"Get your facts straight" is close enough. I also want to imply seeking the facts relevant to a discussion in which one wants to participate. Often people will promote something they consider plausible as fact. Sometimes they hear something, do not expend the effort needed to confirm or qualify it, and use it as fact. I do not necessarily accuse these people of intellectual dishonesty when a simple absence of diligence will do. Speaking for myself: My career and my hobbies involved becoming fluent with a set of facts and applying them, sometimes elegantly.
The latest current topic to catch my interest is the question of global warming. I have noticed two interesting phenomena: 1) most participants in the discussion fall into two well-defined and opposed camps, the Warmists and the Deniers. the division seems to follow politics with surprising fidelity: warmists tend to be socialists and deniers tend to be to the definite right of the USA's civic spectrum.
2) The question of global warming can be addressed using science, although not immediately. I am uncertain here because I no longer have access to a good university library or its online equivalent. (Tangential example: chemistry. Almost all professional chemistry data, such as journal and patent searches, are bulkheaded behind members-only firewalls. Seeing behind them is expensive.) The global warming-relevant science that does make it onto the free web has been washed through various ideological filters, and the cut&posts that appear here on SI are often more informative in the source url (usually known advocate sites) than in the actual content. While logical rigor does not allow it, I find myself reacting viscerally to the politics of the source site, even though I am not especially prone to dismissing a source. Primary data, and their interpretation by a neutral source, are as uncommon on the web as the proverbial hen's teeth. Since I don't trust the smorgasbord of Select-A-Dataset offered by interested sites and blogs on both sides of the political divide, I am not a very effective participant in that discussion.
As regards "be nice", I don't mean being congenial, going along to get along. I think more in terms of knowing and respecting the line between assertion and aggression, dissent and insult. "That was dumb" is ok; "you are dumb" is not.
Do you mean actual rotten tomatoes or their verbal equivalent? If the former ... ok. If the latter ... duuuuuude. |
