bad posting habits, jeremy bernstein and scientific cranks
Robert Citek
rwcitek at alum.calberkeley.org
Wed Mar 30 15:37:06 UTC 2005
On Wednesday, Mar 30, 2005, at 05:25 US/Central, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> there's an old essay by jeremy bernstein entitled something like
> "scientific cranks: how to recognize them and what to do with them
> until the doctor arrives" (can't find it online, dang), in which
> bernstein writes about getting regular submissions from obvious crank
> scientists, claiming to have solved some of science's biggest
> mysteries -- guys showing up with a unified field theory scrawled with
> crayon on a shopping bag, that sort of thing.
In a similar vein, Clay Shirky gave an interesting talk at the O'Reilly
Emerging Technology conference a couple of years ago titled "A Group Is
Its Own Worst Enemy" which he has posted on his website:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
<quote>
The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and
vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone
who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see
this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a
big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation
going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding
from their ears, they would get so mad.
If you want to make it better, there's a list of things to do. It's
Open Source, right? Just fix it. "No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates
grrrrr ...", the froth would start coming out. The external enemy --
nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.
</quote>
s/Microsoft/top posting/g
s/Bill Gates/HTML e-mail/g
I would simply add that an external enemy not only galvanizes a group,
but also causes the group to lose focus.
Regards,
- Robert
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