Re: Take up airs

On Wed, 6 Aug 2008 11:39:47 -0700, "Richard Yates"
<rayates53@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

This *inconsiderate* & *pigheaded* prick Richard Yates
is *still* snipping the important attribution lines.

When someone complained I explained, in detail, the point of it in that
instance and asked what objections there were in general. I received no
reply. If you have something of substance to say about it please find that
post and write back. RY

"In general," it's discourteous to fail to attribute quotes. People
like to know who has said things that are quoted.

Sorry, but that is not really an explanation, except to say it is a
convention. Why is it "discourteous"?

It's obviously discourteous to depart from convention in such a way as
to deprive someone of something they are used to getting and like to
have.

Your fallacious "explanation", that people should know who has said
things because it's evident from previous postings in the thread,
fails because a reader should be able to read a posting...

Again "explanation...fails because a reader should be able..." is not a
reason; it is a circular.

Not true. It explains why your "explanation" was not valid.

It's not true that just "someone" complained. More than one poster
made it clear they considered you to be at fault in failing to supply
attributions.

I saw only one (and I was away on vacation/holiday for a week). Cite or
quote the posts if you can and I will look at them. I am sure that the
poster I replied to did not respond in the next day or so because I was
looking for it and was curious about the questions I had asked.

You might get someone to explain to you how Google Groups works. It
would allow you to recover easily the entire thread and read all of
the responses to your fallacious remarks. When I do that, I see no
posts that support your oddball mindset, while more than one post
expresses disfavor of it.

With respect to numbers, a Usenet participant will often consider a
certain response, but will change their mind about posting it after
having read someone else's post saying what they were about to say.
There could be dozens of near-posters who disapproved of your
idiosyncrasy but didn't post after seeing that others had objected to
it. But any poster who considered supporting your idiosyncrasy would
not have found a post supporting it and would not have been deterred
from posting for that reason.

To understand better that your behavior makes you an annoying oddball,
you might try to find some regular poster (besides you) to AUE who
makes it a normal practice to fail to supply attributions....
As for the comment of an unidentified poster you quoted, I think it
may be going too far to call you a prick, but it does seem fairly
obvious that you are inconsiderate and pigheaded, inconsiderate
because you fail to consider the convenience of readers, and pigheaded
because you continue to omit attributions after a number of people
have told you you're at fault in omitting them.

Some assorted comments and questions for you on the topic:

Your post essentially cites an unsupported "courtesy" as a reason and does
so using words such as "oddball", "annoying", "prick", "newbie" and
"pigheaded". Do you see any contradiction there?

No, because each of the words is based on demonstrated fact.

An oddball is someone who flouts convention, which you do.

An oddball is annoying because people value normalcy and tend to shun
the abnormal.

Someone else called you a prick. I merely remarked, intending to be
somewhat droll, that you may not be one.

I doubt very much that I used the word "newbie" at all;
you're probably confusing my post in that respect with someone else's.

"Pigheaded" is simply a synonym of obstinate, and you have
demonstrated that you are obstinate in clinging to your oddball
behavior in the face of objections to it and no support for it.

Do you expect that language
to elicit courtesy? If not, then what is your purpose?

My purpose is not to elicit courtesy. It's merely to vent my contempt
for your behavior.

(The "newbie" is especially odd since the earliest post of mine here that
Google groups shows was five years ago; your earliest was last week.)

Again, maybe someone else wrote "newbie"; I didn't.

Okay, I've now searched at Google Groups for occurrences of the word
"newbie" in AUE from 1 July 2008 to date. There are 11 hits, none in
a post from me. There was one such post in this thread, again from
someone besides me. "Newbie" is not a word that is in my active
vocabulary, not currently anyway.

As I wrote back then, sometimes I include the attribution, sometimes I do
not. Has it occurred to you that, sometimes, it is a kindness to not include
attributions?

Yes, but I doubt very much that that has been your reason in any of
your posts that I have happened to read. But there are many
more of your posts that I haven't read, so I can't comment on them.

However, from a statistical point of view, taking the posts of yours
that I have read as a sample, and seeing that you have never properly
attributed quotes in that sample, I--as a nonstatistician--think it's
reasonable to suspect that a statistician would conclude with a high
degree of confidence that you never do attribute properly.

My view is that ideally this is a forum for ideas not personalities.

It's not a matter of personalities but it is a matter of persons. This
is a forum in which a few contributors may be fools, quite a few seem
to be of average intelligence, and quite a few are serious thinkers
whose ideas are well worth paying attention to; and there may be a
nearly continuous gradation of worthwhileness between the fools and
the paragons.

It is
far too often the latter as your post amply demonstrates. I have no
objection if my name is left off quotes - what I write is the point, not who
I am. You may have noticed I sometimes don't even include it myself.

How experience has taught me to predict the value of anything a given
poster may contribute is the point.

Tell
me, do you think that is more or less courteous than those that always
include their name along with lines of additional information such as a
quote that was amusing the first time we read it but is just a waste of
space the 1,00th time? Is there not courtesy for other readers in snipping
these, or in not including them in the first place?

Surprisingly, you're confusing the signature with attributions. The
signature should *always* be snipped--well, almost always. On rare
occasions, the signature contains a quote that's relevant to the
topic. Quotations in a response should only be ones that are relevant
to the topic being discussed. Quotations in a signature almost never
are. It's usually a waste of what is erroneously but commonly called
"bandwidth" to quote signatures.

Why is it important to you to know who wrote something that is being
responded to? Does it affect how you assess the ideas?

Yes indeed, ever so much.

Why does it?

Experience with reading comments by various posters lets us develop
varying degrees of confidence. There are posters here whose opinion I
always find welcome, interesting, and often thought provoking. Below
that best, there's a descending scale of confidence down to the
posters whose comments I know better than to read at all.

Since many posters use pseudonyms here anyway, and there is no way to know
who does and who does not, why does it matter if an attribution is included
or deleted?

The answer to that is in two parts:

1. I'm pretty sure my favorite posters don't use pseudonyms.

2. The posters who use pseudonyms tend to persist in their use long
enough for me to assess the probable merit of anything they might say
over the pseudonym. As long as I can associate a level of merit with
an ID, it doesn't matter whether or not it's an alias.

Actually, this touches on a topic that has been discussed here one or
three times: How do we know that *anyone* is using their true name?
How do we know that "Donna Richoux" is really Donna Richoux, that
"Evan Kirshenbaum" is really Evan Kirshenbaum, or that "Robert
Lieblich" is really Robert Lieblich. And why does it matter, so long
as they've been using those names long enough for us to know the high
level of merit to expect in posts with those IDs?

Is your view of human nature that empty bullying and insults are more likely
to change someone's behavior rather than to make them dig in and resist?

That's a pointless question in this context, because as I've stated,
my aim is not to change your behavior but to express my contempt for
it.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Take up airs
    ... in that instance and asked what objections there were in general. ... things because it's evident from previous postings in the thread, ... sure that the poster I replied to did not respond in the next day ... pigheaded because you continue to omit attributions after a number ...
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  • Re: Take up airs
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