On 2 Dec 2003 08:50:34 -0800, (Carl Fogel)
wrote:
Rick Onanian wrote in message . ..
While I remain convinced that there was something fishy with at
least some of the messages, the scale is not nearly as large as I
thought. I can't put my finger on what I still believe is wrong,
but:
I apologize to all the real people who I lumped together as frauds.
You know who you are.

What problem?
What's "not nearly as large" as you thought?

sigh
The amount of illegitimate posts is not nearly as large as I thought
it was.

Why are you wriggling? This is no apology.
It's just another half-assed claim that some
fraud occurred.

You're wrong. I had prejudged that all cyclingforums posts in this
thread were illegitimate. My apology above admits that my
assumption was wrong and ill-conceived, and apologizes to the
majority of cyclingforums posters who posted to this thread.

Please name the frauds and give us your evidence,
preferably something better than Chalo's far from
credible inability to find them . . .

Maybe you didn't read what I wrote, so here it is again:
While I remain convinced that there was something fishy with at
least some of the messages, the scale is not nearly as large as I
thought. I can't put my finger on what I still believe is wrong,

I'll bullet the points for you:
-- I still believe that there was something wrong
-- I no longer believe that it represented a major portion
-- I can't quantify it, it's just a gut feeling

Their disagreement with Frank about helmets . . .

Obviously that's not a reason. I disagree with Frank just as they
do. The evidence seemed to be in their more universal agreement
with eachother. In that one forum, it seemed that the distribution
was much heavier weighted on the pro-helmet side, with a much
smaller rate of anti-helmet than is found aggregately of the whole
rest of the internet.

Bizarre complaints that their style is too simple
or too complex . . .

I don't recall any complaint of that sort. Simplicity or complexity
was, IIRC, only used to describe the style; the evidence was how
incredibly similar the style was between so many users.

Obvious signature bugs that have nothing to do with
the sender . . .

You claim to have proven that the David Ornee issue was part of the
bug, but the closest to concrete evidence I recall in this thread
was Chalo's report of having emailed David Ornee.

Or the real reason that the rec.bicycling.tech
bigots still aren't ashamed to raise--they despise
anyone who posts from cycling forums.

I don't "despise anyone who posts from cycling forums".
I do tend to unfairly prejudge web forum users, because of my
observations of web forums. They rarely show signs of intelligent
life. Many include brilliant people, but few exclude excessively
dumb ones -- most that I've seen have more "me too" and blank
messages than actual content-containing messages. Either way, a
"sock puppet campaign" would be easily done through abusing a web
forum with a usenet gateway.

You are one of the bigots, aren't you? Here's

Above, I admit to the amount of prejudice I have, and explained why.

one of your posts to Frank Krygowski. Would you
like to be one of Frank's students?

No, I wouldn't. I don't like how he feels that what works for him
should work for everybody, and nobody should ever do anything more
(safety equipment, motor vehicles, etc).

Rick Onanian wrote in message . ..
It's the nature of the beast. If you're too smart, you use a
real newsreader, or at least google.

This is an example of a conclusion that I have reached via
observation of web forums.

I suspect that those users don't even realize that these
messages exist anywhere other than at cyclingforums.com.

Again, observation-induced conclusion.

Have you noticed that they rarely, if ever, reply to any of our
replies to them?

Isn't it terrible how those people rarely
reply to arrogant bigots?

Carl, it sounds like you're jumping to conclusions now. At first,
posts from cyclingforums were replied to the same as posts from
anybody. I even held on longer than others did, IIRC. However, I
remember that after anybody replied, whether Frank/Chalo/Whoever
arguing against them, or myself arguing with them (or later
questioning their credibility), they never bothered with the reply.
Most, it seemed, only ever posted their one reply to the original
post, ignored the 800 other messages, and when their post was
replied to, they did not bother to find out what somebody had to say
about what they said.

One generally expects that when a real person says something, and
somebody else argues with them, that person would likely argue back.
Certainly that would happen at a higher rate than did happen with
the cyclingforums posts to this thread. Even with personal attacks,
where the anti-helmet crowd or even myself would question their
credibility, they often did not have anything to say to defend
themselves. That became quite convincing evidence that they were
not real people.

You're going to ask me to back all of that up with hard evidence,
with groups.google.com links and such. I won't do that. It's not
about science here; they've presented themselves in such a way as to
cause us to reach this conclusion. A person can't go back and
re-examine every minute detail of everything ever leading up to a
decision; they would never make it out of bed in the morning.
Instead, we work off of our [sometimes fuzzy] memories, remembering
feelings and conclusions if not hard evidence.

It still seems to me that something fishy went on. I can't give you
hard evidence. Your hard evidence has convinced me that the
misrepresentation was not nearly as widespread as I had thought it
was. My gut feeling remains, and my gut feelings serve me so well
so often that I hesitate to distrust them. If you believe gut
feelings are inaccurate, that's certainly your right to argue. They
often are. If, however, you believe that gut feelings and
experience are not applicable, than you are as closed-minded as
Frank is.

Carl Fogel
--
Rick Onanian