I had not intended to return to this thread, or indeed to this forum but I’ve received a number of emails from a few posters asking me to respond to particular topics, and one poster in particular who was insistent that I ‘owe’ an explanation or response for my absence. While I frankly don’t think that I owe anyone on a message board anything, there are a number of posters (including that mentioned above) who I do respect and have enjoyed interacting with, so the extent to which anyone needs ‘closure’, this will serve as it. For those who consider all my posts to be long-winded ‘bloviating’ or worse, I can only recommend that you skip reading the post entirely and either move on with your life or proceed into more insults and insinuations without reference to anything actually written.
I want to take the opportunity first to address a couple of the criticisms that are completely valid. In particular, in the discussion about vaccine timing that @Shalmanese brought up, while I think my essential point (that it would be better to provide best possible immunogenicity to vulnerable demographics rather than diluting the protection by getting as many people partially immunized) has been since borne out by experience of the pandemic, the argument I employed regarding basic education was at best specious and the particular example was only weakly applicable. Of course, this issue was already previously discussed at length and I admitted to overextending my claim, but it will never be said that @Shalmanese will pass on an opportunity to bring it up again and again; nonetheless, I was wrong in my assertion and acknowledge my error. Also, my claim that Santa Barbara (which I don’t recall making and can’t comprehend what I was thinking at the time) was completely incorrect, and I don’t have any idea why I was so certain about it other than perhaps falling into the fallacy of assuming particular people I knew were representative of the community as a whole. If I’d realized that had been festering for many years I would have volunteered a retraction and apology because it is clearly wrong, and for what it is worth I sincerely apologize to @hajario and anyone else of that locale for unfairly maligning your community.
Many of the other criticisms and complaints seem to fall under the category of ‘expressing an opinion’ and being taken to task for other people assuming that it represented an authoritative claim or expert opinion. Since the “employee who claimed a TBI had resulted in him being unable to control his swearing” discussion appears to have been hashed out extensively, it can serve as a good example of someone accusing me of being ‘wrong’ for expressing an expert opinion or making a diagnosis where I in no way actually expressed particular vocational qualifications or made a professional diagnosis (and no actual professional neurologist or psychiatrist would attempt to diagnose or counter an expert diagnosis based upon an anonymous secondhand accounting on an internet message board). In fact, while I expressed one sentence questioning that a highly specific behavior attributed to a brain injury was legitimate (based upon my long experience with coworkers and people in general attempting to use some kind of self-diagnosed condition excuse a behavior that they clearly just didn’t care to modify) the bulk of my actual post was a response to the query of the o.p., addressing the applicability of the Americans With Disabilities Act in brief and recommending that he refer the issue to his line manager and/or HR to adjudicate as is their responsibility instead of trying to deal with it himself, which I don’t see as a remotely controversial bit of basic common sense. In fact, I’m not at all clear how this became an example of some rhetorical misbehavior on my part except stretching any disagreement or vague controversy to an absurd degree. Some of the other assertions here–that I never admit to being wrong, that I claim expertise and authority in all subjects, and (especially) that I am a sycophantic apologist for Elon Musk–are utterly absurd insofar as simply searching on a few basic terms like “My mistake/error”, “Mea culpa”, “I stand corrected”, “You are correct”, “I am not an expert in ___”, “This is not my field of expertise”, and essentially any post where I have ever expressed any opinion about Musk will reveal dozens if not hundreds of posts where I have admitted error, or declared a lack of vocational knowledge, or have absolutely railed on Musk long before the general public recognized the narcissistic, entitled, self-aggrandizing cosplay fascist that he is. I do often make the effort to provide extensive citable evidence for factual claims, and very rarely claim any kind of subject matter expertise unless it is a topic in which I literally have vocational experience, and even then frequently acknowledge ambiguous statements or wrong claims or assumptions when they are pointed out. I don’t literally go back and explicitly acknowledge every minor error or claim of possible misstatement because it would be exhausting to do so, and with even a cursory amount of research I can find examples of every poster here making that assertion doing the exact same thing. All of this just smacks of trying to find any reason to justify whatever animus that particular posters have for me for whatever reason without even doing some basic research to validated the claims.
