On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 08:33:52PM -0700, Doyle Saylor wrote: > Doyle, > Couple of things, while for you the term moron is simply a label that > indicates you think Shirky is not interesting, for me as a disability rights > advocate I find the term anti-disabled. If you read Stephen Jay Gould's > book on "The Mismeasure of Man" you get a decent insight on this made-up > word. The basic concept from the early nineteen hundreds in the IQ > 'science' underlying the word moron was a person too stupid to learn how to > read. The science behind the concept was dismantled by Gould. So the term > moron while associated in the public mind with developmentally disabled > persons is simply empty of meaning because it has not scientific validity.
Ah, yes, thanks Doyle. Your point is well taken, and I apologize for loosely throwing around that term. I did, in fact, mean precisely what you said: I simply don't find Shirky interesting or convincing. He's probably a really smart person, I just don't care for his work. Thanks for the gentle correction. > As to your personal insight into Shirky, I always thought Bush was not > intellectually able, but I don't dwell on labeling him stupid because that > is an empty way of trying to understand what is going on. Just a brief > reaction to your wording about Shirky. Noted and accepted. (And I really meant my comments to be taken as my opinion of the value of his *work*, not as any sort of insight into *him*.) > I would say though you can't argue that investment in the telecom industry > is what made things scale up to 5B + documents, if people didn't use the > internet as well, it was after all for a couple of decades just a back water > in the sciences community. My point was that infrastructure investment is systematically under-estimated, among the technical crowd I write for regularly, as *part* of the overall explanation. I didn't mean to imply that such investment was alone a necessary or sufficient condition. Sorry if that wasn't clear. > If you are meaning 5B+ (billion plus) documents > I am struck by this statistic that there are roughly one document on the web > to every five hundred documents in private intranet resources. So I think > about these things in terms of public and private intellectual property. Well, sure, and that's an interesting way to think about them, just not one that I was working toward in this context. While my publisher will let me do a bit of politech, it's a very short leash, and this really is a practical programming book. > support for the web. So you are downgrading the intellectual labor process > that goes into the web by dwelling on the machinery behind it. Maybe that > isn't your intent, but strikes me that way. I'm surprised that you read anything I wrote to mean *that*. There are lots of books which explain to programmers how to write software for running on the Web. That seems a perfectly reasonable kind of book to write. I'm writing one such book. It strikes me as relevant to "dwell on the machinery behind it", since that is what the book is about. I have no interest in "downgrading the intellectual labor process that goes into the web", nor do I think I've done that. I've been part of that process since 1995, so it would be an odd thing for me to downgrade. > me, > This reads to me like you have a thing about the W3C (world wide web > consortium) being over blown in value. And the machinery and spending on > the infrastructure as much more important. In point of fact, the HTTP protocol is a product of the IETF, not the W3C. I think that the W3C is a very peculiar institution, and I've written about it a lot. I'd be perfectly happy to discuss those issues with you. My throwaway comment about Berners-Lee was simply meant to suggest, as I've done on LBO before, that I think he's overrated. > 'ideas' across. Even if I think you are off the beam I get a lot out of a > capable person writing in depth including having a historical sense of time > and place. That's a fair and good suggestion. Again, I'm not sure I can squeeze that into *this* book, but this is the sort of thing I do regularly in my weekly columns, for what it's worth. > I hope I gave you some value for your request for advice. I was trying to > be helpful. I appreciate and recognize that. Thanks, Kendall Clark
