If you don't question me, you don't respect me

[scottalanmiller]

Originally posted Oct 17, 2013, just months before ML was born, on another site.

I've said it before but it bears saying again. This is a professional community. It is through asking, testing, probing, questioning, trying... that we learn from each other. I don't want people taking things that I say as some kind of mandate (unless I put it in bold, then you can work from fiat but I want people to read what I say (as I do with others) and ask if it is true and correct. Ask questions, push me to defend what I say. Don't state things if you too are not prepared to defend them.

Let's work through things together. We are all here to grow, agreed? Not to spout opinion and hope that no one else is knowledgeable enough to catch on. If we do that the community has no value. This is our sounding board. This is how we test each other. No one has all the answers, this field is huge and complex. Things are always changing. If we don't have this process we stagnate.

That doesn't mean probing the same, tried and true ideas every day - let's take time to look up existing arguments and see what has been seen as consensus and only continue to disagree if we see errors or are aware of new data. But in new situations we should work out what is true, what is best, what is good enough, what works and what does not. It is through this process, this communal feedback loop, that we become better than the individual components of the community. This is what makes made the community that cannot be named no longer a Q&A site but a think tank for the industry. We are no longer just a passive community in a sea of IT, we are a thought generator pushing the field to improve as we do ourselves.