Subject: Re: Cello Rising [was Re: Lisp's future] From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 31 Jan 2004 13:34:08 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <2004-031-374-KL2065E@naggum.no> * Kenny Tilton -> Timothy Moore | Now you are calling me a liar, right? No, he pointed out that only people who have no regard for the ability of others to examine the truth of a statement, refer to private mail in support of their public position. | Who wants to deal with that kind of abuse just to share their feelings | about CLIM? The only abuse you see is of your own invention. As always, in fact. A written text has no power to abuse you. It is a dead string of bits that needs an interpreter before it has any meaning. That interpreter is you, and you have to accept responsibility for your interpretation. If you fail to do this, you will believe that other people said what you interpreted it to mean, and it becomes impossible for anyone to show you that you interpreted it wrongly. This is just like those UFO sighting programs on Discovery Channel, where people claim that they saw something and when somebody else points out that it was not what they thought they saw, these interminabely retarded people claim that scientists and skeptics deny what they saw. I mean, sensory evidence, man! What are you going to trust? Your own eyes or some scientist who wasn't even there? | But it did kill a few months, as did training for a sporting event, | which was a lot friendlier than c.l.l. now that I think about it. Dude, comp.lang.lisp is a collection of texts. It has no capacity to be friendly or hostile. There is simply not enough information here to give rise to any such things. If you think you see it, it can only be because you are willing to fill in all the blanks and flesh out an impression with all sorts of extrapolations. This is not like people who communicate in real life, with faces and voices and body language. This is nothing more than sterile, dead words that come to life only because you breathe life into them. If you look for friendliness, you will breathe friendly life into them. If you look for hostility, you will breathe hostile life into them. If you look for abusiveness, you will breathe abusive life into them. If you look for humorous content and are prepared to regard incongruities as funny, you will find a lot of warm, intelligent humor here. If you are dead serious and lack a sense of humor on your own, incongruities are insulting, harmful, and in need of revengeful responses. We had a lot of people here in the past who came to comp.lang.lisp with their minds firmly set in their hostile expectations, who saw every single utterance as evidence of hostility. In real life, people who have this kind of mental disorder face a large number of strong correctives via their non-verbal senses, but something is missing in people who are unable to produce the same correctives on their own from the texts that they read. Some people are /inept/ at producing their own correctives and need other people who actually hold their hands or shoulders and deliver the correctives through body heat. Look at the word «corrective», which some people respond to as if it can only mean punishment through infliction of pain. A smile is a corrective action when some person misreads a joke. A body hug is a corrective action when some person misreads group acceptance rituals. People who believe that correctives are painful were most probably damaged by extremely harsh conditions during their formative years, during which they never learned that correctives are never a statement of personal like or dislike, but an expression of a desire for them to improve. Those who deliver correctives through words on the Net, have a right to expect that the recipient is able to process correctives in an intelligent way. All kinds of information that contradicts beliefs or previous statements have a core purpose of improving the state of the public information, and this must always be regarded as good. However, some people are broken. They probably never experienced that accepting correctives led to better relations with other people, and so they have come to believe that doing something harmful and stupid on purpose is a good way of showing someone else that it is a harmful and stupid thing to do, but this kind of «corrective» has never worked in all of human history. It is the kind of retarded coping strategy that people who never understood that if you do not care enough about the improvement of someone you give a corrective to want to see it through, you should refrain from delivering the corrective altogether. In all likelihood, these people were damaged during their formative years because they received correctives with no follow-up concern and the only thing they ever learned was that they had done something bad and wrong, which they could not process. Almost all the people who have gone ballistic here and elsewhere on Usenet when they are told that they are mistaken in one way or another, exhibit serious problems in this regard, and they lack the focus on their self-improvement and probably any other purpose that would mean they would appreciate the correctives. Many of these people walk out into the great wide open and speak only for a single person: They want others to like them, and they say things that they believe will cause others to accept them as members of their tribe. A corrective to such insufficient people will be interpreted as rejection from the tribe, and if they think they had deserved to be members of the tribe, they attack the tribe member that has unfairely rejected them, while in reality, and as self-sufficient people immediately observe, the corrective is a welcoming message to the tribe. If, however, you have an emotional deficit and demand that other people provide you with what you lack, you will necessarily find that people who refuse to give you anything of what you so desperately need, are hostile. If you have an emotional surplus, you do not need other people to provide you with what you do not lack, and so you have no need to engage in this practice with others, either. The more we learn about the psychology of team-building, the more we realize that people with a similar lack or similar surplus of self- sufficiency are able to team up and work together, while teams where people have wildy disparate self-sufficiency turn into cat fights and exhibits of the constant need of those with a relative deficit of self-sufficiency to prove their position relative to the other team members, while those with a relative surplus of self-sufficiency want nothing to do with those with a deficit because they get nothing back from being around them. The best team-building methodology has been found to be to help every team member increase his self-sufficiency to the point where dependence on constant infusion of «respect» and the like to cover the running deficit, vanishes completely. This is in sharp contrast to the traditional belief that the best teams exhibit a strong interdependency between team members, and it does not take much thinking to realize that in such a system, if anyone starts to feel that they have been more «giving» and others more «receiving», they will stop giving and start to be demanding, instead. In a team where nobody is /needy/, however, the universal surplus means that nobody is in a position to demand that others take care of them, and they can focus on their stated purpose, as well as play and joke and take care of anyone who should suffer a temporary loss. It is therefore vitally important for a group of people who wish to cooperate over the long haul to ensure that no one is allowed to exhibit an emotional deficit that others are somehow obliged to make up for. Especially for such a loosely coupled group as a newsgroup, where people communicate for but a few hours a day, at best (or perhaps worst :), everybody needs to make sure their emotional needs are satisfied before they venture out into an environment that cannot have any duty to fulfill their needs. In other words, Kenny, newsgroups are only as friendly as you decide to make them with your own contributions. If you start to exhibit a need for others to be friendly towards you, you will necessarily start to believe that absence of friendliness is equivalent to presence of hostility, just like a bunch of neurotics have done here in the past. | Well, thanks for calling me a liar. My record here on c.l.l. totally | justifies that. You CLIMers have really hit bottom. I hope! Notice how I completely fail to care about your faux guilt trip. -- Erik Naggum | Oslo, Norway 2004-031 Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.