How to gain knowledge and pleasure from philosophy forums
Good stuff from the thread:
1. Learn what guys are like what in discussions
2. Isms will fall into battle trenches an will not get out(only a few bold ones)
2.5 God discussions are for the battle roosters
3. Some reading groups, could be more active, though.(have some thoughts here)
4. Zoom. Good idea but people do not want to out. Needs some afterthought
5. Some great stuff from internet memory lane, scroll to find(links to posts here would be cool)
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Being an amateur, first coming in serious contact with philosophy 46 years old, I am not one of those here that involves in 7 pages long discussions trying to beat someone else in an argument. An amateur - someone who loves what he is doing - my wish is roughly to start from whats written about philosophers on Wikipedia and gradually increase my knowledge. I have been doing that in my not so abundant spare time for a decade or so now.
From Wikipedia i go via SEP and some online lectures to read some of the more approachable original works. I have come as far as reading things like Sein und Zeit and Tractatus. I do subscribe to magazines like ”Philosophy Now” and listen to radio programs and so on. But face it:
Not that many people take an interest in philosophy. Even if living in a community with teachers, doctors and engineers I have noone to discuss Nietzsche or Sartre. Either people can write a paper on details about sartre or they fluffily know that he was married to DeBeauvoir and was an existentialist. I feel like the only one in between.
An online forum seems to be the place for a guy that eg has read ”existentialism is a humanism” but want to know more about Sartre and discuss it with peers at the same level. But I have a hard time finding that. And sadly, not here. It seems like whatever is started two hotshots takes over the discussion on a scientific paper level and waits for oohs and aahs from other hotshots.
The ”philosophy now forum” is a little better, but there people are angry all the time and make politics of everything.
First question - is there a group or a forum for guys like me, amateurs that want to build knowledge together?
Second question - the concept of ”forum” is stone age computer wise. In university in the 80’s the BBS was not much different from this forum ages later. Are there any more effective group discussion platforms? Where a thread do not wander away into oblivion and some conclusions are made. Maybe an active moderator?
But even more I would love to explore the world of philosophy together with people and not against people, and without prestige. I am at the end of a rather succesful career (in a much more boring discipline than philosophy) and I have no need to prove Wit or IQ. I simply want to learn togeter with others. Is that possible here?
1. Learn what guys are like what in discussions
2. Isms will fall into battle trenches an will not get out(only a few bold ones)
2.5 God discussions are for the battle roosters
3. Some reading groups, could be more active, though.(have some thoughts here)
4. Zoom. Good idea but people do not want to out. Needs some afterthought
5. Some great stuff from internet memory lane, scroll to find(links to posts here would be cool)
———————
Being an amateur, first coming in serious contact with philosophy 46 years old, I am not one of those here that involves in 7 pages long discussions trying to beat someone else in an argument. An amateur - someone who loves what he is doing - my wish is roughly to start from whats written about philosophers on Wikipedia and gradually increase my knowledge. I have been doing that in my not so abundant spare time for a decade or so now.
From Wikipedia i go via SEP and some online lectures to read some of the more approachable original works. I have come as far as reading things like Sein und Zeit and Tractatus. I do subscribe to magazines like ”Philosophy Now” and listen to radio programs and so on. But face it:
Not that many people take an interest in philosophy. Even if living in a community with teachers, doctors and engineers I have noone to discuss Nietzsche or Sartre. Either people can write a paper on details about sartre or they fluffily know that he was married to DeBeauvoir and was an existentialist. I feel like the only one in between.
An online forum seems to be the place for a guy that eg has read ”existentialism is a humanism” but want to know more about Sartre and discuss it with peers at the same level. But I have a hard time finding that. And sadly, not here. It seems like whatever is started two hotshots takes over the discussion on a scientific paper level and waits for oohs and aahs from other hotshots.
The ”philosophy now forum” is a little better, but there people are angry all the time and make politics of everything.
First question - is there a group or a forum for guys like me, amateurs that want to build knowledge together?
Second question - the concept of ”forum” is stone age computer wise. In university in the 80’s the BBS was not much different from this forum ages later. Are there any more effective group discussion platforms? Where a thread do not wander away into oblivion and some conclusions are made. Maybe an active moderator?
But even more I would love to explore the world of philosophy together with people and not against people, and without prestige. I am at the end of a rather succesful career (in a much more boring discipline than philosophy) and I have no need to prove Wit or IQ. I simply want to learn togeter with others. Is that possible here?
