Occasionally, in life and on the internet you will find yourself in a discussion where people want to share knowledge and opinions about a topic and it can be a very enlightening experience; most of the time though, you’re forced into an argument because someone wants to protect their belief or promote their agenda and has no interest in reality.

If you went to a forum and asked why intel processors had much higher in game performance than the Cell processor even though the Cell had higher theoritical GFLOPs performance you would see both styles of discussion in action. The people who understand CPUs and game programming can give well thought out explainations of why floating point performance is a poor indicator of in game performance of a processor, and how the cell processor isn't well suited to game development; while Sony fanboys make unrealistic claims that the PS3 will produce better graphics, physics and AI to the best (new) PC games when developers get around to optimizing games for the PS3.

It's the internet, dude.

Slightly more serious: lots of people aren't interested neither on rational discussion nor free exchange of ideas, they are in the game to either boost ther egos, propel their agendas or proselytise (sp?). Additionally you need to factor in the guys who get a rile out of trolling, flaming, attention whoring and other standard internet behaviours.

AKA it's the jungle! Have a banana.

Thing is; if you're not personally or emotionally invested in a discussion, there's no use taking part (and most don't).
However, when you're personally and/or emotionally invested, reason has a tendency to slip, that's kind of the essence of internet forums.
Being anonymous and being able to act like an ass or lie about virtually anything doesn't help alleviate the situation either I'm afraid.

That said; this site is among the best I know of when it comes to discussion, simply because of the amount of reasonable and level-headed posters it has!

Uhm.. are you refering to MikeB in that thread?
Cause we gave up on MikeB a long time ago... ^^
He is here for us to give us a good laugh!!

People defend a point of view more for emotions than for reason, they can argue with reason till determinate point, if you pass this point people just won't change point of view because there is no more argue to defend it, they'll appeal to emotion or faking arguments. I have this in mind when i'm going to discuss something, there is no reason discussing if no one is opened to change their minds, it got just trolling, and believe, i'm used to it.

When they finally invent keyboards that can shock idiots your problems will be over (probably).

Also, most people allow emotions and bias to override reason, many consoles are owned by teenage boys and young men who need to back 'their side' at all costs as if it actually mattered, and the internet allows everyone an equal voice (which morally pleases me but in practice is a pain in the butt and forces me to acknowledge some people really shouldn't be allowed such a great privilege)

If you're lucky, though, sometimes the people you refer to can be very funny, mainly unintentionally.

Passion, emotion. A enthuiast often is a passionate person who likes the values they care about. Often the enthuiast however cares more about HIS/HER OWN value. This at this point then becomes a state where logic is devoid and only passion remains. I would say that a majority of internet enthuiasts are passionate past the point of rationality.

Best way I can explain it is this:

You are having a debate with someone who has an emotional attachment to a peice of plastic that encases metal and copper wiring.

I only like the ones who have emotion attachments to circular peices of plastic and/or plastic cartidges with data on them. Those people are much easier to deal with.

I think you nailed it when you said that most rational people just don't even reply. Or they just reply and ignore all the crazies.

I know every once and awhile I will get mad and reply with some fury but usually I just ignore the junk and look for people who need assistance or aren't just trying to start an argument.


*nice avatar - haven't seen the Tick in forever

Thanks everyone for sharing in my frustration. Some days it just gets the better of me and I can't stand to read the garbage that passes for debate. This thread gave me hope that there are enough sane lurkers and parsimonious posters to keep reading and looking for the occasional proper debate.