• Alex’s First Law
  As soon as an online discussion becomes an argument, the participants will never admit they are wrong, no matter how strong the evidence against them. Winning an argument fairly is impossible.
• Alex’s Second Law
  Upon reading something that flies in the face of accepted science or reason, the educated layman will immediately make an attack on the semantics of it, as he does not understand enough science or logic to make a more detailed response. Inevitably, the discussion will shift to the meaning of one or two key words rather than focusing on the science or logic.
• Alex’s Third Law
  It is far easier to attack an argument by quoting one of the Laws of Argumentation than it is to actually construct a logical response.

  First Corollary: Using a Law of Argumentation (this includes laws such as Danth’s and Godwin’s) as a substitute for logical argumentation is justification for using Alex’s First Law against you.

  Second Corollary: Using Alex’s First Law to win an argument immediately makes you a victim of the First and Third Laws.

A list of the other Laws of Argumentation

Yeah, big deal. It’s been all over the Internet lately. Well, as an assignment for one of my university courses, I wrote a nice report on Comfort’s edition, comparing it to the original 1859 first edition, which we conveniently have a copy of in a library here on campus.

It was very revealing.

You can see the entire 11-page report here, though don’t be frightened by its length: it’s double-spaced and in a nice, large, easy-to-read font.

Enjoy, everyone! Feel free to spread this around the Interwebs as much as you’d like.

For the impatient, here are the highlights:

• Ray Comfort’s table of contents omits page numbers entirely, so you can’t skip to specific chapters. In fact, new chapters start in the middle of pages, and chapter headings are in tiny font, so you can’t even find chapters if you want to find a specific detail. It’s worthless as the edition for “universities and higher education” it claims to be on the back cover.
• The text of his Special Introduction is in a nice, large font, whereas Origin is in a tiny, unreadable font. It is painfully clear that Comfort does not even want you to read Origin, just his introduction.
• The nice, 12-page index is completely omitted.
• Darwin’s credentials, once present on the title page, are left out.
• The one figure included in the first edition, a nice tree of life diagram, is omitted, leaving four pages or so of Darwin blabbing about a figure illustrating his point with no actual figure to illustrate his point.
• Comfort’s claim that atheists wanted book-burnings and generally had a huge violent outcry is mostly unsubstantiated. Though one atheist on RichardDawkins.net calls Comfort out on his “ideological masturbation fantasy.” (Yeah, the paper’s worth reading just for that quote.)
• I did not, in fact, see much response at all from the religious online community, besides some criticisms of Comfort.

What does this lead me to believe? Well, here’s my conclusion:

Comfort’s edition of On the Origin of Species is not the product of a society that has rejected Darwinism. It is the product of a society that accepts Darwinism more than ever, whose acceptance has driven Ray Comfort to the conclusion that society is rejecting God. To a deeply religious minister, that is cause for action. Thus, a new Origin was produced, one designed to bring people back to God by emphasizing a religious message and discouraging anyone from even reading Darwin’s words. In his view, after all, Darwin is the man who drove them away from God in the first place.

This is no ordinary edition of Origins, with a nice introduction stating the “other side” of the story, as Comfort makes it out to be. It is an outright, but very subtle, attack. And it deserves to be treated that way.

Over this time I have collected various bits of wisdom about moderating and participating in discussions on Internet forums. As SFN moves ahead with new plans and new ideas for the future, I thought it best to write some of my thoughts down.

You’re not always right

Imagine: you’ve just solved a problem in physics that has gone unsolved for decades. You have a simple, comprehensible way of explaining it. You’re brilliant. You write up your explanation and post it on SFN for the masses to marvel at.

Except they don’t marvel. A swarm of members tell you that you’re wrong; they say you don’t understand quantum mechanics properly, and that there was an experiment that directly contradicts your hypothesis. But that doesn’t make sense; your explanation has nothing wrong with it. It couldn’t. These people just can’t know what they’re talking about.

This is a trap that many, many members have fallen into. Convinced their right, they choose to attack contradictory evidence rather than evaluating to try to improve their theory — there’s a difference between “hmm, that experiment is interesting, let me adjust my hypothesis” and shouting “no, that’s impossible, the universe doesn’t work that way!”

Always consider the possibility that you may not be right.

