Dismal Level of Discourse

[Alex Zee]

Having an invite only forum would be fine, but those posts shouldn't be isolated from the public, instead it should be something like a +v channel... only those invited can reply and post. The rest just watch and listen.

That's exactly what's missing from both Foundation and this forum's "premium" hidden section.

You don't need to hide things, this will only feed conspiracy paranoia. Just make it read-only for non-members.
And if people can't see what's inside, it's hard to know whether it would be worth paying for.

Overall, I don't think the problem is how to do it, it's just the lack of will (or organization).
I've been off bitcoin for 18 months and came back to the same sorry state of affairs as it was back then

[deepceleron]

Now, I am not criticizing the kids, this is all part of their learning process. Also, there are very bright ones out there. But most of them are just adding noise.

Plus they won't get off my lawn!

I have also become more exasperated, there is not much enriching information being posted here (and the search function doesn't work correctly to show refreshing old search results), nor is there much point in posting to an audience who didn't bother searching for obvious sources, or who's response to the information they pretend to seek is TL;DR. The kind of people who think that the stuff they don't know how to do is easy to do.

I think that like the Internet itself (which was great before all those AOLers...), you will see segmentation between content creators and content consumers in Bitcoin media. We will cordon off the latter's banal exchanges (e.g. youtube comments) in a way that doesn't distract from the thoughtful word. The question is whether to keep rearranging deck chairs in this forum.

On the positive side, I think we are at the saturation point of conspiracy survivalists here (you know who you are), and will see more mainstream users joining.

[dataphile]

[1] Although this is a subjective claim, I believe it can be independently verified because of the high correlation between intelligence and vocabulary (typical correlation coefficient is 0.8 ).  Thus if one compares the level of vocabulary used in years past on bitcointalk, I assert that it would be considerably higher than it is today.

Are you defining intelligence as IQ? A large component of an IQ measurement is verbal skill, which implicitly includes vocabulary. Your argument is tautological.

[ZephramC]

I would like to point out to my older suggestion of personalized tags for users: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=160900.msg1704296#msg1704296

However, this is probably not the right time (it is too turbulent these days) to promote such functionality.

[Herodes]

[1] Although this is a subjective claim, I believe it can be independently verified because of the high correlation between intelligence and vocabulary (typical correlation coefficient is 0.8 ).  Thus if one compares the level of vocabulary used in years past on bitcointalk, I assert that it would be considerably higher than it is today.

Are you defining intelligence as IQ? A large component of an IQ measurement is verbal skill, which implicitly includes vocabulary. Your argument is tautological.

IQ is one thing. And having a high IQ, I guess it indicates you're 'smart'. And that's not a bad thing. However I've seen many people with a high IQ, still making mistakes on many levels. For instance I had a professor at a university once, he was a complete ass. There was a clear hierachy. Undergraduate students were not allowed to contact him directly, because it was beneath him. Also it was important not to disturb him early in the morning, because then he was grumpy. Also he liked to plaster images of himself everywhere, letting everyone know about all his 'important' trips. Also, he was also always the master of everything computers, and for every assignment we got to know at the top of the paper that this stuff was written LaTex, vim or whatever obscure method he used to produce whatever. He always liked to use the most difficult methods to make something, so if he could write an assembler program to output gif's to give some nice graphs in the pdf's he produced, he'd do that.

Then immediately when students were enrolled, if they didn't know all the things that the curriculum was about for every session in class, the students were ridiculed and laughed at. He also used to write complicated calculations on big sheets of paper and plaster it on his office windows facing outwards, so that everybody that went by his office could gawk at his awesomeness.

If you sent him a question on e-mail, most of the time he either did not answer, gave an evasive answer, or was downright rude. At one time I was swamped in assignments as I also took extra subjects, and I sent him an e-mail asking him when the next assignment came out, so I could be better able to plan my time.

I got an e-mail back telling me that I must be in an idiot to be in this much of a hurry. But if I really was pressed for time I could have (insert very difficult assignment in assembler programming language here), and it was to be completed over the weekend and delivered to his office first thing in the morning the nextmonday (about 4 weeks before the general assignments were done). I gently declined and told him I'd rather wait for the official assignment.

