But to save time in the future I'd really like to get clear what not to write. And is it a moderator or an overzealous algorithm at work? — Kym

The site guidelines are pinned at the very top of the main page. Here's a link:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/480/site-guidelines

It was a sensible but short question on physics, dutifully posted in the Science folder. The title was a bit silly "Do Black Holes S*ck?" (replete with vowels). Maybe this was interpreted as obscene?

Or could it have scanned as too short? The question only included two premisies leading to an apparently paradoxical conclusion - one I'd really like resolved. — Kym

The moderator who deleted your posts might respond in this thread to inform you why they did it.

I deleted threads of yours which had an OP with a single sentence, a blog link, and a terminology of science question. This is a philosophy forum, original posts of threads should ask a coherent and detailed question, state a coherent position with an argument, and importantly be philosophical in nature.

You'll notice that I didn't delete the other threads you've made, because they fit the site guidelines (to my reckoning anyway).

Thanks for reply fdrake.

I'd still like to know how black holes can exhibit gravity while simultaneously having an escape velocity that exceeds the light speed of gravitational waves. Is there any way I can communicate that question in in The Philosophy Forum?

There is a subsection titled Science and Technology. If it's not appropriate to ask such a question there, then I have no idea why not.

I couldn't find a staff contact link so I'll try the wisdom of the crowd. — Kym

The rule is - when in doubt, bother @Baden

I'd still like to know how black holes can exhibit gravity while simultaneously having an escape velocity that exceeds the light speed of gravitational waves. Is there any way I can communicate that question in in The Philosophy Forum? — Kym

There is a subsection titled Science and Technology. If it's not appropriate to ask such a question there, then I have no idea why not. — snowleopard

I deleted threads of yours which had an OP with a single sentence, a blog link, and a terminology of science question. This is a philosophy forum, original posts of threads should ask a coherent and detailed question, state a coherent position with an argument, and importantly be philosophical in nature. — fdrake

If you don't think that it has any philosophical implications, I wouldn't put it in one of the philosophy subforums - and would ask such a question to Google, physicsforums and Youtube (try 60 symbols, they have some pop-sci videos on gravitational waves) before trying to chance it with a particularly informed person here. We're more likely to be able to give good replies to philosophy questions.

The specifics of a scientific theory or experimental results generally aren't philosophy of science, they're science. If you want to try and draw some philosophical conclusions from them maybe try it again with a stronger opening post sensibly linking gravitational waves to a philosophical issue. Lots of us use examples from other disciplines to try and illustrate points in the threads here, so it's really a question of sufficiently good explication and being philosophically relevant in a broad sense, or made so by the context. As the guidelines state - context matters, so does content.

PS. if you want to alert someone to a reply, the syntax isn't @name, it's @name (double quotes around the name). EG @kym doesn't do anything, but @ "Kym" does (when posted without the space between the @ and the first ".)

PS. if you want to alert someone to a reply, the syntax isn't name, it's @name (double quotes around the name). EG @kym doesn't do anything, but @ "Kym" does (when posted without the space between the @ and the first ".) — fdrake

There's also the @ symbol you can click as one of the options right above the message box and then you just type in the name. It even makes sure you choose a real user.

To be fair, there would appear to be some inconstancy in the application of this guideline. For example, this post 'CERN Discovers that the Universe Ought Not to Exist' doesn't seem to be especially philosophical in nature. If you feel that it is, could you be more explicit as to why? It also asks no specific or detailed question of the readers.

Ok I'll look elsewhere answers. Thanks for your time.

Mods aren't robots. We also aren't all on all the time. It's also likely that we will all respond differently to threads.

Furthermore, if an OP has already garnered good responses, the thread is less likely to be pruned. I think that one was also in science and technology, and was given a philosophical context through the title. That's a pretty clear case of the guidelines being relevant - the OP and the title were related. The sarcasm @Wayfarer showed also expresses a reasonably interesting philosophical position - a criticism of scientism, or what is interpreted as scientism.

And it has the philosophical context of 'look at this absolute howler that we get from pop sci headline grabbing science interpretations'.

I also believe that posting in science and technology is more forgiving on lacking detailed, expressed philosophical content.

I wouldn't delete the thread now.

PS: if you're thinking 'you're saying that because you posted it' - that thread predates me becoming a mod.

I hope this doesn't discourage you too much. Your other threads have provoked some nice discussions. :)

That the mods aren't all on the same page in their interpretation of guidelines just speaks to my point that there is some inconsistency in the application of the guidelines, wherein a certain amount of leeway is given, depending upon the subjective opinion of the mod, and their familiarity and affinity with poster's mindset. I understand that this isn't going to be perfect, just seeking clarification on why. Now I know.

Also, if there's anything controversial we talk about it. It isn't like someone can delete pro-Palestine or pro-Israel posts depending on personal taste. Or that I'd delete @Nagase's posts in my recent engagement with him despite holding opposite opinions... It's also not like someone gets banned arbitrarily when they put effort into their posts. Sometimes people who generally behave very well lose their temper and get annoyed.

Also, this being a forum where posters are expected to be able to put things together and highlight inconsistencies, observations like yours are expected. If you believe any decision taken by a mod is unfair you should probably tell a mod or admin about it.

