experiment: off-forum explication

I am an INTJ personality type.  Some aspects of this type mean I can be frustrating to others on forums and in real life.  I promise I’m not trying to frustrate anyone.

INTJs tend to be more abstract than concrete. They focus their attention on the big picture rather than the details and on future possibilities rather than immediate realities.

INTJs tend to value objective criteria above personal preference or sentiment. When making decisions they generally give more weight to logic than to social considerations.

Fairly often others say that I “just want to be right”.  This has always confused me;  I don’t want to win arguments or be the one who is “right”, but I do want someone in the discussion to be right so we can all learn.

And I don’t mind folks being misinformed, as long as:

1. they aren’t externalizing the costs of their error to others

2. they aren’t advocating misinformed positions as if they had “truth value” (ie, not leading others into error)

the downsides of addressing misinformation

• can contribute to topic drift

• can appear to be argumentative

• can annoy moderators and other forum users

The common advice is for folks to take detailed exchanges to PM, but this has downsides, too:

• onlookers can’t see it, and onlookers exploring a new topic are the most important audience

• the misinformed OP is unlikely to be receptive to good information, since they already are already misinformed in at least one area.  The misinformed are the least likely to realize they are misinformed.  A corollary to dunning-kruger?

backchannel explication

I am going to run an experiment to see if I can fit in better on the forums.  I’ll take hair-splitting to my blog here, removing the OP’s username because I want to explain my own position rather than beat anyone up.   I’ll link subtly to the blog from my last reply on forum, and put a link to the original thread/post from the blog.

These posts will be [labeled backchannel] in the title.