[Tango-L] Style Wars: Truth and Truthiness

[Konstantin Zahariev]

On Nov 27, 2007 1:50 PM, meaning of life <kushi_bushi at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> if you want to see how this forum deals with "information that contradicts its' views" [...]

But that's just it - Tango-L is not a very good example in most cases
because it deals a lot in opinions about art forms. So your sentence
above should really be "if you want to see how this forum deals with
_opinions_ that contradict its' views" - but then it really addresses
a somewhat different phenomenon.

There are other reasons why bringing out examples of past Tango-L
activity is not necessarily illuminating to the truthiness versus
truth discussion - there's deep (personal) history among some, and
there are subjects that are brought up repeatedly and/or in an
implicitly or explicitly non-constructive way, so some people are just
tempted to dismiss or declare. This does not necessarily mean they
have no argument against what is offered or that they cannot defend
their point of view.

In other words, the notion of an informal discussion network of people
with converging views clustering and developing information biases is
still an idealized model of the real thing. Tango-L is not close to
that model, but perhaps one can study it by isolating properties
somehow (identify relevant variables, keep variables other than the
one you study fixed, etc.)

With best regards,

Konstantin
Victoria, Canada