🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <WEX.91Jan21140658@dali.pws.bull.com> wex@dali.pws.bull.com (Der Grouch) writes:
>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.

Oh piffle!  I recognize tone of voice, history of personal and social
interaction, and other emotions for what they are: typically irrelevent
to the technical matter at hand.  I can and have exchanged large amounts
of technical information (in e-mail, news, source-code control, and bug
tracking groupware) without ever having met the person or had any sort
of emotional interaction.  Similarly, I can read scientific journals,
judging them on technical merit without knowing or caring one whit about
the emotions of the person when the were writing the paper.  If in fact
I know the person, I usually go into "filter emotions" mode so that I
can exchange the information needed without noise.   I save my emotions 
for non-technical social occasions where they are appropriate.


>   ...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.

"Idiocy"?  Thank you for providing more evidence that shows how emotions 
get in the way of technical communications.  Now for some facts: when I 
debug code there are correct and incorrect solutions.  This is also true 
(albeit statistically instead of logically) for other forms of engineering 
and hard science.


>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.

Assuming that this is true (you again provide no evidence), "extremely 
important" != "productive".   I have consistently found in my career
that my and my fellow's emotions and technical communications do not
benificially mix.


>   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.

I want to see evidence, not hand-waving. :-)


>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. 

I am not "reacting" to your post, I am thinking about it.  


>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.

I don't know for sure what your "tone of voice" is, nor do I care.  I am 
looking for facts that support your position -- examples of emotional 
groupware being used to enhance the productivity of a technical project.


>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.

Your gestures and tone of voice would just distract me: that is not
the information I need.  Whether you are being serious, angry, silly, 
sad, or whatever doesn't tell me anything about whether you are right.


>....
>   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.

Thank you for some examples.  However, these are examples of technical 
graphics, not sound or video.  I agree that technical graphics are 
important for many applications.  This has little to do with communicating 
emotions.



-- 
Nick Szabo			szabo@sequent.com
Embrace Change...  Keep the Values...  Hold Dear the Laughter...