bad posting habits, jeremy bernstein and scientific cranks

[David Liguori]

Robert P. J. Day wrote:

> 
>   and then (in the spirit of bernstein) the cranks arrive.  no! they
> proclaim!  you've been completely wrong all this time!  i bring you a
> *new* unified mailing list theory which overthrows the current
> orthodoxy!  a theory in which HTML is a *good* thing, and in which top
> posting saves time!  i bring you the new paradigm of the next century
> and, why no, i really *don't* know the current rules and why they're
> there or why so many people have agreed to abide by them but ... no
> matter!  change is good, and years of constancy are to be swept away
> by my new universal worldview!
> 
>   cranks, the lot of them.  bernstein would be amused.
> 
> rday
> 
Unfortunately, I don't think your analogy is very apt.  You're right that scientific progress has pretty much always been incremental.  Times in history that are considered "scientific revolutions" have actually been merely more rapid evolutions.  In the field of physics, for example, the beginning of the twentieth century brought us relativity and quantum mechanics.  Both theories required scientists to accept counter-intuitive ideas, but only because pushing the old ideas into realms in which they were no longer applicable led to contradictions that were even less intuitive, or to blatant disagreement with experience.  Even so, the old ideas were not discarded but extended.  For example, when formulating the general theory of relativity one of Einstein's two fundamental requirements was that the theory go over into Newton's theory of gravity in the "weak field limit" (the other, that the laws of nature be "generally covariant", means absolutely nothing to one who has not s
tudied physics).  Bohr's "correspondence principle" says pretty much the same thing about quantum theory.  The cranks of which you speak often have no understanding of the old theories or the limits they had reached, and just assume ideas that seem weird are automatically works of genius.

In the field of technology and the response to it by the society in which we live, on the other hand, revolution is the norm.  A quarter century ago, who'd have thought that only the disadvantaged would not own a "personal computer"?  Why would you even think you would have needed one then?  Fifteen years ago "The Internet" was pretty much email, telnet and FTP.  "Gopher" clients were cutting edge as I recall. Who would have thought Mosaic would take off the way it did?  Although I get as urinated as the rest when I get an HTML email with flashing graphics for cheap software (yes, spam filtering takes care of it for the most part, thank you), I submit that in twenty years email as we know it today may be a distant memory.

Science is a huge edifice of logically connected facts, experiences and theories, and does not change lightly.  Things like the proper form for business letters are conventions (incidentally I embrace the quaint conventions of proper English punctuation and capitalization, a preference "rday" apparently does not share).  Some conventions, like which side of the road you drive on, are literally life-and-death issues.  Others, like whether the Fedora list should be top-posted or bottom-posted to, I dare say, would make no observable change to the world as most people know it.  A statement like "energy is conserved" is a hugely universal principle, because it can apply to mechanical energy, it can be expanded to include thermodynamic energy, and finally  matter itself.  If a crank reported he had discovered a violation of energy conservation I would consider it more likely that he had merely discovered a new form of energy (though of course much more likely that he is just wron
g).  A preference for top-posting or bottom-posting is not a logically connected construct.  You may list reasons for preferring one, others may state reasons for another--and you may label one who disagrees with your reasons a "crank".  I may groan as I scroll through a quoted message, then a quoted response to it, etc. until finally I get to a single sentence by the poster, and declare "bottom posting is awful!"  But isn't the real problem that someone was too lazy to take 30 seconds to edit his post so that what he is actually responding to is clear (which in some cases actually requires quoting all of the previous posts)?  In other words, bottom posting is *not* a unified general principle, though maybe "be courteous" is.

So on this list I "do as the Romans".  But I don't believe the debate over top versus bottom posting is worth one hundredth of the bandwidth that one way or the other allegedly saves. 

All opinions expressed here are my own, of course.

 --
David Liguori