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There seems to be a string of questions which just state the same underlying (basically unanswerable) question in different ways. Then it devolves in to a lot of finger pointing and name calling and assertions that because something someone said is not grounded or somehow arbitrary, that it means that anyone can say any old thing and it is perfectly valid as a question.

It's getting to be like a bar with people waving handwritten monopoly money at the bartender, getting disorderly and challenging people to throw them out. Is there any sort of appeal to reason that can be applied here? Not just everything goes, and trying to sneak up on some hidden answer by endlessly trying every scenario and challenging all prior arguments is not really getting us anywhere.

I try pointing out that these questions are not fruitful and there are better ways to look at the issues, but haven't had success. Suggestions?

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  • 2
    Can you link to some of these questions?
    – causative Mod
    Commented Nov 23 at 2:27
  • 4
    I can, but I may not.
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Nov 23 at 3:33
  • 2
    Most philosophical claims are wrong, because on most philosophical issues there are at least three conflicting claims. Any wrong claim is unjustified; therefore, most philosophical claims are unjustified. Unjustified claims are bad philosophy. Thus, most philosophy is bad philosophy. So it is normal. You have to have a tolerance for discussing bad philosophy or you can't really discuss philosophy at all. (Of course, precisely which philosophy is the bad philosophy is very open to interpretation)
    – causative Mod
    Commented Nov 23 at 3:38
  • 2
    We know some of it is bad, but we don't know which, LOL. Animals usually don't eat something again that disagreed with them, but dogs do roll in dead things, so even animals aren't free from vice.
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Nov 23 at 3:45
  • 1
    When I was teaching programming I got so I could recognize most of the common problems just from a description, and I could distinguish a comma from a semicolon six feet away. But this isn't my classroom, so I can't see all the issues as clearly and it is not my place to tell people they are wrong. But, gosh, it sure does seem like much of what goes on here is misguided and a complete waste of time. When I was teaching I could cut off unproductive discussion or attempts by students to do the impossible. Not so much here.
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Nov 23 at 3:54
  • 6
    Down vote and vote to close. Repeat.
    – JonathanZ
    Commented Nov 23 at 14:47
  • 1
    Also, since you have experience being a teacher, y'know how you could come to recognize that certain students would regularly ask questions that, even though they might be rooted in genuine personal confusion and a desire to learn, it would not be a productive use of everyone else's class time to go over their questions in class? Well, that, but here
    – JonathanZ
    Commented Nov 23 at 14:51
  • And in anticipation of someone coming with the "class time is limited, but storage space for additional posts on SE is essentially unlimited" argument: What's limited here is people's time, attention, and energy. Qualified people will stick around SE if we don't waste theirs.
    – JonathanZ
    Commented Nov 23 at 14:55
  • 1
    @JonathanZ yes, but honestly, I don't want people to waste their own time on stuff that simply isn't going to help them.
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Nov 23 at 15:03
  • 1
    Noble attitude, but if people are going to be allowed to make their own decisions and choices, one can only give good advice so many times before accepting that they've made their choice for themself. But in the meantime, if their decision harms a common good, we can decide to protect that common good.
    – JonathanZ
    Commented Nov 23 at 15:13
  • Is this different?
    – Rushi
    Commented Nov 27 at 1:22
  • @Rushi yeah, similar. I was pointing out how these particular cases cause interactions to worsen, which concerns me.
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Nov 27 at 1:44
  • @ScottRowe Yeah? Well ignore those questions and read something else.
    – Miss Understands
    Commented Dec 8 at 22:48
  • 1
    @MissUnderstands but, but, but, they're often the best thought-through ones. If we could just harness all that brainpower towards something that is both interesting and useful, my life would be so much better! BTW I like your stuff and often upvote even if it seems controversial, casual or "doesn't meet a Stack Exchange guideline", so mwa.
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Dec 9 at 10:36
  • @ScottRowe oh! [blushes; stares at floor]
    – Miss Understands
    Commented Dec 9 at 12:43

5 Answers 5

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I also have a similar impression that there are some serial askers lately who seem less interested in answers than in the process of asking. This is characterized by a high frequency of questions, high ratio of closed ones, typically about pseudosciences or otherwise questioning mainstream materialism with clickbait.

