SUO: Sticking to subject : Universal Time, other universals, and cultural context of SUO.
Hello all
Two days ago I started a thread entitled:
"Universal Time, other universals, and cultural context of SUO"
It thought this title was quite explicit, the little remark on use of UTC
being just an opportunity to raise more fundamental questions about eventual
"cultural biasis" of an enterprise having some pretentions towards
universality ...
The message was contai
ning the following explicit set of questions:
<< If time scope of SUO community is US time, how far is cultural scope of
SUO extending beyond US culture and English language? How much of "upper"
concepts will be really "universal" and how much only pertinent in this "US
culture - English language" background? How many participants is this
community are non US natives and how many have another native language than
English? Are there Asiatic, African members? What about the alignment of SUO
with these other languages? >>
There were more than 20 messages since under the title of this thread. I
won't say 20 "answers", since none of those messages, as far as I understand
them, addresses directly any of the above questions, nor says explicitly
that they are non-sense or off-topic or already addressed in msg.nnnn. The
debate started instead on an expressed "intuition" of mine, that I had gave
just to present the view point from which I set the questions, not to answer
them, and then drifted towards the validity of the notion of "intuition" by
itself (BTW I share completely John Sowa's position about intuitions: only
more or less interesting hypotheses) ... cool debate, but having IMO direct
relationship with neither the title of the thread nor the questions set in
the original message.
I'm afraid this is not specific to this very thread, but seems to be an
heavy trend of this - and other - forums. I'm always amazed of how people
tend to drift in debates towards discussing some bit of peripheral viewpoint
they are personnaly interested in, than to address the question that was set
to begin with. Is it possible to avoid that pitfall? Is it difficult to
stick to the below simple communication clarity principles? I feel a bit
rude, as a newcomer to this list, to recall this principles, but here goes
:o)
Either I think that a thread subject is of interest, and stick to the
subject when I use its title.
Either I answer on the edge of the subject and drift to another one, and
then start a new thread, (indicating the original one).
Either I don't care about the thread subject, and abstain to comment just
for the fun of writing something witty. Everybody knows on that forum that
everybody (else) is very smart, and proving it again and again every day is
an overload of information and a waste of time for both authors and
readers - like that last remark is :o))
Maybe I could have put this message under "Volume and Focus" after all ...
Regards
Bernard
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bernard.vatant@mondeca.com
Mondeca - "Making Sense of Content"
www.mondeca.com
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