I very much appreciate carefully worded Phd-Design posts with citations
(and am somewhat in awe of those of us with the ability to produce them
along with their regular workloads!). If and when they touch on subjects
I'm directly interested in, I find them truly helpful, especially if and
when they point me to literature I might not have known about otherwise.
Speaking purely personally, if there is a category of postings that
inherently interest me less, it's those that lean too far in the direction
of 'ungrounded' opinion, assertion, and/or abstraction. They rarely help me
to consider something from a new viewpoint or to delve more deeply into
some subject matter. As Usenet posters often used to say in the early 90s,
they too often "waste bandwidth, " like someone at a dinner party who
monopolizes the whole table's conversation. Such posts come with the
territory on listservs, but they do tend (as a group, by their
proliferation) to crowd out posts that might bear closer reading.
Al
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