Journal perfessor multigeek's Journal: Debate As Distinct From Bullshitting 13
As a few of you may have noticed, my choices of topics and stands as well as, well, my aggressive 'tude have lead to my getting into a few tangles on /. these days. Well, let me lay this out once again. I engage in debate to try to get all of us closer to shared conclusions. Like a rugby player or a person in a sparring match, I have no problem giving or getting the occasional bruise; if you can't handle rough and ready you shouldn't be debating on /.
But. But. The end goal should be common understanding. If you want to debate to bolster your fragile ego, or even worse, your inadequate manhood, then bugger off now and stop wasting my time and everybody else's.
Now, I learned the rules of honorable, results-oriented debate back in junior high school. Evidently many of the folks here don't know them even yet. They apply to a lot more then /. as the same things matter for, say, troubleshooting a technical problem at a job. So I'm laying them out here.
Consider these Rustin's Rules of Order.
1.) Read the other person's post before you respond. All of it. Every sentence. Every punctuation mark. Then check your response against their post before you hit the submit button. If you expect to be taken seriously then you should at the very least also glance at every link they provide.
2.) Sources count. Provide links to data in the hands of a mutually acceptable source. Try to be civilized about it and neither choose an obviously biased source nor leave the reader to wade through hundreds of pages of muck to find the one little nugget you prize.
3.) Accept that most people are ideologically middle-of-the-road. That means that when you provide a link to something at the Worker's World Party or the Heritage Foundation, you're just screwing around. Like it or not, mainstream sources like The New York Times, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal, while they may distort, are not complete fictions. If you can't back up your claims without dismissing those sources then don't expect others to just take your word for it.
4.) Association is not proof. If somebody says that a scientist in Chicago did a relevant study, saying "well, somebody from Chicago hit my sister once so you're an idiot" does not constitute proof. Just because something you don't like or trust is in the same sentence or even article, does not make the sentence or article invalid.
5.) State your case clearly. I'm no grammer obsessive, but some attention to posting complete sentences and basically decent spelling can clear up any number of misundertandings before they fester.
6.) Use formatting to your advantage. This covers everything from using the Preview button to ensure that that one missing tag doesn't leave your entire post in italics to using bullet points. The list tag isn't so very hard to use, and taking the time to format will help you think things through more carefully anyway.
7.) Why is not What. This one gets tricky. I have found it to be the logical equivalent of an optical illusion as most people can't see it even when it is in front of their faces. So I'm going to separate each thought and strongly suggest that you read them, first in order, and then all over again, each in isolation.
Let's say we're talking about if Computer A keeps crashing. Again, the thing being discussed is whether or not a particular computer is prone to operational failure.
One person says that a major factor was that Computer A was run at too heavy a load. It is known that running that type of CPU above X load causes crashes.
Somebody objects "but we needed to run at that load to do an urgent project".
Bing! Welcome to the logical misstep. We were talking about what(does this computer crash?) and somebody has just tried to change the subject to why(but we had a good reason!)
This happens all the time. Almost everybody does it, especially on "sin" topics like crime, war, and sex. It usually comes about either because the person thinks they're being blamed and so "cuts to the chase" or because they want to ignore the data because the subject "deserved it".
Statement: Many Nicaraguans are pissed at us because we invaded them five times and occupied them for over twenty years.
Response: But we had good reasons!
Look, if you grow up knowing that your country was invaded by somebody else five times, who also mined your harbors, bombed your capital city, encouraged a slave-holding maniac to conquer you (untrue but widely believed), and executed your bravest national heroes, you're going to be pissed at them. It doesn't matter why these things were done. They are maddening no matter what the reasons.
Only a child should respond to a question "but I/we/they had a reason!" There is always a reason. Everybody's got 'em. Charles Manson, Bill Gates and Lucrecia Borgia each give plenty of evidence of reasons, just not ones that *you* like. Having a reason for an action doesn't make that action "not count".
Now that we've gone over it, I'll give another example.
