On 01 Feb 2013, at 09:57, Kim Jones wrote:
"akin to FRACKING" - to hell with bloody auto spell correct
K
On 01/02/2013, at 7:48 PM, Kim Jones <[email protected]> wrote:
The other thing is, there may well be other fora and lists to
discuss posts someone wishes to define as "metadiscussion" but that
does not mean that there exists the same quality of thinkers on
those other lists and fora as there do on this particular one with
whom you might have insightful exchanges, as we do here. So often,
topics like religion, politics, education, belief, gun control etc.
are the province of the merely opinionated and never get a chance
to be skilfully considered from a range of viewpoints by those with
a bit of training in the business of real thinking as opposed to
the fluff and phlem of opinionising. There are many things to talk
about. Do we have to invent a special chat room for every bloody
thing? It seems to me an overtly tight-arsed academic viewpoint to
restrict people's self-expression in this way. As for Wei Dai's
description of the aims of his list: when was the last time Wei Dai
opened his mouth on his own list?
One must realise that the natural behaviour of the system we call
"mind" is that it will instantly link-up any input it is presented
with, with some other already-established pattern of recognition
already IN the mind. This is another way of saying "you cannot know
from which direction new knowledge will arise." A good thinker will
take a diversionary post and see it as "a random word" in a
discussion and will take value from that provocation. An off-topic
post is indeed a provocation. There is a great need for this, lest
those who continually voice a confidence in their thinking fail to
see the other perspectives. In a meeting of Exxon-Mobil top execs
in the early 80s Edward de Bono was invited to listen in to some of
their deliberations and was asked to teach them one creative
thinking technique that would result in "leverage". He listened as
requested and reports that at a certain point in the meeting, a
deadlock was reached concerning the yield from a certain type of
vertical drilling. The room went silent and everyone looked at de
Bono who simply said "earthworm". This raised a few eyebrows and a
few chuckles were heard, but the result of the meeting was that a
new way of drilling horizontally (akin to "tracking") was invented
after people allowed "earthworm" to penetrate their minds and
allowed it to mate up with other things.
I can agree for the mind, but I think that gun control, or climate
change are still out of topic. We can allude to such problem to make a
point, but discussing climate change itself is way out of the topic,
unless again as some possible illustrations of some point. In that
case the earthworm can still makes its hole.
There is no problem in trying to self-moderate ourself a little bit,
if only to be able to find the time to read the posts and comment them.
Bruno
K
On 31/01/2013, at 7:53 AM, Russell Standish <[email protected]>
wrote:
Might I remind everybody that the purpose of the everything-list
is to
discuss ensemble theories of everything. If you want to know what
that
is, please consult Wei Dei's description
http://www.weidai.com/everything.html
Granted, this does touch on a lot of topics, ranging over
fundamental
science, philosophy and even aspects of religion, but is not
relevant
to the current gun control debates, or a move to assert moral values
in our households (whose morals?), just two of the topics discussed
this morning on the list.
The list is deliberately left free-ranging and unmoderated. That has
been its strength, and the list has been remarkably troll-free. But
can I please ask everybody to keep the discussion more or less on
topic, so that the list remains relevant.
Cheers
--
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Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected]
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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