mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate) (05/14/85)
In article <1167@ratex.UUCP> mck@ratex.UUCP (Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan) writes: >>You can't draw any conclusions from silence on the net. Most of us >>have little time for the netnews, especially if the topics being >>discussed are not directly related to our studies or profession. (A >>good thing, too -- otherwise there would be 500 articles/day in >>net.politics alone.) > >You can't draw conclusion from an instance of silence, but you can draw >conclusions from a pattern of silence. I'm sorry, but that just ain't true. When you consider flaming at someone for his lack of response, remember: net communications are almost always worse than they appear to be. Many sites expire the heavy traffic non-technical groups quite quickly. When propagation times get very long, or a site goes down for a while, or one of many causes, messages often fail to reach many sites. In the net.religion groups it is COMMON for me to see replies without ever seeing the referenced articles. If you are going to flame someone for failing to respond, at least have the courtesy to ask him if he saw the article. At this time I also want to state an important usenet right: The Right to be Bored Everyone who reads news has the right to be bored by what he reads, and, by implication, the rights to a) quit reading and b) not to respond. If your message is not responded to, it may not be a concession of defeat; it may be that your reader has decided it isn't worth the trouble anymore! I have used rn's kill files to avoid reading articles posted by certain people (no, it wasn't you, Rich), and I see no reason not to do so in the future. Flame away, folks; I'll just put /Silence on the net/j in my kill file, and Presto! Flames to /dev/nul. Charley Wingate umcp-cs!mangoe
chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) (05/20/85)
>>You can't draw conclusion from an instance of silence, but you can draw >>conclusions from a pattern of silence. > >I'm sorry, but that just ain't true. I have to agree with Charlie on this one. From my experience, lack of response doesn't mean a thing, except possibly that nobody bothered responding. In net administration, for example, it is possible for a special interest group to generate an amazing amount of mail for whatever they are interested in, while a group of people of the same relative size generates almost nil. It is a common occurance out on the net that anytime someone opens their mouth, all of the people on the other side proceed to jump into it, usually loudly. All of the people on the same side tend to agree rather quietly, unless a specific appeal is made. Trying to figure out what the 'group' believes based on what is (or isn't) said on the net or in mail is silly at worst, and an art at best, because you have to know enough of the people in that group to know what they might say if they said it, and who is and isn't saying things. That takes a LOT of work, and is frought with inaccuracies. My tarot cards tend to be more accurate, as a matter of fact. I can name any number of examples where the 'popular' opinion and the real opinion by the silent side were different, wildly different. I can also probably name as many cases where they were the same. I've seen situations where the raised voices were on the affirmative side, and cases where they were screaming for blood. I won't bother naming any, since that doesn't do anything except fill space. What it DOES say is that there isn't a pattern to what people do or don't say -- you have to extrapolate each situation individually based on your knowledge of the net. There are very few people on the net that I would trust doing that, and they tend to misjudge often enough that I wouldn't trust it implicitly. -- :From the offices of Pagans for Cthulhu: Chuq Von Rospach {cbosgd,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!nsc!chuqui nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA Who shall forgive the unrepentant?
marko@mako.UUCP (Mark O'Shea) (05/20/85)
MY sentiments exactly! Many times people are proving true what my father often said. "Let people think you are a fool, rather than open your mouth and remove all doubt." I think I just violated that statement. Mark O'Shea