🚀 go-pugleaf

This is drifting rather far from the topic of this group, so this will
probably be my last post in this thread.  (Not that I don't find the topic
interesting...)

In article <20964@crg5.UUCP> szabo@crg5.UUCP (Nick Szabo) writes:
   For a technical discussion, I find the most serious objections by
   looking at the most serious evidence put forward to support those
   objections. 

Oh, piffle!  You do no such thing.  You look at the objections brought,
listen to the tone of voice used to present them, evaluate that against the
history you have of technical, social and personal interaction with the
person making the objection, then you form an opinion as to the
"seriousness" of the evidence.  *Then* you weight the seriousness.

   If by "serious" you mean which coworker does not *like* the proposal 
   emotionally, it may be of interest to certain parties to communicate that
   emotion, but it is not in the interest of the group as a whole and will
   lead to a political rather than technical solution.  Furthermore, the
   emotional communication diverts attention from the technical communication,
   leading to even poorer results.

Depends on what you consider a "poor" result.  You appear to believe that
there is the One Great Truth out there and your Job is to Discover it.  This
kind of idiocy came into fashion with the Victorians; I rather thought we'd
gotten over it.

In the real world, the politico-social process is *extremely important* even
in the Discovery of Truths (like physics, which we may suppose to be an
approximation of the real world).  In more fuzzy areas like building
computer products (which I naively assume you do), that process becomes even
more important.

[I'm certainly not going to argue here about what the Pope would or would
not have done.]

   I am interested in discussing the facts and uses of groupware, not a silly
   contest to see who can get the most red in the face.

You missed my point; perhaps if you'd seen my gestures you'd have gotten it.
Let me say it again: you are, at this moment, interpolating a huge amount of
information that has been stripped out of the bare text I must send you.
You have to hope that you get most of it right or you end up over- or
underreacting.  Perhaps you interpolate an angry tone of voice and decide
this discussion is not worth your time, so you ignore my posting(s) and miss
out on an interesting topic.

The point of all that is to say that rather than leaving it to guesswork to
fill in this missing information, we would all benefit from having the
"real" raw data there to analyze or ignore as we chose.

   [...] that many people *want* to communicate
   emotions for various reasons, many others do not, and those that do not
   (eg scientists) have had a more beneficial impact on organizations and
   society than those who have.  I conclude that those organizations that
   waste their engineer's time on emotional communication will go out of 
   business at the hands of those organizations that give their engineers
   tools to enhance their ability to work as a team on technical projects.

If that's what you think, remind me not to work for any company you own!
Not that I don't want the tools, of course I do.  I just want to work for a
boss who realizes that things like reputation and image do more for a
company's success than strict technical regalia.  (To anticipate the obvious
reply, yes I know even the best image houses can't live forever on
vaporware.  But they die eventually because their images get tarnished.  The
point remains the same.)

Oh, and you're right about my not being an expert in this field.  But I do
know a fair bit about it.  I suggest you pick up a book on the philosophy of
language; any good text will teach you the difference between syntax,
semantics, and pragmatics.  Then look at the work of, oh let's pick someone
relevant to this newsgroup: Horst Rittel (whose work on IBIS got Conklin et
al started on gIBIS, rIBIS et seq).

   Hate to tell you, but most of the research of which you speak is
   *written down* not in sound or video. 

Yes, and a bloody shame too!  Chomsky, for example, is a mediocre writer at
times, but can be a terrific speaker.  I understood some of his ideas *much*
better after I attended one of his lectures and saw his diagrams and
sketches.  Or try to imagine how well you'd understand fractals if you'd
never seen a Mandelbrot or Julia set rendered.  Self-similarity is much
better demonstrated by allowing a user to zoom in a section of such a
rendering than it is by any number of words.



--
--Alan Wexelblat			phone: (508)294-7485
Bull Worldwide Information Systems	internet: wex@pws.bull.com
"Honesty pays, but it doesn't seem to pay enough to suit some people."