Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: MODERATION: The whinning begins

Author: Michael Neish

Date: 06:32:35 02/20/00

Go up one level in this thread


On February 20, 2000 at 03:12:49, Alvaro Polo wrote:

>Perhaps I should look in my dictionnary again, but I fail to see how insulting
>Adams can be considered naive. It can be uncorrect, or wrong, if you want. But,
>naive?

Alvaro, I'm afraid we're misunderstanding each other.  I didn't say insulting
Adams is naive per se, but insulting him when you have no basis on which to
do so, in this case hearing a few facts from one side, drawing your own pet
conclusions and then stating your opinions loudly and strongly, when the
foundation of what you are saying might be shaky.  You are in danger of
leading further people astray with your faulty conclusions and you might
be forced to swallow your words when fresh facts come to light. It's naive
in the sense that you are forming strong opinions without even considering
the limitations of what you know.

The whole scientific process depends on being aware that you have limited
information, and taking that into account when you draw up your own
theory (or opinion as it would be in this case).  I didn't mean "sit and do
nothing because we don't know anything," but "be aware that you don't
know everything that happened and therefore act with caution.".

>The main point here is that waiting for the facts is an attitude that always
>favors status quo. And the status quo here is that Junior was forfeited without
>it being clearly right (you see, nobody here says that it was right, at most
>they say "let's wait and we'll be able to make a sound judgment). It is not
>correct, in my opinion, to support the status quo, therefore I view the critics
>to Adams and even to Mig as reasonable.

If you re-read my first post, I said that I thought the best course of action
would be just to find out as much as possible about what happened and to
try to prevent the same thing from happening again.  This doesn't
support a status quo.  It supports putting aside irrelevancies and doing
something positive.  I never said we should just forget the whole matter,
did I?

There's one thing I've learned from living in Japan (been here four years
now), and that is that when there's a problem, they don't waste time and
energy (like we do in the West) trying to lynch the person responsible
for the mistake.  Instead they work hard to fix the problem.  Obviously
a far better approach.

I don't think we're saying very different things anyway.  We just
disagreed on the issue of insulting Adams.

Mike.

P.S.:  Calling someone a coward in Spanish, "cobarde" isn't strong?




This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.