🚀 go-pugleaf

-From: KitchenRN@ssd0.laafb.af.mil
-Newsgroups: sci.space
-Subject: Space List Flame Wars
-Date: 30 Dec 92 17:06:42 GMT

-I subscribed to this list in order to try to inform myself about the latest 
-news about US and other coutnries' space programs.  I thought that this would 
-be a list of technical discussions, not a religious debate that has turned 
-into ad hominem attacks and flame wars as virulent as any I've seen in the 
-religious news groups.  

-Such political ranting belongs in the alt.talk.politics or alt.religion 
-groups.  Could we please take them out of the space list?

Amen!

-In addition, there is much too much signal to noise ratio in the flame wars 
-and the ad hominem attacks.  Could we move them out of the list and into 
-private emails?  There is too much heat and not enough light coming out 
-of them.

There are at least four problems with some of the current posts:
 1) Being unnecessarily nasty. Obviously, nobody who's still participating
    in the debates is going to be swayed by heat alone. (It brings to
    mind the Eddorians in the Lensman series - they gave up fighting one
    another only when they realized that all the Eddorians that were left
    were too tough to be killed.)
 2) The attitude of "I could come up with a good argument to counter your
    claims, but you're too stupid to appreciate it, so I'll save the effort
    and post a poor argument instead". There are some awfully poor arguments
    being used to support otherwise good points, and of course this attitude
    is self-perpetuating.
 3) Arguing at cross-purposes. Sometimes both participants have good
    arguments, but they're aiming at different topics, so the debate never
    comes to a resolution, and confusion results.
 4) Arguments in which all the participants basically agree with one another -
    they just haven't noticed it yet. :-) These usually degenerate into
    recriminations over who said what and when they said it - and the variable
    delay of the net adds fuel to the fire.

-I know that I have now left myself wide open to being attacked from all 
-sides, but I just thought that, considering the size of the mailings that I'm 
-getting, there is too much of this stuff to wade through to get to anything 
-worth reading.

More important - some of us are too busy wading through the flames to get
around to posting as much worthwhile stuff as we would like to.

Don't despair - flame wars are usually cyclic. There are often long intervals
with very few flames.

John Roberts
roberts@cmr.ncsl.nist.gov