Re: Being balanced

jstevh_at_msn.com
Date: 03/27/05 

Date: 26 Mar 2005 17:12:25 -0800

C. Bond wrote:
> jstevh@msn.com wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > Usually, if I'm talking about a problem on Usenet I'm brainstorming
it.
>
> According to the bulk of your posting record (you can check this at
any
> time), you are usually *promoting* a so-called solution to a problem,
not
> brainstorming. In the majority of your posts you are defending your
cause,
> regardless of its merits, with a vigorous, sometimes militant, and
> sometimes hysterical passion. In the rest of your posts, you are
generally
> snivelling about liars and conspirators. Neither of these is
> 'brainstorming'.
>
> [snip]
>

Well, yeah, I've spent a lot of time promoting ideas that I'm
brainstorming, and I've done so in highly creative ways.

It's a creative process.

There are people who get angry about my posting.

And they are angry enough to reply obsessively in the negative to my
posts.

For me brainstorming is generating a lot of ideas in a particular
problem area, and putting them out there.

There are posters who get angry, so they come after my posts with a lot
of extra, so I end up defending ideas early in the process to keep them
from being unfairly trashed.

Worse, I've seen posters make questionable claims, so that their
counterclaims against my ideas have to be critiqued carefully, which is
just extra work that I don't like doing, so I often would shift to
avoiding their claims, or quickly dismissing them if I could find any
basis for doing so, as they weren't reliable.

Now, however, in the critical phase, I can go slowly and carefully
considering both my own ideas and claims against them, without fear
that the now mature ideas will be tossed prematurely.

You see, with mature ideas you don't have to actively defend them.

If they can't stand against anyone and everyone--including you--then
they're not valid.

So, I no longer need to be defensive about ideas I feel are mature, so
I can instead be a critic, to test them as rigorously as possible.

James Harris