert knowledge (or at least knowledge of a very high level; I am in awe of Haus' knowledge on language and antiquity, btw). This discussion was not (I think) meant to make anyone feel unwelcome, but simply to say, "If you are going to use a word, use it properly. Understand what it means." The failure to do so is your own.

Sure, maybe. Maybe "All of this is in my head"? But given that I wasn't specifying a target when I used the words (for example) "pretentious" and "sophistry", what makes you think I have misused them? My Oxford English Dictionary says the following:

"Sophistry 1. Specious or oversubtle reasoning, the use of intentionally deceptive arguments; casuistry; the use or practice of specious reasoning as an art or dialectic exercise. ME b. an instance of this, a sophism. 2. Cunning, trickery, craft. LME-M17. 3. The type of learning characteristic of the ancient sophists; the profession of a sophist. M19

Pretentious ( ... as PRETENSION ...) Making excessive or unwarranted claim to merit or importance; making an exaggerated outward show, ostentatious. M19"

With a name like mine I'm at a disadvantage when it comes to discussions like the one we appear to be having now, but you'd do well in this instance to respectfully remember the second word in my name.

It may mean that you need to do more work to understand, and not that those who claim to understand are a bunch of charlatans. [etc]

Seriously, this is getting WAY out of hand.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
19:02 / 07.06.05
However, Haus, you know full well you have been baiting me in this thread and a couple of others today. Indeed, a more paranoid person might think your choice of using the "panopticon" in your previous post, was a thinly veiled reference to an even older thread: the only thread I have started in Head Shop since I joined Barbelith -- seeing as I was honest enough to admit in the thread that I didn't know much about it.

That's right. It's all about you. Barbelith has, in fact, been set up entirely for your benefit. All those old threads? Fabrications. Other members? One very busy man called Tom. You have a wealthy benefactor who believes you need to be encouraged to write more and yet worse poetry, of a kind that could be explained and understood easily by a ten-year-old. Only thus can the secrets of the universe be laid bare. He is doing this through a complex and highly allusive code, through which everybody is talking about you all the time. Also, the voices in your head? Totally telling the truth. They actually are all dirty.

My God. And I thought *I* was self-absorbed. Now, do you have anything to say about the Head Shop, pw? And did you know that Socrates was accused of being a sophist? Could that have been because people didn't understand that humble quest for truth stuff? Could, therefore, one man's sophist be another man's person who is talking sense? Obviously not on Barbelith, since it has been designed, built and coded down to the colour scheme entirely for your benefit, and thus what you judge sophistry goes, but in the wider world?
 
 
paranoidwriter waves hello
19:10 / 07.06.05
See what I mean?
 
 
alterity
19:14 / 07.06.05
With a name like mine I'm at a disadvantage when it comes to discussions like the one we appear to be having now, but you'd do well in this instance to respectfully remember the second word in my name.

Do you think I care what your name is? Just because it says you are paranoid, does not mean I assume you actually are. I have no idea what 99% of the names on Barbelith mean or refer to, so I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. I know that they are not "just names", but it's not really my concern. And saying you are a writer does not make it so. I wonder what disadvantage you see yourself as being at?

As for my attempt to explain Haus, which perhaps I shouldn't bother to do as s/he does a much better job than I could ever hope to. . . what I was writing about was not the definition of terms but rather the use of terms. You no doubt can look things up in the dictionary, but just because you know what the definition of sophistry is does not mean that everything you see but don't understand is sophistry. To blame lack of comprehension on others is a problem. No doubt there are bad teachers (although I don't recall ever seeing anything on the internets [sic] generally or Barbelith particularly that requires anyone to be a teacher at all). However, sometimes, just sometimes, bad grades are the result of shoddy work.
 
 
paranoidwriter waves hello
19:21 / 07.06.05
Do you fancy me or something? There seems to be a lot of unnecessary insults and hormones flying around. At the risk of making this sound even more like a fight in the playground: who started it?
 
 
Bed Head
19:28 / 07.06.05
Oh God.

Pw, please leave this thread alone unless you’ve something to add to the actual topic. If you want to rassle with haus, start a thread in Convo and invite him to join you. If you seriously want to complain about haus harassing or victimising you somehow, start a new thread in Policy. Just please don’t rot this thread any further with this idiotic ‘fight’ you think you’re having.
 
 
Lurid Archive
19:29 / 07.06.05
Oh FFS. I don't care who started it. Stop needling eachother. Either comment on the topic or not at all.
 
 
paranoidwriter waves hello
19:44 / 07.06.05
Yeah, you're right. Sorry everyone. See you around people. : )
 
 
Tryphena Absent
19:51 / 07.06.05
Haus I wasn't talking about Oxford and Cambridge, I was talking about a specifc skillset that people who attended those Universities tend to have, thus I presume that people, even ill-educated people might tend to have that talent or skill without having specifically attended either Oxford or Cambridge. Regardless it leaves out people who don't have that ability.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
19:54 / 07.06.05
And perhaps you can read Benjamin or Wittgenstein and understand immediately where the keys in the text were for you. Perhaps it's that easy for you to read and understand complicated language but I can't pull quotes out without scouring the entire work and then recalling how it fit together. I can't do that.
 
  

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