How is a spatial IQ off the charts you might ask? When you answer the question before they hit their timer… they have to make a special note that you answered the question before they hit their timer. Do you have any idea how few people on earth can do that?
In this instance your level of debate is low. I suggested 3+ possible reasons for banning and never did i suggest that you were “wrong”, an “asshole”, nor that you were an “idiot”.
But those are also reasons why you might be banned, it would all depend on the Forum in question. And that might be about the aims, content or style of forum and nothing to do with you except that you are not a good fit for many reasons.
Being banned from 15 is not relevant to the standard here.
PS I don’t think your spatial intelligence is relevant either.
My verbal intelligence is high as well… not as high as my spatial intelligence, but far beyond the 99th percentile. Actually, I think it is very relevant. A forum that doesn’t ban the stuff I say, has a very high level of integrity.
You’re completely missing or avoiding the point I am making. Obviously IQ is not a qualification for dealing with an issue.
PS. I just had to delete the point in question due to the 3 quotes rule.
This reminds me of an interesting blog post I read arguing that post count is worth very little as a metric for the quality of discussion. And again, I don’t think the ability to make quick, one-liner replies is a selling point. If all we were interested in here were how many posts we could accumulate in an hour, we’d be a website about reality television or we’d just populate the forum with spam bots. We’re interested in philosophy, and quality philosophy at that, of which multiply nested quotes and the rapid-fire prattling they enable is not conducive.
Certainly we are, but it seems like we agree that a more academic trajectory would do the site some good, right?
The rationale for restricting the quote depth is not server space. It is in part aesthetic, because nested quotes make for an unwieldy and uninviting presentation, and it is in part functional, because the mechanics of a site can affect the way users interact with it, and nested quotes do so by encouraging short posts that stoke feuding and stifle progress towards understanding.
LOL! No IQ doesn’t explain everything… I agree with you. Even emotional IQ doesn’t explain everything… some people just don’t fit in the box. I have an extremely high emotional IQ as well.
But Carleas, seriously… that has to do with post count, and reputation, that has nothing to do with embedded quotes. Like i said before… my experience is that you can illuminate a discussion by embedding a particular amount of quotes, which sometimes will be more than three. That is my observation and experience here. Let’s say you make a really good point that involves 4 embedded quotes but not three, and you link to your post… well if you need all four to make the point, then if it’s three, the person has to read much more of the thread. Sometimes it’s not necessary to read a whole thread to assent it or refute it.
That hypothetical is all well and good, but look at the way you actually just used the quote feature. You quoted my entire post, which made multiple points in reply to multiple points made in multiple other posts. And you quoted all of those points and said “that has to do with post count”. “That” being the aesthetics? “That” being the fact that it’s not about server time? “That” the rapid fire?
No, you used the quote where saying “Carleas, …” would have done just as well, and you made your point less clear (and your presentation much more cluttered) by including a whole lot of discussion that appears immediately above your post.
And that’s how quoting happens in the wild. Even if there were a hypothetical post where nesting four quotes deep would really drive the point home (and I don’t think that is a realistic hypothetical), there would still be a net gain in clarity by reducing cluttery, easy copying of what the previous person said.
And if you were to, say, type out some of the things I said (e.g. “And you quoted all of those points and said ‘that has to do with post count’”), you’d be more likely to digest those things, to think about them and break them down, and to really pay attention to them and read them before you responded. Human reading comprehension, even 99+ percentile comprehension, is poor. Quoting in-line, actually using (as opposed to mentioning) someone’s words makes clear at the very least where they are ambiguous or subject to multiple interpretations. That’s a good thing for discussion.
EDIT: I apologize if the above comes across as overly confrontational; in many cases I meant “you” to serve the role of the genderless third person singular, and probably would have better conveyed my intended tone by using the word “one”.
I do often feel that the three-quote limit is too low. For here’s what that looks like:
S
::
Above you really see only two rounds: P + Q is one round, and R + S is the next. I’m all for an experimental three-round limit, meaning a five-quote limit.
Why is a longer visible history preferable? Because it’s not just about what a person says, but also about the context in which he says it–especially in a discussion. I often feel misrepresented when it seems I said something out of the blue when I did not.
Of course, one could always backtrack. But, as Muishkin argues, this can be quite a hassle. As this doesn’t seem likely to change, though, considering that you, Carleas, are the one in blue, I’d like to remind you of another recent Help And Suggestions thread: the one about post numbers. It would be nice if there was a way to search on post number, so you can meaningfully say something like "But in post # 31770, you said:
[quote]
". It would help then, though, if post numbers were more easily visible. In any case, I think I’m actually gonna link people to the oldest post in a quote string from now on–though it’s a hassle.
