Ideas about whatever the discussion may be on. I'm hard pressed to see how relating my personal motivation for participating in these discussions is posturing. Furthermore, you misquoted me--possibly because you were too busy looking for a chance to make me look silly, when you should have been attempting to understand what I actually wrote. I said "design and test," not "design and apply." That means I use the ideas and opinions of others to help me figure out what my own are (hence "design"), and I use the opposition to challenge those ideas (hence "test"), to determine whether or not the ideas or opinions are sound.
As an example, many of my current ideas about religion are the direct result of having spent years arguing about it on the internet--those discussions required that I think about the subject in ways that would have not been necessary, otherwise. Under my normal conditions, I would have never been exposed to the ideas that affected the way I think about religion, and I never would have been challenged on those ideas I previously held.
Likewise, on a lighter note, many of the ideas I have about Batman and the Joker came out of discussions I've had on this forum, with a handful of individuals--or at least evolved from ideas I already had, in ways that wouldn't have occurred if those ideas weren't discussed or challenged here.
