on Wed, 20 Oct 93 09:23:03 PDT, hfinney@shell.portal.com (Hal Finney) writes: < A basic principle of < discourse is that the validity of an idea is independent of its source < (which is why ad hominem attacks are considered invalid). Yet this < principle is not widely followed (which is why ad hominem attacks are < considered effective). i believe the reason this principle is not often followed is because so much context is gained from knowing who a person is. not just the message history, but knowing what a person's experience and profession are can be extremely helpful in understanding the intent of the communication. removing the sender's identity also removes a substantial amount of semantic information. computers might be able to send billions of bits per second over a network, but it's up to us humans to remove the degrees of freedom and figure out what is really meant. < Dug's solution enforces the discipline of judging < each piece of mail on its own merits. Maybe more people should consider < this approach. i don't think that's what he meant. Doug Luce <doug@lm.net> says: < if i can't figure out who it is by the context, the sender loses. which means to me, doug is still using contextual information gained by his knowledge of the sender. as an example, i often find mr. detweiler's posts to this list difficult to interpret, since i don't know him personally. is he playing devil's advocate? is he just trying to be entertaining? is he deliberately behaving in a schizophrenic manner, or is he just a victim of MPD? i can't tell from his posts alone. which is why i believe that honest humans for the most part will have no good reason to spoof. trusted communication just won't work without reputation. both the sender and receiver rely on context provided by reputation to send comprehensible messages. ---- i liked the point made recently that e-mailing lists are often like discussions at a coffee house, and are not formal environments for objective culling of opinion.