My comment policy dictates that people leave their name and town of residence for their comments to be posted. The anonymity of the Internet is not a good thing in my view, fueling the movement away from community that is occurring in this country. Admittedly this may be a quixotic battle on my part, the Internet was not meant to establish traditional communal bonds, but on the main page of The Middle Class Forum I will continue this battle nonetheless.
However, there is a new forums feature (imagine that) being offered that will accomplish two things when it reaches its potential. It provides anonymity to posters that this page will not, and it will phase me out of the discussions. The phase out may be a long, gradual process, but it needs to occur so that I spend more time researching and writing future books than spending much time on initial posts or responses on a web log.
The new forum feature may be just the answer for a person I have referenced as the Illuminati guy. He is an anonymous poster whose initial posts were quite witty and clever. My policy prevented me from approving them as comments, but I cut and pasted to approve and respond to them. When he kept commenting anonymously I declared I would stop responding because I would only be playing the role of enabler to his anonymity. Then I recently broke that resolution, sort of, with my post about the vitality curve. After that post the flood gates opened and there were three more comments from Mr. Illuminati, all anonymous and therefore not approved.
Just reading the comments requires a taxing consumption of time as I try to infer some empirical evidence behind them. Initially, I thought his motive was entertainment and read them as such without worrying about the lack of supporting evidence. Lately, it appears he wants to be taken seriously, but his comments continue to be scholarly rather than empirical. I now am puzzled as to why he continues to comment anonymously. If he hopes to persuade me personally he should have learned by now he needs to do so empirically. If he is hoping I will relent and allow his comments to be read anonymously by all, that is not going to happen on the main page.
If the latter is his goal then the new forums page may be just the ticket for him. I will administer the usual controls on flaming, and continue to encourage empiricism as basis for information, yet a person can be anonymous and scholarly on these forums and survive, perhaps even thrive. If he really does hope to persuade me personally, I’m afraid he will have to do so on these new forums as I will soon be designating his comments as spam. As a conciliatory gesture, my next post will feature some of his recent comments to provide some tips as to how he or anyone might persuade me empirically, rather than with a scholarly, think tank type of approach that lacks experiential/experimental evidence.
As an empiricist, the only belief I hold sacred is that no beliefs can be held sacred. They all must be potentially amendable by experience or experiment, no matter how strong the current conviction with which they might be held. Scholars are not bound (or liberated) by this approach to knowledge. For this reason I doubt anything as flimsy as empirical evidence will be persuasive to Mr. Illuminati, but if he stoops to the same empirical standards he might be able to persuade me.
I believe Mr. Illuminati may be a smart guy, and for that reason he is already suspicious as to how open I really am to amending my views. Fair enough, there is truth to this. I am well-steeped in middle class experiences from the neighborhood where I always have lived and how I lived my life. I am well-steeped in the natural experience of traveling with small nomadic bands of people, having backpacked thousands of miles on journeys up to seven months with cohesive groups of other long-distance backpackers. I also have conducted research on these nomadic bands, and have corrobrated these experiences with the works of cultural anthropologists who studied the “real thing.” Consequently, it would take some very thorough presentation of alternative middle class and/or natural experiences or experiments that would change the beliefs I formed based on my own experiences. If a person has not had these experiences on his/her own, nor can point to a researcher who actually has, he/she is not likely to succeed. Still, I pledge that a person could succeed in amending my beliefs on the middle class and/or what is natural about being human with sufficient empirical evidence. Some tips on how to do so comes next.
Tags: Altruism, Misinformation
