What is on Your Mind?

@bakounin

Thanks for your feedback, I sincerly apologize if it made you uncomfortable.

I am not willing to waste bandwith of this site in any way.

I posted that thread in the "Lounge" forum which is entitled "What's on your mind", so i think if there is one section in this site where we can have opened discussion and not only "computer focused" i thought it was the relevant one.

By the way, i initially just wanted to share a link that - i think - could also interest some other people.

I didn't plan to go so far in telling what i think but since i have then been asked for giving more details about what was in my mind, i just went on.

Anyway, it was nice and interesting to read you both. Thanks for having taken the time to share your thoughts.

Oh.. I forgot to qualify my post above as mainly focused on "closed systems"....... it gets more interesting when we discuss "open systems", "living systems", "complex systems", etc.

Naturally, this is an area I am always keenly interested in.... and I tend to think in terms of "systems theory" when looking at situations and things. I even view all belief systems (religions, for example) as "systems" as well as nations, governments, markets, and more.

I think it is good to discuss these topics in our forums, as long as we discuss them through the lens of a technologist or scientist, and not via irrational thoughts based on fear and other emotions that lead to irrational thinking and human conflict.

This has always been the philosophy here at these forums.

Don't be mistaken : i am not willing to bring human conflict here

I agree about the fact that emotions should be avoided or minimized as much as possible when they bring fears or when they bring to an alteration of the quality of the judgement (by making bad (egoist, personnal, ...) reasons coming into account) when a decision need to be made.

But we are not robot, we are human our thought have a part of irrationnal regardless whether people accept it or not. Then it becomes a matter of logic, argumentation, and fact. Then it is up to the audience to judge the quality of the argumentation.

Example : It is not because someone tells some statistics about unemployment (statistics that have scientifically calulated with scientific formula) that we have to take it as irreversible truth. How has this number be calculated ? which part of the population has been included or not in this calculation ? does it reflect the reality ?..... and so on.

So i agree that we should be able to have a logic in our thought and argue why we think this or that, but i emit some reserve about the all-tech-science-rational-only thought.

Not tolerating the inner unavoidable irrationnal part of our thought is - in my opinion - at least an utopy, and - in some worse case - can become a form of lack of tolerance (this would mean that we would not listen to people who don't have a scientific approach or opinion, this is sectarisme, fascism ).

Of couse it is just my opinion, nothing personal

Yes, I understand... but every system has boundaries, and for these forums, we made the decision to keep the "signal-to-noise ratio" high by discouraging emotional arguments and "religious opinions".

Is this a "perfect system"? No, it is not; but it is the system here; and it seems to work quite well. We are not the biggest forum on the net, but we are certainly, with little doubt, one of the highest quality forums.

So, we intentionally created some system "boundaries" here, and those boundaries will make some comfortable and others uncomfortable. That is the nature of boundaries and systems.

... and on a personal basis, I loathe forums and discussion groups where emotions run high, logic is lost, and manipulation and gang and chic mentality runs rampant. I really don't like it when someone who cannot formulate a technical argument in a debate takes the low road and starts using ad hominems, false logic (fallacy), and personal attacks.

These forums were formed and are managed in this manner; and yes, it is not a perfect system, but it is the system here.

Don't be mistaken : i am not trying to argue against the necessity of boundaries or rule on this site, for sur they are necessary to keep this site high-quality.

I totally agree with you regarding the high "signal-to-noise" rule.

In fact if every body would behave fairly & respectuously and with a sufficient auto-disciplin (which -i agree - is currently a pure utopy) , rules would not be necessary

I totally agree that no drift should be tolerated regarding the respect that people should demonstrate to eachother, and - as you stated - this site has a very good quality from this point of view, because of the good work you all - moderator and admin guys - do, and for sure i can just encourage you to keep up doing that great work .

Hi ctsgnb,

Don't worry; I don't think you did anything against the forum rules. From my perspective, I simply added my thoughts, which were grounded in system theory, and tend to reflect how I feel about things; and since I don't get a chance to emphasize the forum philosophy very often, I found the discussion a way to express this view; which is neither perfect nor expert.

From my perspective, I was not and am not interested in a Facebook, where the roots are with people compared "who is hot and who is not" and sharing photos; nor am I interested in twittering my every thought to the world or having a multitude of "followers"; my main interest was to create a technical Q&A platform where everyone can share their ideas, learn and grow, mostly regarding computing and in particular unix/linux, in a way that everyone can participate (novice to expert), with a high quality database of knowledge that has a fairly high (ok, very high) signal-to-noise ratio.

That does not mean folks cannot have other discussions in this area; and they should have; and I hope sharing my system views have not tossed to much of a wet blanket on the discussion you were hoping to have. That was not my intention.

Carry on!