Reply #13: Rules of the game

[andym]

There can not be civilized debate between true-believers and skeptics. They do not share common assumptions about what happened and do not share common assumptions about the rules of the game. Therefore the true-believers look upon the skeptics as potential evil-doers, and the skeptics look upon the true-believers as irrational, intolerant and biased.

The USCV debate thread is a very good example.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=374482&mesg_id=374482

It's actually amusing. There is a messy scientific debate occurring simultaneously with an absolute defense of all arguments for election fraud by true believers/polemicists. By the rules of scientific debate, the true believers often look ridiculous in their arguments. By the rules of polemics, the true believers have crushed their "Trojan-horse" adversaries, whom they consider misguided at best, and evil at worst.

The only solution would be to segregate the groups. Since they will not segregate themselves, I think the most useful approach would be for members of each group to ignore the other. However that will not work for true-believers, since they need to defend their beliefs and it will not work for scientifically-minded skeptics because they have been trained to answer all serious criticisms.

The rules of the game lead to Stalemate.