Supposedly he was a brilliant man, or at least so he said himself, and he naturally had a few fans also. Maybe he had a very high IQ, I honestly don't know - but he was a complete ass. If I could chose I would chose a professor with 30% less knowledge but a better attitude.

As for the signal to noise ratio on this forum, using the ignore button usually helps. But it seems to be an influx of noise every time we have much activity in regards to speculation on the bitcoin price.

Imo, the most pleasant people to be around, are the ones with a relaxed attitude, helpful, friendly and with good intellects. Or simply put: Adults that can behave.

[Mike Christ]

IQ only signifies a capacity for holding knowledge.  It says nothing about knowledge held.  For example, if Bill had a cup the size of 130 IQ, and Jane had a cup the size of 150, how can you tell how full their cups are?  Would Jane's cup necessarily be more full than Bill's because it's bigger?  It's possible, but not always the case.

That is, if you believe IQ is a legitimate method of determining how much potential a person has to understand.  If someone can improve their IQ, everything gets thrown out the window.

[Herodes]

I think that like the Internet itself (which was great before all those AOLers...), you will see segmentation between content creators and content consumers in Bitcoin media. We will cordon off the latter's banal exchanges (e.g. youtube comments) in a way that doesn't distract from the thoughtful word. The question is whether to keep rearranging deck chairs in this forum.

Although there's much noise here, I find this forum more intellectually stimulating than youtube comments. Youtube in itself limits the length of any conversation, so it becomes like twitter on steroids, ie. not good for discussing things in depth.

I think there's a place for everyone on the internet, we just need to find that place.

[Herodes]

IQ only signifies a capacity for holding knowledge.  It says nothing about knowledge held.  For example, if Bill had a cup the size of 130 IQ, and Jane had a cup the size of 150, how can you tell how full their cups are?  Would Jane's cup necessarily be more full than Bill's because it's bigger?  It's possible, but not always the case.

That is, if you believe IQ is a legitimate method of determining how much potential a person has to understand.  If someone can improve their IQ, everything gets thrown out the window.

IQ is good to have, but so is EI. No matter how intelligent a person is, if he's constantly attacking, being negative and in general being a douche, I have no interest of dealing with that person. Now, if he has the occasional heated moments, that's not an issue. But some people just have a very bad attitude overall. And no matter how much you ignore it, if you stay around people like that, it will eventually eat at you, and your own attitude will be contaminated by theirs.

[Mike Christ]

IQ is good to have, but so is EI. No matter how intelligent a person is, if he's constantly attacking, being negative and in general being a douche, I have no interest of dealing with that person. Now, if he has the occasional heated moments, that's not an issue. But some people just have a very bad attitude overall. And no matter how much you ignore it, if you stay around people like that, it will eventually eat at you, and your own attitude will be contaminated by theirs.

True true.  There are many forms of intelligence.  Nothing bugs me more than someone who doesn't know how to handle other people.  I can't imagine someone like that would be all together wise; most of life would be a series of failed relationships and anger at people in general for not accommodating their lack of social ability, furthering the hole they're in.  I generally try to be nice to these people; when you attack someone who attacks you, it makes them believe it's okay to act that way.  Throwing them a curveball forces them to think about why nobody's acting like they are.  Doesn't always work, tho

[Raize]

If we had more filtering abilities, I think it would help increase the signal to noise ratio. Right now I can't even find the good comments worth responding to. I'd like to completely exclude posts from users under X number of months old from every single thread I read. If I had this option, I'd participate more, but lately I'm finding coming to the forums more of a chore. I still read Meta and the Custom Hardware categories, but I think after my Avalons come in, I'll be visiting the forum only sparsely.

Perhaps a voucher-only system for getting out of the Newbie section would be good. I'm not sure. It seems like a lot of these new folks need to read more than they post, however.

[bitsalame]

IQ only signifies a capacity for holding knowledge.  It says nothing about knowledge held.  For example, if Bill had a cup the size of 130 IQ, and Jane had a cup the size of 150, how can you tell how full their cups are?  Would Jane's cup necessarily be more full than Bill's because it's bigger?  It's possible, but not always the case.

That is, if you believe IQ is a legitimate method of determining how much potential a person has to understand.  If someone can improve their IQ, everything gets thrown out the window.

IQ isn't really about capacity for "holding knowledge", in that case it would test memory, encoding and retrieval, which isn't really tested there.
IQ is more about your capacity of processing information, and that's it.
Visual processing, pattern processing are the most typical ones.

