Quote:
Originally posted by Fred Dieckmann
"My wisdom is rather that the more you learn about a subject,
the more you know how little you actually know about it."
Yes, and when you actually learn SomEthing from a reputable SourcE you SEe how little "Some Experts" know about it.
Unfortunately Some Experts SEem to think it their task to "teach" othErS things they don't understand themselves. I don't SEe much of this as a quEStion of credibility as much as recognizing the SElf-dEdeluSional. No one will Ever Straighten him out, but keeping othErS from being confuSEd by him SEems to require an amount of effort better devoted to actually disscussing uSEful imformation. Of courSE I won't mention namES.
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Well I do agree, in a sense, and I expect myself to be amongst
the people you are aiming at, not entirely unfair
from your point
of view, I admit.
However, you do miss an important point. This
is not a forum where a number of experts have signed up to
answer questions from other people. It would be wondeful to
have such a forum, but I suspect these experts would expect
some kind of favour in return, like money. Rather, this is a
forum where the majority of members neither are nor are
expected to be professionel EEs or professionally involved in
audio. If you are an EE and work professionaly with audio, like
Jonathan Carr for instance, you are, by definition, not a DIYer.
However, since most of us value the input of such people they are more than welcome as members anyway.
OK, so let's
assume we agree that only those who really really know what
they are talking about are allowed to answer questions. What
do you think would happen? Of course, there would be a number
of people who answer without really knowing, either because
they honestly but falsely believe to know, or because they
want to fool themselves or others that they do know. How do we
tell these people apart from those who do know? Sometimes
nobody really knows, which is why there is still science going
on in a number of universities, research labs and peoples homes.
For simplicity, count out those who answer without knowing.
Then I think it is a safe bet that a very small percentage of
questions would be answered. Even if there were people who
could answer all of them, why would they spend so much time
and effort on this task? So we are left with what we have in so
many other cases, for instance the usual situation at most
peoples work, namely an interactive community of people on
different, and often not comparable, levels where most people
honestly want to give something back in return for all the
answers they get to their own questions. People try to help
to the best of their knowledge, which sometimes go wrong.
However, one benefit of this is that instead of leaving the
job of answering questions to a few select members (who are
to select them?) the job is shared by everybody and
the "experts" can save time by answering only those questions they find interesting and otherwise just skim through other peoples answers to the "trivial" questions and jump in and
say "STOP" when the answer is wrong. Furthermore, trying
to explain something to somebody else is often a very good
way to clear your own thoughts. When trying to explain, you
have to think a bit deeper than you have maybe done before,
and if your explanation is wrong, because you had misunderstood
the concept, there is a good chance somebody will tell you you
were wrong, in which case you have learnt something yourself.
(I do, however, myself admit to having tried to answer questions
prematurely, without the proper dose of contemplation before,
at occasions.)
Further, you talk about credibility. Well, the problem is that the
people you consider credible may not fully coincide with those
I consider credible, so we really have no common set of credible
persons on the forum, I am afraid.
Oh no, this seems to be turning into another "novel" of mine,
so I'd better stop here, but as they say "a picture says more
than a thousand words", so I guess this is still shorter than
most of your posts Fred.
Re: Re: Re: Competent software users