For my next trick, I will make this post disappear! Wait for it...

Hey, I know it's not an easy job, and often quite thankless ... been there, done that. And I trust that there's generally good will, as well as the will to make it as good as it can be under the provisional circumstances. So thanks for your efforts in that regard.

Thanks guys, especially @fdrake. I'm probably only about half as cranky as you think I am. There's certainly no indifference here towards the censorship dilemma and I'm grateful on that score.

Now I should now shut up and just take my medicine. But I've got the insomnia and some interesting points were raised concerning an intersection between science and philosophy.

I can see how my question could be seen as a flippant bit of sophistry - after all, the observations (like gravitational lensing) show pretty conclusively that black holes do exist. So why waste our time?

Investigating paradoxes can, and have, pointed to flaws in scientific paradigms. Flaws that only played out fully much much later, when further observations finally forced the adoption of new and better paradigms. For examples I'd recommend Thomas Khun's 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (that's an OP right there).

Meanwhile here's an example I'm fond of from my youth. Zeno of Elea came up with some pretty curly paradoxes. Perhaps the most vivid was Achilles and the Tortoise. In a fairly dry summary:

In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead. — Aristotle, Physics VI:9, 239b15

But why waste our time? We've run the experiment, Achilles won. Case closed.

But it turns out this non-problem arising from assuming the infintely divisible was not to remain an academic one. By the 1900s the formulae of physics, as we knew then it, was having to predict infinities that just weren't observed (the Black Body Problem). The solution was that radical paradigm shift to Quantum Mechanics which abandoned the previous assumptions and opted to include indivisble quanta (photons in that case). Now we recognise all kinds of quanta, including indivisble Plank length and Plank time - which I'm sure would have been great of interest to old Zeno. In practice QM has become so important that we now must use it to sucessfully design things like this PC I'm using right here.

Ok we could at this point say, well that's still all 'Sciencey Stuff'. Personally, I never bought into the 'Two Cultures' view of Science vs the Arts they started pushing during the late Enlightnment (but that was during my middle years and I was getting pretty recalcitrant by then). Nor do I did think did the famous paradigm-busting thought expermenters of science ever drew this distinction (e.g. Gallileo, Einstein). They were philosophers as much as they were scientists.

Ok then, good night all.

There's a 'Questions' sub-category in the Learning Centre (see menu on the left) for stuff that isn't homework, can't easily be Googled but at the same time isn't intended for extended debate and discussion but merely for informational purposes.

Hi @Baden, did you get a chance to read the above post? (the one just above yours there)

Yes, and I agree with you in the sense that I recognize that science and philosophy are not absolutely clearly demarcated just like philosophy and the arts aren't; science bleeds into philosophy and philosophy bleeds into the arts, but this is not the place to debate the details of that particular issue. I just wanted to let you know that you can post questions on science with some philosophical element to them in the questions category. Or if you want to develop a non-philosophical science question further in an OP (with the intention of discussing and debating it) you can post it in the science and tech category. And with any OP, if you have some doubt about where to put it or what to do with it, you can always run it by any of us first and we'll help you out. We're not enthusiastic about deleting OPs but do like to keep the place well-organized.

@Baden

Ok the full story is that I attempted to initiate this debate in 2 forum categories. One was Science, the other was the Philosophy of Science. These got wiped as irrelavent to philosophical enquiry. I still want discuss this stuff and I suspect others might too. To this end I've outlined the issue above, you can see it's not trivial.

All I need to know now is:
a) Where can I discuss this stuff in the Philosophy Forum?, or
b) Should I cut my losses and look for answers elsewhere?

Maybe if you had said all that in the original post you wrote and not tried to cram it implicitly into the single question Do Black Holes S*ck? then it would have got a more sympathetic hearing. Tell us about Kuhn and Zeno. Start a thread already.

Yeah, too much brevity can easily sound flippant.

@Kym @fdrake already explained above what you need to do re OPs. Plus, see the site guidelines. The only part I didn't see mentioned was the question category, which is why I piped in. If you're still not sure after you rewrite the OP, you can always send it to one of us to check.

@Baden, @fdrake. Ok, I've made my final attempt in the Philosophy of Science section. Hope it reads ok now.

Cheers then.

I am 99% sure I posted a comment in "Why I Left Academic Philosophy" a few hours ago on Friday the 13th, and it appears not to be there. I rewrote the post. I'm fairly sure that on occasion other posts have disappeared too -- -posts that were good enough to be left alone. Software glitch?

I can't remember where, but I recall someone posting that a spam filter had been getting false positives.

A while back on wikpedia it was pretty much open slather to edit other's texts. A lot of superflous waffle got cut this way. Anyway a culture of minimalism took hold. Eventually entire entries got deleted.

Up the front the content for "Aardvark" got wiped and replaced with the text "One ugly animal'. Since then the procecess of censorship has been censored quite a bit.

Not in the spam filter and not in the change log, so it doesn't appear that you were modded. Let's just put it down to bad luck...?

Another deleted post. Outta here then. All the best guys, I enjoyed it otherwise.