Not everybody is an expert

Imagine: someone comes on the forums saying they’ve solved a previously unsolved problem in physics. They have some simple way of explaining it, and they want everyone on SFN to hear it.

Of course, their explanation is wrong, like every one preceding it. You and other members tell them they’re wrong; you point out that they misunderstand quantum mechanics, and that an experiment contradicts their hypothesis. But they don’t get it; they claim the experiment is wrong and they’re still right.

It’s frustrating. After much arguing, you’re convinced they’re not interested in listening to you. They’re just trolling.

This is another trap that many of our best members fall into. Many of our members have little formal education and haven’t even been exposed to this fancy quantum mechanics stuff. When you’re throwing your best at them, pointing out that some obscure quantum effect makes their explanation void, realize that their confused and angry reaction saying that they’re still right is not stubbornness; they’re defensive because they have no idea what you’re blabbering about. Try to explain, not argue.

“Calm down” pisses people off

Posting a note telling angry members to calm down never works. Especially when written in a stern tone. Take a look at the Betari box; the only way to stop anger is not more anger but de-escalation. (But not to the point of being condescending; that backfires miserably.)

In short, the easiest way to avoid an angry discussion is to never allow yourself to make an angry post. (Remember that you have control over what you type. Feel free to shout at your monitor as much as you want, of course.)

Nobody is evil

Humans are great at finding patterns where none exist. We see cows in the clouds, Jesus in JIF peanut butter, and penguins in horse poop; we’re great at taking limited data and thinking it fits a pattern (”penguin!”). The thing about forums is that they present you a limited set of data points: you do not get to hear other members’ tones, see their facial expressions, or see anything except their words. Often you don’t read all of one member’s posts, either, you see some limited subset.

But based on that limited group of data points, we all end up making assumptions about what that member is doing. Often times we look at ten of their posts and assume they must be trolling, trying to elicit a reaction from other members. Or we look and think we see a consistent trend of them not answering questions and assume that means they know they’re wrong and are simply avoiding responding.

Those assumptions are almost never right. It’s more likely that the guy evading your questions simply doesn’t know how to answer them; try to think of the situation from his perspective before you try to beat him down.

Automated warnings are scary

Any system that automatically sends PMs for discipline — like our own infraction system — is inherently scary. Our infraction system worked by letting members accumulate “points”; if they got 25, they were automatically banned for 3 days.

Many times we’d issue a member an infraction for five or ten points and the system would send its automated official-sounding private message advising them that they’ve been infracted. Of course, nothing actually happens to you until you get 25 points — but the automation and official-ness of the system frightened people. They’d get their infraction and PM an administrator, panicked and demanding it be removed; they might even refuse to post until the points go away. But the points meant absolutely nothing unless they got 25! And infractions are rare events.

But because it was an automated system rather than a friendly PM from a local moderator, infractions were scary. They put people on the defensive and made them feel attacked. Very often they were counterproductive.

More to come

That’s all for this time. Some day I may write part 2, or part 3, of this series, whenever I think of something more to add. Feel free to comment with your thoughts. We all want to improve our moderation, and any comments you have can’t hurt.

What I Believe

I believe that unicorns exist,
but that dolphins and iguanas
are entirely imaginary.

I believe that a hamster’s bite
won’t kill a man,
but that his wife will.

I believe that the weirder you get,
the crazier you are,
but the more fun you have.

I believe that if you roll over at night
in a small bed,
you will fall off the side.

I believe that no one
is spared insanity,
but some people get too much of it.

I believe in determinism,
but that’s not my fault.

I believe that, when all
the clocks melt,
Dali goes on without them.

I believe that whatever
pulls us under,
will do so violently.

so as to alarm everyone,
so as to make them shout
and inspire generations of filmmakers.

And I believe that there are living poets
that are quite good,
but that I have yet to find any.