Fred"Why didn't you apply for the job?"
Ted"I don't have a car and no busses go there."
Fred"That's just stupid! You should just get a car."
Ted"But I've been out of work for three years and have no money or credit."
Fred"Then it's your own fault!"
Fred will now happily and smugly proceed to treat Ted as lazy for not applying. After all, if somebody doesn't work, it's their own fault if things go wrong. Bzzzt! Logic Flaw! That is not what was established. The question was: Is Ted lazy for not having applied? Answer: No, Ted had a good reason. However Fred got distracted by the whole "sin" thing and decided to ignore anything else. Also keep in mind that nobody has discussed yet why the respondant was out of work. For all we know he was out of work giving some form of unique help to his slowly dying mother.
Don't assume. Don't skip the evidence-gathering process. Be patient, spend some time up front establishing the facts. You can get back to Why later. In fact, this is a great reason to take notes; keep a few responses in progress on the Notepad. But unless both sides of a debate work to agree on what the basic facts are, then it's not debate, It's just mutually-supported public wanking.
8.) Things happen for reasons. This is the other side of what I just said. We're in the year 2003 folks, and while psychology has a long way to go "he's just insane, there *is* no reason" is not a valid answer these days. Again, only a child takes that sort of foolishness seriously. People do not carry out the sorts of acts that end up debated on /., from O.J. to Steve Jobs to Saddam, "just because". Once we get above the subatomic particle level, we do, in fact, live in a Newtonian universe and even the human brain does have certain predictable patterns. In an age of Cyert and Garson and Milgram and Thaler, to dismiss the reasons for a decision as "random" is lazy at best, cowardly at worst.
9.) Please do not disagree just for the sake of disagreeing. Yes, I can see some of you poised over your keyboards at this very moment about a few sentences back. "No, Josephson Junctions and a dozen other key phenomena in our world are non-Newtonian." Yeah, whatever. You don't sincerely expect your can of Red Bull to spontaneously dispurse into plasma so don't expect me to play little Hawking-wannabe games with you. More generally, it helps nobody but trolls to screw up a debate just for the sake of doing it. Most slashdotters claim to have a deep respect for reason, so show it.
10.) Ad hominen attacks are low and sloppy. Please avoid them. Is it never valid to switch from the topic being discussed to the person discusing? Sometimes it is. My dispute with neocon crossed into that territory because his character and behavior was relevant to the discussion. It rarely is. Just because somebody says something stupid doesn't make them stupid. It just makes them a typical rushed slashdotter. Anyway, the moment you get personal you raise the testosterone levels and cut the viability of productive debate.
Go ahead, shred and abuse their statements. Deride and disparage their sources. But try to avoid getting nasty about the other people involved in the debate.
11.) Be willing to apologize. We all make mistakes. I do. If you get caught out, then don't stand there blustering and fronting, apologize. If you can, give a reason for your mistake, an acknowledgement of the person who found it, and a revised, corrected version of what you got wrong last time. This, by the way, will buy you massive cred points with anybody watching and, if you are on /. looking for *ahem* companionship, way increase your attractiveness to women.
Some Perspective We are in an odd time and place. To most of us /. is a quiet CRT or flat screen with rarely more then thirty people's comments visible at a time. It *seems* like a dorm room. Don't fall for it. There are over half a million people coming and going at /. every day. I would give more precise numbers but Taco, Roblimo, and cohort, do not choose to provide any coherent gathering of /. stats. But the bottom line is that what you post on /., even in a journal, counts. It may turn up on Google months or even years later. It may, quite possibly, be part of a thred downloaded and saved for some school project or business archive. It may also turn up someday when you re being evaluated for a job.
Think about astroturfing. Companies like M$ and even Dr. Pepper spend money to try to convince /.ers of things because they know that ths forum matters. Yep, this little bunch of geeks we're all in is a million-plus gathering of quite a few of today's and tomorrow's decisionmakers. Good Lord! It is significant.
