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Thank you, whoever nominated my comment for an AAQC and whoever accepted it, always an honour. I know this is more of a meta-thread question, and has probably been discussed on them before, but since it's fresh in my mind I'd like to ask it here: does anyone else find the wording of the rule against consensus-building to be a little misleading? It was on my mind as something to avoid while writing the comment, and came up in the discussion, and definitely made me think it could be clarified. Here is the full text:
I think this is a straightforwardly good rule, but the phrasing of the summary appears to confuse a lot of people. "Building consensus" in casual use can cover many kinds of valid arguments ("I think people should believe...", "I think many people believe...", "I observe people acting like...", etc., even bracketing that building a consensus is an inherent side-effect of winning an argument), and the text of the rule doesn't really refer directly to ideological conformity (it sort of reminds me of how people use "begging the question," referring to something very similar, incorrectly because of confusion with ordinary language). It also feels a little ambiguous how much the spirit of the law is violated by people coming in arguing "All good people believe X and only bad people believe Y" as a way to bait out people who believe Y and attack them as Bad. I would suggest something like "Don't assume consensus or enforce what you believe to be consensus." If we want to say something about ideological conformity, maybe an additional sentence explaining that.
This is basically how the rule is interpreted in practice. Don't assume your controversial, far-from-universal position is universal and then begin reasoning from there.
The examples you listed here:
Are all totally fine because they're phrased as beliefs specific to the writer. In general, much more leeway is offered to statements hedged with "I think that..."
Gets a lot of leeway.
Gets more scrutiny
Veers into consensus-building.
And worse of all is when you're doing #3, but only by implication because you take consensus as so baked-in that it doesn't even appear to occur to you that some people might disagree.
Yes, I agree with you entirely, that is also how I have always interpreted it. But I think the wording of the rule is such that people who don't read it carefully and/or are less experienced with the forum culture can easily get the wrong impression of what it means. Essentially, we are using "consensus-building" as a technical term removed somewhat from its ordinary use, and people may misunderstand that and try to interpret it based off ordinary use.
Not to mention people whose native language isn't English which applies to a fair numbers of commenters here.
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