con etiquete: the struggle continues (or: conetiquete vs. tek sass)

[Ken Miller]

A quick summary of some of the responses I've received to my con etiquete
note.  Though Dave Touretzky's note about making this a moderated 
newsgroup partially supersedes this, the question remains as to what
will be the criteria for acceptable discussions there or here.

I got 9 notes saying "thank you/I agree", 1 saying "I disagree with almost
everything you say".  Other notes brought up new issues, as follows:

Four people (dave at cogsci.indiana.edu,tgelder at phil.indiana.edu,
thildebr at athos.csee.lehigh.edu,rick at csufres.CSUFresno.EDU), at least two
themselves philosophers, opposed my "technical not philosophical"
distinction.  I responded

	Maybe the dichotomy philosophical vs. technical was the wrong one.
	How would you all feel if I had instead made the dichotomy one
	between speculation (or opinion) and knowledge?  Anyone can have
	their opinion, but after it's expressed nothing has been changed.
	Nature alone knows the outcome.  Whereas an opinion based on real
	experience or analysis (and analysis I presume could include hard
	philosophical analysis) is quite worthwhile.  So I am talking about
	setting the threshold much higher between speculation and knowledge,
	the former being raw and the latter distilled.

I should have known that wouldn't make it past the philosophers:  

	Knowledge is interesting, but often too much distilled to carry the
	insight of the imparter.  I think the real distinction we are
	seeking is the dichotomy between unsupported hypotheses and
	supported ones.  ... I think what you are getting at is that we have
	a built-in credibility meter, and that its value for some recent
	postings to the net has been incredibly (pun intended) low.  You
	would like to ask people to apply their own judgement to potential
	postings (as to how well the idea is supported) before taxing our
	credibility filters with the same task.
				thildebr at athos.csee.lehigh.edu

	The distinction between speculation or opinion and knowledge is not
	a pragmatically useful one. How do you know whether your opinions
	amount to "knowledge" and are therefore legitimately expressible on
	the network?  ...  As far as I can see, the only
	relevant distinction in the vicinity is that between carefully
	thought-out, well-grounded opinion vs raw, crudely-formed,
	not-well-grounded opinion. If what you really want to say is that we
	only want the former on the network, then I am in agreement.
				tgelder at phil.indiana.edu

Scott Fahlman (Scott_Fahlman at SEF-PMAX.SLISP.CS.CMU.EDU) "certainly agree(s)
with setting the threshold higher", but emphasizes the importance to him
of opinions of other practitioners:

	I think that if someone who has thought hard about an issue is
	willing to share their opinions, that's about the most valuable
	stuff that goes by.  We can get the facts from published work, but
	in a field like this, opinion is all we have in many cases.  The
	technology of neural nets is more art than science, and it's largely
	an unwritten art.  And sometimes the conventional opinion is wrong
	or incomplete.  If we can expose some of these opinions, and someone
	can show that they are wrong (or offer good arguments against them),
	then we all learn something useful. Maybe what we learn is that
	opinion is divided and it's time to go do some experiments, but
	that's a form of knowledge as well.

	What I'd like to ban or strongly discourage are (a) statements of
	opinion by people who have not yet earned the right to an opinion,
	(b) any message composed in less than 30 minutes per screenful, and
	(c) iteration to the point where people end up repeating themselves,
	just to get the last word in.

	I don't want to leave your message out there without any rebuttal,
	because if people were to take it as a consensus statement of
	etiquette, we'd lose a lot of the discussion that I feel is quite
	valuable.  If there really is widespread support for your position,
	then the right move is to split the list into an announcement
	version and a discussion version.

ashley at spectrum.cs.unsw.OZ.AU (Ashley Aitken) seems to take a similar
position with some different arguments:

	I understand your point of view with regard "conversation" and
	"philosophy" but strongly disagree with raising the threshold too
	much.
	
	Let met tell you my situation. I am a graduate student at the
	University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.  I am
	researching biological neural network models of the cortex.
	Unfortunately, there is no-one else really interested in anything
	like this in Australia (that I know of). 
	
	... Connectionists can give me the chance to listen in to
	"conversations" between some of the leading researchers in the
	field. This to me is extremely valuable - it provides an idea of
	where the research is, where it is going, and also provides a great
	deal of motivation. I don't think I could keep in touch with the
	research without it - connectionists is, in a way, my research
	group*.
	
	Sure we don't want to get into silly "philosophical" discussions
	which lead nowhere (like the ones that appear regularly in the news
	groups). However, there is a thin line between philosophy of today
	and research areas and theories of tomorrow.

So: I would say there is general but not complete agreement that (1) the
threshold has been too low lately, and (2) postings should be well-grounded
and supported.  The main disagreement seems to be how much room that leaves
for experienced people to be offering their otherwise unsupported opinion,
or contrariwise to what extent people --- including experienced people ---
should restrict themselves to points on which they have specific analysis
or experience/experiment to offer.  

We probably can't resolve these issues except by fiat of the list
administrators.  I hope that raising the issues, and assuming that everyone
will think carefully about them before posting, will increase the signal to
noise ratio.

On the positive side, *nobody* disagreed that dialogues should take
place off the net.  

Ken