From: kaminski@netcom.com (Peter Kaminski)
Subject: Re: Flame wars on sci.med
Organization: The Information Deli - via Netcom / San Jose, California
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 20:44:10 GMT

SUMMARY:

  Making room elsewhere for off-topic discussions is a necessary step, but
  I think y'all are right that active flame control needs to be practiced
  as well.

  Some controversy and debate is a good thing, but for purely inflammatory
  material, the best course is either no reply, or only an indirect one.


DISCUSSION:

In <1992Oct14.005350.1756@cnsvax.uwec.edu> nyeda@cnsvax.uwec.edu (David
Nye) writes:

>My only concern about this is that it may appear that we approve of
>some alt.med-type post if we say nothing about it.  

In such an open, leaky, non-authenticated medium as an unmoderated
Usenet newsgroup (and *unlike* other forms of communication), silence
cannot be taken as assent, especially if an article is not already part
of an ongoing debate.

Being open, leaky, and non-authenticated isn't in itself bad or
anything, but it does force certain constraints on the discussions, one
of which is that the most appropriate response to an off-topic or
zero-content post is *not* to followup to it.  (Email to the author, and
perhaps to his or her postmaster is okay, of course.)

Why?  Here are a couple of reasons:

  1) A followup to a noise post is noise.  Flames should be left to die,
  not fanned.

  2) Usenet is a leaky system.  The vast majority of posts are seen by most
  people, but posters cannot be assured their articles will be seen by any
  particular set of readers.  The silence of those readers cannot be
  assumed to be their assent.


>How is someone looking here for help to suspect that the advice is
>flakey?

Unless he or she is familiar with the author, a Usenet reader should
suspect *any* post of being flaky, and should corroborate it before
acting on it.  (There's the additional problem that articles can be
forged so they appear to be from an author you're familiar with,
but are not.  But that's another topic...)

That should be part of the introduction for new Usenet readers; for groups
like sci.med, it should also be made part of the regularly posted
introduction/FAQ list, along with canned answers or refutations of the most
commonly posted idiocies and misapprehensions.

If readers need a reliable source of non-flaky advice, the proper
solution is a moderated advice newsgroup.

>There should be some way we can flag such a post without being drawn
>into a holy war.  Perhaps something like "Readers should know that the
>information in the above posting is inconsistent with conventional
>scientific medicine".  If the initial poster fires back, we can ignore
>subsequent postings and avoid being drawn into the flame that way.

A good idea, but kinda like saying "just one potato chip".  What if the
original poster responds to your refutation with something like "you're
wrong!  It's *is* commonly accepted in scientific medicine, as shown by
Drs. Idiot and I. M. Quack".  Now it *is* a debate, and silence would
be assent, and you're well on your way to a flame war.

If a response *must* be made, it should be a general one about the topic
of the original post, but *not* a followup.
Xref: sparky sci.med:18893 ca.general:1390