It seems to me that it would be nice to have a thread dedicated to explaining the unspoken rules of various fora. I'll start.
Head Shop
There's a perception that you need an advanced degree to post in Head Shop. This isn't so. What you need is an understanding of the way to conduct inquiry in a systematic manner, and a way to explain that clearly. Here's one possible example of that process:
An initial post makes an assertion— let's call it "People who believe blue must necessarily also believe yellow." Even if you don't know very much at all about "blue" and "yellow," you can look up these two brightly-coloured schools of thought on wikipedia. If something doesn't feel right about the assertion, you can dissect why this might be so. For example, you might find that if interpreted in a certain way, "blue" thought does not necessitate "yellow" thought. Then you post a link to your definitions, explain how you are interpreting "blue" thought, and how it does not appear to necessitate "yellow" thought. Valid responses include challenging your definition, your interpretation, your reasoning process, or agreeing with any or all of the above, or approaching the question from a different angle. This is not an exhaustive list.
There are many other, unproductive ways in which you might approach this problem. Some of the most annoying include attacking blue thought, when the topic is actually blue thought's relationship to yellow thought and not blue thought's merits of its own, attacking green thought, when no one has mentioned green thought at all, claiming to be an expert and producing unsubstantiated claims on the grounds of your self-proclaimed expertise, making personal attacks, and using "argument from funny words"— a logical fallacy wherein the poster makes an assertion which appears to rest on her or his ability to call an invisible adversary amusing names.
Also, if your argument rests on an assumption that people will take the existence of anything that might reasonably be called supernatural, psychic, magic, spirits, deities, or subtle bio-energy like chi or prana as a given, it probably more properly belongs in Temple.
Temple
Remember when posting here that just because people are expected to take as given that science does not describe the whole of reality, and people here generally hold beliefs about magic, the supernatural, deities, thoughtforms, and other such things, it does not necessarily hold true that their critical thinking skills will be suspended to the point that they won't question what you say. Argument from personal experience is more accepted here, but people generally don't feel like it's threatening when their experience is respectfully questioned, so long as it's not discounted altogether.
Any other takers? Also, if this is not your experience, please feel free to correct me. |
