(24-08-2020, 07:18 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (24-08-2020, 04:00 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Rene, buddy, you sound depressed.
David, if I were, I would probably be offended... You don't really know me.
The point of my opening post was really to indicate that there are some discussions that show after a while if they have any chance of leading anywhere, and that it may be a good idea to recognise this and react on it.
As Anton already anticipated and detected, some of my points have not failed to prove themselves in the follow-on posts.
There are plenty of interesting areas to explore, and there are areas that are not.
In the second category:
- trench wars about theories
- discussions who is an expert, who knows more, who knows better
There are some people doing great work on the MS, both in this forum and outside.
In this thread, I , myself, have been keen to emphasise that discussions or "implications" about who knows more or better can be problematic. Likewise, as I have made clear, I am to keen that we move away from the notion of someone being an expert.
I should say that I find Rene often makes the implication that he "knows more and knows better" and I find it unhelpful. I think different opinions are good, but I very much feel that I have to view all researchers on much more of a level playing field rather than some researchers acting as if they are an "expert" even if they don't explicitly say it.
Statements like: "Most of these people are not *at all* receptive of any type of advice."
Rather than "Most of these people are not *at all* receptive of any type of "different opinion'."
Would be a better way of phrasing and thinking about it as the term "advice" again subtly implies expertise, which is indicative of a mindset.
I have one opinion of many and wouldn't generally feel it my place to describe myself as providing "advice" to other researchers, though certainly opinions. Especially if or when that advice turns out not to be helpful. A case in point when it came to my recent plant matching work I was advised that it had pretty much all been done, turns out that it far from the truth. Discouraging or advising researchers from pursuing valid areas of research is a problem; there can be little or no debate that this is an objectively valid area of research. Some areas of research may yield results or may not, but if they could they are worth pursuing. I have been working very hard to collect a large number of pre-1447 ciphers, unavailable except by direct contact with the archives, how useful this is to do remains to be seen, but it is incontrovertibly it is a valid line of research. Contacting experts on medieval maps to discuss whether the rosettes folio is a map should be incontrovertibly a useful endeavour. So when someone "advises" someone else against these courses of actions it can present a problem.
Recently Marco Ponzi advised me on the subject of making public documents from archives. When I treated his opinion as doubtful, as it seemed inconsistent with what archivists had previously told me, he was quite rude to me. Being in contact with archivists their legal opinion differs markedly from his, so his rudeness was misplaced. I was Just Asking Questions to obtain the correct answer.
I have for a long time found it difficult that there has been a tendency to construct hierarchies of expertise even if not explicitly said so.
I think we could all, myself included, do with saying "this is my opinion, but I might be wrong".
), impossibility has definitely not been unequivocally proven. 