Community

At OoLEN we are actively engaged in the creation of a secure, connected and healthy community. We stand strongly against all types of bullying, aggression, threat and ridicule in scientific debates and discussions.

We aim at building powerful objective arguments while keeping the conversations fully-open and collegial — in science one cannot be certain to be “right” or “wrong” — we must be ready to debate. At the same time, we wish to bring the attention of the community to the use of logical fallacies in scientific debates. One example is the Strawman fallacy, where an argument is misrepresented and wrongly refuted. We defend, before a debate, “steelmanning” the opponent’s argument.

At OoLEN we believe the origin of life is a natural process that science can tackle, and for this reason supernatural explanations are not to be considered in scientific queries to members, debates and scientific meetings.

Have you suffered any type of bullying in the OoL community? Do you have ideas or suggestions on how we could improve on this mission, or any inconsistency from our side to report? Contact us!

Friends and resources on this mission:

• https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ – Identify logical fallacies and cognitive biases

• https://www.ted.com/playlists/482/talks_to_support_a_healthy_deb – Collection of talks on how to have healthy debates

• https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/employee-relations/pages/handling-bullies.aspx – How to deal with bullying.

• https://lifehacker.com/how-to-handle-being-bullied-as-an-adult-1726099137 – How to deal with bullying.