From: joe@sfbooks.com 
  
 In article , 
 Richard Henry  wrote: 
  
 > "Rob Kelk"  wrote in message 
 > news:nbu8k09r8q6rsr26te43rd2lo8jjrp4p8e@4ax.com... 
  
 [metrics of net-abuse such as spam] 
 > > Motive is irrelevant - the results are what matters. 
  
 > I disagree.  I understand the need that information managers have for a 
 > mechanical tool that will eliminate the need for them to actually make a 
 > judgement, but that doesn't make it right. 
  
 Well, look.  The current discussion is an excellent example of why 
 they do need to eliminate having to make judgements. 
  
 You entered this discussion with a point of view.  Unusually for 
 news.groups, you got considered responses that disagreed with you, 
 instead of the usual (and highly cynical) referral to the flamepit 
 known as news.admin.net-abuse.usenet. 
  
 Your answers to these responses have essentially boiled down to: 
 "Well, that's your opinion, but you haven't convinced me." 
  
 Now, it's perfectly possible that the only good world would be the 
 one in which your opinions always determined everyone's courses of 
 action.  However, this would have a severe drawback:  the other 
 several billion of us would routinely be unable to act, waiting for 
 you to have time to determine what we should do.  So realistically, 
 a functioning world pretty much *requires* that people mediate between 
 your opinions and everyone else's.  Well, no, they don't actually 
 have to consider your opinions at all, but the problem has the same 
 shape whether or not they do, so why not be generous to you and 
 assume they consider yours?  Anyway. 
  
 Since, as has been demonstrated in this discussion, persuasion is a 
 slow and unreliable process, a system for mediating among people's 
 opinions that relies on persuasion to achieve agreement among all 
 relevant parties is unlikely to be effective.  In fact, although 
 such an approach is used *far* more in the running of Usenet than 
 in almost any other human institution known to me, it has nevertheless 
 repeatedly failed across Usenet's history. 
  
 These failures have usually been established when a problem grew to 
 unacceptable levels, and some people then acted independently of 
 consensus.  Such actions have sometimes met with widespread 
 condemnation (Richard Depew's binary-cancelling bot comes to mind). 
 They have sometimes met with widespread approval, and presumably 
 that's the model you would want any given independent actor to 
 strive for, if only because, all other things being equal, the more 
 people approve of a given actor, the higher the odds that you're 
 one of those approving. 
  
 Now, the most obvious examples of widespread-approval actions of this 
 sort that I can think of would be, in chronological order, 
  
 1) Mark Horton's renaming of the NET.* groups in 1981 
 2) The Backbone Cabal's takeover of the group creation process in 
    I think 1984 
 3) The Backbone Cabal's Great Renaming in 1986-1987 (which, 
    interestingly enough, was driven by a breakdown of consensus 
    *within* the Backbone Cabal) 
 4) The Cancelmoose's spam-cancelling bot in ?1993. 
  
 Of these, I think consensus was strongest for the first and the 
 last, and weaker for the middle two.  It's notable that the first 
 and the last shared a common technique:  *objectivity*.  The 
 Cancelmoose cancelled spam regardless of content; Mark Horton 
 renamed groups regardless of his personal opinion of them.  In 
 contrast, the Backbone Cabal was well known for less than objective 
 actions. 
  
 But objectivity is what you now object to.  You would rather the 
 cancellers judge the worthiness of your what-they-call-spam as against 
 someone else's what-they-call-spam.  You are apparently confident that 
 they would see it as worthy, and would not cancel it. 
  
 Why is that?  To take one final example from this discussion, you 
 demonstrably don't consistently persuade people within the Usenet 
 power structure that you're right.  Why do you think the cancellers 
 would be the exception to this rule? 
  
 I realise that nothing I say will convince you.  I begin to suspect 
 that you're a troll, existing only to say "That's your opinion, and 
 I don't agree", but I remain hopeful that I'm wrong; I much prefer 
 interacting with humans over interacting with trolls.  That said, 
 I'll be very surprised if you follow up to this with anything that 
 could justify a reply from me.  If you reply in a way typical of your 
 replies so far in this discussion, I will not answer. 
  
 Nevertheless, I thought it worth setting out in this much detail 
 what others have been saying more tersely.  Maybe it's just been too 
 long since I allowed myself to be trolled.  Whatever.  Anyway, have 
 fun with this. 
  
 Joe Bernstein 
  
 -- 
 Joe Bernstein, bookseller and writer                   joe@sfbooks.com 
  
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)