Flint, someone has just impersonated you

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End of the thread "OK, Poole let's get down to the nitty gritty".

I walked away from my argument with Poole, in disgust I might add, and now some of the pollies are having a high old time. There is a comment, supposedly from you, which I think you will be interested in.

-- Peter Errington (petere@ricochet.net), May 14, 2000

Answers

Hmm, looks like a "Flintstone" to me.

A think it was over a year ago that I asked a "banks are toast" dude on csy2k just what evidence of a healthy banking system he would accept. I said he was free to dream up whatever evidence he chose, however unlikely (or hopelessly impractical) it might be, just so long as he'd find it convincing. He replied that, after much thought, he COULD NOT dream of any such evidence that he wouldn't find SOME reason to reject. But, he went on, since banks were toast anyway, it didn't matter that God Himself couldn't persuade him otherwise. He KNEW better.

Errington goes this dude one step further -- even *after the fact*, when he and everyone else can SEE than nothing happened, he rejects that reality has "made a good case"! At some point, denial passes from pathology to farce. Errington has passed that point.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), May 14, 2000.

-- Barney R. (barney@bedrock.com), May 14, 2000.


ERRingman, you are beginning to puzzle me.

In your initial post in the "Nitty Gritty" thread, you said, Well, everything came thru OK, so Poole thinks my cluelessness, vs. his brilliance, is now established. You be the judge.

You ASKED people to be the judge. (And you were found wanting, but let's leave that aside.) Why would you draw a target on your chest and dispense a boxfull of darts, then complain when you begin to resemble a porcupine?

Truly, ERRingman, you must explain this behavior.

-- Stephen M. Poole, TTMHMIY2K (smpoole7@bellsouth.net), May 15, 2000.


I'm not sure why you would think that the post was made by an imposter. The csy2k post Flint refers to can be found hmm@hmm.hmm), May 15, 2000.

One more time...

I'm not sure why you would think that the post was made by an imposter. The csy2k post Flint refers to can be found here and is much as he described it. Perhaps his comments just hit a little too close to home.

-- (hmm@hmm.hmm), May 15, 2000.


I don't understand either why this was assumed to be not written by Flint. Thanks for the link, hmmm. I remember well how McIsaac was treated on csy2k. Joseph McIsaac, wasn't it? He was one of FEW who chose to throw their toe into the waters of csy2k in an effort to fight the rampant misinformation that had infiltrated that newgroup.

Just the thought encourages me to sing "Those were the Days" that Edith Bunker sang so poorly [which *I* would sing just as poorly.]

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), May 15, 2000.



Peter:

Well, I'll certainly admit I was quite surprised by the lack of y2k impacts everywhere. I was quite convinced that we'd experience numerous locally nasty problems. No dominoes, no cross cascading defaults, but still some organizations dead in the water for a while and some glitches causing newsworthy inconvenience for some small groups here and there. And I started out *much* more pessimistic than this. My expectations were probably no more optimistic than yours.

I've put quite a bit of thought into how I managed to be as wrong as I was. I grant that nobody on earth could possibly know in detail (1) Just how many date bugs existed; (2) How many had been repaired; (3) How serious the remaining bugs were; (4) What exact effects those remaining bugs would cause. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who claims today to have had this level of detailed knowledge before the fact isn't credible. But was such detailed knowledge *required* for any solidly accurate understanding?

Let's ignore the advocates for the time being. The "banks are toast" person was a gold dealer, trying to boost his business. The majority of the y2k pessimists on TB2K probably had no financial stake, and what the ultimate source of their conviction might be I can only guess. BUT they were still advocates of doom, and not investigators at all. They built their case for doom like a lawyer, ignoring or rejecting positive information, treating pessimistic speculation as fact, and interpreting inherently ambiguous information to suit their position. As near as I can tell, their *goal* wasn't to understand what might happen as clearly as possible; it was to talk people into "preparing", never mind what for.

As for those more interested in integrating all the various indications into an accurate picture of the future, the crux of this effort was the reliability and credibility of our information. And credibility is not something information has, it's something YOU give it or don't. When different people give strikingly contradictory evaluations of the same situation, we have little choice but to assign weights to these evaluations based on our general sense of which source(s) have better information and/or a better understanding of what the information means.

But where does this general sense come from, if not from experience? Many on the TB2K forum had no relevant experience at all. I wasn't concerned with embeddeds after the results started coming in, because I work with these all the time and I know how they're designed and why. I could tell that Cherri, Malcolm, Dan the Power Man knew what they were talking about and Paula Gordon was a fake. But I have NO experience with IT systems, so should I listen to Yourdon or to Hoffmeister? Who made the more consistent case and why?

Bear in mind that all speculations are not equal. If my car is acting strange, an experienced auto mechanic's speculation about what's wrong is going to be a whole lot better than mine, in the sense of proving more nearly correct a whole lot more often. This is NOT pure luck based on 100% ignorance! Even though it's still speculative.