Just generating that many questions that often (and dealing with answers and comments) would take a lot of time, unless an LLM were used to generate questions.

I think just looking at the activity of the following tags

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  • +1 I would add questions tagged "Probability"
    – Idiosyncratic Soul
    Commented Nov 24 at 18:35
  • Maybe we could create some tags that just automatically close the Question?
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Nov 24 at 19:03
  • Questioning materialism is an entirely legitimate subject for philosophy, and has been increasingly successful, which is why almost nobody today is a materialist, and physicalism is no longer a majority view. Evidences for or against non-materialist worldviews are also entirely legitimate questions within philosophy. Banning questions on topics you don't want to think about is an effort to censor Phils SE to defend an ideology from appropriate philosophic evaluation. All those tags are valid on this site.
    – Dcleve
    Commented Nov 25 at 23:21
  • 1
    Nowhere did I say the tags are invalid, or suggest banning. You are fighting windmills.
    – tkruse
    Commented Nov 25 at 23:34
  • @tkruse Reeeally? So then what exactly do you advocating? You just linked to lists of every single question about 3 tags. One might reasonably infer that you had some sort of problem with these tagged qiestions.
    – Miss Understands
    Commented Dec 8 at 22:51
4

Often, the questions you're describing are not sufficiently focused or would require more details or clarity. If that is the case, those would be appropriate reasons to vote to close.

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    Right, but I keep hoping that the askers themselves would realize that their own understanding lacks details or clarity. The place to begin learning is within one's own views. If the Question has issues, probably the understanding which prompted it does also.
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Nov 23 at 16:11
  • 1
    @ScottRowe For years, I also meditated on such issues, and ultimately I believe that user behavior is largely circumscribed by architecture (or archityranny if you prefer). I used to think the issue was mods, but the StackExchange model has imperfections which make it tough to alter the community dynamics.
    – J D
    Commented Dec 7 at 15:25
3

The issue is whether or not the actions performed by a user are in "good faith". The "opinion" flag is really a catchall for users that are generating "argument bait". It's not that the question is opinion based, it's that the intent is to generate an argument rather than an answer which violates the mission statement for this site and is NOT "good faith" usage.

The latest argument bait is:

  • Intelligent Design
  • Any inference drawn from improbability, coincidence, miracles, complexity, etc.

How can moderators/users determine whether actions performed by users are in "good faith"?

I doubt there is a simple answer.

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    We could be stricter about "interesting question, but that part of philosophy is now the science called...and that's where you will find the accepted answers." Or, to escape that, ask people to make very clear that they are proposing a thought experiment, and identify what assumptions they are making rather than simply asserting them as if they are accepted truth. Of course, the problem with that is the Dunning-Kruger effect; people often don't know what they don't know, or what they believe that is not currently accepted as the primary model of the world.
    – keshlam
    Commented Dec 5 at 20:19
  • 1
    People asking questions to confirm or refute a belief is fine, but this may not be the place to do it, and it needs to be done with a willingness to at least listen seriously to both answers. (Not that I claim to be a paragon of that.)
    – keshlam
    Commented Dec 5 at 20:21
  • 1
    I do tire of the endless iterations of questions about whether something or other supports or falsifies something related, distantly, to theism. But, sadly, these are some of the best posed questions lately. I just wish humans could get over their thing with divinity. Ethics might be more important.
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Dec 6 at 2:21
  • @ScottRowe Usually, good faith questioners take the comments given as an attempt to help. Votes to close and down votes occur when polite comments fail and/or are met with belligerence.
    – Idiosyncratic Soul
    Commented Dec 6 at 3:00
  • 1
    action is the key word here — thanks for that usage. Question, answer are actions — ideally the main ones here. Then comments. But crucially VTCs reopens, flags also. And allt these can be in good faith or otherwise
    – Rushi
    Commented Dec 6 at 5:38
2

There are a few separate problems here:

  1. Some people mistake ideology for philosophy, and write multiple questions to find the best way to frame the question towards the answer they want.
  2. Some people are unclear about what it is they are trying to ask, and write multiple questions because their thoughts are evolving (or sometimes just revolving) as they write and get initial responses.
  3. Some people — particularly on certain 'trigger' topics — have a combative attitude, and write multiple questions in response to comments or answers they perceive as aggressive or demeaning.