Somewhere in all the beowolf cluster jokes and goats.ex links is data that is used (and saved) in the real world. Does that mean that we shouldn't have fun? Hell, no! But try to stay alert, use the brains that brought you here in the first place, and treat others with the respect that you would want if you were in their shoes.
Rustin
But. But. The end goal should be common understanding. If you want to debate to bolster your fragile ego, or even worse, your inadequate manhood, then bugger off now and stop wasting my time and everybody else's.
Now, I learned the rules of honorable, results-oriented debate back in junior high school. Evidently many of the folks here don't know them even yet. They apply to a lot more then
Consider these Rustin's Rules of Order.
1.) Read the other person's post before you respond. All of it. Every sentence. Every punctuation mark. Then check your response against their post before you hit the submit button. If you expect to be taken seriously then you should at the very least also glance at every link they provide.
2.) Sources count. Provide links to data in the hands of a mutually acceptable source. Try to be civilized about it and neither choose an obviously biased source nor leave the reader to wade through hundreds of pages of muck to find the one little nugget you prize.
3.) Accept that most people are ideologically middle-of-the-road. That means that when you provide a link to something at the Worker's World Party or the Heritage Foundation, you're just screwing around. Like it or not, mainstream sources like The New York Times, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal, while they may distort, are not complete fictions. If you can't back up your claims without dismissing those sources then don't expect others to just take your word for it.
4.) Association is not proof. If somebody says that a scientist in Chicago did a relevant study, saying "well, somebody from Chicago hit my sister once so you're an idiot" does not constitute proof. Just because something you don't like or trust is in the same sentence or even article, does not make the sentence or article invalid.
5.) State your case clearly. I'm no grammer obsessive, but some attention to posting complete sentences and basically decent spelling can clear up any number of misundertandings before they fester.
6.) Use formatting to your advantage. This covers everything from using the Preview button to ensure that that one missing tag doesn't leave your entire post in italics to using bullet points. The list tag isn't so very hard to use, and taking the time to format will help you think things through more carefully anyway.
7.) Why is not What. This one gets tricky. I have found it to be the logical equivalent of an optical illusion as most people can't see it even when it is in front of their faces. So I'm going to separate each thought and strongly suggest that you read them, first in order, and then all over again, each in isolation.
Let's say we're talking about if Computer A keeps crashing. Again, the thing being discussed is whether or not a particular computer is prone to operational failure.
One person says that a major factor was that Computer A was run at too heavy a load. It is known that running that type of CPU above X load causes crashes.
Somebody objects "but we needed to run at that load to do an urgent project".
Bing! Welcome to the logical misstep. We were talking about what(does this computer crash?) and somebody has just tried to change the subject to why(but we had a good reason!)
This happens all the time. Almost everybody does it, especially on "sin" topics like crime, war, and sex. It usually comes about either because the person thinks they're being blamed and so "cuts to the chase" or because they want to ignore the data because the subject "deserved it".
Statement: Many Nicaraguans are pissed at us because we invaded them five times and occupied them for over twenty years.
Response: But we had good reasons!
Look, if you grow up knowing that your country was invaded by somebody else five times, who also mined your harbors, bombed your capital city, encouraged a slave-holding maniac to conquer you (untrue but widely believed), and executed your bravest national heroes, you're going to be pissed at them. It doesn't matter why these things were done. They are maddening no matter what the reasons.
Only a child should respond to a question "but I/we/they had a reason!" There is always a reason. Everybody's got 'em. Charles Manson, Bill Gates and Lucrecia Borgia each give plenty of evidence of reasons, just not ones that *you* like. Having a reason for an action doesn't make that action "not count".
Now that we've gone over it, I'll give another example.
Fred"Why didn't you apply for the job?"
Ted"I don't have a car and no busses go there."
Fred"That's just stupid! You should just get a car."
Ted"But I've been out of work for three years and have no money or credit."
Fred"Then it's your own fault!"
