On 21/11/2007, Daniel R. Tobias
<dan(a)tobias.name> wrote:
I find it interesting, and a little distressing,
that there seems to be a
"groupthink" phenomenon on this list (and also sometimes on Wikipedia
itself). I saw it just now in the discussion of an expulsion from this list.
When it was first brought up for comment, there was a "me-too" chorus of
agreement with the ban. Then, a day later, I posted my dissenting
commentary (which I actually wrote yesterday, but failed to successfully post
due to a misconfigured mail program... getting outbound mail sent while on
vacation and using various different access providers is a pain with all the
security moves and port blocking tossing up hoops to be navigated), and
suddenly there were several other dissenting views following in close
succession.
Surely that's *why* you posted your views, in order to try and
convince people to agree with you. That's how discussions work - if
someone makes a good point, people tend to agree with it.
If you assume that everyone is rational only based on the points
brought up so far and not their individual thoughts on the issue as a
whole then it may work that way. But it is still groupthink to go
along with the current trend in a conversation just because,
highlighted by sudden switches to other good points that you did not
see at first because you were too busy agreeing with what was said.
Peter