1. Silvia

   Hi Phil,I actually find it very hard to unsdterand what drives these people. In particular what drives otherwise reasonable, intelligent people to cling onto an opinion long after they must have realized they are wrong, or at least partly wrong. I mean, I can unsdterand that it’s not nice to admit one is wrong, and if every word of the discussion is documented that certainly doesn’t help either. But what strikes me is how often the time spent, the effort, and anger is completely out of proportion to the issue at hand. I mean, seriously, who cares what sort of a tower it is? Thus I am wondering if it would be beneficial to just list pros and cons and have them defended in some limited time span, and then come to a conclusion, if necessary by vote rather than consensus, with the procedure to be repeated if there are new facts. That is for cases in which a conclusion has to be reached like possibly: what do we write on this site, is it a TV tower or not. A conclusion should not be enforced though when not necessary (as is the case with many scientific debates where the situation is just inconclusive.) Basically, this would cut off the fruitless repetitions one very frequently finds in online discussions, as if repeating a point would make it true. It is interesting though that research has shown that people do indeed think facts more likely to be true if they have heard them repeatedly, even if from the same source. This fact been known to PR outlets and advertisement managers and probably to some extend, intuitively to humans generally, this might explain a lot of the repetitions we see in argumentations. Best,B.

   21.02.15

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