By the way, never forget that “quote” = 8 4 6 2 5 = 25 = 7, which is the number of philosophy (Seven Sages), so the quote limit should actually be seven.
Carleas already addressed the post number function… and it is a vibrant part of the website… just click on the header on your post and the link to your post will come up. I see no issue here.
[quote=“Ecmandu”]
Yes, I’ve known that for years. But you cannot search the page for the number–as you have to at least float your mouse arrow over it in order to see it–, much less search the site for it.
I don’t see the issue, this is leg work you’re supposed to do… find your own post and link to it. I think the actual issue is the embedded quotes issue, because as you said, context is important… Carleas used my reply as a counter example, however, context in involved discussions come from multiple replies and it is tedious when the sealer of the reply is more than three embeddings of context. Sure someone may make a new point and then there’s no point for those embeddings, but 3 is too small for some of the situations I’ve encountered here personally, which is why i brought this up.
Like I already said. You are mistaking what you think the Forum ought to be with what it.
I’d like to be part of that Forum you think this one is, but there are some other things you will have to do to achieve that.
Most of my time, here, seems to get eaten up brick batting with people who have no interest in philosophy. You’d have to cut out the dead wood, and instigate better standards. But that would also mean ejecting moderators like UCC, who is an abusive thug.
I have found none of the moderators here to be abusive thugs.
Am I doing that, or are you? Because it is is a forum that only allows quoting to a depth of three, and you’re arguing that it ought to be a forum that allows quoting to a depth of … what is your ideal depth, by the way? That might help me understand your position. Infinite?
But anyway, taking as a given that is me who justifying what ought be the case, I don’t think it is absurd for me to say that ILP ought to act in a certain way to encourage better discussion, despite that the discussion we’re trying to discourage is currently the norm. We do that by adding and removing forums, locking threads and issuing warnings and bans, and generally by setting and applying moderation policy. That’s all aspirational: if ILP were perfect, we’d never change a thing.
Which returns us to the question: does limiting quote depth improve the quality of discussion? I maintain that it does.
Sauwelios, you may have manifested the hypothetical that Ecmandu described: I would like to quote to a depth greater than three in order to quote your reference to all three quote depths in one post. It’s a contrived situation that only comes up in a discussion of quote depth, when we might expect our needs to exceed the bounds (in fact I think it follows from Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem), but still, well played. =D>
But let me express my reply without the quote: in your P-S scenario, you’re effectively saying “you said that I said that you said …” (i.e. S is effectively saying “R said that Q said that P said…” At best, at this point, you’re arguing over what you said, rather than over the content of the topic, right? When was the last time you had a real-world conversation in which a sentence like “you said that I said that you said …” actually served to advance the topic?
And again, I’ll concede that there might be a times where such a references is useful, but they are exceedingly rare. Most often, by far, deeply nested quoting is used because people click “quote” as a way to reply to a specific post, and then the person their talking to does the same thing, and again and again.
Next most often, the thread has effectively split in two, and several people are having one conversation between several other peoples’ conversation and they’d like to keep the context by recreating their sub-thread in each post. In that case, I’d argue that the context is fairly effectively kept by keeping the three most recent posts in the sub-thread, and that if more quotes are truly that valuable they can be added serially instead of being nested.
And finally, we get a post like yours, where quoting it to a depth of only 3 is not really quoting it at all. I would be surprised if any other such posts exist on ILP, and I again applaud your ingenuity, whether or not it was intended. Hofstadter would be proud. =D>
No you are under the impression that this Forum has something to do with academic philosophy. I’m simply arguing for a procedural improvement, whilst you are living a fantasy.
As for the quote limit - why have one at all? Memory is cheap and text takes up little space. You can fit the entire canon of ancient Greek literature; drama, comedy history and all philosophy onto a CD-ROM.
So why have any limit? But why only three?
Lev, I think he said that the rules were set to facilitate what the forum aspires to be. More academic…in spite of the opposite being the norm. Then he said that at a certain point with all the multi quoting, people are arguing about who said what instead of the topic. I agree that when people start having 10 quotes in 1 post and taking up half a page with that stuff that it’s cluttery and annoying and not conducive to good discussion. I’ve seen it before. It’s ugly.
I agree with mr. reasonable… it is ugly. That’s why I suggested a character limit.
It might not be pretty, but it has precious little to do with presenting a more academic Forum. Academically minded people prefer to make their own choices about the depth of their quote history. So the point is moot.
It’s almost like you don’t know what you are talking about.
What would be your limit?