Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!mips!prls!max
From: max@prls.UUCP (Max Hauser)
Newsgroups: comp.dsp
Subject: Re: 180-deg phase shift -- A study in Usenet technical advice
Message-ID: <51193@prls.UUCP>
Date: 3 Jun 91 23:48:16 GMT
References: <51184@prls.UUCP> <1991Jun3.012747.841@appmag.com>
Reply-To: max@prls.UUCP (Max Hauser)
Organization: Philips Research Labs, Sunnyvale, California
Lines: 36

I don't really plan to belabor this subject, especially as it's improbable
that I could improve on the case made so thoroughly (if unwittingly) by
the principal respondents themselves.  (And I can tell you that this has
struck a chord, to judge from the various gleeful mail I've received.)

In article <1991Jun3.012747.841@appmag.com>, todd@appmag.com (Todd Day)
comments:
|
|   I've never looked at the first replies
|   to USENET questions and said, "That's the definitive answer."

Well, I'd be the last to take exception with the way someone reads the
Usenet.  My remarks concerned not the reading but the writing.  So many
submit assertive, decisive, definite responses when, basically, they don't
know what they are talking about.  Such obvious honest qualifiers as
"I think" or "I once heard" or "I remember it having something to do with"
would effortlessly avert this hazard (if the writers cared to do so).

To their credit, some Usenet contributors use exactly such qualifiers,
and often, at the same time, have more to say than do those who pretend
dazzling expertise.  Do you sense a pattern in this?

|   USENET provides expertise through consensus.

I would have phrased it somewhat differently.  Nine years of reading the
Usenet have demonstrated to me that the "consensus" converges, with
alarming regularity, to the wrong answer.  Or even, as I separately
alluded to on rec.audio recently, to multiple, competing wrong answers.  

Max Hauser      {mips,philabs,pyramid}!prls!max      prls!max@mips.com


"Write each Usenet article on the assumption that you will see it again,
years later, in printed form, in a glossy plastic page protector, shown
to you pointedly by someone you have never met before.  It happens."
                                                             -- me, 1987