Christianity 2013 Moderator Election

12:22 AM

@ryan Let's try this one again. The answer is now officially yes, Mason is running for election. I guess that settles that.

El'endia Starman

@Caleb Woo!

pterandon

1:17 AM

@Caleb The points can be viewed either as a policy platform, or a pledge to refrain from specific abuses (such as using Mod/Superuser powers & suggestions in comments in order to go after those "making thinly veiled attempts to discredit Christianity)."

@Caleb Caleb. I wrote a nice answer on personal opinion but it was too long. This really is a terrible place to write out a position).

Caleb

10:26 AM

→ 1 message moved to The Upper Room

→ 4 messages moved to The Upper Room

svidgen

1:51 PM

@Caleb I was joking, of course.

justbelieve

2:42 PM

in my opinion, recognizing possibly false premises is more important than having iron-clad inference (from this follows that) and legalistic (Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world , and I will find enough in them to hang him ) skills.

Therefore, I'm curious if we can get a summary of nominees' positions on young earth creationism and evolution. While a person can be affable (gaining social allies and charming newcomers), I think it is important to know where they stand on intellectual humility. Rejecting solid arguments based on a solid process (the scientific method), on hard evidence and the investigations of a lot of smart people seems a supreme form of intellectual arrogance.

wax eagle

3:02 PM

My position is one may best describe as intellectually agnostic on the subject. I'm quite familiar with the science and biblical interpretations that YEC folks use to defend their position (and see a certain amount of validity in it, though I believe it's hopelessly tainted with bias). And I'm familiar with the cosmological argument for an old universe (I'm less familiar with the biological arguments simply because my education background is heavy on physics not biology, and you'll see in a moment that I don't care).

justbelieve

@waxeagle Thank you. I suppose there is no other way then to answer questions directly in chat. Perhaps in the future we can implement a table view with candidates on X and topics on Y (and let me be the first one to agree that some topics should not be brought into the election, as they are irrelevant to moderation; that's why I introduced my question with an argument for its relevance)

wax eagle

@justbelieve yeah, I was going to question it at first as it's unecessary, and I still think even in the framing it's unnecessary, partly because there are certain things that religious folks will take on faith even in the face of overwhelming evidence simply because they believe that it's a matter that cannot be proven.

Ryan Frame

4:05 PM

Shouldn't these last few posts belong in the Upper Room (or the creation chat) now that it's stepped away from being directly relevant to the election?

wax eagle

@RyanFrame yes. Let me figure out what to migrate and I'll ship it over that direction.

→ 6 messages moved to Creationism vs.

justbelieve

@RyanFrame yes. My question was if we can see the candidates' position on <>, given that <>

Dan

@justbelieve So we can predict their mod behavior? What is the P(A|B)? :P

wax eagle

@justbelieve The answer is yes. I'm not sure it's particularly important to whether or not they will make a good moderator. Though I do understand your concerns about intellectual humility, and think they would be more founded here than other sites about faith.

justbelieve

4:26 PM

More messages to be moved to the Upper Room, I guess...

wax eagle

hmmm...this is starting to get fractured. I'm going to move that we take further debate about intellectual humility to the Creationism chat. Including migrating @svidgen's most recent messages.

svidgen

@waxeagle Sorry. i didn't read the full discussion. I thought it was relevant to vetting candidates.

wax eagle

Let's keep our responses on intellectual humility and creationism down to a direct reply to the question starred on the sidebar with any further discussion on intellectual humility or creationism moved to chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/1254/creationism-vs

@svidgen tis ok. and there is relevance here, we just have to figure out how to keep this on topic for the election and address the question that leads to off topic discussion. I'm still playing it by ear.

justbelieve

Wait... it seems some follow up was moved to Creationism-vs, while some was moved to the Upper Room. Which one is the right place to follow up?

wax eagle

@justbelieve um, the intellectual humility stuff as related to creationism is going to the creationism chat.

I'm still trying to sort out what's relevant to the election and what's not and I'm uncertain so I think rather than move anything else I'm going to just say that we need to redirect further discussion that way.

is that an adequate solution to everyone?

