Subject: Re: Bring back Xah! From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 2000/04/25 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3165654568785902@naggum.no> * Michael Hudson <mwh21@cam.ac.uk> | (Admittedly it's been a pretty tiresome couple of weeks for cll...) is this a cry for help to learn how to instruct your newsreader to ignore threads? I have always labored under the "misconception" that USENET is a medium where selectivity in reading is as much a requirement as with any other news medium -- namely that if you aren't selective, you'll go mad from sheer information overload. to aid those who agree with this, I don't change the subject of threads unless I want to break continuity, and that happens almost as seldom as changing the newsgroup. (speaking of which, why is it a good idea to bug a new and different audience with a topic if the only constructive element to a "take it elswhere" is to get rid of noise?) I'm very disappointed that this is not appreciated by those who obviously don't want to read "tiresome" material, and I get annoyed when they go out of their way to make more noise about the noise, usually blaming others for their meta-noise in the process, triggering the _normal_ and _expected_ reactions to false accusations and general blame-throwing. the only way to reduce noise is to figure out what it comes from and help fix the core problem. complaining about noise _is_ noise, by definition. but frankly, complaining about news _volume_ (which is what this boils down to, much more than signal vs noise) means you have missed a crucial point about communication. tuning in and tuning out, focusing attention, and following up the listening with _caring_ is so fundamental to our ability to sorting signal from noise in real life that I can't imagine how people work who are irritated by stuff they profess to ignore, and so it always amazes me that people think it's somebody _else's_ fault if they care about the noise they "suffer". the best possible remedy to news overload is to read news on a machine that displays messages fast enough that you can actually browse them and let your trained reader eye spot information that is _important_ to you among all the noise that _inevitably_ fills up your sensory input system. it may be one of the great "failings" of artificial intelligence and the Internet as a whole that _all_ information has an air of _importance_ associated with it, simply by virtue of requiring nonzero effort to come by it, but being able to discard the unimportant and leave the important is _crucial_ to surviving in the information age. #:Erik