Fred will now happily and smugly proceed to treat Ted as lazy for not applying. After all, if somebody doesn't work, it's their own fault if things go wrong. Bzzzt! Logic Flaw! That is not what was established. The question was: Is Ted lazy for not having applied? Answer: No, Ted had a good reason. However Fred got distracted by the whole "sin" thing and decided to ignore anything else. Also keep in mind that nobody has discussed yet why the respondant was out of work. For all we know he was out of work giving some form of unique help to his slowly dying mother.
Don't assume. Don't skip the evidence-gathering process. Be patient, spend some time up front establishing the facts. You can get back to Why later. In fact, this is a great reason to take notes; keep a few responses in progress on the Notepad. But unless both sides of a debate work to agree on what the basic facts are, then it's not debate, It's just mutually-supported public wanking.
8.) Things happen for reasons. This is the other side of what I just said. We're in the year 2003 folks, and while psychology has a long way to go "he's just insane, there *is* no reason" is not a valid answer these days. Again, only a child takes that sort of foolishness seriously. People do not carry out the sorts of acts that end up debated on
9.) Please do not disagree just for the sake of disagreeing. Yes, I can see some of you poised over your keyboards at this very moment about a few sentences back. "No, Josephson Junctions and a dozen other key phenomena in our world are non-Newtonian." Yeah, whatever. You don't sincerely expect your can of Red Bull to spontaneously dispurse into plasma so don't expect me to play little Hawking-wannabe games with you. More generally, it helps nobody but trolls to screw up a debate just for the sake of doing it. Most slashdotters claim to have a deep respect for reason, so show it.
10.) Ad hominen attacks are low and sloppy. Please avoid them. Is it never valid to switch from the topic being discussed to the person discusing? Sometimes it is. My dispute with neocon crossed into that territory because his character and behavior was relevant to the discussion. It rarely is. Just because somebody says something stupid doesn't make them stupid. It just makes them a typical rushed slashdotter. Anyway, the moment you get personal you raise the testosterone levels and cut the viability of productive debate.
Go ahead, shred and abuse their statements. Deride and disparage their sources. But try to avoid getting nasty about the other people involved in the debate.
11.) Be willing to apologize. We all make mistakes. I do. If you get caught out, then don't stand there blustering and fronting, apologize. If you can, give a reason for your mistake, an acknowledgement of the person who found it, and a revised, corrected version of what you got wrong last time. This, by the way, will buy you massive cred points with anybody watching and, if you are on
Some Perspective We are in an odd time and place. To most of us
Think about astroturfing. Companies like M$ and even Dr. Pepper spend money to try to convince
Somewhere in all the beowolf cluster jokes and goats.ex links is data that is used (and saved) in the real world. Does that mean that we shouldn't have fun? Hell, no! But try to stay alert, use the brains that brought you here in the first place, and treat others with the respect that you would want if you were in their shoes.
Rustin
About Astroturfing (Score:1)
Rustin, do we have ANY source for MS astroturfing? I've been accused of being an astroturfer just for speaking up and sharing some of what I know about how Office/Windows works.
I suspect that
Re:About Astroturfing (Score:2)
Have I come across some pretty suspicious candidates? Yeah. My favorite was a guy who waded in to claim that using some M$ standard or other was easy in a way that set me off so I checked his info. His info linked to his student account (in Utah, IIRC) but digging around I found that he had a new couple of pages and on those he said that he had moved to . . . sunny Redmond, WA! IIRC he said that he "loved the new job".
I asked (I believe that my subject line contained the line "Redmond, huh?") and he was good-natured about it but didn't pop up again.
Now, given the admissions by people from M$'s own PR firm (what was that book a few years back by the daughter of a founder?) and the many other places they've been caught, I don't think this phenomenon exactly fits the "urban legend" category and yes, a few times I have done a cursory check and found pro-M$ folks with suspicious personal data. I google at the drop of a hat, so I see a lot.
