(November 22, 2016 at 1:04 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: A Poe is someone who pretends on the internet to hold positions they don't actually hold, in order to make the people who do hold those positions look bad. The classic example is an atheist who pretends to be a Christian and makes particularly bad arguments and treats people with disrespect.
Also, Poe's Law holds that an extremist position on a subject is difficult to differentiate from a parody of the same. Some of the earnest theists will make claims or offer explanations that are so bizarre that it's tough to be certain that they're not just pretending. Thus, someone who comes along making posts that are meant as a parody may be taken seriously even as they get stranger and stranger. I think we've had one or two people who tried to see how insane they could sound before everyone realized that they were having us on. And then we have members like enrico...
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