Those who made mistaken predictions lost credibility with me. Yourdon, Hamasaki et. al. predicted dire events at critical dates (FY changes, common lookahead dates) and nothing happened of any note. What was important to me was that NOTHING happened. No visible problems, no news stories of screwups here and there. NOTHING. Yourdon even said that it would be more likely that pigs would fly than that the government would cruise smoothly through FY rollovers, but that's what they did. Predictions that far wrong surely imply a fundamental misunderstanding of the underlying phenomenon.

Conversely, Poole's predictions proved unerringly accurate. Both Poole and Yourdon (and many others) explained the reasoning behind their predictions -- they weren't pulling numbers out of a hat at random. When what happens both matches the predicted results, and does so for the predicted reasons, such people gain great credibility, and are worth listening to. At least for me.

So you and I have two choices: We can admit that others understood the entire situation far better than we did and recognize that some of the pessimists had clear vested interests (Yourdon, Gordon) which we failed to take into account properly. OR, we can claim that OUR evaluation was simply the best that could be done, and to the degree that others were closer to the mark, they were just lucky!

It's clear to me that you have chosen the second option. Worse, you claim that a case for the first option simply *cannot be made*! Given the overwhelming and unambiguous lack of y2k problems, it seems clear to me that the REAL evidence must itself have been overwhelming and unambiguous, despite the waters being muddied (in my inexperienced eyes) by so many incorrect speculations to the contrary. Why continue to deny so adamantly that it was simply not possible for those with the knowledge and intelligence to know where and how to look at it, to get it right for the right reasons?

Hey, I did my best and others did much better. How can I hope to improve if my ego demands that I deny them what they're due? Poole (and Y2K Pro) did a better job than we did. Good for them.



-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), May 15, 2000.


Anita,

Shoot, Joe McIsaac, Brad Sherman, E. Christi, and especially Hoffmeister, all deserve big nods -- not only for their experience, not only for being right, but for the fact that they stuck it out in CSY2K in spite of being flamed.

I would drop in there from time to time (and of course, would be relentlessly torched as well), but would soon lose interest and move on. These guys stuck it out.

Boy, that link DOES bring back memories. Speaking objectively, it's hard to determine whether the name-calling was worse in CSY2K or the old TB2000.

-- Stephen M. Poole, CET (smpoole7@bellsouth.net), May 15, 2000.


OK Flint, this is you, but are you really the author of that response at the end of the nitty gritty post?

-- Peter Errington (petere@ricochet.net), May 15, 2000.

Peter:

Yes, but I can see that I was too terse. You know I have a hard time saying what I mean in less than enough words that only someone with the patience of a saint could wade through it.

In essence, though, Poole understood the true situation better than you (or I) did. You can't seem to admit this. You thought he was wrong beforehand, and now you think he was lucky. Now I see you claiming that he disgraces himself by pointing this out! Why do you find yourself unable to give credit where it belongs? You (and I) don't become any dumber just because Poole is smarter. Can't you see this?

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), May 15, 2000.


Flint,

You're kind to an old man, but I have to be fair: it would be better to compare Yourdon to, say, a Nick Zvegintzov. I never claimed to be an IT/IS guru, save for my general knowledge of the systems (and the fact that the people who mother these systems tend to think that the world revolves around them). (Naturally.) (That's just human nature.)

I'm trying to think who my counterpart would be in the embedded/control thingie. Roleigh Martin? Naw, because he was merely another IT type (and a weak one at that) posing as an embedded guru.

Most of us who had hard experience in control systems ranged from (at worst) moderate to full-blown Polly. It was difficult to find a full-blown Doomer.

It was also very difficult to find Doomers in the PC realm (which is my primary "enterprise", quote-unquote, experience, so I'm hardly unique there, either).

There was a guy calling himself "Dean from (Almost)Duh-Moines" in CSY2K who claimed to be an embedded whiz AND a doomer, but that's the only one that springs to mind.

Why this matters, I can't say. There's a fresh roasted chicken on the table with french bread and salad greens, and I think I shall deem that more important for the nonce. :)

-- Stephen M. Poole, TTMHMIY2K (smpoole7@bellsouth.net), May 15, 2000.



Mr. Errington,

I see your reason for concern about impersonations, though you needn't worry about it personally. You are on the "preferred" side of the debate.

Too bad it's not the correct side. But one cannot have everything...

Vindicated Regards,
Andy Ray



-- Andy Ray (andyman633@hotmail.com), May 15, 2000.

You know I have a hard time saying what I mean in less than enough words that only someone with the patience of a saint could wade through it. -- Flint, saying "I'm wordy."

-- Dancr (addy.available@my.webpage), May 18, 2000.

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