[p2p-research] The psychopath as peer?

[Stan Rhodes]

To clarify, I was not suggesting any sort of policing.  I was offering
feedback only.

In the case of my original reply to this thread, I was correcting a
significant error, and suggesting the whole "clinical concept" of
psychopathy be taken with a shaker of salt.  I only offered that because I
was familiar with the topic area, and feel that attempting to place
"psychopathy" into the context of p2p interaction and peer production
generates heat but no light.  I usually consider my replies as a way to
flesh out sides of an issue not represented, to challenge assumptions, or
provide domain knowledge that may be counter-intuitive.

To me, it's not as much depth, but the conciseness issue that matters for
email. I'm not sure what Ning offers over email for discussion of p2p
research, other than not filling inboxes--maybe that's good enough for
many.  I don't visit the p2p ning very often. The the p2p research list
being more general than the p2p ning community seems rather
scope-backwards.  However, if it's evolved that way, so be it: the
relationships and channel of communications between the members is more
important and valuable than the original name of the list or community.  I
tend to think that while people pretend groups are organized by topic, they
ultimate become organized by community with shared interests, which matters
far more.

Conciseness really comes down to the signals people want from the list, and
how much noise they can handle in their email box (number of emails) and in
the email bodies themselves (body text of emails).  Notice, I'm not saying
what's signal versus noise--that's a personal judgement, although the
farther we get into extremes, the more people will agree.

While links are certainly concise in the body text, I tend to use RSS reader
aggregation to glance through those.  Out of my 1000+ unread p2p research
list emails, a lot are probably links.  My p2p research "box" is sort of
like an RSS reader in that way.

The body of emails being a shotgun commentary + link-flood is far harder to
deal with.  The technology, in my mind, for shotgun commentaries is the
blog.  Emails are "pushed" to my attention, whereas I can "pull" from a blog
when I choose.  Conceptually, emails are more of a conversation, and in
terms of dicussion about topics, more like being in a conference room.  I'm
not sure shotgun commentaries have a meatspace analog.

-- Stan


On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 11:07 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> It's kind of difficlt to police different styles as this is a mixed list,
> ranging from ryan's one line links to paul's link-floods, to stan and andy's
> super-thoughtfull mini-essays and many things in between ... one thing is
> that is there is no obligation to reply or even to read ...
>
> what about exporting in-depth debates to Ning, and open debates there, for
> 'limited' periods of time. For example, stan could say, I want to discuss
> this particular topic, let's do it this week in a forum on NIng?
>
> Michel
>
> On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 3:34 AM, Stan Rhodes <stanleyrhodes at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Paul,
>>
>> I do appreciate your enthusiasm, and I appreciate the very broad scope and
>> fuzzy nature of the p2p research group, but it's nearly impossible to
>> explore issues deeply with these sorts of threads.  I consider these large,
>> mostly digressive link-flood replies to be hand-waving that obfuscates any
>> attempt at concise and possibly insightful discussion about issues.
>>
>> It might be worthwhile to consider using a blog for these long,
>> digressive, almost stream-of-consciousness emails, while using the p2p
>> research list to explore one or two very closely-related points in-depth.
>> Until something like that happens, I will have to bow out of replying to
>> these sorts of emails.
>>
>>
>> I only include the list on the reply so that anyone else who feels
>> similarly will know they are not alone.  If I am in the extreme minority,
>> that's fine too.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> -- Stan
>>
>>
>>   On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 6:53 AM, Paul D. Fernhout <
>> pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Stan-
>>>
>>> You are right to be concerned about simple labels, and that's one reason,
>>> as a caveat, I mentioned the idea of moving beyond the paradigm of
>>> "psychopath" to maybe something more useful, someday.
>>>
>>> On neural evidence, you are right again that it is not for 100% sure
>>> genetic, but genes do affect a lot of how the brain is wired, in interaction
>>> with history and current environment, so it could be a factor.
>>>
>>
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