Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1999 19:27:24 -0400
From: Kafka Dreams 
To: void
Subject: causation vs. correlation


Something I've noticed - whenever people are being obsessive or
flame-ridden about a particular thread, others respond with amazingly
good signal.

I'm not sure exactly why it happens - hence the causation vs. 
correlation concept.  I do know that when I'm doing it, it's out of an
instinct to drown out the stupidity and maybe raise the quality
(although I might be giving myself too much credit).  I'm also hoping
that a side-effect will be to encourage others to give good stuff as
well.

In the life-cycle of mailing lists, I'm wondering if there has to be a
point where the participants have too much baggage themselves and too
much anger-soaked shared history with each other to be capable of
communicating, or even wanting to communicate, in a civil fashion.

For myself, I've been resisting the urge to tell a bunch of you freaks
to shut the fuck up because it's not really my place to give orders.
But at the same time, I share ownership (for whatever value you want
to assign that word) of this community and get to express my opinions
about it.  And people keep self-censoring or referencing the fact that
they expect a "STFU rant" from me.

Maybe the flip-side of knowing people (or at least their electronic
personalities) for a long time and/or in a thorough fashion has the
potential to put a mailing list into the place in the cycle where
things both meaningful and amusing flow through.  

Maybe that's happening and I just don't realize it, but I don't think
so... But I think I'd rather be on that mailing list than this one.

Just thinking out loud,
Kelly J.