The best approach, I think would be to restrict low-rep users so that:

  • Their question automatically goes into a 'probationary' mode
  • Probationary questions:
    • can be commented on for suggestions
    • can be edited for improvements
    • cannot be closed, shared, or deleted (except for obvious violations)
  • Probationary questions stay probationary until a moderator is satisfied the question is ready for prime time and releases it
  • Users with a question in probation cannot post another question until the first is released

The idea is to force posters to focus on editing the question to get it 'right', and keep other users from reactively answering or closing a badly framed question, not fixing it. You could also use this to handle duplicate questions before they get locked in, I suppose.

I don't know if this is technologically possible, but it's the most effective solution I can think of.

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  • At Computer Science Educators SE they tried a "question sandbox" which would let experienced members help improve questions before they were posted. Technical solutions could help, but I was thinking more of a "boot to the head" solution of getting people to avoid going down these blind alleys to begin with. Forlorn hope, I suppose.
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Dec 4 at 23:31
  • 1
    Re 3: Have hi-rep users transcended trigger-combative question-response-answer behavior?
    – Rushi
    Commented Dec 5 at 7:28
  • @Rushi: I'm sure some (or all) do. But (a) high-rep means the user is at least familiar and comfortable with the stack, and (b) I didn't want to force moderators to probate every question on the site. Moderators could always decide to probate a question from a hr user after the fact if problems arise, or is could be set up so that a hr user could probate his own question if she thinks it needs development.
    – Ted Wrigley
    Commented Dec 5 at 14:40
  • Or so the moderators could return people to the "can I help you with that" queue if they're getting sloppy despite (or because of) experience. But this brings us back to having more things that would be useful to do than moderator time available to do them.
    – keshlam
    Commented Dec 5 at 20:12
  • @keshlam: The hope would be that a probation stage would prevent a lot of the problematic behavior that mods have to deal with otherwise.
    – Ted Wrigley
    Commented Dec 5 at 20:22
  • Does stack exchange even have that capability? We already know that they have little interest in adding features at this point unless they are trivial or essential.
    – keshlam
    Commented Dec 5 at 20:32
  • @keshlam: Like a true philosopher I'm much better at what ought to be done than I am at what can be done. I mean, I know it can be done (could do it myself, if I had access), but the trick here is to find a SE dev who's bored enough to play with it.
    – Ted Wrigley
    Commented Dec 5 at 21:59
1

Had some similar thoughts here: Better ways to improve questions: Sandbox/Workshop post? Chat? Template for Meta?. It seems like it'd be helpful to invite people to a chat or meta question to help clarify what is being asked, what answers would be useful, etc.

At the same time, I think a lot of people are essentially WP:NOTHERE to do the SE thing--in an ideal world I think other sites would be a better place for many questions here.

That said, I think 'we need to clean up the site and improve quality' is a minority opinion. Causative (I don't mean to disparage you here, just to state your position) ran on a platform of laissez-faire moderation and won handily.

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    The problem with “high quality” in philosophy is that there is no established consensus for what constitutes as high quality. It is irredeemably subjective unlike the fields of science or mathematics where the correct answer is clear.
    – Syed
    Commented Nov 25 at 22:30
  • Quality and correctness really aren't as yoked together as one might think. I can report that on math.se there is plenty of discussion as to what should be kicked off the platform for reasons having nothing to do with correctness. We could, if we wanted to, decide as a community that posts that don't meet certain standards are closed/deleted and start doing our individual, non-moderator moderation (down vote, vote to close) to uphold those standards. But, as this answer says, laissez-faire seems to have strong support.
    – JonathanZ
    Commented Nov 25 at 22:56
  • I wasn't so much thinking of cleaning up the site or improving moderation as I was of getting people unstuck from whatever rut causes them to keep on the same unproductive topic week after week. If they ask a dozen questions around a basic idea, what really are they expecting? A miracle breakthrough? Sudden change of heart by philosophers?
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Nov 26 at 2:54

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