On 05/04/2019, Simone Basso <bassosimone@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey Giacomo,
> [...]
> If that’s the case, isn’t it a bit weird to drag some one that is far from
> this community into a discussion within this community on topic that lately
> has really been the focus of your interest?
Hackers are weird people... ;-)
This is not a response. I have met plenty of non weird hackers and plenty of weird hackers.
As much as you can choose to identify yourself with this community, your behaviour is ultimately yours, and alleged stereotypical community traits should not justify it.
> Provided I understood correctly what happened here, then I think this is
> not proper behaviour and, if that occurred to me, I’d be very cross at you
> for doing that.
While I respect your feeling and note it for the future, I think your
reaction would be quite counter productive for yourself.
Dragging someone in the middle of an email thread of a mailing list they may not know is not necessarily the most rational way of eliciting interesting feedback from them.
What strikes me as counterproductive here is that you did not consider less direct and more friendly ways of approaching them.
If one of my articles for Science (ROTFL! ! ! :-D) was discussed on a
public mailing list with the deepness of Nexa, I would be glad to be
informed and join the conversation! :-D
Careful here. Whether the mailing list is deep or not is a subjective call.
The may not have the same opinion on the mailing list and they may perhaps be quite annoyed by your message. Or they could just see it as spam and trash it immediately.
Who knows. (Heck, they may even answer you and that’s for sure gonna be fun.)
But if your rational objective is asking questions to receive answers and reason on them, a less aggressive approach is probably more likely to lead to answers.
(You May want to read Raymond’s essay on how to ask questions in the smart way. As much as Raymond is questionable, I think that essay is still interesting read and has actually helped me in this respect.)
OTOH, I would find a bit wimp to do the opposite: why would I have
published my mail with the article in the first place if I don't want
to discuss the matter anymore?
I am not sure that the choice of publishing the email is personal in that venue.
Even if publishing their email was a personal decision, it still remains a personal call whether they want to discuss further with you. And, in turn, that depends on how you approach them.
Anyway, if the author agree with you, she will be free to answer me
privately and (since I'm weird but not an asshole) the conversation
will remain private until she decides otherwise.
They will behave as they see fit. This is not my concern. I was annoyed by the way in which you behave and I saw useful to chime in. Some sort of “someone is wrong on the Internet” reaction, modulo the fact that I doubt I will ever be 100% right on any topic.
But to be honest, this mailing list is so interesting that I think she
will love to learn about it. ;-)
Do you know whether this person speaks Italian? Otherwise, well, it may be quite complex for them to assess the list.
(And, again, what gives you confidence that they would share your judgement with respect to the list? The goodness of this list does not strike to me as a self evident truth.)
Simone
Giacomo