Of course, I would be the last to claim that only Microsoft is doing it [linuxtoday.com]. It must be sooo tempting. I won't even swear to never be part of an astroturfing campaign myself. I suspect that we'll see more and more of it.
As for my ability to judge, well, you and I have gone at it good and proper a few times and I am well aware of your feelings about Bill's little playhouse. Have you ever known me to accuse you of astroturfing?
As I've commented online more then once, (in a recent JE for that matter) I started out pro-M$ and it is, in part, talking to friends of mine and coworkers as they have talked about personal experiences watching or even taking part in sleazy monopolistic practices that changed my mind. One old friend once nervously told me, after he had taken a *huge* sign-on fee, that M$ was "evil" and that he was afraid to even talk about it. If somebody had just handed me a six figure handshake it would take an awful lot to get me to use that sort of language.
But back to your specific question, no, I have made no specific effort to track this sort of thing. As an avid Mac guy (since '84) I find most M$-oriented threds tiresome and counter-productive.
As for how much of this is on
BTW, I would love to hear your general feedback on the JE. Beyond the astroturfing issue, what did you think?
Rustin
Re:About Astroturfing (Score:2)
Rustin
Re:About Astroturfing (Score:2)
Barbarians led by Bill Gates [amazon.com]. I got a copy from a friend when I resigned after the company I was working for got bought by Bill 'n Ballmers Traveling Circusssss [microsoft.se].
Re:About Astroturfing (Score:2)
Rustin
I agree. [no text below] (Score:1)
Tattoo me too (Score:2)
AKA Rustin's Rules of Entanglement. Could you please condense them to a few lines, at most? I'm not big enough to have all of this tattooed... Maybe a hi-res T-shirt print?
Re:Tattoo me too (Score:2)
LOL
I'm trying, I promise. Someday I will do so and, in fact, since t-shirts are a thing I'm planning to sell anyway, yes, maybe I'll do one of this if I can reduce the wording a whole heck of a bunch of a passel of a lot.
Give me some time.
How about this, email me in two months and I'll send you a t-shirt of a condensed version for free for having suggested it first.
Rustin
Re:Tattoo me too (Score:2)
Can we help with suggestions? How about Don't be an asshole!? ;-)
How about this, email me in two months and I'll send you a t-shirt of a condensed version for free for having suggested it first.
Only if you mail me first to remind me. I swear, if my head weren't secured with Loctite(TM), I'd misplace it...
Guilty. I slide what-to-why. (Score:2)
I also have been guilty of writing people off as "crazy." (I'm also guilt of just putting random words in "quotes")
So there is a WHY behind why I will sometimes write people off without delving into their potential reasons, however we are only speaking of WHAT I'm doing.
Geez! man! this sucks! its like trying to not say the word "like" and then saying it, like, a bajillion times in a row! oh, shit.
You've ruined my day (actually, not a hard feat- I'm staring down the barrel of dual death marches. Pretty exciting stuff but psychically corrupting)- I WHAT-TO-WHY slide as if it was a logical thing to do. So now I need to figure out WHY I think intention is enough to nullify the action, never mind that the action stands regardless; immortal, irrefutable, un-take-back-able.
P.S.- un-take-back-able is (C)copyright 2003, MekkaB.
Re:Guilty. I slide what-to-why. (Score:2)
And just remember, my friend, that knowing there is a problem is halfway to solving it. (Do I need a really big hairdo and a shiny suit to talk like that, or can I just fake an earnest Southern accent?)
Seriously, glad to have been of service.
Rustin
Re:Guilty. I slide what-to-why. (Score:2)
As for the tandem death march- totally on purpose. I don't gamble on slots, nor on the "ponies"- I gamble on software engineering projects.
Additionally, the one project is my escape hatch if the other project self-destructs. I've still got a job!
SO view my death-march whining as the little old lady with two virginia hams under each arm crying that she doesn't have any bread.
This part. Right HERE (Score:2)
But, in general, like formatting, finding a better subject line makes it easier on reader and writer to get through the thred.
Rustin