17 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: Announcement: New Rules, Guidelines and Flair System
I don't know how /r/AskHistorians works, but is there any way of accommodating the worry that a lot of questions are people copying and pasting homework prompts, such that if the only answers that fit the rules are substantive answers (as opposed to invitations for the OP to give their own opinion or some other sort of Socratic dialogue opening) they're just going to get copied and pasted into someone's homework assignment?
So for instance with this post[1], in the past I would have posted an SEP link or two, but that's out of the picture. Another option would be to ask OP to do their best job answering the question and then I could critique what OP writes, but that's out of the picture too. I *could* write a short paper on liberty, but chances are OP is just going to say "thanks for doing my homework, sucker" or even worse they'll just turn it in without thanking me.
The fourth option is to leave these questions unanswered, which is nice from the point of view of preventing plagiarism, but I always thought it's good that this subreddit is a place for people to get homework help, so it would be a shame if some of the main ways to help people with homework (pointing them to papers to read so they can do their own research or inviting them to engage in a Socratic dialogue) are out of the picture.
Again I don't read /r/AskHistorians but I suspect perhaps this is less of an issue for them because it's rarely the case that you can just say "go read this short, professional article that covers precisely this topic" because history has no SEP and besides that, it's rare to have a single history article that answers a specific question OP asks (whereas this is relatively common in philosophy - say someone asks about bisecting a brain and putting it in two bodies). Moreover, my impression is that you can't teach history via Socratic dialogue, because nobody can figure out on their own when some king chopped off someone's dick or whatever. Meanwhile, philosophy is quite amenable to being taught through Socratic dialogue - I suspect someone with free time could find dozens of examples of people successfully learning *a lot* in this subreddit via Socratic dialogue just by browsing through my posts alone!
Again, not the end of the world, but I wonder if maybe there aren't options that might better address these issues?
Comment by ADefiniteDescription at 05/11/2018 at 15:36 UTC
11 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Thanks for asking this. The way I wrote these guidelines, including the part you're asking about, is **not** meant to rule out posting links to papers or articles, including the SEP.
What it *is* meant to rule out is stuff like the following:
Question: Do Gödel's incompleteness theorems prove that consciousness doesn't exist?
Answer: No.
We want something more substantial in the answer, even to silly questions. It may be a link to an article, or paper, or what have you, and that's fine. But just dismissing a question or answering it in the affirmative without saying anything more isn't helpful.
That's the main purpose of this rule. The other is to encourage folks to say a bit more about their answers when appropriate. So if you're suggesting a philosopher to read on 'X', say, Plato on truth, telling them what exactly they should read in Plato is necessary, as he wrote on basically everything.
Does that answer your concerns?
Comment by RennDennis at 01/05/2019 at 04:56 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Was just having a more thorough read of the guidelines for flairs and came across your comment.
I want to personally thank you for all the times you’ve given substantive answers to myself despite the misgivings you had. I can’t speak for others but can assure you my education is entirely informal and so I have no HW assignments with which to plagiarise you. More to the point; If I ever am in formal education for philosophy and something we have discussed comes up, I’d ask directly for your permission to quote and properly cite you.