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From: ghn@mind.UUCP (Gregory Nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Thanks. (was  Re: Results of Symbol Grounding Poll)
Message-ID: <1010@mind.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 13-Jul-87 14:25:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: mind.1010
Posted: Mon Jul 13 14:25:46 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 14-Jul-87 06:19:26 EDT
References: <993@mind.UUCP>
Reply-To: ghn@mind.UUCP (Gregory Nelson)
Organization: Cognitive Science, Princeton University
Lines: 58

In article <993@mind.UUCP> harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad) writes:
>[]
>I will abide by the decision [to move]. Perhaps I may be allowed a few
>parting reflections:
>
>(1) It is not entirely clear what the motivation of the nays was:
>ecological/economic considerations about overuse of the airways or
>reluctance to perform the dozen or so keystrokes per week (or to
>put in the software filter) that would flush unwanted topic headers.
>[]
>(3) Along with several thoughtful replies, there was unfortunately also some
>ad hominem abusiveness, both in the poll and in the discussion. This is the
>ugly side of electronic networks: unmoderated noise from the tail end of the
>gaussian distribution.

Is it possible, that with all of the artificial intelligence researchers
this board has brought together, we might come up with a way to filter
bulletins before they were posted:  for example, to cut out sarcasm and
abusive language (of course, informing the writer of this fact).  This would
certainly help to ...

>[make the] Net the reliable and respectable medium of scholarly communication
>that I and (I trust) others are hoping it will evolve into. 

>(4) I continue to be extremely enthusiastic about and committed to
>developing the remarkable potential of electronic networks for scholarly
>communication and the evolution of ideas. I take the present votes to
>indicate that the current Usenet Newsgroups may not be the place to attempt
>to start this.

That sounds like something a good program would have to filter.

>(5) Starting a special-interest Newsgroup every time a topic catches
>on does not seem like the optimal solution. 

This is true.  However, there is a great difference between a topic 
"catching on" and a few people posting hundreds upon hundreds of lines of
text every week.  Not everyone who said "nay" was attacking you.  Many of
them said that they would like the discussion to continue, but that it was
just TOO verbose.  I for one am very interested in the problem, and have
been trying to follow along (for several months of "catching on"...), but
it's hard to keep up!

>(6) The current majority status of engineers, computer scientists and
>programmers on the Net also seems to be a constraint on the development of
>its broader scholarly potential. 

You've clearly had a lot to do lately, keeping up with the symbol grounding
discussion and summarizing polls.  Perhaps you should take some time off to
look at some of the other newsgroups.  The comp.xxxx discussions are naturally
oriented to computer people, but things like rec.xxx and sci.xxx are much
more "broadminded" (if you will.)  If you want a real surprise, try tuning
in to the Deja Vu discussion on misc.psi or something like that.

Greg Nelson                 (609) 924-6923
Princeton University
Cognitive Science Lab
princeton!mind!ghn