How do multiple users close a question for a reason that doesn't seem to apply?

Question

I posted a question asking "What is a rigorous definition of a 'strong Brønsted-Lowry base'?" (noting that the usual glossary definition of "strong base" was that it "dissociates completely", but that can't be right for a Brønsted-Lowry base because a Brønsted-Lowry base is defined by proton acceptance, not dissociation): what is a rigorous definition of a Brønsted-Lowry "strong base"? (glossary definition seems wrong)

This question was closed as "primarily opinion-based", which didn't seem to make sense to me. (Presumably chemists generally agree on what the definition of a 'strong Brønsted-Lowry base' is, and even if there are multiple accepted definitions, the question still has a factual answer, where the factual answer is: there are multiple accepted definitions, and here they are.)

But the oddest thing to me was that the site displays a message saying it was closed as "primarily opinion-based" by five different users. It seems unlikely that all five of the users reached this conclusion independently! I don't know what the UI looks like from the point of view of those users, so which of the following best describes the most common situation (across all Stack Exchange boards, not just chemistry):

1. The five users separately and independently reach the conclusion that the question was "primarily opinion-based".
2. One of those users initially flags the question as "primarily opinion-based", but this action is visible to the other users, and there is an unwritten rule that if one user does this, the other users will jump in and do the same thing to back up the first user.
3. One user initially flags the question as "primarily opinion-based", and explicitly asks the other users, "Hey gang, back me up on this and close the question as opinion-based as well", and that's what they do.

(I think this distinction matters quite a bit, because in a recent blog post the management at Stack Exchange was asking what they can do to make the site more welcoming to newcomers. Regardless of how hard experts try to be "polite", one of the most off-putting things to me is when insiders create the false appearance of "consensus" against an outsider opinion -- "Hey n00b, all these people agree that you're wrong, so you should listen" -- when all they did was agree to form a coalition, rather than arriving at that conclusion separately and independently from each other.)

Answer 1

Bennett, I appreciated your previous detailed meta post, however, this one honestly goes a bit off-track. First, I hope you have read our Help center page on closing questions. If so, you would know that a moderator closing questions is different from regular users closing questions. The regular users in this context are +3k users, users who've spent time on the site, contributed by asking or answering, etc. They've earned their privilege to make such decisions.

Now, if you write a meta post like so, and indicate - just because one or two of your questions got closed - that they are "forming a coalition" and trying to close down on new users' questions, I doubt that would work. Regulars here are working in good faith, trying to keep the site neat and clean. They have no vested interests in closing down more questions, or in closing questions by a particular set of users. orthocresol already has said the most important stuff:

there is no public or private collusion to close questions on Chem.SE.

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I assure you that StackExchange has multiple and rigorous mechanisms in place to prevent new users from feeling helpless when their post is closed. In fact, you can always contest the closure, via messaging in Chemistry Chat, or writing a meta post. You've already done the latter once, and the question was reopened too. Moreover, if a post on hold is edited, it is again sent to regulars for review, who now decide based on the new edited post.

Finally, here's an image of the close dialog box:

Notice that the number of close votes that have been cast is shown. These are beneficial to a reviewer because:

1. if I was about to Leave Open, knowing that other people have voted to close instead, looking at the reason they chose can help me reconsider my stance, and look at the question from a different perspective. This is also especially important in case of duplicate closures ("Why did this good question get four close votes? Ah, it's a duplicate of an existing question!").
2. sometimes the question is borderline, and I am not sure whether to vote what. Looking at the existing votes again gives me an idea of what could the possible reasons be.
3. If I disagree with a close reason and see that there are multiple close votes already, I can put a comment, sort of a call to discussion or just a general reminder, that the question does not seem to fit the grounds on which it is being closed. Here's the latest example from two days back. If people agree they vote Leave Open. Otherwise, if they disagree, they comment back.

In all of these, one crucial fact is that which user voted to close - and with what reason - is not visible until the close process is over. (ignoring duplicate/custom closures). So, a regular has no way of knowing if their favorite CV reviewer has already voted to close. That is entirely pointless though because such a thing ("an unwritten rule that if one user does this"/"Hey gang, back me up on this") does not exist in the first place.

Here at meta we've had and continue to have countless discussions on how to make our site better for newcomers. You yourself can go through the previous posts and read them. Most of the regulars here have invested days of time in just discussing the philosophy behind these close boxes. We attempt to make our process as smooth, as less confusing, and as less error-prone as possible. Your post, therefore, would have been better if you didn't tried to imply - directly or indirectly - that there are collusions on our part. In fact, there aren't. There may be sometimes be errors though, after all, we are all human volunteers devoting our time to the site. (You're already seen one error before.) However, I'll repeat, those errors - if any - do not imply collusion.

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Now, regarding your own post that made you started the thread, there were five close votes and two Leave Open votes. You can view them all in the timeline. Being the first to Leave Open, I don't see how exactly the post is opinion based. But, five other people did. So, it'll be best if one of them comes by and describes directly why the post was deemed to be worth a closure and how it could've been improved.

Answer 2

Thanks Gaurang. I think my use of "collusion" was harsh and sounded unnecessarily accusatory. What I mean is that any time there is a group making a collective decision, there is a tendency to follow the herd and pile on to an initial arbitrary decision, even if that decision is not objectively "right".

There are many psychological experiments demonstrating that people are more likely to make an objectively wrong decision if they think other people have already made that same decision. Solomon Asch did experiments where a test subject could be persuaded to say that line A on a board was longer than line B (even when line B was really longer) because everyone else in the room (really stooges of the experimenter) said that line A was longer. More apropos to the current scenario, experimenters have found that when teams are trying to solve a problem (e.g. guessing the number of beans in a jar), the teams did best when the experimenters imposed a rule that the team members couldn't talk to each other, and everyone just wrote down their guess and then the team would average them. Without this rule, the teams were usually further off because everyone would just coalesce around whatever answer was called out first, which seems analogous to what happened here.

Now, in the case where something is a duplicate of an existing question, that is a special case that depends on circumstances "external to the question", so it's helpful to see if someone else has noticed a duplicate.

On the other hand, as to the issue of whether a question is "opinion-based", that's something that presumably can be determined by looking at the question itself. So it would seem you're more likely to arrive at the objectively correct answer if each user is voting separately and independently whether a question is opinion-based, without seeing the votes of the other users.

So, suppose that for each question in the queue, the voters review the question and vote -- either not to close the question at all, or they vote that the question is primarily opinion-based, or whatever -- but they vote without seeing the votes of other users. And then the question only gets closed as "primarily opinion-based" if a sufficient percentage of voters separately and independently come to that conclusion.

Is there any reason to think this would not result in more accurate decisions? (Even if it's not realistic to expect the UI to be rewritten this way any time soon.)

p.s. as you can see, this would have been better as a comment reply to Gaurang's answer, but the character limit for comments was much too short to summarize this. Is there a better way to reply, other than submitting a second answer?