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Path: utzoo!linus!security!wdr
From: wdr@security.UUCP (William D Ricker)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: Alien Aliens
Message-ID: <341@security.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 22-Jun-83 13:00:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: security.341
Posted: Wed Jun 22 13:00:48 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 22-Jun-83 23:19:20 EDT
References: <64@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Organization: MITRE Corp., Bedford MA
Lines: 23

In responce to the article asking for good aliens:

An acquantance of mine, Bob Butler, wrote in the current issue of The
Wild Hunt [the FRP Gaming magazine published by Mark Swanson (Hi
Mark!)] about alien mind-sets.  He described an encounter he had had
with a being which thought and argued in entirely different patterns
than he did, and thus they could not communicate.

The entity in question was a philosophy professor who treated all
discourse as syllogism and would attack any discourse not in the form
of a valid syllogism as UNTRUE.  He graded students not on how well
the chose positions or how convincing they could be but on how well
they could argue a position using oral formal login.

Bob, being interested in xenosociology, views this episode as a model
Alien Encounter, and apparently uses it to build alien mindsets for
fantastic and SF-ish entities in his role playing games.

             Bill Ricker 
       (617)271-3725 MS k203, The MITRE Corporation, Bedford, MA, 01730
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