We need a name (Godwin's Law, Poe's Law)

[overtone]

Turns out you were also foreshadowing what was about to happen right here in this very thread. Fancy.

All that's missing is this actually happening: "These threads each reach a point at which an unsustainable claim/counter-claim is made - and when you are challenged on said claim you refuse to acknowledge (or maybe you do not realise) that you are wrong - - - "

 

He's wrong, of course, about the timing: My claims and arguments in the referenced threads have come in near the beginning, often in the first page or so, rather than when the thread has "reached a point". But the larger (and threaqd relevant) issue is that the claims he is talking about are none of them mine in the first place.

 

Still looking for the first "challenge" to a claim I've actually made, right or wrong. Pulling teeth, this. Maybe that's an inspiration for a name? Probably too vague.

 

Unless you were posting relevantly, unusually in such a matter: referring to an incoming Techwit Rule violation - the pattern described in the OP, where the techie misses the argument and invents a claim, soon thereafter demanding evidence for it from whomever they thought made it?

 

Repeatedly, for pages and days?

 

We haven't hit the demand for evidence yet (which would be interesting - not an easy one to predict). So this could drag on for pages with none of you guys ever addressing the OP. Imagine my shock.

 

Edited in: sudden thought: I've long recognized the similarity of the Techwit blunder to the standard hypnosis technique of context assumption - by focusing on a controversy within a frame, the frame is established as a reality. Having a character in a story tell a story, for example, is a classic way of involving the audience for a story in a willing suspension of disbelief in the existence of the storyteller. The famous illustration is the character of Scheherazade in the Thousand and One Nights, whom the listener (by the fifth or sixth tale) often comes to accept (and remember, years later) as a real person. In that sense, what seems to be happening in these Techwit situations is a kind of hypnosis - the demand for evidence, and subsequent unsatisfactory refusal to provide any, focuses attention within the frame, and the claim or argument itself is from then on simply reality.

Edited May 15, 2015 by overtone

[John Cuthber]

If, after "pages and days" people are misunderstanding your claim, perhaps it's because you didn't make it clear in the first place.

[overtone]

If, after "pages and days" people are misunderstanding your claim, perhaps it's because you didn't make it clear in the first place.

Obviously. Or the second place, third place, and so forth. Several rewordings, responses, etc, later, no clarity has been achieved.

 

But that does not explain the ridiculous claims substituted for it - they come out of nowhere, and they make no sense. They are not always even predictable from any actual posting.

 

Neither does it explain the demand for evidence that by presumption does not exist.

 

Another unexplained matter is the refusal of any responder to correct muddled posting, and clean up an argument in the standard way of honest discussion, so as to deal with the strongest case or best argument available, using superior expertise etc, thereby both advancing the discussion and making their own refutation or case that much stronger and more persuasive.

And finally, it does not address the matter of the abysmally poor counterarguments offered, counterfactual claims made, etc, in these Techwit situations. One person's muddle does not excuse anyone else's, surely?

Edited May 15, 2015 by overtone

[Strange]

No such evidence suggests any such thing, is part of the issue

 

So are you saying that every technology or product for which there is no evidence of danger (and some evidence of safety) should be considered a risk?