--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > What I *have* noticed is that sometimes people > (including myself) get carried away with them- > selves and their own self importance to the > point that they *think* they have more than five > interesting things to say in one 24-hour period. > > My experience is that the inverse is more often > the case -- the MORE compelled the poster is to > "make his case" or "defend his stance" or "get > deeper into the issues," the LESS likely it is > that anyone else on the forum actually finds what > the poster has to say interesting, and the LESS > likely it is that they follow up and respond.
Actually, the situations you're describing in these two paragraphs are not necessarily related. An exchange in which folks get deeper into the issues can (and often does) take place over many days (and is usually more substantive if it does). Some of the meatiest discussions on alt.m.t went on for weeks, with *at most* one post per day by each of the participants and frequently only one post over several days. That kind of discussion has almost never occurred on FFL, at least since I've been here, even before the posting limit was imposed. Do FFL posters have shorter attention spans than those on alt.m.t in its better days? I don't know. If so, though, it's too bad. There's a great value in dialectic, as far as I'm concerned: "discussion and reasoning by dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation; specifically: the Socratic techniques of exposing false beliefs and eliciting truth" Whether any final "truths" are elicited is beside the point; dialectic, if conducted thoughtfully, tends to get *closer* to the truth, or at least to weed out what is demonstrably false. It usually results, at the least, in clarifying the issues so participants have a better idea of why they disagree. > Anyone else notice the same thing? > > It's almost like a "law of nature" -- in order to > feel that what one has to say is "important," and > that other people "need" to hear it, there has to > be a great deal of ego and small s self present. That's one possibility. Another is that one engages in dialectic because one wants to refine one's perspective by *listening* to what the other guy has to say about it. In my observation, it's those who decline to engage in closely reasoned exchanges who most suffer from ego problems. They don't *want* to expose their opinions and reasoning to challenge. To have to modify those opinions or improve their reasoning-- to have to acknowledge they were not 100 percent "right" from the start--is perceived as a threat to the small-s self. > And on the other side, among those being subjected > to these compulsive ego and small s self rants, the > more EGO they feel or intuit in a poster's rants, > the more likely they are to hit the Next key after > only a few sentences, and never bother to even read > it, much less reply. > > I guess this is just another way of saying that I > think that the five post limit is just about perfect. > The mere fact that you believe you have more than > five interesting things to say during one 24-hour > period should probably tell you that you don't. In any case, again, the issue of willingness to engage in, or simply to read, dialectic doesn't really have anything to do with the posting limit. (For that matter, a person might well have more than five interesting things to say a day in more than five different conversations.)
