This is a recursive post…
There are two ways it’s good. The mysticism conversation, and the idea of aggregating quality monologues or dialogues from the forum posts.
The forum is a phenomenal tool for generating these quality bits of knowledge, or knowledge exploration.
But it may not be a good mechanism for building cohesive views.
This goes into something I’ve been thinking about more and more over the years.
There’s a real line between individual/social. The two realms impact each other very much.
In this case, the posts are a mechanism for social exploration of knowledge and social production of knowledge.
But for a consumer of knowledge (like when I read different articles or books about various topics) is to evolve my internal tools for understanding the phenomena I encounter in the world.
So, the forum serves all of us when we come to interact around a topic, but how do we save it for reference for those of us who want to research what’s been said about a topic we may be ignorant of?
I don’t think the forum is the mechanism, it’s a generation tool, not an educational tool. There’s some hubris implied in assuming that content from our discussions might in fact be educational, but hey, if other members find a high amount of value from certain posts, is there a way other than simple links to forum posts from another stickied forum post?
It might be useful to go through on a regular basis and have people extract and post some of the discussions to a wiki or a blog, with appropriate tagging to make it searchable. Then it might be easier to link to even in our ongoing discussions. That’s a labor of love though, who wants that job?
We’re an individualist group anyway, so I’m guessing it would be a voluntary thing if it happens. So, my only remaining question would be is there a wiki mechanism associated with the mises site?
