Thoughts on the discussion of the email list

Thoughts on the discussion of the email list

By Liu weipeng (pongba)

C ++'s Luo Yun (Http://blog.csdn.net/pongba)

Toplanguage (Http://groups.google.com/group/pongba)

 

Every forum, every email list, and countless quarrels will occur in its life. This is a normal thing, from the daily gossip forum to the comp. lang. c ++. there will be a lot of controversy in the Mail List of STD professionals to teeth. So I don't want to, and it's impossible to ask everyone not to argue. Moreover, a public email list should be a democratic place.

I just want to talk about my personal thoughts on what is a valuable argument. Why do I want to talk about this? I always think that a high-quality email list is an invaluable asset and a fortune for everyone (subscribed, diving, and discussing, different people have different knowledge structures, different perspectives, Mutual Supplements, and mutual comparison. This is a wonderful thing and an extremely effective way of learning. It was an accidental idea to create this email list, but one year has passed and I regard it as the most valuable thing I have done over the past few years, because I have learned a lot from it (if you are newThis listYou may as well flip the previous archive :-))

I think a valuable discussion should be of the following nature (for the programmer community, there are many purely technical discussions, such as FAQ-style questions, but there are actually no of the following questions, but there are also many complicated decision-making and judgment problems)

1.Objective. This is the most important point. Of course, everyone looks at the world with a filter and is influenced by the existing knowledge structure and belief (cognitive science calls this Cognitive Schema, and we usually call it a mindset, or a slightly derogatory "bias"), we can't help but understand the problem. This is the value of the debate. I often find loopholes in my own thinking during discussions with others, this vulnerability is hard to detect. -- Why should we emphasize objectivity? According to the above statement, I am not saying, "We cannot be objective, so we can argue ". I don't think so. Although everyone is inevitably influenced by the existing knowledge structure, we can try our best to be objective and try to be comprehensive and profound when thinking about problems. I have summarized some ideas about rules of thumb.YesMentioned.

2.Question. This problem is the biggest source of noise. For the programmer circle, the most common one is to analyze the technical advantages and disadvantages of the language. However, the result is finally a chainsaw of faith: The panelists first determine their beliefs, and then collect evidence that matches the beliefs, ignoring the opposite evidence. Use them to support faith. The result is all about each other. I only talked about one or several aspects of the problem. Some people touched the elephant legs and some people touched the elephant nose. That is, few people have noticed that the problem of language selection is a complicated decision-making problem, which can be decided only by integrating various factors according to specific situations. Once a topic involves a personal belief, it is very easy to escalate to a faith tug-of-war (in fact, the "belief" here does not necessarily need much faith, as long as it is the knowledge that you think is established, it constitutes a belief, and most of the beliefs are implicit, guiding daily decision-making, but they are not aware of it-only those who have a one-to-one comparison with those who have a relative belief will find out ). When you believe that the right thing is put forward by others, everyone will jump out to defend, because after all, everyone wants to do the "the right thing ".However, the true purpose and value of the discussion are not to blindly defend their own beliefs, but to reveal what should be believed.. For example, I often see this:Although..., I still accept my stance.. I laughed. What logic is this?I have always felt that it is not a great task to have faith. What is awesome is to be able to change faith at any time based on more reliable and objective evidence..Evolutionary PsychologyIn the ancient society that formed today's psychological mechanisms, we had a hard time acquiring knowledge about the world through simple observation and induction, and considered it an internal belief, therefore, belief in this stuff was a very valuable thing at that time ("buy" is used in English to express whether to believe a thing or not. If you don't believe it, it is I don't buy it .), It often means the knowledge that survival depends on.As a result, we have evolved a very strong emotional mechanism to protect our beliefs.To ensure that we will not easily abandon our belief because of one or two counterexamples. But the times have improved too fast, and our ancient psychological mechanismsBefore evolution, we were dragged into the modern information society.(The so-called "evolutionary delay"), the progress of knowledge in the Information Age is very rapid, and new knowledge is constantly discovered, and we can view the knowledge found by the world's top cattle at any time, therefore, the original belief is easily broken in the face of new facts. So, I just want to say,The Battle of faith is the least valuable, because everything in the brain of each of us is just an approximation of truth.AndEach of us has the same goal, that is, to approach facts as much as possible., "There is only one truth ",If we really care whether we are doing the "the right thing", we should all be on our way to finding it, instead of trying to maintain.

