Re: Just one more anecdote

dawn wrote:
> Marshall Spight wrote:
> > dawn wrote:
> > >
> > > In order to get good, interesting, informed, alternative opinions from
> > > people like you, perhaps sometimes I lure you into my lair.
> >
> > Everyone watch out for her electric mace!
>
> so that I can keep it in my purse for now, would you be so kind as to
> arbitrate and let me know why David thinks
>
> "You are treating as proven something this audience generally does not
> accept"
>
> when I thought I was clear when I was stating an opinion and that I was
> making a conjecture and not stating a proven fact? We definitely have
> a communication gap on that one and I'm curious to know where it is.

Oh no! You asked me for my opinion. That's going to make *everyone* unhappy. Having learned nothing from Paris (the son of Priam, not Ms. Hilton) I will answer. (Actually I think I've learned nothing from Paris Hilton either.)

It strikes me that the issue here is that you've got an extremely complex issue, about which we know little, and we're trying to assign causes. You've chosen a controversial (aka unpopular) explanation. This explanation advances a recurring theme in your posts, hence David's hilarious "is the axe sharp enough" comment. Point David.

However, he also took you to task for "assuming" something in a paragraph that you started with "My conjecture is" and ended with "I could be wrong, of course." And it wasn't even a very long paragraph. Point Dawn.

Hurray! Everyone loses!

Now that I have passed judgement, I expect to be universally reviled, as per custom. But just in case I'm not, yet, I'm going to throw in my own opinion.

Ultimately, we cannot begin to assign weights to the various potential causes for this project's failure. Such projects are simply too complex, and we're not in a good position to instrument the process after-the-fact. So we are all just speculating based on our particular experiences. What is interesting is that our experiences often lead us to different conclusions, which suggests to me that many of the conclusions we reach have a context-sensitivity that we are not aware of.

Marshall

PS. Okay, it was a weak ending, but it's all I've got. Received on Thu Jul 28 2005 - 07:31:07 CEST