Mere Information vs. Genuine Dialogue

Steve Shiffrin takes issue with my post seeking to elicit an opinion from Michael Perry with respect to the results of a recent survey that Michael posted on MOJ.  To be sure, I see the value in posts that are simply informational, but I hope that Steve would admit that the idea behind Mirror of Justice is that it be more than a news site.

Yes, as Steve says, informational posts are “indispensable to informed dialogue on this site.”  But that is to say that they are an aid to such dialogue, not a substitute for it.  Indeed, Steve makes this very point in the concluding sentences of his post, though, I suspect, without meaning to do so.  Steve says that Michael’s informational posts are “absolutely invaluable” in part because from Steve’s point of view “most of the contributors to this site take a different view from the positions implicated by Michael’s posts.”

But what are the “positions implicated” by Michael’s post?  I frankly don’t know what they are because there are so many.  The poll Michael cites suggests multiple implications, some of them quite antithetical (a point I tried to make explicit in my post).  Moreover, because Michael doesn’t indicate why he thinks the survey is germane to the project that MOJ seeks to foster, we can only guess at what he had in mind.

I’m all for dialogue, but at an absolute minimum, dialogue calls for a basic level of candor and forthrightness – qualities that are surely lacking when one only posts the contents of a survey, leaving members of the blog and other readers to simply speculate as to one’s meaning.

Like Steve, I think that Michael’s posts are valuable, and I look forward to reading them, but I’d look forward to them even more if he actually had something to say.