Re: Cowboys herding cats

cryptoguy <treifamily@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
One thing that *does* piss me off is when a newsgroup thread gets
hung up on finely shaded meanings of words. 'Few' vs 'Several',
'some' vs 'often', 'pissed' vs 'annoyed'. There is simply no way
to resolve such disputes.

I agree. I'd prefer to stick to substantive issues. Perhaps it's a
character flaw that I feel compelled to defend myself when someone
accuses me of arguing in bad faith or whatever. Then I have to defend
my word choices.

Threads often get sidetracked into arguments about who said what
earlier in the thread, which is stupid since the thread is right there
for anyone to see for themselves.

He annoys me sometimes, with his evasions, half-truths, and
misdirections,

I am baffled as to how anyone can think I am evasive, etc. In fact,
I've been accused of being too blunt and straightforward. It's
certainly never been my intention to evade or misdirect.

such as his current unbelievable claim that anti-malware shouldn't
need updates.

My claim is that anti-malware shouldn't need to exist in the first
place, except perhaps to recover a system on which a privileged
user deliberately downloaded and installed code which turned out
to be malware.

Is it your contention that that claim is evasive? That it's a
half-truth? That it's an attempt to misdirect? I thought it was
your claim that my claim was honestly mistaken.

He more often frustrates the hell out of me. He makes all kinds of
claims about what he 'thinks' or 'believes', notions which appear
to not have the slightest touch of reality about them. He doesn't
check what he says, and more often than not, is just plain wrong.

I almost always check, and I am very, very seldom wrong. And when I'm
not *absolutely* certain, I do try to hedge my bets with "think" or
"believe." Do those words bother you more than an outright statement?
Which is better: "I believe Microsoft sucks" or "Microsoft sucks"?

What about my posting questions? For instance, "Isn't it true that
most broadband..." or, equivalently, but not phrased as a question,
"It's my understanding that most broadband...." Would it help if I
prefaced it with, "Correct me if I'm wrong, but..."? Does any of
that bother you? Does it bother you when others do it?

I do post here more than anyone else. This is an attempt to reply to
everything that I believe requires a reply. This doesn't stop people
from getting upset at me for not replying to every point of every
message directed at me. Is this what you mean by "evasive"?

When I'm sufficiently sure of myself, I do sometime scrimp on fact-
checking in an attempt to reply to more messages. Perhaps this is a
mistake. Maybe I should remain silent until I have cites for every
statement I make. But then people would get upset at me for replying
to fewer messages.

Unfortunately, I am likely to fall even further behind, due to
Balticon. I won't be posting at all tomorrow, Saturday, Sunday, and
very likely Monday. If I do run into any rasff regulars at Balticon,
I will discuss how I come across on rasff with them. I'm pretty sure
Ben Yalow will be there. But a lot of the old regulars have long
since unsubscribed. Seth and Nancy are likely to be there, but
they're no longer *here*. I suspect a lot of the old regulars
unsubscribed because of all the hostility in this newsgroup in
recent years.

There has been a nearly complete turnover in people here since I first
joined rasff. In the '90s, it was something of a game to try and
catch me in any mistakes. I suspect that newbies who saw that game
misunderstood, and wrongly thought I had a reputation for *errors*, not
for accuracy. And everything since then has been confirmation bias.

Due to his primitive tech set up, he couldn't verify a lot of things
even if he wanted to.

What *are* you talking about? I have access to the web (except
pictures), and thousands of books. And if I really need to look
at a graphical web page, I can do so at my brother's house.

It's not the lack of graphics that keeps me from collecting more
cites, and posting them, it's the lack of *time*.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
.

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