Can we use the Socratic Method?

I've been doing some research into the Socratic Method:

http://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html

I've done some experimenting along these lines on WITP with varied results. I asked the question" Do we need leaders?" to get people thinking about what a leader is, how it's defined, whether this is a good idea or not.

I think the thread devolved into a discussion about whether police are good or bad, but what I was really trying to do was just get people thinking.

I'm not very good at this stuff, and as the link I gave above says, this is a lot of hard work to really do it right.

But I wonder, what if a certain number of us started using the Socratic Method to get people to really start thinking?

In addition, I've had some success using sockpuppets to keep the thread active. This has to be very subtle. The sockpuppet cannot be a vocal proponent, I think, but can be used perhaps as one of the first followers to help push the tipping point.

Is this bad of me?

Maybe I've been in marketing too long.

Thoughts? Comments?

ravenpaige wrote:But I wonder, what if a certain number of us started using the Socratic Method to get people to really start thinking?

In addition, I've had some success using sockpuppets to keep the thread active. This has to be very subtle. The sockpuppet cannot be a vocal proponent, I think, but can be used perhaps as one of the first followers to help push the tipping point.

Is this bad of me?

Maybe I've been in marketing too long.

Thoughts? Comments?

I love the Socratic Method. It was something I tried to use in the classroom whenever I could, to get kids to follow a path of logical thinking. FFaD was also a fan of this method.

This was ALSO something he talked about as a typical COINTELPRO technique, and using a sockpuppet to help it along is just good form. Again, FFaD wanted to create a 'tribe' whose main function was to use this back/forth in news comments, YouTube, and others, to help people understand what's actually going on in the world.

In that sense, I think it's a fantastic technique. I'm ALL for engaging in Psyops to spread truth and common sense. Try to do this on the forums sometimes, and that's where the trolls can really try and derail an argument: spam can really interrupt the flow of this type of argument.

But we should use it on the this forum to reach actionable conclusions.