Hub of Reason

2:42 AM

@ThisIstheId In your opinion, has there been any satisfactory answer to your "Do atheists need to define god(s) in order to reject them?" question yet?

Vitaly

3:58 AM

>This site (Atheism) has to be about athesism; It simply cannot be a site about "anything of possible interest to atheists. —Robert Cartaino

Borror0

Ya. Saw that.

Vitaly

Great.

I think I can be bothered counting the number of questions about atheism.

(And not about anything related)

Borror0

Well, there IS a good number of questions that don't have anything to do with atheism.

10

Q: Believing in Evolution without fossil evidence?

Is it intellectually honest for Dawkins to proclaim that without a single fossel in favor of evolution he would still believe in it all the same? Personally, I find this and like claims bizzare; and, I keep hearing them more and more. I've also recently noticed that this point has poped up in thi...

That one, for example

Vitaly

…for example?

Borror0

Yes...?

Yasir Arsanukaev

4:04 AM

It has to do only indirectly.

Borror0

That's my point. Currently, there is a good number of questions - even many interesting questions like the one above - that don't belong on the site because it's not the right site for it. (We're atheism, not evolutionary biology.)

So, it's not really surprising he can think of a lot of questions that don't belong.

Vitaly

I managed to find only 10 questions (out of 196) that would suit the definition (about atheism).

Based on the headlines.

Yasir Arsanukaev

Something makes me think we're going to run out of question in a week or so.

aaronasterling

FWIW, I pretty much agree about running out of questions

There's only so many that can be asked

Borror0

@YasirArsanukaev That's my worry too. I'm not sure if atheism is too narrow of a topic to have a StackExchange site dedicated to the topic.

aaronasterling

4:09 AM

For a long time, tangentially related questions were accepted on SO before programmers.SE came along

I don't see the problem with allowing them here too

Borror0

The overlap between programmers.SE and SO is pretty big.

Vitaly

@Borror0 so, well, the whole Q&A website is an example (except for those 10 questions) of off-topic questions not related to atheism.

That's why I was so amused.

Borror0

Someone qualified to answer on one site is usually qualified to answer on the other. You can't say the same thing about atheism.

aaronasterling

I can generally tell when one is on on or off topic for SO at least. If it directly relates to writing code and is a technical question with a definite standard for correct (i.e. compiles and runs) its for SO. Otherwise it's for programmers.SE

All the questions about IDE's that get so many upvotes on SO belong on programmers.SE but they were part of getting SO up and running

And they're about as related to programming as questions about evolutionary biology are to atheism.

Borror0

But here's the question: were the answers GOOD?

aaronasterling

4:15 AM

I guess it depends on what you mean by good.

I definitely agree that the honor killing question is pretty useless.

I think that the evolutionary biology one is pretty good though. I thought that I gave a good answer to it but nobody seemed to think so. I probably should have gone into more detail about it rather than picking two criteria out of the seven that I could have chosen.

Borror0

It's not enough for a question to get answers and for those answers to get upvotes. If the answers are crap or if the site because an atheist echo chamber, it's kind of pointless or even harmful.

aaronasterling

I agree about that

But I think that allowing the scope to broaden can help to prevent that.

Borror0

But that's why whether a question is on topic has to take into account whether it's going to get answered properly.

aaronasterling

The problem is that I'm not sure how to tell until the answers start rolling in except in obvious cases.

Borror0

You know, all those arguments belong on meta: meta.atheism.stackexchange.com/questions/168/…

aaronasterling

4:20 AM

I haven't been hanging out there much. I've only checked it out twice. I saw your recent question and thought I'd drop in to chat to flesh out my thoughts on the issue

Borror0

It's not only directed at you.

Vitaly

How would we define questions “external to atheism”?

There are obviously questions “internal to atheism”, as in, “is atheism a religion?” et cetera

I notice that all of the 10 questions that in my opinion suit the definition are internal to atheism

Borror0

I mostly mean to say that anyone who disagrees with me has to voice his disagreement on the meta page. For one, not everyone hangs out in chat and two Jeff et co. follow meta but not chat. If we,re in trouble, they may lend us a hand.

Vitaly

Let's for a moment call atheism a philosophical stance

Then this question, which was called on-topic by Borror0, is not about the philosophical stance

(I couldn't think of a better word or group of words to refer to the concept, as a non-native speaker)

The question is about atheists.

aaronasterling

@borror0 I was just speaking for me. I didn't think it was only directed at me

Ami

4:30 AM

@Vitaly how about "epistemological framework"

Vitaly

@Ami yeah, thanks. That's what I had in mind

aaronasterling

That wasn't even a question so much as an excuse to post a weak, rhetorical "argument"

Vitaly

I'm inclined to disagree with this as well:

>it's not the kind of question that will be answered objectively here nor would an objective answer the most likely to be upvoted here

It is dependent on whether there are experts on the question logged in at a given moment

Who could well be atheists

Borror0

@aaronasterling Pretty much. I remember thinking it could be salvaged into a better question when I read it, though right now what that question was escapes me.

@Vitaly Have you ever read the YouTube comments of an anti-theist video where really bad anti-theist arguments are made? There's a good amount of atheists who are dogmatically anti-theist. Heck, even non-dogmatic ones are not immune to poor thing. Humans are more skeptical of arguments that contradict their beliefs than those who are in congruence.

Vitaly

Yes, why?

@Borror0 lesswrong.com/lw/11m/atheism_untheism_antitheism

Borror0

4:44 AM

@Vitaly So, basically, what is most likely to happen is that someone will write a "well, duh, of course theists are stupid so it's their fault" kind of answer and it's going to get tons of upvotes. Even though it's baseless.

In fact, that's what happened in that honor killing example.

"I don't need any evidence! I have faith!"
"You have *what*?"

Vitaly

So now that you read the article, do you claim that, speaking in Yudkowskian terms, the website should be about untheism?

Borror0

I already knew the terms and no

But the site should be about helpful answers

Vitaly

So, untheism + antitheism?

Helpful answers to questions about what?

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