Although this little rant of mine was prompted by the latest dust-up on FOFOA's blog, it really is applicable everywhere that learning is occurring:
Old News for FOFOA
Reading the current headlines is like sorting through the bets of participants in a giant game of Texas Hold’em: it’s not a question of if any single participant lies (all of them do), it’s only a question of who’s lying when (and the he best lies are only shaded truth); depending on what’s in plain sight, participants in the game estimate odds of claims of concealed resources.
Imagine watching a game with stakes of epic proportions, the consequences of which would make even side-bettors watching the game phenomenally rich, only you are arriving at the venue with the contest already in play. You survey players at the table, and the cards already dealt face-up, quietly listening as each player bets, wondering how you can possibly figure out who will win, when the guy sitting next to you starts to whisper.
The guy next to you says he’s been sitting here for a while, and gives you some perspective from bets before you arrived: about tendencies to fold early, and you’re immediately relieved that you have a testable hypothesis to try and observe the validity of which going forward: trust but verify. Your new-found ally also points out a data stream that the venue posts of prior bets for the information of the audience, which is searchable for data analysis. After another hand you can see that some of what they guy next to you said is working out, so you ask the question: Where did it come from? And he says that he has some observations of some other guys who were watching the game earlier, and even before he himself arrived, and those observations act like a lens through which he has looked at the game for his time in the audience.
Now stop.
Suppose instead you’re the guy sitting behind the guy who’s whispering. You hear everything the whisperer says, and you’re trying to make each newly arrived bet make sense in your head. You desperately wish that the whisperer would explain things more, sometimes, but you’re doing your best to keep up with understanding the here-and-now current bets, in light of the whisperer’s explanation. Maybe you’ve been having a small conversation of your own, trying to exchange understanding of the whisperer’s theories, and maybe spinning your own, but trying your best to keep silent together when he talks, and ask thought provoking questions if you can.
Ask yourself: which would you have the newly-arrived guy sitting next to your de-facto professor do, at this moment: give the assembled group a fresh-eyed observation of current events to evoke the unvarnished opinion of the guy who is right here, right now, answering questions based on his entire observation period AND his interpretations, based on theories espoused by ANOTHER prior observer who had shared his opinions in a similar fashion, in the deeper past, or instead turn away and start reciting old bet sequences without context, directly from the commonly-available searchable database?
What if the noob made the wrong choice? How pissed would you be if he wouldn’t listen when you asked him to stop? How bad would it suck to be that guy?
How much worse would it suck to be the guy who realizes he’s been asked to stop and that dozens of people are staring daggers at him?
Check your ego at the door my friend, The guys staring daggers at you have a point. There’s a guy sitting next to you who has managed to make enough sense that he’s gathered a group of avid listeners; we listen to what he says and we try to extrapolate in a way consistent with the theory as developed by those before us, as we understand them. If you don’t like the theory, fine – find another group to sit with, create your own group, or put together a coherent theory and carefully explain it in a cogent counterargument. If you like the theory and you’re confused, it’s fine: then ask questions based on your current understanding, and try to elicit answers from whoever is willing to consider it. Please refrain from interrupting the flow of discussion with quotations from the record that bear no visible relevance to the issue at hand: if you feel that something from the past casts illumination on the current moment, reference that material with at most a brief quotation, and provide some explanation of what thesis you are trying to defend.
It’s the civilized thing to do.
