Re: So What Is The Purpose Of This Newsgroup?


"John Prentice" <johnp.usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
message news:6a7mngF369o6uU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Enough, damn it.

Don, please stop trying to be the Gestapo of this newsgroup, trying
to bully everyone into behaving as you'd wish.

I don't act as a gestapo. I act solely in the interests of advancing
knowledge which is what any -ology is about. This is a forum concerned
with an -ology. If people want to indulge in chat, sloppy thinking,
pig ignorance, likes and deislikes, or anything else irrelevant to
advancing knowledge, there are plenty of forums for that.

You seem to regard this group as a panel of experts whose sole
purpose is to answer your questions. It isn't.

You seem to regard this group as a panel of experts! It isn't,

So you agree with m,e, because that is precisely what I said and you
quoted above!

and your
hostile, insulting and confrontational attitude to many newbies is
clearly having the effect of turning them away.

I don't give a toss about how many of the useless I turn away. As I
explained in full with an example, I'm doing them a favour by getting
them out of what they can't handle and leaving it up to them to find
what they can handle elsewhere. For a personal example I have used
before, if there was a newsgroup about maintianing cars, I wouldn't be
on it. If I tried to get on it, any self-respecting car mechanic would
tear to shreds what I wrote on the subject because it would be
nonsense in his world. He wouldn't want me cluttering up serious
attempts to improve his trade and learning. So I don't go there.
Indeed, having driven cars for 50 years I can say that the number of
times I've lifted the bonnet is less than the fingers of one hand, and
the number of tmes I've got under one is exactly zero. It was an
uncle of mine, who was more than somewhat car savvy, who told me
brutally frankly that I was so bloody useless at car repair that I'd
better not buy another car until I could afford a car mechanic to do
the repairs and maintenance. My uncle was right. In that field I was
and am incompetent and unsuited and needed to be told to get out of
it. My uncle did me a great favour by making that abundantly clear.

It isn't peculiar to me. The whole point of examination systems is to
sort those unsuited to a subject from those who are suited. There is
no divine right of everybody to do everything. Society wouldn't have
or need the structure it has if everybody could and did do everything.
We'd all be interchangeable cogs, and that we are demonstrably not.
Some are suited to doing genealogy, most aren't. Whatever enthusiasts
think and however fast 'genealogty on the Net' is believed to be a
growing activity, the truth is that the vast majority of the
population don't do it. Because for one reason or another they can't.
Most accept that and go off to football or whatever else they fancy. A
few who can't misguidedly think they can, probably because they've
seen it made to look ridiciulously easy on telly. It shows in their
first posting. Those who can't do it because they haven't learned but
could learn if they are willing to do the work, can be pointed in the
direction of how to learn the basics, which is what your own metaFAQ
would be about. Those who can't do it, because they just don't have
the mind for it ,will only thrash about getting more unhappy and
confused if they stay around They just have to be told for their own
sakes to go.

In my view, this collective does not exist for the exchange of any
information which could be easily accessed by the enquirer from the
keyboard from which they send a question to this group.

Fine, that's your view. Stop enforcing it on everyone else.

I am not trying to force anything on anyone. I am merely restating
what has been found by millennia of experience by thousands of
thinkers to be the necessary conditions for participating usefully in
an -ology. Just as in, say, marathon running intending runners have to
take note of the rules developed by tens of thousands of runners as to
how to train for and do that exercise without killing themselves.
Nobody just falls out of bed, hears about a marathon, toddles along,
joins in, and expects to finish the course with no learning, no
preparation and no training.

Just ignore
threads that you don't like instead of injecting bile and venom into
them.

Do try reading what I write instead of reacting with emotive words.
How often do I have to say that like-dislike has nothing to do with
any -ology? I don't look at threada with my 'likes' in mind. I
evaluate them as attempts to advance knowledge. If it's a subfield of
which I know nothing, I say nothing. If it is a subfield on which I
know something which is or might be relevant I put that forward. If
the attempt appears to me to be nonsense I'll say that too. If you
don't 'like' me saying the emperor has no clothes, the remedy isn't to
berate me. It is to get the silly bugger dressed.

The people here have a huge gestalt knowledge of many, many family
lines. By no means all of their researches are published in forms
that are accessible even to an expert.

Which in slightly different words is exactly what I said, and
encouraged the OP to contribute. In spite of the ever-increasing
digitising of published information, there is vastly more infomation
stored in the heads of human beings. A lot of it they don't know they
know until some stimulus calls it forth. Ehat stimulus could be an
intelligent question on this newsgroup. I said that accessing that
collective information is. in my view, the real purpose of this
newsgroup. So what is your beef?

It shouldn't have to be the case that anyone who dares to draw upon
that fund of information and ask about a family should have to
tread, trembling, on eggshells lest they be flamed by you.

If. like you. they want to misread what I write, then that is their
affair not mine. There are plenty of other people who have asked
about a family, or family circumstances, who got considerable
information from me and have been able to advance their knowledge by
using that information. Even the OP admits that, but perhaps you don't
see hat you don't wish to see.


In fact, yours is a straw man argument, because you're creating your
own definition, then applying it. "-ology", from the Greek "logos",
means "the study of...". By that token, anyone here who is actively
researching family lines is an -ologist, regardless of their
methods.

Perhaps you should try reading some Greek pgilsophers. Socrates for a
start. He showed that method is important. Go and count the horses'
teeth.

In genealogy, newbies have a racing start provided courtesy of Roy
Stockdill on the genuki website.

And how do they find out about that?

By doing what FAQ they can find recommend again and again: lurking.
They won't have to be lurking long on this newsgroup to find
references to Roy's writings; and if they have a quick scan of the
group archives they'll find references by the hundred.


Or I'll come down to the West Country and dope your perfusion
membranes with fluoxetine myself, I swear it!

That'll be an interesting exercise since the only perfusion membrane I
use is my own peritoneum all day every day. It isn't available for
experimental dosing with anything, more's the pity since it isn't
working in an ideal manner. I'm rather more concerned with
rationalising the dietary advice of dieticians attached to the Kidney
Unit and the Diabetology Department. There are details in the advice
of each which suit their speciality but would be deleterious or fatal
in the other. Since the number of diabetics proceeding to kidney
failure is bound to increase, it is important to work out dietary
advice for both conditions simultaneously, and the related control of
insulin type and the dosages. Somebody has to be the first
experimental animal and I sort of got that slot by default. Hence
today's call to go into hospital at short notice. And why I've said
before that anybody coming down to the West Country and wanting to
take a break here would be well advised to telephone ahead to make
sure I'm not off to a treatment or a research jaunt.

For those acquainted with modern protocols in health research, I'll
say I still live by the old approach. I don't recommend it for others
unless I've done it to myself,. The real problem is that to do a
reasonable multivariate statistical study I'd want 10 groups of 10 of
me. To which a consultant friend rejoined 'God forbid. I'd rather do
without good stats.'

Don


.

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