(plus there's the inherent potential for conflict of interest and I'd like to avoid even the appearance of that if at all possible)

El'endia Starman

4:34 PM

@waxeagle For me, yes.

wax eagle

@justbelieve huh? He posted those in here, they haven't been moved from anywhere.

wax eagle

4:51 PM

→ 1 message moved to Creationism vs.

@svidgen Ok I lied, I made one more move to make it easier to continue the discussion in the creation chat.

Peter Turner

7:25 PM

I think one thing everyone is going to have to spill their guts about is how ardently they want to enforce the whole "truth question" idea.

Caleb

@PeterTurner Ya that sounds like a relevant thing to hear positions on. Do we have a question suggestion for that in the collection yet?

El'endia Starman

I myself have been mostly uninvolved in the "Truth question" stuff, and I think at least part of that is because those are the questions I can answer best, in a sense. I don't have much denominational/doctrinal knowledge, so it's difficult for me to answer questions from such a background. I am in the process of fleshing out my current theological system in an online place, so I may start using that once I finish it.

I've also been pretty lax at looking at questions in the first place, sooo...

Peter Turner

7:45 PM

@El'endiaStarman yeah, I was going to ask you specifically ;) !

@Caleb yeah, I think it's in there

El'endia Starman

@PeterTurner Haha. Okay, now for my opinion: I agree that Truth questions are in general a bad fit for this site, and part of that is because they are more subjective than objective. This site is a place for a answer, not the Answer (obviously 42). When it comes to questions about doctrine, practices, statements, and the like, answers are demonstrably right, wrong, or a mix. Questions about Truth are generally opinion-based (though that opinion may be held by a LARGE group of people).

If and when I ramp my mod activity back up, I'll probably be putting questions on hold more often as it's not nearly so "final" as a closure, and so questions can be put on hold until the framework is specified and then reopened. So, to answer your original question: I'll likely put Truthy questions on hold more often from here on out.

fredsbend

8:03 PM

@PeterTurner I see them as a case by case thing. Usually, they are not good and not easily salvageable. When they are salvageable, it is when the asker is okay with framing it in a doctrinal perspective (assuming that is even possible in the question). For example, questions that start with "Why did God ..." Are almost always not salvageable because they ask for suppositions on why God did something.

svidgen

10:01 PM

@PeterTurner I'd like to see truth questions rewritten as either single-denomination or comparative questions. Ideally a question phrased like, What do Christians believe the Eucharist is? could be answerable like, Well, there are a few competing beliefs on the matter.... In practice, I'm not sure how easily that could be moderated. It would require a lot of help from the community to ensure that the most up-voted and selected answers are actually comparative.

wow ... my formatting got totally destroyed there.

El'endia Starman

@svidgen Fixed it. I think it was the spaces ("matter ... *").

svidgen

@El'endiaStarman oo! thanks!

wax eagle

11:03 PM

My beliefs on the subject: In the context of this site there is no such thing as truth. I have my truth and you have yours there is no universal definition of truth. That leaves us with a few options on how to moderate this site.
The first and most obvious is to let anyone ask a question addressed to the whole of Christianity and leave it to answers to defend specific positions
The second is to make the questioner scope the question so that there is a testable criteria for a right answer.
The first perspective runs far afould of "Good Subjective, Bad Subjective" because there is no criteria…

The solution to this I believe is to ask people to scope their questions to a specific perspective on a doctrine, a specific group of Christians (no matter how small), or a specific teaching. Something by which we can narrow the field and sources and form some kind of testability of answers, even if its still a subjective question.

The alternative is that we ask answers to be testable within the frame they claim to represent. This has been suggested and tried and honestly found not to work. I made the point in my previous post and in a meta post earlier today that our system scales well for moderating questions, but significantly less well for moderating answers. This is a feature, not a bug and in general if this is going to continue to work as a concept we need to keep a strong hand towards questions.

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Christianity 2013 Moderator Election