On 21/07/17 06:52, Brian K. White wrote:
On 7/20/2017 3:06 PM, L A Walsh wrote:
FWIW, Responding to notes like these takes time -- days for a first draft (over 2 days for this one). Most of my notes take time for anything but simple answers as I too often need to spend time looking things up. Even after writing a note there are many times I don't think it is good enough or worthwhile enough to send and end saying nothing and only wasting hours or days of composition. sigh.
That definitely seems to be a factor, that someone who does not invest much thought in their posts does not properly interpret that someone else might have.
IE: Not all statements are equal. One person might say something after 45 minutes of research and on the spot testing and checking assumptions, and then someone else hearing it will disregard it lightly, because they themselves never do that. Their own statements are mere opinion, so they perceive and treat all other statements as equally insubstantial.
I naively keep thinking that there's really nothing you can do except keep on making sure your own statements hold water, so that ultimately the record can always shake out the truth. But in reality that doesn't usually happen. A tide of opinion can often totally override and ignore facts and robust reasoning. No one reads through a thread from the beginning to see if there is a pattern to show who deserves to be believed and who doesn't.
Sometimes I try to ask things as questions, to force people to realize for themselves that they can't answer the question, other than by saying what I would have said. The idea being that you can't simply tell some people anything, regardless if it's a true fact or if it's a sequence of reasoning that holds water. But if they arrive at the truth themselves by trying to answer a question, then they can't very well simply ignore it because they ignore everything from a source they don't like. Even this very often doesn't work. At that point the topic is exposed as religion, and there is nothing you can do about someone who is religious on a topic. They will in fact accuse you of the same thing, whether that accusation has any basis or not. It's like mere namecalling instead of an actual set of words with an actual meaning. There's nothing you can do about that either.
Now, even I, who is pretty flexible about most things, consider the above as something which does not belong in this mail list but definitely should have been sent to Linda ONLY as a private message. BC -- You are NOT entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your INFORMED opinion. Nobody is entitled to be ignorant. Harlan Ellison -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org