Comments (70)
You can ask questions on forums and sometimes you will get quality replies from intelligent people. "Building knowledge together," I think this is one of the hardest things, those who are capable of it have to either be fresh and new, curious, or exceedingly mature. I have searched for this kind of thing for years and never really found it. But this is only my experience.
Quoting Ansiktsburk
I am exceedingly cynical of the possibility in this day and age. I think these kind of forums are a step in the right direction because they go beyond mere soundbites of information. They refute the shallow formats that are suited to propaganda. I have personally found this forum to be most excellent and fair.
Quoting Ansiktsburk
This is the kind of thing I look for, but it's difficult. If thinkers are not to some extent matched, or at least good at asking the right questions, the dialogue will only go one way. Further, intelligence, and restrictions of time, dictate that thought must be aggressive, focused, it cannot afford to posture itself if it's really trying to get somewhere. Can you handle being a tough thinker?
The best way to do it here is probably a reading group. We have a section for that:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/categories/16/reading-groups
You'll notice that most of them didn't take off, because they take some effort. When they work, they tend to be lacking in the kind of unpleasantness you've talked about.
Welcome to the forum :smile:
There is no obligation to handle stuff here. If people are unpleasant, ignore them, and if they are hateful report them. I hope you will feel able to have the conversations you like here and pass by the inevitable silliness. I find it very helpful to try and express a viewpoint, make an argument, respond to comments - it improves my writing and deepens my understanding and corrects my errors. Some threads are above my pay grade and some are beneath my dignity; some folks are interesting to read but painful to engage; some are painful to read. Please, bat away the flies, and join the picnic.
Regardless, I'm glad you are interested in philosophy, and wish you well in encountering more good than bad!
Same here.
That is totally possible.Just do not expect others to feel that they are learning with you,some people just want to win over others.But learning totally allowed here.
Start online live meetings (using zoom or any other platform)... some people here might join the discussions. You could be the moderator or choose one among participants. Live meetings might be easier to control/organize than written threads.
I for one am not here to win arguments, and wish often that the culture of this forum were more collegial, more cooperative. I often fall into defending my position or attacking another's out of habit; now & then I notice what I've been doing and take a step back. As I write this, I can already imagine other forum members lining up to disagree with me. ("If you're not going to defend your position and look for flaws in someone else's, what are you even doing, that's the whole point of philosophical discussion, the arguments are all that matter, etc. ")
I think we can bring about an environment that looks more like cooperative truth-seeking and exploration ourselves, if we make the effort.
I think sometimes people discussing philosophy have a hard time with the idea of disagreement: it's very tempting to think, "If you really understood my position, you'd agree with me; since you disagree, I'll explain it to you again."
There are biggish background disagreements (e.g., religious faith) that can end discussion, so the one further step people are willing to take is to ferret out these differences about which nothing can be done.
It rarely seems to occur to anyone that what another is saying might constitute an actual objection, something that could compel you to revise your views.
I could go on and on. Apologies if my concerns aren't quite relevant to your concerns.
Great answer. :up:
This is a deal breaker for me. I cannot have a serious conversation with a person who has an invisible, celestial friend. The mindset is so incredibly divorced from what is actually going on in reality. We are barely surviving in the midst of chaos. Serious thinkers don't have time to ponder the abstractions of God.
There are going to be barriers. Once thinkers have managed to escape the crudest forms of ideology, they can then begin work on liberation from more intricate, advanced forms of ideology. This is quite important. Thought is largely about liberation, this is its praxis, it is not merely about information. So my interest is in thinking with other thinkers who have escaped intricate ideological structures, thinkers who want to codify the steps that lead in this direction so it can be shared throughout society. Self-conscious thinkers, which I take to be the rarest, are not merely driven by their thought, but they have learned how to drive their thought. The former is lost in an impulse world of his own interest, while the latter strives to go in the direction of objectivity.
We build our own inner worlds, reading others thoughts and ideas contribute to that. I am new here, and reading some of the threads makes me wonder, and others not. Some of it i find amazing because of not whats there, but what is left out. There is a thread on abortion with no mention of conscience. There is no ultimate explanation of anything.
As long as you keep being open its all a winner.
Some say that's a sign of a budding (wet behind the ears) intellect.
