I wrote this last year (when I was fairly active) but it applies here, so I'll repost it (rather than rehash it):
The truth of the matter is that while I stick within the forum guidelines, I have no interest or motivation in trying to convince anyone here of the wrongness of their position. It's a complete waste of time and resources.
The people who post here are those (on both sides) who are already convinced of their "rightness" and while we sometimes see some minor shifts (generally in scientific terms and away from literal creation science), most of the long-term posters are complete entrenched.
The weaker ones on the creationist side will disappear very quickly once it becomes clear that a) "Hey I don't know what I'm talking about!" and b) "Hey if I don't know what I'm talking about, maybe the rest of it is nonsense as well - geez that's scary, better stop going to that site" (
information blunting).
The important battle is here is for the hearts and minds of the
lurkers and those who end up here via google or other mechanisms. I'd like to say that facts and evidence are the important aspects of the battle but for those people, it needs to be simple and it needs to be straight forward - those who want a more complex explanation will generally join in with the debate.
We keep talking about how scientists doing their debate via peer review rather than internet forum, it's true and it's also an illustration that science is a complex business and one that the average man in the street will struggle to get a grasp of without a significant investment of time. It's why the creationists are so effective on the internet - they pitch their material at the right level (it's irrelevant to an extent that it's made-up!).
Therefore there needs to be a level of discourse on those boards pitched at people with little or no experience or understanding of the sciences or the atheist/theist debate. Iano also digs me for my relatively short posts - but it's entirely intentional, I occassionally write long posts but will delete them and replace them with something much shorter.
The truth of the matter is that most of the lurkers
will skip straight past the long posts for a varity of reasons (This is not off the top of my head, my real-world "expertise" is around the information-seeking behaviour of individuals and organizations. Therefore I have a fair idea of the process and the best mechanisms to attract attention). It's at this problem perpection level that I am trying to reach the lurkers - when they are still trying to define their source selection criteria.
At that level, it's more useful to try and get them to consider the
source rather than what the source is saying/providing as evidence. The "education" in the
relevence of the evidence is already provided by people like Razd, wounded king and others. People will seek out that information when they feel able to cope with it.
That's why as a element of any debate it
is useful to question the motivations and backgrounds of the organizations that what they are actually saying.
Am I attacking the messenger? No I'm just highlighting aspects of their expertise and their bias that the reader should consider. It's an attempt to act out what in social cognitive theory terms is termed as "behaviour modeling". Many of the lurkers on here would struggle to replicate the questioning techniques of RAZD or Wounded King or many of the others in terms of evidence but attempting to model the lurkers behaviour in terms of source selection is slightly straight forward.
(I've used Lurkers as a very broad term in there but in reality I'm talking about the people who are only casually considering those issues or just starting to think about them).
Edited by CK, : clarification
Edited by CK, : typo
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