From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Mon Sep 23 2002 - 21:20:43 MDT
On Sun, 22 Sep 2002, Chris Hibbert wrote:
[snip]
(regarding "hot" topics):
> I think that he (Lee) has proposed that we talk about them.
That would be my impression.
> Other times he has tried to understand why certain topics are hot
> buttons for some people.
Well we can say with p < 0.05 that that seems to be the case.
[For statistics newbies: http://www.sportsci.org/resource/stats/pvalues.html]
> He doesn't understand when others think the issues shouldn't even be broached.
Perhaps true. Lee, have you taken your Asperger's quotient test?
Or perhaps he is simply "fearless", e.g.
http://reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=healthnews&StoryID=1477197
(Is "debate" a sport???) semi-:-)
> The thing that other people should consider doing is to read Lee's
> posts more carefully.
Here, here. That goes for *all* posts.
> I don't have trouble distinguishing between your proposals to talk about
> a particular issue, and your endorsements of particular viewpoints, but
> I get the impression that others do have trouble. Since I don't have
> trouble, I wouldn't recommend that you try to be clearer. If you did, I
> would take it as condescending. :-)
I may disagree here (I'm having trouble with the smiley).
As I've pointed out both on and offlist "communication" is a shared
responsibility proposition -- both the speaker and the recipient
have to take responsibility for both what is spoken and what is heard.
We are operating on very low bandwidth channels with a lot of noise
in the background -- it is easy to be misunderstood and to misunderstand.
Because of the one-to-many nature of an email distribution forum the
speaker should *expect* to be misunderstood some fraction of the time.
To always say "Oh, your misunderstanding is your fault" makes no sense
at all. Carried to the extreme it implies you are wasting your time
speaking because nobody understands what you are saying (you might as
well be speaking in tongues). You can't please all of the people
all of the time but you should attempt to please most of the people
most of the time. (By "please" I mean to have the *precise* nature
of ones perception of the topic be understood as *your* perception
without the perceptual filtering that other minds normally do. Your
"red" is not my "red", particularly if I'm color blind. Communicating
through the filters is a very difficult thing for people to accomplish
but is necessary to minimize wasting even more time with "I said/They said"
discussions.
Damien probably understands this topic much better than I since his
vocation is communication. He has the advantage however that his
medium isn't low bandwidth real time "conversations". He can just
preach his message to the congregation. He will know if he was
successful if they show up the next Sunday without tomatoes in
their hands. Lee on the other hand seems to enjoy fielding the
tomatoes and turning them into ketchup. :-) Of course he fails
to realize the next Congress will take up the topic of his dumping
ketchup onto the market at lower than its production costs and
that some people can only tolerate *just* so much ketchup.
Robert
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