Spinoza isn't a "serious thinker"? or Leibniz? or Hume? Kant? Hegel? Kierkegaard? Feuerbach? Nietzsche? Peirce? Wittgenstein? Buber? Levinas? Jaspers? et al ... Even Marx acknowledges the effectiveness of "the opium of the masses" helping the oppressed barely survive "in the midst of chaos".
And why should anyone assume "reality" is g/G-less on your say-so (without even addressing such an assumption as an aporia) just in order to have a "serious" (philosophical) conversation with you?
Here you make my point as I have no desire to engage with thinkers on the topic of God. That is, a building has a vetting process to keep certain people out, in my case it's simply a matter of not wasting my time. Though this does draw my curiosity, are you claiming that the topic of God is of utmost importance?
:lol:
There was a golden age of internet forums back when only academics had computers and modem access. Every contribution was high quality.
Well, I say that. But academics are just as prone to bitch-fests.
One discussion board owner got so angry with the way the community was "derailing" his own preferred take on complexity studies that he shut down several years of debate and tens of thousands of posts without warning. Just wiped it.
So we are always stuck with the "least bad" I guess. :up:
:yikes:
Of all people. But here I agree with you.
I have often walked away from/stormed off/promised myself not to post on the philosophy forum. But it’s a good forum, or as Pfhorrest says, the ‘least worst’. The Philosophy Now forum was a shitfight when I was a member, there was a massive thread called Kant is a Douchebag. The Online Philosophy Club was OK, but the owner intruded far too much (although there were some pretty smart contributors there.)
So I keep coming back here, even though I’m on the spiritual-but-not-religious side of the ledger which is a common source of friction in our secular age. I agree with @unenlightened above. I still read philosophy, history of ideas, and related, and probably always will, it’s become an interest, when I’m sitting around twiddling my thumbs, I can’t prevent myself from looking in.
It was revolutionary feeling. Woodstock for academia.
It was like one year I was down at the British Library - sometimes sitting in Marx's old research seat - waiting the three days(!!!) it took for obscure books to be retrieved from store and have them brought to me on a clanking tea trolley.
The next it was daily chatter with the biggest names in the business (so far as my research interests went). Papers would reach you months and even years ahead of publication. Any one would talk to anyone.
That lasted about a decade. Then some fool invented blogging. And kids could afford computers. The discussion boards evaporated or became narrowly focused again.
:scream:
Quoting JerseyFlight
How could it not be? Either one's 'ontological commitments' include or exclude an 'ultimate intentional agency' - explicitly as g/G or implicitly as weak anthropic / contra-mediocrity / sufficient reason principle - which conditions, or qualifies, any discursive critique or praxis. Even if we restrict discussion to 'avowed nonbelievers', providential assumptions are likely still operative and function as unexamined inconsistencies effectively blocking, or sabotaging, all but the shallowest critique. The g/G topic must be gotten out of the way first, at least stipulatively for the sake of discussion, I think, in order to proceed seriously even with those who claim to be "atheists" or "agnostics" (but who are also e.g. anti-realists, idealists, panpsychists, hegelian marxists, et al - even "materialists" who nonetheless more-than-speculatively entertain the "Simulation Hypothesis", etc). Without bracketting g/G (in husserlian fashion) or dialectically ripping-out analoguous assumptions root & branch (i.e. neutralizing - neutering - them), only idle reflections & polemical apologetics (sophistry) seem possible, or likely.
That is, the word, "God," means what?
Just saying.
Sorry about that, Malcolm.
//I will add, I was trying to be courteous in response to your posts, but I don't feel as though you understood my objections to what you were saying.//
I was a young early adopter of the internet just slightly before Eternal September, and was acculturated into the old ways before they went away. I attribute a lot of my success at critical thinking (and therefore philosophy) to spending my high school days debating with college professors on usenet. Before web-based centralized forums that could be controlled by a central authority were a thing, when "moderation" just meant using your own killfile, etc.
I naively thought that, through the net, reaching out to "the rest of the world", I had discovered that the rest of the world besides my tiny hometown was not as ignorant and cruel a place as my IRL interactions had led me to believe. Turns out, that was just a filter from the net of that time being available almost exclusively to the highly educated. Watching the actual rest of the world, full of the same ignorance and cruelty, spill into the space I thought I had escaped all of that into, as the internet got more widely adopted, has been quite a disheartening experience.
