Huh. I was wrong twice in a row. Your previous post was worse than I expected, but your post that I’m replying to was better than I expected. I also did not expect MetaCreation to rage(?) quit(?) in the way that he appears to have after his sustained, regular posting for months. To me it looked abrupt after not enough happened for me to expect it.
Since you took reviewing your post history positively, I’ll make some more comments related to it.
It’s not just about time gaps in discussions but also switching topics when returning, rather than continuing previous discussions. (IIRC you did continue some discussions later, but only temporarily, and sometimes only after being prompted by someone else about it.) So the overall result is that I don’t recall any of your (non-tiny) discussions reaching clear, satisfying conclusions.
Also, I have a debate policy. You (like most others) have never tried to use it. I purposefully engage with people less than I used to unless they do something explicitly CF-related, like using CF ideas about how to structure discussion, debate or learning, or discussing my policy itself. You also (like others) have not requested an informal debate or informal extended discussion or otherwise shown interest in debate, and also just haven’t written much.
My personal experience is that virtually no one wants to debate me for years now – ever since I started using debate methodology (like impasse chains or debate trees) more. I think people are scared of debates where they can’t easily escape (without admitting weakness and error – without losing) or keep things disorganized and inconclusive. And I think people deal with rules poorly and want to avoid discussion rules. I think almost everyone is unable to handle effective, rational debates (but also people don’t want to admit to that or view themselves as scared of debate).
I think people’s unwillingness to talk with me is also related to my use of meta criticisms that get at their methodological errors, their irrationalities and dishonesties. But I generally don’t consider it productive to ignore those things – I think they’re often dealbreakers/bottlenecks for the main discussion.
I also find many people are hostile to reading or citing literature instead of writing their own half-baked arguments, and they don’t want to talk about or do things like analyzing expert literature to understand the current state of the debate. Most people don’t even want to use quotes appropriately in order to avoid talking past each other, which I fear is ultimately because their reading comprehension and logic skills aren’t good enough to really clearly and accurately understand a lot of what they read (they read in an approximate way, not a precise way, which means e.g. they sometimes ignore some words instead of understanding all the words. similarly their own writing only kinda approximately says what they mean but some parts of it don’t make sense and weren’t thought through. and yes ~everything we say is approximate in some sense but I mean people are way too approximate – like from my pov they’re perpetually skimming instead of reading).
Anyway those are some thoughts on how I see people’s availability to debate.