2.1.Direct argument rather than roundabout argument-Critical Thinking. Ruan Yifeng once reproduced oneList of Roundabout arguments(Note the comments later). This list is lively and interesting. For more information, seeCritical Thinking(In particular,Informal fallacies,Fallacies). Here are a few common examples: XX has ulterior motives => his statement is wrong. What are the advantages of XX to him? => His statement is correct. This allows moral judgment to directly guide logical judgment (In addition, value judgment prevails over logical judgment ). Another example is: failure to prove false does not mean false evidence. Failure to prove false evidence does not mean proof. Another example: if two people's ideas seem opposite, it proves that one party is wrong and does not automatically prove that the other party is correct. And so on. In addition, there is a well-developed list of cognitive bias (List of cognitive biases), Recently discovered, very valuable. Students who are impatient with the books "decision making and judgment", "don't be a normal fool", and "attitude change and social impact, you can refer to the preceding Wikipedia entries (note the link content ). Finally,In fact, it is not difficult to establish the truth as much as possible in daily discussions. When I feel that I want to put forward a certain opinion, I would like to ask myself: Prove it!

2.2.Avoid empty Discussion. Vague arguments have several typical features: 1 ).Only assertion not to logic. 2)Extensive use of ambiguous words and phrases. 3)Space Abstraction(This also appears in the encoding,Zhou siboI have mentioned that) although an empty Summary does seem to fit in with the things to be discussed, a careful look is not constructive at all, nor is it necessary to portray the problem at all. In a daily example, the vast majority of people think that the horoscope is accurate, but in fact the horoscope is indeed accurate-it just uses a bunch of nonsense, not just for you, but for everyone. But there is no guiding significance. Another interesting feature of vague arguments is that the speaker does not feel that his or her speech is vague, but he thinks that he or she is justified and correct-of course, he is correct, and there are too many correct nonsense, abstract to a certain degree, it is very correct to yell at anyone. The most correct word in the world is undoubtedly "existence is reasonable" because it isSynonymous repetition. In addition, why do speakers think they are correct? The truth is the same as what people think is true-correct, but unreliable. In fact, the ability to generalize and abstract is available to everyone, but we are afraid that the abstract has been exhausted. What can be abstracted to the right height is truly awesome.

3.Cherish. It is a good thing for a group of friends to discuss the problem with themselves. The email list is not a cnbeta comments platform. Everyone goes up to take a bubble and vent their emotions, and then they will die again and again, I think everyone subscribes to the email list to get something from the discussion, rather than just trying to get something to talk about. The email list is neither a public comment Platform nor a Twitter or BBs. The email list is a more private and closer community, just like sending emails directly to each other. The interaction frequency of the email list is faster than that of any forum. Because of these characteristics, an email list is more like a private circle of friends. The formation of a high-quality list is not an easy task. When there are more people, it is difficult to ensure that the noise remains unchanged. In my opinion, I would rather not speak than speak without making a speech (that is why I wrote"Welcome to diving). There is a simple heuristic Judgment Method: a speech with less than one hundred words can hardly produce value. Of course, we do not advocate talk, but say,People who have some experience in the forum may notice that many people just want to express their emotions or the results of personal judgment when speaking, it seems that something is defended when it is thrown out, and then it can be refreshed. Therefore, the intention of such a discussion author is not to acquire things from the discussion, so you won't see him clearly display his logic, because he doesn't want to present it, nor has he ever thought about putting out logic and facts, just throw the first conclusion from the subconscious.. This discussion is difficult to have value, but it is put in a list of emails that are originally intended to get value from the discussion, which degrades the list of emails.For those who want to learn from the discussion, I suggest that you do not just make judgments and statements during the discussion, but simply describe your principles, it is very likely that you have vulnerabilities in your truth, which can be viewed by people from different perspectives. This is the true value of discussion..

4.Not familiar. It is normal to win a red ear for a problem. However, it would be cool to raise the level of personal disputes. Wrong person,"I can disagree with you, but I am still your friend.". It's just a little difficult to implement it, because everyone, including myself, does not like prove wrong in a public place. (Sorry, let's talk about evolutionary psychology again) this may affect public assessments of personal abilities, which are of great value. I can only say this, so try to make the correct and objective words as much as possible (refer to the above several articles). If prove wrong is used, nothing will happen, because new things have been learned, stay Foolish is a good thing. I remember where I saw one (more than one actually) scientist. After completing the study, I tried to find my own fault and try to prove that I was wrong. I think this is really a golden mentality,After all, if we do not stand on the truth, we are all on the road to seeking truth. If we just want to be psychologically satisfied, we can accept any belief that is not too outrageous..

Finally, I sincerely hope you can make full use of the maximum value of an email list :-)

 

BTW. A little data:Toplanguage email listIt was founded for one year, with 10 thousand discussions, nearly two thousand people, and many cool people. I personally estimate that 60% of the theme Quality is quite good. At present, the average daily message is about 40 ~ 50 (but I want less, less is more ). For more information, see the homepage of the list.