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From: ladkin@kestrel.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.news.group,soc.singles
Subject: mistakes in reorganisation
Message-ID: <12615@kestrel.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 19-Sep-86 17:29:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: kestrel.12615
Posted: Fri Sep 19 17:29:48 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 20-Sep-86 07:18:14 EDT
Organization: Kestrel Institute, Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 63
Xref: mnetor net.news.group:3463 soc.singles:6

The administrators of the Usenet are caught in a fundamental
policy difficulty. They need to reduce the volume of messages,
but want to use a consensus method of deciding which valuable
newsgroups should be retained. And, of course, one way of
deciding which newsgroups serve a needed function is to look
at how many contributions there are. So, volume demonstrates
need, and one should retain needed groups, but the intent is
to reduce volume. A tricky position to be in.

And mistakes are made. That's ok. No-one expects system
administrators to be experts at everything under the sun.
Not everyone can be aware of the role of what's called
`technical philosophy' in modern computer science, for example.
So I maintain a mailing list since a mistake was made on
the moderated group mod.philosophy.tech.

But I have been amazed at some of the reasoning demonstrated
recently in discussion of this issue. 
Greg Woods has been trying to argue that the
newsgroup mod.philosophy.tech is not technical. Dave Taylor
has been justifying his support of net.singles and his lack
of support for mod.philosophy.tech by mentioning  the cost 
of support to hplabs.

To address Dave's point:
I can't see how discussions of vaginal lubricants
are of value to hplabs, but that discussion of constructive
set theory, Montague grammar, and semantics for constructive
logic are not. I have colleagues at hplabs with whom I discuss
the latter quite frequently. I wonder if he's aware what
researchers in the natural language and AI groups are doing?

To address Greg's point:
I can understand that researchers at a high altitude observatory
are not primarily interested in what is happening in AI and 
applied logic. But ignorance and lack of interest are one thing,
and no reason to claim that a field is not technical. A course
in logic doesn't automatically qualify one to judge a field in
which some of us spend our whole careers. 

Both might be interested to know that what they classify as
`talk' is close to what people at ibm san jose are studying
in order to design highly reliable distributed systems.
One can scan recent conference proceedings from PODC, 
IJCAI 85,  AAAI 86, and the Reasoning About Knowledge 
conference for many other examples.

So much for the content of the discussion.
I have a few hints about the style - to whomever it
may concern - 

Putting down the Berkeley math department isn't going to get
anyone brownie points for wisdom. 

Addressing the style of Gene's and Matthew's writings, 
but not the content, isn't going to win you a prize for
rhetoric.

Dismissing what we call `technical philosophy' as merely `talk' and
`opinion' is a very easy way to look like a fool.

Peter Ladkin
ladkin@kestrel.arpa