[Mike Christ]

IQ only signifies a capacity for holding knowledge.  It says nothing about knowledge held.  For example, if Bill had a cup the size of 130 IQ, and Jane had a cup the size of 150, how can you tell how full their cups are?  Would Jane's cup necessarily be more full than Bill's because it's bigger?  It's possible, but not always the case.

That is, if you believe IQ is a legitimate method of determining how much potential a person has to understand.  If someone can improve their IQ, everything gets thrown out the window.

IQ isn't really about capacity for "holding knowledge", in that case it would test memory, encoding and retrieval, which isn't really tested there.
IQ is more about your capacity of processing information, and that's it.
Visual processing, pattern processing are the most typical ones.

Potential for knowledge might fit what I was trying for better...

[bitsalame]

IQ only signifies a capacity for holding knowledge.  It says nothing about knowledge held.  For example, if Bill had a cup the size of 130 IQ, and Jane had a cup the size of 150, how can you tell how full their cups are?  Would Jane's cup necessarily be more full than Bill's because it's bigger?  It's possible, but not always the case.

That is, if you believe IQ is a legitimate method of determining how much potential a person has to understand.  If someone can improve their IQ, everything gets thrown out the window.

IQ isn't really about capacity for "holding knowledge", in that case it would test memory, encoding and retrieval, which isn't really tested there.
IQ is more about your capacity of processing information, and that's it.
Visual processing, pattern processing are the most typical ones.

Potential for knowledge might fit what I was trying for better...

Neither that.
They do find correlations with academic performance, but that doesn't really prove potential for anything.
Ie. You can have a high IQ and be deluded to know it all, in that case you will never learn and be an ignorant ass all your life. You can find those examples quite often.

[niko]

Have you tried the "ignore" function?  With some discipline, I am able to remove low-IQ contributors, whilst keeping most of those who have something to contribute - even if I totally disagree with it.

[nanopene]

Have you tried the "ignore" function?  With some discipline, I am able to remove low-IQ contributors, whilst keeping most of those who have something to contribute - even if I totally disagree with it.

But the invite only/read only subsection is not a bad idea either.

[myrkul]

Have you tried the "ignore" function?  With some discipline, I am able to remove low-IQ contributors, whilst keeping most of those who have something to contribute - even if I totally disagree with it.

But the invite only/read only subsection is not a bad idea either.

I beg to differ. We're already getting accusations of elitism.

[repentance]

Like it or not, as Bitcoin adoption grows the forums are going to attract a lot of users who have little interest in intellectual discourse and even less interest in reading what others have written.  Many of them will have no interest in discussing concepts.

Other boards handle this by having dedicated forums with tougher rules.  The problem with that here is it takes a great deal of pro-active moderation to enforce and there's neither the will nor the resources to do that effectively.  This particular messageboard has an over-arching philosophy of minimal intervention by moderators and that's probably not going to change.

[bitsalame]

Like it or not, as Bitcoin adoption grows the forums are going to attract a lot of users who have little interest in intellectual discourse and even less interest in reading what others have written.  Many of them will have no interest in discussing concepts.

Other boards handle this by having dedicated forums with tougher rules.  The problem with that here is it takes a great deal of pro-active moderation to enforce and there's neither the will nor the resources to do that effectively.  This particular messageboard has an over-arching philosophy of minimal intervention by moderators and that's probably not going to change.

You know what, I am imagining a collective moderation mechanism, where people vote privately each other if someone is worthy. Something like the "thanks" mechanism. Someone who received kudos/thanks/whatever, automatically gets authorized to get into the exclusive forum.

The ones who gets the voting feature would be only those who achieved Hero Members, VIP and Donors, this would prevent gaming the system by registering new accounts massively and flooding each other with votes.

I think it may work pretty nicely.

[rpietila]

You seem like a boring pretentious douchebag.  That said, I think the donator's/VIP's have their own private section of the forum.

Yes, we do. But don't bother to buy your way there. There is not much extra insight there compared to what you can find in the public area.

[Alex Zee]

But don't bother to buy your way there. There is not much extra insight there compared to what you can find in the public area.

Yeah, that was my suspicion all along... Besides, 10 BTC for a forum access is kinda pricey nowadays