Do you consider yourself a member of a tribe here on SciForums? I'm just curious because I see many familiar people every time I visit. There's definitely a community of sorts, but would "tribe" be a better term for the participants on this site?
The question comes from a book I was reading, which refers to hardcore patrons of a business as tribalism.
sciforums is about as "tribal" as any other similarly-sized online community. We come here and we recognise familiar names. After reading enough of a person's posts, we develop a sense of what that person is like, and often a fairly accurate picture of his or her worldview, to the extent where we are seldom surprised any more by that person's response to any given topic. As in any "tribe", there are people here that we would regard as friends, or at as least like-minded people with whom we share certain views. And then there are the people with whom we often disagree, or whom we dislike because of what and/or how they post.
Hmmm....yes I get this tribal community , but in science is this really a good attitude to have ? Because if tribal attitude continues , any " tribe " gets stuck into its thinking as the only thinking that understands anything ; the thinking becomes an absolute , rather than just thinking , a possibility , on the explaination of things . Then there are multiple tribes . All not really trying to understand anything out side their particular tribe , on the same ology. Tribe can be a good thing but it can also lead to closed mindedness , and unneccesary conflict . If you can't cross the floor and listen to the other tribes , with respect , and vise versa , then how are we any better than any other form of dictatorship ? or really conformity ? Which neither gets us to where we want to go ; a greater and more complete understanding of where we are and where we want to go in the future and how we can get there in the future . We are in this time in Human history able to combine spirituality , the mind with technology which may have never happened before in our history .
