Re: [ga] My policy on postings - and slurs

[Dave Crocker <dhc2@dcrocker.net>]

By way of demonstrating the basis for taking Prof. Froomkin's contributions 
with some caution:

At 06:22 AM 4/17/2001, Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law wrote:
>Perhaps therefore I should mention again that I routinely killfile ... 
>many of the more active posters on ICANN-related lists.

1.  His note begins with the personal rather than the substantive.  That 
might seem minor, but it shows what he considers the more important.

2.  He has frequently touted that he filters out mail, and frequently been 
explicit about who he filters.  These constitute personal attacks; not 
unique on this list, but still that means he has brought himself down into 
the mud with the rest of us.

3.  He is pointedly filtering out serious points of view with which he does 
not agree.  That rather flies in the face both of objectivity and academic 
rigor.


>On the issues of substance, I'm comfortable that my published work speaks
>for itself, and am happy to discuss serious responses that are either
>published in a serious journal or communicated to me directly (that
>excludes email from people in my killfile

Again, this highlights that validity of content is secondary to other, more 
personal issues.


>   I would note that to date AFAIK no one has published a counter-argument 
> to my ICANN paper,

What is interesting about this comment is that it ignores a range of 
reasons that counter-arguments might not get published, independent of 
simple logistics.

It is common for the academic community of a profession to be disjoint from 
the practising community of the profession.  (Computer science often 
suffers from this.)  So, for example, one possibility is that no one else 
considers his views significant enough to respond to.  Taking such a line 
of analysis deeper, perhaps none of the practising community takes it 
seriously and perhaps none of the academic community considers the topic 
that significant.

The rule of serious scientific effort is that simply getting something 
published is, at best, a beginning point; it is not an ending point.  The 
effort is validated ONLY by being taken up by others and substantiated by 
their further work.

Rather than noting that no one has published a retort, if Prof. Froomkin 
were serious and diligent about the legal import of his work, he would be 
much more concerned whether anyone has adopted his work and elaborated it...


>The following names in my killfile are potentially relevant to this list.

So let's both start and finish the message with the personal stuff.  The 
ensures that "substance" comments are relegated to trivia.

d/

----------
Dave Crocker   <mailto:dcrocker@brandenburg.com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking   <http://www.brandenburg.com>
tel: +1.408.246.8253;   fax: +1.408.273.6464

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