On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 07:35:23AM -0400, lmsanger@sbcglobal.net wrote:
[snip]
After everything that both you and Jimbo have said in this discussion so far, Larry, it looks to me like he has a not invalid perspective on the matter that perhaps grants you slightly less credit than other not invalid perspectives might, but that you in turn are presenting your own perspective that gathers more credit to you than most of these perspectives would grant. If you want to have a less stressful and more productive discussion than you've been having, I'd recommend aiming for a middle ground somewhere.
Every single point of dispute you've brought up so far looks like nothing more than a difference in perspective, and thus a difference in terminology used comes into being. I don't think anyone has to be a liar for the other to be right from his given perspective in this matter. I think it's much more likely that, in your excitement over the idea of a wiki-based encyclopedia, you missed Jimbo's offhand comment about someone else that you apparently didn't know well enough to even remember having mentioned wikis as a model for encyclopedia development.
I prefer to think that neither of you are lying, and there's a simple, easy, reasonable explanation for how all this disagreement might have arisen from nothing but a difference of perspective. In fact, the very existence of this disagreement as it is occurring seems further evidence that it's nothing but a difference in perspective, from where I'm sitting, because Jimbo is trying to point out where the two of you have a difference of perspective and you're arguing that only one of you can be right. This seems to be a fairly good indicator that, from Jimbo's perspective, what you called amicable discussion he might have seen as arguments that he let you win back in the days of Nupedia. You seem argumentative to me, on this, and if your social proclivities run this way I'm not surprised that Jimbo would have called policy discussions "argument", even if you did not -- and if he "let [you] win" these arguments, whether for the peace or for reason of coming to agree with you, I'm not surprised that you might have seen the exercise as being more agreeable and less argumentative.
So, again, perhaps you should aim to balance biases, perspectives -- points of view -- in this matter. Try to see the other guy's side of things. From what I've seen here, it looks like Jimbo is doing so already, though he clearly doesn't feel constrained to adopt your view as his own, which is fine: he does seem quite willing to acknowledge that you have a valid perspective, though, while you insist on failing to acknowledge the same about his perspective. That, I think, is what sustains this unnecessary debate, and it suggests immediately to me how to smooth the troubled waters: see, acknowledge, and respect the differing perspective.
You know -- like an NPOV solution, despise the term though you might.
Then again, that could just be me.
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]