[ExI] Conversational rules (and metaconversational games)

[Amon Zero]

On 28 September 2011 03:47, F. C. Moulton <moulton at moulton.com> wrote:

> <snip>
> ...I am all for criticism of all ideas.  What
> I would suggest is that those making the criticism also apply the same
> level and types of criticism to their own pet ideas.
>


Well said!

Now I'm curious as to whether there have ever been significant discussions
of "meta" rules for conversation or investigation of ideas? Given that most
(if not all) lists eventually develop perennial thematic "ruts", I wonder if
any deep thought has been applied to how to handle such things?

Fred's sentiment, above, is a good one I think. Of course we also have
fairly typical moderator rules. Anything else spring to mind?

Whenever I think of this kind of thing lately, Brent Allsop's
canonizer.comproject is never far from my mind. It seems that it would
be fascinating if
there were a database (rather than static list archive) of typical Extropian
points of view on different topics over time. Could be very useful,
certainly very interesting I would think.

If you *really* wanted to go out on a limb with this line of thought, you
could turn conversation (which is arguably a sort of game already, with
rules both implicit and explicit) into a metagame, where the rules of
conversation are themselves topics of conversation. Think of the database as
a kind of n-dimensional playing board.

- A
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20110928/b9a3a737/attachment.html>