Media I can use to communicate with people I know in person:

• Phone call. The highest-bandwidth and lowest-latency medium, unless you get voicemail. But somehow the least preferred.
• Text message. Annoyingly brief and usually vapid; useful for arranging meetings or telling someone you can’t go to their party when you’d rather not have to explain on the phone.
• Facebook message. Either wall post or private message. You can talk as much as you want, but in public you’d rather not and most private messages are just messages sent to groups to inform them that a party is coming up. (In my experience, anyway.)
• Instant messenger, like MSN or AIM. You will never have a group of friends that entirely uses one protocol or another; there’ll always be the one or two people using a different system. IMs are convenient and fast, you can keep logs for yourself, and it’s a lot easier to type on a keyboard than on a phone; still, IM clients aren’t as portable. (If you have one on your iPhone you have to type with the tiny keyboard.)
• Email. The original electronic communication method. It’s now basically the Snail Mail of the Internet, though emails only take two seconds to arrive most of the time. For some reason many people I know don’t use email for serious messaging at all, sticking to Facebook or text messaging.
• Smoke signal. This is arguably my favorite system, although it is difficult to find willing people to communicate with and the fire department tends to show up a lot.

I’m the sort of person that likes to keep things archived. I have all of my email since my current email accounts opened; I have all instant messages logged and I keep offline copies of the (very few, as it happens) Facebook private messages I actually deem important. Text messaging presents a problem because there’s no good way to archive it, and of course nobody likes having their phone calls recorded.

My obsessive-compulsive need to have a cohesive record of my past isn’t being fulfilled! Stupid technology.

That is all.

It is not an ordinary fire. It is the heat of uncountable gazillions of tiny pairs of protons and electrons being squished together at incredible temperatures, releasing scads of energy. The energy is transmitted outward, through clouds of zillions of other pairs, until finally it reaches the surface of this giant ball of fusing protons. Off it goes, zipping through space at ludicrous speed, until some of it — a tiny portion of it — is stopped.

This particular portion happens to have collided with a collection of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms arranged in such a fashion that its energy contributes to a complex chemical reaction, helping to link twenty-four globs of proton, neutron and electron together into a giant chunk of atomic soup. This chunk is passed around in a veritable sea of watery goop, until finally it is broken apart again and used for fuel.

That atomic soup was partially composed of water, another oddity. This particular water was part of a huge collection of water much like it, interspersed with various salt molecules, which simply sits, unsure of what to do with its life, on a giant bed of sand and rock. For fun, it slow-dances to the rhythm of the coming and going of another chunk of rock a quarter of a million miles above it, shifting around on its bed slowly, like it’s about to pass out.

But back to that atomic soup. Eventually the structure housing it is ripped from its comfortable bed of ground-up rocks and organic matter, mashed into small bits, and then doused in a bath of acids which gradually separate some of those balls of protons and electrons. From there it moves on to a long fluid-filled tube where some of those chunks are absorbed through the walls, into a stream of watery, reddish fluid with iron in it.

That fluid, being pushed in its containing tube by a pump made of soft organic matter that pulses in a particular rhythm, gradually works its way up. Reaching its destination, our chunks are ingested by tiny wriggling balls of chemicals which use them as building materials and energy sources for further wriggling and squirming.

Let’s not forget where this is all happening: on a giant ball of rock, soft on the inside and crunchy on the outside, bathed in water and hurtling through space at a speed generally considered unsafe for travel. It’s circling around the aforementioned giant fireball, which circles around a chunk of stuff so huge other stuff can’t help but fall right in.

And this chunk of rock, this fireball, this other huge chunk, are all but one of billions and billions of their kind floating around the universe.

Whatever your religious affiliation, or lack thereof, I hope this post has made you think of just how fantastically insanely weird and complex our universe really is. Maybe God did it, maybe it’s a consequence of our complex rules of physics and the patterns that spring from them; regardless, this is one hell of a crazy place to live in. So stop acting so unsurprised at everything.

‘Twas a warm summer day in La-La Land,
Fields of grass swayed lazily in the breeze,
The cool wind made ripples in ponds quite grand,
Cattle grazed quietly in the tall trees.

Fields of wildflowers, cover’d in white snow,
Were drinking from the ice-cover’d river.
High up in the grasses was a white crow.
The moon resembled a small cheese sliver.

The townspeople, dressed in parkas, were out
To round up their herds of longhorn llamas;
The honey bees were beginning to sprout,
Searching for fresh floral-print pajamas.

Another normal day in La-La Land,
Said mister Dali to his melting hand.

Those who do not get the Salvador Dali reference should go check Wikipedia. And those who are Googling to see if I plagiarized this sonnet: 5th period. I was Hamlet.

And so on.