Nowadays, I feel like what I had thought was an escape from the hole I was born into into a brighter broader world, was actually just retreating from the dark world into a brightly-illuminated hole. And sitting in a hole avoiding the darkness of the world feels much less illuminating than the perception of having escaped a dark hole into the bright real world felt.
The forums were actually email based. But you could browse the logs. I’m not sure. It all seems so far away and hazy now. And usage was metered so you had to get on and off with messages downloaded before you racked up a bill.
The discussions on this forum seem to take on a life of their own. You are right that one should try not to derail a thread, but information is almost always introduced that inevitably leads to this conclusion. Even with the most intelligent people I have discoursed with on this forum this is the case.
You made the charge of "ego stroking," which is not an articulation I would use, but to each their own. In order for this to be the case, as I understand it, one must be driven, not by the desire to get at truth, but to prove something about themselves. I have consciously tried to strike out against this in my life as a thinker. One must not confuse vigor of dialogue for insecurity of ego.
"Whatever is started two hotshots take over the discussion." This is exceedingly generalized. You cannot mean that every time two people have repetition of conversation between themselves on a thread that this automatically proves they are doing something wrong? I am not sure what you mean by "take over?" I am open to being corrected if I am doing something wrong on a thread, but you will not simply be able to stick it to me through authority or your wounded feelings. I am not a moralist and don't much care for them.
These seem like cheap shot generalizations, poisoning of the well. If you disagree with something I say or am doing then confront me on it, not passive aggressive stuff like this.
What "g/G" means, as Witty would say, is the role - function - the term plays in (our) discourse as I've already pointed out:
Quoting 180 Proof
Of course, your interlocator will often propose a stipulative definition; but even 'undefined', she will use the term and that usage makes explicit the commitments and implications for her statements and arguments.
Quoting Wayfarer
Usenet was accessible via email (or via dedicated clients, which made browsing it a little easier), and I remember that UK/Australian/etc internet usage was metered for longer than American dialup (besides AOL) was, so it probably was usenet that apo is remembering. Were the forums named like talk.origins or comp.sys.mac.games or alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork, things in that format? If so, that was usenet.
Eternal September was apparently 1993, so I must have gotten on around 1992, which is younger than I remember (I was only 10 then), but I definitely remember when AOL gained access to usenet happening in real time, so it must have been that far back.
Most of us are on our private islands these days.
I found a snapshot of philosophy sites in 1995...
https://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/LocalFile/PhiloServ.html
Psyche-D and Peirce-L are a couple of listservs I was on. Talk.origins was another site. So I must have started in 1994. Psyche-D came out of the first Tucson “Towards a Science of Consciousness” conference.
Quoting apokrisis
This one?
Yes, I did hear the Greeks were fond of discoursing on Zeus.
That looks like the 20th anniversary greatest hits version.
That was pretty good for 95. Everything isnt better now. At that time people took effort to present info in an organized manner. Try to get the most important news from eg a newspaper site now...
I'm not saying right or wrong, I just want to get knowledge and pleasure from a forum thread.
One thing I sometimes do when I start a thread is to try to make an "abstract"(my english fails me here) in the OP of what has been said in the thread. That is a way to try to get the juicy parts out of it.
Maybe I should do it for this thread.
Probably AI can do good stuff in the future. But I would prefer new types of media that really enhances seeking of knowledge together.
People don't really beat each other in arguments here, most of the time I suspect each side walks away thinking they put forth the better argument or that the other engaged in some kind of fraudulence. It is exceedingly rare to ever see someone say "no, you are right, good points", almost never. Therefore, there is some level of delusion if someone comes to a forum such as this, trying to show their cleverness or great ideas, they will generally only walk away with the same self-assurance they came with regardless of how good or bad their ideas were.
Nearly every philosophical idea is going to be contentious in some way, if you post anything about religion, for example, anything at all, it will probably end up being a debate between atheists and believers. There is no way to avoid this kind of thing as far as I can tell.
Maybe just remember that you don't have to respond to every post in a thread, you learn which posters you like to read and which aren't worth responding to. At least a few people will certainly say helpful things which are on topic, evaluate the value of the thread based on number of good contributors rather than how many pointless side debates are happening. Philosophy is all about yourself, even if it seems like a group activity in a forum such as this. Try to be your own biggest critic and let the forum be a way to make thinking more interesting and fun, as opposed to expecting to build your knowledge up with other posters. That's my advice on this matter.
