SeriousEngine said:
I've decided not to post here. I think doing so would just give the moderator, who possibly has a sadistic inclination, another opportunity to squelch what she sees as excessive speculation. It's terribly boring without any kind of imagination whatsoever, and impossible to inspire learning of any kind.
We don't have any sadistic inclination. If it's excessively speculative, to the point where it wouldn't be approved for the IR forum, then it's probably lacking substance. The guidelines there are generally a very light version of what you'd need to get a journal publication...intended so a person can bounce around ideas without a fully formed theory if they so desire, and keep our main forums free of things that would confuse the students visiting our forum.
And plus, it would take too much effort.
That's your call. If someone is serious about getting feedback, they put in the effort. If they don't want to put in the effort, then we in turn don't really want to put in the effort for them either. It's give and take. If you want us to give serious consideration to your ideas and critique/feedback, then you have to show us you're serious enough to put some effort into what you write. (When I'm saying "you" here, I mean more generally, anyone submitting to the IR forum, not necessarily you personally.)
Too bad. The thing is, without any means of airing my pet theories, I am guaranteed to think, in fact KNOW, that I'm right.
Yet you would prefer that over putting some effort into finding out if that is indeed the case. Hmmm.
I'm NOT going to reformat my essay. And I'm NOT going to copy portions of it onto your message board. That way I'll maintain the "integrity" of my pet theory.
Again, your call. If that's your feeling, why are you getting worked up and complaining to us about it? If it would require that much reformatting to submit, it's probably not appropriately suited to our forum anyway, so I'm not sure what the big deal is?
I could care less about the integrity of a message board that merely references published articles. If that's all I wanted I would go to Google Scholar. PF is redundant without creative speculation. We don't learn anything if we don't extrapolate beyond what we know and test it.
If that's how you feel, you don't need to stay. There are many people who find benefit in discussion about the existing literature to gain better understanding. It's the same reason professional scientists hold journal clubs, to discuss published literature and learn from everyone's thoughts on it something they might have missed in reading it alone. Reading the literature at a level where one can fully understand the content and adequately critique it is a skill every professional scientist needs time to learn, otherwise, you're limited to just taking everything said at face value, which is not always wise. We decided a long time ago that we are not going to try to be everything to everyone here. We know our strengths, and stick with it, and provide those services and discussion areas to those who feel they can benefit from it or enjoy it in some way.
If I wanted to vett my paper for publishing I would send it to a professional journal, not to Physics Forums.
If your paper is at that stage, then I don't know why you'd want to post it here anyway. Indeed, we are not a journal and not the place to publish a fully developed theory. If that's what you were expecting, we cannot provide it.
