Re: flame wars

From: Brendan Coffey (bmc@section9.net)
Date: Thu Jul 17 2003 - 14:45:12 MDT

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    Natasha,

    I'm hesitant to go compiling a list of particular posts I think to be
    the _cause._ As has come up subsequently in this thread, there's a lot
    of talking and little action. And most of the bickering seems to be
    about the talking.

    There's a general perception among members of groups that actively
    self-select for intelligence that intelligence somehow inherently has
    value, and that an overall increase in intelligence increases the Good
    that can be accomplished. To me, this seems silly. Intelligence is just
    a very poor measure of a myriad of very slippery properties of humans.
    "Intelligence" as we measure it doesn't correlate to social status,
    political affiliation, professional capability or competence, or,
    really, to anything but the ability to argue endlessly about minutia.
    There feels, to me, to be a high degree of out-of-touchness among
    extropians on the list.

    Analogously, Silicon Valley has a higher-than-average (and increasing)
    instance of autism. One explanation that's been offered is the
    reproductive over-selecting for intelligence that inherently goes on here.

    ;-)

    These are some thoughts. I hope this is useful to people, and not
    perceived as unwarranted criticism. I've definitely gotten a fair number
    of "me-too" offlist responses, so other people do feel this way.

    -bmc

    On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 05:40:15PM -0400, natashavita@earthlink.net wrote:

    > Brendan,
    >
    > Thank you for your post showing your concern about the quality of the
    > list. In your opinion, what specific posts are causes of the bickering?
    >
    > Natasha
    >
    >
    > Original Message:
    > -----------------
    > From: Brendan Coffey bmc@section9.net
    > Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 10:57:21 -0700
    > To: extropians@extropy.org
    > Subject: flame wars
    >
    >
    > The perspective of an infrequent poster:
    >
    > My reading of extropians has definitely fallen off seriously in the past
    > six months. The bickering and sniping represents a large percentage of
    > the volume of the list. It becomes tedious to have to slog through it to
    > figure out which discussions have content, and where that content is.
    > I've gotten a very good sense of which list members lie where on
    > the content-generation distribution, and I've killfiled a half-dozen
    > people--I've found that it's made the list much more readable. But I
    > do consider unsubscribing pretty frequently.
    >
    > It's a shame--the list is so full of bright, ambitious people with
    > interesting and compelling visions of humanity's future, both near
    > and far. But, as with every other online discussion forum I've ever
    > participated in, the more intelligent and ambitious we get, the more
    > childish, self-important and myopic we become when we feel our hard-won
    > and excruciatingly-thought-out paradigms being queried or challenged.
    >
    > One thing that frequently strikes me about the list is the degree of
    > arrogant certainty with which the list members state predictions of
    > the future. Frankly, if anyone here could predict the future (or, hell,
    > even the present) with any degree of precision, they wouldn't have time
    > to sit around posting to this list, because they'd be spending every
    > waking moment _heavily_ involved in some other, extremely important works.
    >
    > So, yeah, it's a serious problem, and I think you'd see a lot less
    > attrition if it weren't.
    >
    > -bmc
    >
    > On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 07:26:37AM -0400, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
    > > Spike wrote,
    > > > In June we had the quietest time I recall having
    > > > seen on extropians in over 6 years. (Did anyone
    > > > count the messages?) Could it be that the
    > > > spam filters were killing a lot of the posts?
    > > > Perhaps I need to look over the archives. spike
    > >
    > > Heh. You have a strange sense of humor.
    > >
    > > Seriously, I don't think the list has yet recovered from the latest
    > > flame-war and series of personal attacks that caused ExI to start
    > > moderating again. I would love to blame low list activity on spammers,
    > > but we did it to ourselves. It seems that this problem gets worse every
    > > round. I would not be surprised if we were losing members faster than
    > > we were gaining them at this point. Sigh....
    > >
    > > --
    > > Harvey Newstrom, CISM, CISSP, IAM, IBMCP, GSEC
    > > Certified InfoSec Manager, Certified IS Security Pro, NSA-certified
    > > InfoSec Assessor, IBM-certified Security Consultant, SANS-cert GSEC
    > > <HarveyNewstrom.com> <Newstaff.com>
    > >
    >
    > --------------------------------------------------------------------
    > mail2web - Check your email from the web at
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    >



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