Suppose I have serious and plausibly realistic aspirations to become an authority in some subtopic of cryptography, network security, etc. (sometime well into the next millenium). Am I more likely to learn and hone my skills by actively participating (sticking my neck out) or merely lurking indefinitely ? Regardless of the answer to the previous question, should the list suffer me my missteps and naivete ?
This dependsd on what you are attempting to do. If you are attempting to not be thought a fool by anyone then keep quiet. If you want to learn something then you have to speak up. If you have an idea then the only way to know if it is any good is to test it. In the sciences we perform experiments. In engineering and social sciences this is not necessarily possible. We can still test an idea by voicing it and looking at the response. This is the heart of Habbermass's theory of communicative action (modulo it is impossible to communicate such a complex set of ideas in a single paragraph). Just because the response to an idea is hostile does not make it invalid however, the quality of the responses matters. If you get back a reasoned argument you may judge it on the basis of the plausibility of its axioms and the correctness of its logic - accepting that the argument may be incomplete and not fully explain the point of view. If on the other hand people write "This is wrong and I've told the person why in secret" then the argument probably isn't valid. The funniest version of this type of post being the "Here is an example of what is wrong, I won't waste bandwidth here explaining the faults even though I have already done so in making the post in the first place. So I have not only wasted bandwidth but interrupted a lot of people with a vacuous post. To address perrys point on social security privatisation, If there was such a proposal and the basis on which it were to be run was that the privatised company would gain all the data rights then I think there would be the very type of political debate that characterises clipper. One thing about the "new" key escrow system that people have not picked up on. Would you trust Microsoft to be a key agent if you were Lotus or vice-versa? Why on earth should private key escrow be any better? Phill