On Wednesday, Mar 30, 2005, at 05:25 US/Central, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
there's an old essay by jeremy bernstein entitled something like "scientific cranks: how to recognize them and what to do with them until the doctor arrives" (can't find it online, dang), in which bernstein writes about getting regular submissions from obvious crank scientists, claiming to have solved some of science's biggest mysteries -- guys showing up with a unified field theory scrawled with crayon on a shopping bag, that sort of thing.
In a similar vein, Clay Shirky gave an interesting talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference a couple of years ago titled "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" which he has posted on his website:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
<quote>
The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.
If you want to make it better, there's a list of things to do. It's Open Source, right? Just fix it. "No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates grrrrr ...", the froth would start coming out. The external enemy -- nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.
</quote>
s/Microsoft/top posting/g s/Bill Gates/HTML e-mail/g
I would simply add that an external enemy not only galvanizes a group, but also causes the group to lose focus.
Regards, - Robert http://www.cwelug.org/downloads Help others get OpenSource software. Distribute FLOSS for Windows, Linux, *BSD, and MacOS X with BitTorrent
