Proposed Q&A Site for Plasma Cosmology at StackExchange.com

[Giffyguy]

I've proposed a new Q&A site at Stack Exchange, focused on the topic of Plasma Cosmology.

The purpose of this site would be:

• Bring the discussion of Plasma Cosmology to a wider audience with greater search engine visibility.
  Stack Exchange is the most popular platform for this type of thing, with millions of users across all disciplines. (Perhaps a little skewed towards younger people in the IT industry, but that can't hurt.)
• Provide a new and different format for discussion, with each post being a direct, focused, answerable question, and each reply being a direct answer to the original question.
  (i.e. not a traditional discussion board.)
• Work in tandem with the Thunderbolts forum to expand knowledge and enlightenment on the topic of Plasma Cosmology.
  Since the proposed Stack Exchange site would be for clear and concise Q&A only, in the event that a more lengthy comment thread were to arise, we would recommend that they move the discussion to a more appropriate forum, with the Thunderbolts forum generally being a top candidate.
  Furthermore, the Thunderbolts forum will be a significant resource people attempting to answer open questions, and source links will frequently refer people back to the Thunderbolts forum.
• Encourage interested people of all education levels to engage in open discussion on relevant topics, while discouraging inappropriate behavior (such as childish comments, off-topic questions, duplicate questions, incorrect answers, general lack of effort, pointless bickering, personal attacks, etc.) by utilizing Stack Exchange's sophisticated and highly effective user reputation system, multi-tier reputation-based access to moderation tools, and elected volunteer top-level administration.
  (You can browse the overall FAQ for exhaustive details on how the proposed Plasma Cosmology Q&A site would be self-sustained and operated by all participating members the EU community.)
• Gradually build a permanent library of questions and answers, that can morph and evolve as more research is performed and more discoveries are published.
  When an internet user is searching for an answer on a specific topic, relevant posts at the appropriate topical Stack Exchange Q&A sites are frequently found in the top search engine results, allowing the proposed Plasma Cosmology Q&A site to become a primary resource reaching a more vast audience across all reaches the internet.
• Make all forms of participation free of charge for everyone involved, with no paid staff, no paid hosting, zero technical administration requirements, and no off-topic or intrusive advertising.
  Stack Exchange automates all of these services free of charge, with topic-appropriate non-intrusive advertising included to cover their own bills.

If you 'd like to see a working example of what I'm envisioning for the EU community, you can take a look at the existing Stack Exchange Physics Q&A site.
However, please be aware that the existing Physics Q&A site is for mainstream physics only, by policy, so we can't utilize the existing Physics Q&A site to discuss EU topics until/unless pieces of the Plasma Cosmology model become more widely accepted in the mainstream physics academic establishment.
Therefore, for example, if someone were to post a general mainstream physics question on the proposed Plasma Cosmology Q&A site, without any specific EU context, our moderators would simply move the question over to the general Physics Q&A site (and vice versa) in an ongoing effort to help keep these two sites non-redundant, non-competitive, and strictly focused on their respective assigned topics.

After all, one of the main priorities is to encourage constructive conversation with outside groups, and discourage pointless bickering between mainstream physicists and EU proponents.

Please feel free to reply to this thread with any thoughts, comments, questions, suggestions, or concerns.

If you'd like to help support this proposal, head on over to StackExchange's proposed site staging area (don't mind the aliens ), locate the proposal for Plasma Cosmology either by using the search box or browsing under the Science category (it's currently on the second page), create a Stack Exchange account if you don't already have one, "follow" the Plasma Cosmology site proposal, submit up to five of your own example questions to help flesh out the type of content we want to foster, vote on other people's posted example questions, leave comments with your suggestions or critiques, and even open up general discussions if you'd like.

[Giffyguy]

I had a brief conversation with the ThunderBolts Communications Director, Susan Schirott.

While she is certainly far too busy to take an active role in this Stack Exchange project as it stands right now, she did recommend that I continue to work to spread this proposal around the community and see what types of support, questions, concerns, suggestions, and/or critiques the community can come up with.

I agree 100% with Susan's recommendation, and I welcome any comments from you guys.

Susan also recommended that I work to organize a larger discussion in-person at the EU2015 conference in Phoenix, since that would a fantastic networking opportunity for something like this.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend EU2015, since I have major obligations this summer relating to my career, and I won't be able to travel much.

However, if other members of the community would like to spread this idea around at EU2015, it would be incredibly helpful in terms of gathering support and getting this proposal off the ground.

Any amount of networking among the community will go a long way towards bringing plasma cosmology to Stack Exchange ... and by doing so, helping us to spread awareness, knowledge, and objectivity across the internet from yet another angle.

[willendure]

The trouble with SE is its Q&A format. You are supposed to just answer questions in an authoritative way. It would seem to me that the EU hypothesis is highly speculative, full of conflicting opinions and wildcard ideas. Its a great topic for discussion and discussion is discouraged on SE.

[Zyxzevn]

StackExchange is terrible.
And its format is not designed for discussions at all.

