🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jan21.152728.16754@midway.uchicago.edu> matt@oddjob.uchicago.edu (Matt Crawford) writes:

|   ) John Gilmore:
|   ) >Secretaries all over the world use Emacs, ...
|
|   Kee "my knee is jerking" Hinckley, who by the way seems to be including
|   a small commercial advertisement with his every message:
|   ) You are dreaming.  Secretaries all over the world know how to use
|   ) typewriters and maybe Microsoft Word.  Secretaries all over the world
|   ) think Unix is someone who had a nasty accident. 
|
|   Kee, you have no experience with *this* piece of the world.  Secretaries
|   here use unix, emacs, and tex.
---
Well, of course there are secretaries all over the world who use unix,
emacs, and tex.  The implication of what Gilmore said, though, and the
tone of the context in which he said it is that there are *lots* of
secretaries all over the world who do so.  And that's silly.

If you apply Gilmore's description and Kee's description to the
collection of all secretaries in the world, you will find that Kee's
description applies to vanishingly close to all of them while Gilmore's
description applies to vanishingly close to none of them.

[This has, by the way, nothing to do with the capability of secretaries;
I defer to nobody in my respect for secretaries and my belief in the
ability of people in all walks of life to learn complex tools needed to
carry out their tasks.  Secretaries are perfectly capable of learning
emacs, they just hardly ever get the chance.]

scott
--
scott preece
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