It’s funny reading. I’m now reminded of the Usenet groups of that time. And they were mostly drivel as the page says....
Then back when “a browser” needed explaining....
Yes, I agree with you. I was replying to Malcom Lett's generalizations. :smile:
Not even if they're addressed to you!
This seems rude at first, okay it is rude, but this is crucial advice for enjoying the site.
(As they used to say on Usenet, but with ascii art, don't feed the trolls.)
For those reminiscing about the good old days: was anyone else here on Rodrigo Vanegas's ANALYTIC-L? That was easily the best experience I've ever had on the internet. I've been a wanderer in the desert since it folded.
I should here like to concede. The refutation of error, resistance to tyranny, these things are of vital importance to the quality of our species. The refutation of the error of God is exceedingly important, one of the most pressing counter-acts of ideology in the history of our species.
:fire:
Well said, comrade.
[quote]Quoting Judaka
This x1000. It's funny, I've been here maybe a year and I've been relatively active and there are plenty of other relatively active posters but it'll be like two ships constantly passing in the night silently with some people... just no engagement. With others I've tried to engage and it turns into a total mess and then we learn to avoid each others, but with others, again, two ships passing in the night with never any contact.
Plenty of posters are fine to engage though. @ssu is a pleasure to talk to. I think we've been fine so far despite not agreeing on everything. It's a mixed bag with some of the leftists.
Ok, I admit: - This is the first quote of the forum that really made me laugh...
Just seeing this discussion for the first time. I joined up about 2 years ago - mostly just to learn and pick up new things. I've bumped heads with a few folks here and there, but on the whole my experience out here has been positive for the most part. Your mileage may vary.
Before settling in here I checked out some of the other philosophy forums - the signal to noise ratio seems much higher here than the others. My 2 cents. . . . .
Sounds great. Then you have found your way around. So, seeing a thread eg concerning a philosopher you are interested in, Althusser say, and 14 pages of stuff has already been written - what do you do?
Nearly every philosophical idea is going to be contentious in some way, if you post anything about religion, for example, anything at all, it will probably end up being a debate between atheists and believers. There is no way to avoid this kind of thing as far as I can tell.
I answer like this because my Ipad dont have that button popping up:
Thats kind of so but its kind of stupid in some ways. Its like we have come nowhere since the Dialogues. The idea that “my ism” is better than yours is running through the societies like never before. I does not have to be like that. You can leave your trenches, get up on the higher grounds where “this is simply a hard question” and try to find ways together. If an ism is to “win” you will never get anywhere or simply repeat arguments told dozens of time before probably only in this forum?
You guys who love to take part in a lenghty argument, what do you hope to 1. Gain for yourselves 2.contribute to other readers with from a factual and readable point of view?
Ive been in “forums” on and off since way before the WWW and well, try again here. I know it aint easy. But just because somethings are hard they do not have to be impossible.
One thing, why must these forum have these bloody pages. Forums are so much nicer than reddit to read in a way, but they have done away with that, you can just scroll. Gotta be some guys out there with brains better than mine that can evolve the forum concept. If you google up the first smiley thread from computer stone age not much has happened... its like I ask for a new Brin or Zuckerberg here... or preferrably a Linus Thorvalds... but one that do not talk nerdish and invents GIT.
[quote=Horace Walpole (1717 - 1797)]The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel[/quote]
This is no tradgedy, this are the hey days of my life. I have been in bed with my IPad reading and writing for a couple lf hour. Off now to read, trying to find out why rich kids Sartre and Althusser REALLY became bollinger bolshies. This is no comedy or tradgedy, this is good stuff to do and I wont get up until after noon!
In a field like science or maths, this kind of mentality makes sense. There is a right/wrong answer, show me your argument and let's evaluate it together using agreed-upon rules. In philosophy, things get bogged down in simplicity because participation in the deeper discussion means agreeing on more basic premises. If I do not agree with your premise, my only contribution to your question/topic is to explain why I disagree with that premise and hence the basic disagreement i.e is God real (for religion) comes up again and again endlessly. It doesn't matter if you post a great question about God or a silly one. The same really applies to all topics, the deeper you go, the more likely it is for the topic to be derailed into a premise. Which means that the actual question never gets answered, the premise of the question becomes the debate. This is a form of regression that always occurs.
The problem is that sometimes there are deeply flawed premises which have to be questioned, many questions don't deserve to be taken seriously because of these flaws. If you try to take them seriously regardless, the whole conversation is pointless because you're both simply wrong.
