SUO: Re: This is not a forum for political opinions
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Jim Schoening wrote:
>
> SUO,
>
> This is a professional and open group.
> It is inappropriate to repeatedly express
> political opinions in this group.
>
> Jim Schoening
Jim,
I have been busy with other work for the past three months,
but I have spent some time reviewing the events of the past
week on the SUO List, and it appears to me from that review
that what has transpired is a bit like this:
You introduced a proposal that the SUO Working Group begin to work
in collaboration with a classified United States Goverment Military
Research and Development project of an otherwise necessarily very
vague character.
The details of the proposed collaboration remain unclear to me,
and evidently to many others. Indeed, it seems to be the nature
of the case that the application domain must remain unspecified
for an indefinite period of time, but your proposal appears to
be in the nature of submitting documents tantamount to RFP's
and blind "pig in the poke" types of evaluations, perhaps
concerning the suitability of our SUO Starter Proposals
for this necessarily very vague purpose.
If my description is lacking in any specifics that
you may supply, please assist me in clarifying it.
In the mean time, I will submit these following
provisional questions, observations, and opinions:
Observation 1. In my assessment, all of our current starter proposals,
including the very diverse maturities of methodology that produced them,
are very undeveloped at this point. Their only conceivable utility is
to contribute to the formulation of general principles, such as might
be expresed in a general-purpose standard, and even the first hints
of progress in that direction are clearly some years in the future.
In short, they are all of them, whatever their diverse merits,
unsuitable for any purpose at this time, far less the sorts
of critical but vague applications that you are proposing
we engage our lives and our sacred honors in at this time.
Question 1. Is it standard practice for any Standards Body to be serving
as a short-term buffer between immature methodologies and vaguely specified
but extremely critical and highly politically charged applications?
Question 2. Is the engagement that you recommend an appropriate activity
or even a feasible activity for the Standard Upper Ontology Working Group
in particular?
This brings up an incidental matter that I have also seen arise on the List.
Political Opinion 1. It is not possible to have an apolitical opinion.
That is to say, almost all of our most basic beliefs have some bearing
on what we regard as valid conduct in civil society, the Polis, as the
philosophers customarily state it.
Corollary 1. In making your proposal, you have expressed a huge number
of political opinions, explicit and implicit, examined and unexamined.
For instance, you are saying that a certain activity is a worthwhile
activity for a rather diverse society of persons to engage their
volunteer energies in. Incidental to your championship of this
political mission -- in the heat of contesting for its value,
no doubt, and we all understand how that is -- you have also
expressed opinions about what constitutes appropriate
conduct in an "professional and open" society.
These are are your political opinions, that
rational persons may have a diversity of
their own political opinions about.
Theorem 1. Tolerance is of the essence.
Recommendation 1. In the interest of not only social harmony,
but also to make it possible to attract freely and graciously
volunteered energy and expertise, I suggest that we return to
what has been the long e-stablished custom in this e-community,
of having tolerance for each other's signoff lines, which are,
after all, about as e-gregious as wearing a slogan t-shirt to
one's volunteer job.
Recommendation 2. I personally believe, and this is just an expression
of my personal sense of what constitutes valid conduct in civil society,
that you owe Murray Altheim an apology for in any way suggesting that
his conduct has been contrary either to civility, professional values,
or the spirit of an open society.
Sincerely yours,
Jon Awbrey
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