Personal Grievances

Your claims below about proper list conduct are relevant enough to
discuss them publicly, but we'll keep them out of the other thread.

Carl wrote:
> > Being as you're refusing to open the dialogue, being that
> > this is a consistent tactic that you use in debate,
>
> With whom have I refused dialog? Until recently I responded
> to anything with a pulse on this list, to the best of my
> ability. The cause of the problem you're blaming on me is
> your tendency to indulge in long, wandering and often
> insulting diatribes while being mortally allergic to
> admitting your mistakes.

I write longer replies because the discussions that we're having are
usually too complicated to explain things briefly. This is doubly true
when my job is to explain complicated mathematical concepts to an
audience that doesn't have a similar background. Your insistence on
keeping every message very short makes effective communication
impossible. Your repeated assertions about not assuming that people
know things, needing to explain everything rigorously and thoroughly
as though you were a homeless guy with no knowledge of the subject,
and still keeping messages short - are completely self-inconsistent.
Can you imagine if we were to start yelling at Gene to shorten his
pages on the xenwiki because they're unnecessarily long? If we want
him to make them more readable, that would only require him to make
them longer by annotating them.

In real life, in a scientific society like this, people not only have
lengthy discussions, but they also write very long papers, sometimes
dozens of pages long, for one another to read. It is expected for
someone being critical of a work to understand it in its entirety
before doing so, or to ask questions about the things that they do not
understand. My experience with almost everyone on this list is that
people are more than willing to adopt a similar attitude of polite
inquisition - and so am I! You can observe how I've been asking Kalle
about his views on tonality, how our exchanges have been very long but
refreshingly detailed, how I've changed my opinion on the importance
of melodic leading tones, how we've been posting musical examples to
one another to back up our points. I've had similar experiences with
Igs recently, as well as Cameron, and also Petr with regards to his
opinions on comma pumps. In addition, I notice all of these people
having pleasant and polite interactions with one another, and I notice
everyone changing their opinion in the face of valid criticism.

In contrast, and in opposition to your claim that I'm prone to writing
"insulting diatribes," here's an example of a series of posts that
illustrates a typical conversation between us:

/tuning/topicId_98428.html#98509
/tuning/topicId_98428.html#98520
/tuning/topicId_98428.html#98522
/tuning/topicId_98428.html#98522

Then, meanwhile, while Petr and I were going back and forth in an
unbelievably refreshing and detailed conversation, posting examples
for one another and all that, you write this:

/tuning/topicId_98428.html#98539

This sort of thing happens roughly once per month in my interactions
only with you. I don't notice anyone else telling me that I write
"insulting diatribes," and frankly I enjoy conversation with everyone
else a lot more.

> Take the last thread about
> periodicity buzz, which you ending with a provocation that
> the numerous peripheral and false statements about physics
> and signal processing you made were somehow correct.

Please, go right ahead, point out a single signal processing statement
I've made in that thread that was false - please! Post a single one.
Any one will do! In fact, let's hope it's the one about what aliasing
does to the spectrum of a sampled signal, so I can just post some math
and be done with it! Or please, try to disprove the model by citing
ERB widths again! Or also, why don't you point out how you believe
that sampling doesn't cause periodicity in the spectrum! Make it easy
for me.

What actually happened is that the thread ended with you asserting an
unfalsifiable theory about periodicity buzz resulting from an
undefined property called "spikiness," and me offering to spend MY OWN
FREE TIME devising listening examples to help you test it once you
figure it out. Please note that I'm actually helping you to develop an
opposing theory that, if correct, would completely usurp mine. And
I'll tell you what: if it is correct, we can call it the "Lumma Theory
of Periodicity Buzz" if you want! In fact, since it's not really
"periodicity buzz," we can even call it "Lumma buzz." I couldn't give
a shit if all the world knows if your model wins and mine loses. In
fact, instead of telling you to pull your own weight for a change in
the discussion and to do the work yourself in developing your
competing model, I've offered to basically do 100% of the grunt work
for it in MATLAB. I want to hear some acknowledgement from you about
this fact rather than this bullshit about how I'm trying to "one-up"
you and can't admit ever being wrong.

