bad posting habits, jeremy bernstein and scientific cranks

[Robert Citek]

On Wednesday, Mar 30, 2005, at 05:25 US/Central, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> there's an old essay by jeremy bernstein entitled something like
> "scientific cranks: how to recognize them and what to do with them
> until the doctor arrives" (can't find it online, dang), in which
> bernstein writes about getting regular submissions from obvious crank
> scientists, claiming to have solved some of science's biggest
> mysteries -- guys showing up with a unified field theory scrawled with
> crayon on a shopping bag, that sort of thing.

In a similar vein, Clay Shirky gave an interesting talk at the O'Reilly 
Emerging Technology conference a couple of years ago titled "A Group Is 
Its Own Worst Enemy" which he has posted on his website:

   http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

<quote>
The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and 
vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone 
who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see 
this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a 
big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation 
going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding 
from their ears, they would get so mad.

If you want to make it better, there's a list of things to do. It's 
Open Source, right? Just fix it. "No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates 
grrrrr ...", the froth would start coming out. The external enemy -- 
nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.
</quote>

s/Microsoft/top posting/g
s/Bill Gates/HTML e-mail/g

I would simply add that an external enemy not only galvanizes a group, 
but also causes the group to lose focus.

Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org/downloads
Help others get OpenSource software.  Distribute FLOSS
for Windows, Linux, *BSD, and MacOS X with BitTorrent