So it's not as simple as preventing a behaviour, it is often necessary and the nuance on whether it should be done or not, too complex to be put in as a kind of rule.
If you want to avoid regression, you need to find like-minded posters who are likely to accept your basic presuppositions. Many posters simply look for these regressions, usually because they are ideologically informed or ideologically opposed. So if you want to avoid them, learn their names and do so.
However, even the really good posters, you will have a great time agreeing with but will you ever actually add to their knowledge or change their opinions on something? It is exceedingly rare to see that happen (and be noted). I won't speculate as to why that is, all I can say is that if you come to forums like this hoping for that kind of thing, I would advise you that you're wasting your time.
WroteI'm jealous, the early internet seemed like a pretty cool place. The pioneering days, before the digital suburbia popped up.
I answer Naah, guys sat on low speed links watching low resolution nude pics afraid that their bosses, like me, would come into the room... seriously, It was same, same but poorer equipment. Thing with the 90’s though was the positive derivata. Computing was a nerd thing from the 70’s into the 80’s until nerd Berners-Lee happened to do some stuff that made the PC usable for non-nerds. Cd rom making games attractive too. The hey days peaked with napster. Last 10 years nothing new has really happened. So thats boring. But activities are pretty mych same same. My son would argue highly for esport to be a plus for now and maybe thats correct.
However, even the really good posters, you will have a great time agreeing with but will you ever actually add to their knowledge or change their opinions on something? It is exceedingly rare to see that happen (and be noted). I won't speculate as to why that is, all I can say is that if you come to forums like this hoping for that kind of thing, I would advise you that you're wasting your time.
I answer I dont really think that the success of a thread is individual posts or even posters. Its if, for instance, someone can kind of wrap up what has been said an made a kind of summary. That works pretty well in eg some political forums I sometimes visit.
How many actually READ a dialogue between two combattants as bystanders?
Sorry, missed that on the first pass of your post. :up:
In the fall of 2007 thanks to a discussion here (or basically on the predecessor site) I got alerted to the speculative bubble that was going to implode. As this isn't a financial forum, this viewpoint from another PF member got my attention and it was very important for me. And the last reminder of that PF members do notice what is happening was the coronavirus outbreak, which I have to say I didn't myself at first think so much about (as ebola, sars, etc. outbreaks had been contained), but the thread started by and especially Benkei got my attention.
In the political sphere I think the one of the best things that PF gives you more knowledge is not only to listen to intelligent remarks, but also to notice tone of the discourse itself. What is generally accepted, where do people really have disagreements. I tend to think that the discourse has gotten a bit more aggressive than before (even if it always has been somewhat aggressive) and that may portray something about the time we live in, not just that it's election season in the US.
I would get worried if the thoughtful Americans here would really start to talk about a civil war or something equivalent or would truly lose their faith in their country. But as that hasn't happened, I'm still optimistic about the future.
Did someone post something that left you confused? Ask a question.
Did someone post something you think is really off? Hmmm. Now things get interesting. Does this poster sound knowledgeable? How much free time do you have? Does (s)he curse out other posters who disagree with them? Are you OK with being insulted? Etc.
I don't mind just as long as they're making a point somewhere in the flurry of their emotion. It is a challenge to clash with a skilled thinker, and many people do not have the ability to do it (this is not because they are inferior, but because their social process was lacking the intellectual nourishment which creates such ability). Skilled thinkers need to be humble, they are leveraging their privilege not their own individual, autonomous superiority. Intellectuals do not exist without society, where you find an intellectual there you can be guaranteed that he passed through a qualitative social process. It's probably best to reply to this on the thread I specifically made for the topic: Knowledge is a Privileged Enterprise
I’ll tell you what I find to be a productive habit of thought. I will defend an idea to the death while someone is disagreeing with it. But as soon as they start agreeing, then I start doubting it myself.
Belief should be constantly tested. So either you want others to be testing it for you. Or you have to switch to testing your own certitudes.
That can lead to strange dynamics on a forum if the reasons for seeking constant disagreement rather than settling for cosy agreement (even with one’s self) are not understood.
I Zoomed with a fellow philosopher on this forum. The two of us were dead set against each others' opinions on a number of points. We had serous ego sensitivies. We hated each other and let it loose in some of our debates.
When we Zoomed, to both of our surprizes she turned out to be my own grandmother.