As it stands, the cochlear model is the only one that accurately
predicts the behavior of this phenomenon, and is also the only
reasonable choice I've seen proposed in order to predict where the
behavior comes from, unless there's a second critical band in the
brain (which I've left open as a possibility this whole time). No, I'm
not going to pretend that this is not the case just because you have
yet to finish defining your opposing theory. This is especially true
when I've spent months coming up with a couple dozen listening
examples, detailed plots of the gammatone-simulated cochlear response
to the examples, experiments showing how buzz varies roughly inversely
proportional to the uniformity of the group delay of the signal, all
of which I generated the theory in RESPONSE to, and not only do you
have yet to produce anything, but you still haven't come up with a
cogent argument against anything I've done. And if you do, I'll gladly
start promoting your theory instead of mine.

-Mike

MikeB>"Your insistence on keeping every message very short makes effective communication

impossible...Your repeated assertions about not assuming that people

know things, needing to explain everything rigorously and thoroughly

as though you were a homeless guy with no knowledge of the subject,

and still keeping messages short - are completely self-inconsistent."

    I smell a double standard.  There are a few people on here who both insult others for "not putting in enough effort to explain" and at the same time "going on too long".  Unless we are full of people who are such inexperienced communicators it takes them huge lengths to explain even simple things (which I seriously doubt)...maybe we should consider either focusing on one or the other primarily.   Personally my view is why not go in long detail (as long as it's on topic)...people who don't like long e-mails can delete them or filter senders who tend to write long messages.

>"It is expected for someone being critical of a work to understand it in its entirety

before doing so"
  Right, so it begs one would actually ASK for a detailed (and quite often long) explanation so they know what's intended before they start criticizing it.  Otherwise you end up with a straw-man scenario where you end up disproving a theory out of your own misinterpretation...that no one brought up in the first place...

>"In fact, since it's not really "periodicity buzz," we can even call it "Lumma buzz." I couldn't give a shit if all the world knows if your model wins and mine loses."
   I've had similar experiences with displaying my own theories here...specifically about a PHI-sections scale, which Carl labelled as "the Noble Mediant" (and confused/misinformed a lot of people on here by doing so) for over a year before an AUTHOR of the Noble Mediant paper admitted what I was doing was different.   Even if people hate my or MikeB's theories to death...at the very least we deserve to have your theories recognized for what they are.

   Now, why not get away from the insults and make some actually Lumma-buzz vs. Periodicity-Buzz examples? :-D

There's an alternative to posting the entirety of an explanation in a single message: create a page on http://xenharmonic.wikispaces.com (or anywhere else) and link to it here.

Here's a page which argues for "Document Mode" as a style of writing distinct from having conversations, with different consequences: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DocumentMode

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Michael <djtrancendance@...> wrote:
>
> MikeB>"Your insistence on keeping every message very short makes effective communication
>
> impossible...Your repeated assertions about not assuming that people
>
> know things, needing to explain everything rigorously and thoroughly
>
> as though you were a homeless guy with no knowledge of the subject,
>
> and still keeping messages short - are completely self-inconsistent."
>
>     I smell a double standard.  There are a few people on here who both insult others for "not putting in enough effort to explain" and at the same time "going on too long".  Unless we are full of people who are such inexperienced communicators it takes them huge lengths to explain even simple things (which I seriously doubt)...maybe we should consider either focusing on one or the other primarily.   Personally my view is why not go in long detail (as long as it's on topic)...people who don't like long e-mails can delete them or filter senders who tend to write long messages.
>

Hi there,

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "piccolosandcheese" <udderbot@...> wrote:
>
> There's an alternative to posting the entirety of an explanation in a single message: create a page on http://xenharmonic.wikispaces.com (or anywhere else) and link to it here.
>
A good idea, absolutely. But keep in mind, that not everybody feels well in the "document mode".

I think those, who are familiar with the wiki, should help each other to rescue valuable stuff from the thread-mill ;)

Best,
Wolf