Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!know!slug!wex From: wex@dali.pws.bull.com (Der Grouch) Newsgroups: comp.groupware Subject: Re: 2 comments Message-ID: Date: 21 Jan 91 19:06:58 GMT References: <214@buster.ddmi.com> <115@intrbas.UUCP> <20815@crg5.UUCP> <126@intrbas.UUCP> <872@agcsun.UUCP> <20921@crg5.UUCP> <20964@crg5.UUCP> Sender: news@pws.bull.com Organization: Bull Worldwide Information Systems Inc. Lines: 91 Nntp-Posting-Host: dali.pws.bull.com In-reply-to: szabo@crg5.UUCP's message of 20 Jan 91 03:53:52 GMT 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."