[SystemSafety] Discussion Style [was: Does "reliable" mean "safe" and or "secure" or neither?]

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

Misleading title, by the way. No longer.

On 2016-04-24 01:19 , Ross Hannan - Sigma wrote:
> I really don't understand why this list needs to degrade in to abuse on a regular basis and why certain members of this list seem to see others as fodder for these abusive attacks.

Abuse?

There has been no abuse of this list. None. Zero. Ever. We've been in operation over two decades,
with the current host for nearly four years. That's a testament to the seriousness, motivation,
engineering commitment and mutual respect of our list members.

Not to speak of the point that, if there were any abuse, our subscribers from corporate domains
would need to leave in droves and the list would implode. As happened once for unrelated reasons.

Compare, for example, what The Guardian is telling us in its new project to stem abuse and
reintroduce productive discussion in its WWW operations. A very labor-intensive project. Our
situation? 100% OK, null effort for admins.

People in any intellectual discipline develop very different views from each other, and use various
styles of argument to try those views out, when they care to do so. The kind of commentary which
occurs here is very mild compared with what the giants of literature, politics and economics deal
out to each other on a regular basis in the major communication organs. And that is after peer
review and professional editing. Have you read the New York Review of Books recently? Consider the
kind of things said in public by prominent people, and archived, in Margaret Hodge's and Andrew
Tyrie's very effective - on might say indispensable - UK parliamentary committees. What about the
things prominent people say in public about climate change? About taxing international corporations?
About offshore finances? About the European Court of Human Rights? About nuclear power? About
sustainable energy? About transport and its effect on the lived environment? All of which are
pressing human problems, some of them with considerable engineering involvement, that I would
suggest need to be argued out to the best of proponents' abilities.

The President of the United States comes to Britain and makes a thoughtful speech on which (we may
presume) lots of smart people worked for a long time. Probably no other piece of writing in history
gets as much attention as a major POTUS intervention. A British politician with aims to partake at
Cabinet level in the government of the country publicly labels his intervention "hypocritical". It
is not discussed whether that is "abusive", indeed, no one cares. It is discussed whether what POTUS
said is hypocritical or not. And whether POTUS had any kind of right to say anything at all. All of
which are important points. (I would imagine that POTUS, like his predecessors, welcomes such
debate.) That is robust discussion and, goodness knows, Britain needs it right now of all times.

This list is a place where people can say that the notion of system integrity is akin to ideas in
organised religion. And others can call it poppycock. And where people can claim there is no such
thing as software reliability, and others refute it in three words, or at length. And where people
claim that you can evaluate software statistically in an effective manner, and others say no you
can't. And where people claim to see verbal misbehavior and others disagree. I am proud to continue
the tradition and enable that kind of communication.

The alternative is for people not to say what they genuinely think and receive the views of others
on the matter. I've rarely seen any good come out of that.

This is a place to try out your ideas, in other words, and have people comment (if, like me, you
have the freedom to do so; many people on this list don't). You can't do that effectively in any
other forum in system safety. Blogs are practically only one-way communication, because of the
administrative effort involved in filtering "comments". WWW forums are labor-intensive for the
admins as well as generally being content-poor.

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de





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