From: Kevin Freels (megaquark@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Jul 16 2003 - 17:33:44 MDT
Um. Well said!
Although I try not to, I have to admit that I have a tendency to get a bit
upset when my ideas are challenged. I usually don't voice that emotion on
the list, but it is there and I can see how some people who have been here a
while would feel the need to.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brendan Coffey" <bmc@section9.net>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2003 12:57 PM
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>
> >
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 16 2003 - 17:33:22 MDT