There is one particular claimant, however, that I want to address in particular because of how absolutely pernicious they are and who came into this thread specifically to continue a campaign of insult, insinuation, and hyperbole, and that is @wolfpup. He seems to have really gotten his shorts in a twist over disagreements about the basic capabilities and utility of LLM-based chatbots and general purpose artificial intelligence, and seems to have made it a mission to come into almost any thread and attempt to twist my statements in order to assert that I’ve made false claims or arguments that are often counter to what I have actually said. In this particular case, he brought up a previous discussion where he claimed that I responded to him with “hostility” for disagreeing with him when in the reality (apparent to anyone who actually reads back through that thread) he quoted a partial sentence out of context to make it appear that I had said something that wasn’t really what what he claimed, I responded with “Next time, please do me the basic courtesy of quoting my entire sentence for context instead of ‘creatively’ truncating to so that you can dispute the ‘point’ that you want it to seem I made instead of what I actually wrote,” which he somehow interpreted as hostility and subsequently responded by yet again truncating my post into a partial sentence, leading me to abandon the thread out of frustration. I offered to make a more thorough explanation when he brought up the issue up again, to which his response was to accuse me of being “delusional” and later to decline a discussion in a thread where he couldn’t spit invective and insinuations with his statement that “That’s fine, I have nothing further to add to what I’ve already said here and in the original thread.”. Of course, the poster in question seems to get upset when he finds that someone else has done this to him, but I guess there are different rules for other people in his view. Frankly, I find his responses to be full of just-short-of-the-line insults, insinuations of ill-intent or dissimulation, pettifogging, gaslighting, and all manner of other rhetorical chicanery which is on display here and elsewhere, and I’m morally certain that I’m not the only poster with this opinion because I’ve seen him treat others in the same manner.
(Also, for the record regarding the comment made in the above-referenced thread regarding the impact of continuous stratospheric injection of water vapor was specifically addressing the fact that while water vapor condenses out of the atmosphere in the span of days, it does not normally make its way into the stratosphere in significant quantities, but that even if hydrogen-powered airliners were practicable they would be spraying uncondensed water vapor as bulk exhaust, and this is not characterized in current climate models, which was on my mind at that time specifically because I was reading studies about the 2022 Hunga Tonga undersea eruption and the dramatic and uncharacterized impact it had on heating and cooling mechanisms of the climate system. Of course, the entire comment–again, taken completely out of context–was basically a hypothetical aside to the thrust of the post, which was that hydrogen is a terrible transportation fuel and that hydrogen-based airliners are technically and commercially not viable, so the entire issue was completely taken out of any useful context by @wolfpup just to manufacture a criticism.)
As for the subject of this thread, he has made the habit of following up my posts with persistent and largely unfounded contradictions and criticism which are so pervasive that when I seem him post in a thread shortly after I have, there is a better than even chance that it is some kind of petty sniping, often utterly without merit but to which he’ll continue to keep it up until I abandon the thread or someone else responds to point out that he is completely wrong. It would be irritating if this were just a once I a while thing or it were a poster that I could just put on ignore, but it is just a constant nagging irritation from a moderator who should be displaying and modeling good posting behavior rather than engaging in something just short of trolling that it has become intolerable, and from a poster that I used to enjoy engaging with and learning things from his posts. He knows he’s doing this because I have previous asked on several occasions what the deal is, and the response is silence rather than explanation or apology. (I’ll also note that there have been several moderation decisions that I thought were ‘questionable’, although since I’ve had a discussion with one now-retired moderator where they rightly pointed out that the job of a moderator isn’t to check facts or be ‘fair’, but to prevent threads from going off the rails and posters from engaging in overly aggressive argumentation, I’ve been highly reluctant to criticize the moderators, eve those I personally disagree with, for the hard and unpaid work they do to try to keep this forum from descending into chaos.) In the topic that spurred this one, he posted a completely off-the-cuff answer based upon some ‘logifying’ rationale was completely wrong but seems to have been taken as authoritative, while @Dorjan actually provided a highly detailed response with hard numbers and calculations but passed almost without notice.
But shitty posters engaging in a campaign of retribution for imagined slights and even the occasional moderator with a grudge are nothing new. When I started posting on this board it was because there were a lot of informed discussions about interesting topics and posters who were engaged in largely civil but vigorous debates. I felt that I learned a lot, and it gave me a forum for my own literary and rhetorical impulses in a world where discussion hued toward soundbites even before mobile social media made the 160 character ‘post’ the default format of public discussion. As many of my favorite posters have fallen away (some though death, others disinterest or no longer feeling their contributions to be welcome) I’ve found it more frustrating and less satisfying to engage in posting here. Quite frankly, even aside from the anonymized emails expressing contempt and wishing self-harm upon me, I’ve just found engaging here in the last few years more frustrating than enjoyable, and that in many cases discussions and even whole forums have been dominated by posters who just have no interest in open discussion and honest debate, and while there are still a number of great posters I find the overall ‘signal’ here to be swamped with a lot of people who just want to post ill-considered, completely unresearched, and often totally irrelevant responses to questions of fact or practice without challenge or contradiction. The last few months of not posting or reading here have not left me wanting to reengage, and aside from wondering how certain posters are doing or briefly wishing to have a discussion on a particular topic I think a few people might be genuinely interested in I haven’t really thought about or had any urge to log in or post.
I don’t really have much interest in engaging here further, and while I have responded to a couple of specific requests on topics (one far overdue; my apologies) I don’t really intend to post or engage here forthwith. For those with whom I’ve had enjoyable, interesting, and engaging interchanges with over the years, it has been a genuine pleasure and I wish you the best; for others who see me as obstructive, offensive, or just tiresome, I will be one less thing in your life to be outraged about, although I’m certain that you’ll find something else to feed your contempt and rancor.
Stranger