Don,
I hope comments about the dialog don't put you off posting. I think it's clear that there is nothing that is interesting to everyone and nothing that anyone does will meet universal applause.
I find the PhD list to be frustrating, aggravating, and interesting enough to be worth the frustration and aggravation. I assume that I'm not alone in that. If it were massively less frustrating and aggravating but not as interesting, that would, in my estimation, be a net loss. So even when I think a conversation has gone over the falls, I just use the delete function on my email client. (BTW, I don't think the discussion in question came even close to going over the falls.)
The back-and-forth that gained rebukes was what--two or three emails? It strikes me that anyone who reads hundreds of posts and then feel horribly burdened by two or three is someone who leads a charmed life. (If my design had such a low failure rate or my research reading was mainly useful and almost never a waste of my time, I'd be thrilled.) It also strikes me that people who have made little contribution toward those hundreds of of posts and then complain about the quality have an impressive sense of entitlement.
I am a bit disturbed by comments that appear on occasion, implying that the list conversations are primarily shaped by ego and bad impulse control. People who have spent decades thinking about issues obviously consider those issues important. It is not surprising that they state their views strongly and argue for their conclusions. If they did not, I would wonder why.
In the tonally flat and temporally disjointed medium of email, it is sometimes hard to know when to follow up on something or when to let it drop. And, as I said at the start of this email, not everyone is going to agree whether the followup was vitally important or so much noise. It strikes me as uncharitable in the extreme to assume bad intent on the part of those posting and demands for respect of one's fellows in the form of public rebukes of one's fellows are, to say the least, problematic. (And yes, I do notice the irony of my public rebuke of public rebukes.)
Gunnar
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Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
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