Any question I ask is always downvoted, and only uninteresting noob questions are upvoted.
It's system is only partially democratic, because you get more "voting-power" if you have
answered many questions "correctly". The "best" answers are interesting answers to noob questions.

As a medium to discuss alternative ideas we need something else. On reddit there are some places were we can have discussions. Like: http://www.reddit.com/r/plasmacosmology it is far more democratic, because everyone has similar "voting-power".

But in any environment where the trolls and misinformed have a majority, it is hard to get any constructive discussions.

[Giffyguy]

Thanks for the feedback and the support, Zyxzevn.
I really appreciate it.

There are definitely some, let's say passionate users at SE, but I don't think I've ever encountered any actual trolls. I imagine attempting to really troll at SE would just get the person booted off, pretty much immediately.

I disagree with you regarding the voting system, but then again I've had a much more positive experience asking and answering SE computer programming questions for six years. Can you explain to me by what you mean by getting "more voting power?" If you are referring to the ability to vote to close bad questions, and other moderation tasks, I can see where you are coming from. It's got it's pros and cons, but that's what sets it apart and makes it different from non-reputation-based communities.

I'll explain what I mean by this.

I can say that learning how to ask an appropriate question on SE is trial by fire. Gaining access to moderator tools and participating in moderation tasks was great experience for me, as it helped me to really learn how/why the site operates as it does. The feel of the community is largely dictated by the people performing moderation tasks, and the community decides who those people are - for this reason, I feel like we could create a much more positive experience on SE than you may have experienced in the past, with the most prominent members of the EU community running the show.

After all, this Plasma Cosmology SE site would initially be populated by us, existing members of the EU community. It would be our community, and we would ultimately decide what behavior is appropriate or inappropriate on the site. The "example question" voting and discussion process (at the proposal staging area) accommodates this purpose pretty nicely, IMO.

I do agree with you somewhat, regarding the focus on more "noob" questions, but I don't necessarily view this as a bad thing. The ability to take large, complicated, nebulous concepts and break them down in to a series of more black & white questions for dummies is SEs biggest strength and weakness, I'd say. After all, for some people, that's what they want/need - especially those people who are new to EU, I imagine.

SE is definitely a niche, and there's a time and a place for it.

I suppose the questions we need to ask are:

• Can we draw a clear boundary between pieces of EU that are more firm and directly answerable, vs. pieces of EU that are less firm and more open to interpretation? (And redirect the latter discussions back to this forum, or reddit, etc.)
• Does SE fill any existing needs, that aren't already filled (as effectively) elsewhere?
• While this may not benefit every member of the community in the same way, would a Plasma Cosmology SE site be beneficial to a significant enough portion of current or future members of the EU community?
• Is the greater search engine visibility alone enough of a reason to explore the idea of an SE site for Plasma Cosmology?
• Would a proper, functional, Plasma Cosmology SE site (along with the excellent material already on YouTube) help to strengthen the reputation of the EU community as a whole, giving EU some much needed publicly visible credence as a real, serious, set of theories and not just a bunch of crack-pottery (as is frequently the accusation)? If so, how important is this to the community?

P.S. Zyxzevn, since you were kind enough to follow the proposal on SE, and vote on the existing example questions, would you mind posting some example questions of your own? I'd like to get a better feel for the types of questions you'd like to see (e.g. non-noob) - the kind of questions you described always getting downvoted in the past, etc.

[pln2bz]

I would generally agree with others who are pointing out that we probably cannot simply adopt somebody else's pre-existing system for this sort of project. The nature of this conversation is unique, and we need a format which supports these specific needs. For me, this means taking into account the decade of observations I've made on how people tend to react to scientific controversies, and building those observations into the communication system's infrastructure.

It's unfortunately very difficult to talk about software design without pointing to an actual prototype. So, what I'm doing is trying to put together a prototype right now in Angular.js and the Ionic Framework that demonstrates a first attempt at such a system.

I really believe that this is the way to go with this -- we should be pointing to the ongoing problems with how people talk about science online, and using that conversation to drive a discussion of such a site's design. I should probably emphasize and clarify that I used to also believe that this is purely a content issue -- that if people were simply exposed to the right arguments that they would fall in line. What I feel needs to be emphasized is that my views on this subject have dramatically transformed as I interacted with more people on line. The key is to spend some time in the trenches running arguments by people who do not understand the EU, with critics and using feedback from the Thunderbolts.info experts -- basically running arguments back and forth. Over time, anybody who engages this process will come to observe that the communication medium is having an inordinate effect upon peoples' beliefs about the content. The format is not supporting the various needs of paradigm change.

I encourage people to check out the README attached to the github project that I'm currently working on, for more information about the theory that I am speaking of. The app itself is in a state of rapid transition, so don't worry too much about what it looks like at the current moment. The most important thing is all of this underlying theory that I am pointing to as the basis for the design. We could be having very deep conversations about this design and its motivating theory.

I'd love to see people move into this direction. Unfortunately, I will not be at the 2015 conference either. But, I'd be happy to Skype or simply email with anybody on these subjects.

Here's the github ...

https://github.com/worldviewer/ionic-social-scientific