In alt.support.diabetes Alan Moorman > wrote:
> On 13 Feb 2007 11:29:59 GMT, Chris Malcolm
> > wrote:

>>In alt.support.diabetes Alan Moorman > wrote:
>>
>>> Sorry, Larry, but anyone who posts in a public forum needs
>>> to go to some pains to explain their scientific language in
>>> terms more of us can understand.
>>
>>> I'm smart, educated, and have a large vocabulary, but
>>> several paragraphs of dense scientific terminology doesn't
>>> help me, or any other posters, understand what is being
>>> talked about.
>>
>>*Any* other posters?
>>
>>I assume firstly that at least a large minority of the population has
>>an educational background in the sciences rather than the arts, and
>>secondly that most of those reading asd have the largest and most
>>easily accessible encyclopedia yet invented just a mouse click
>>away. It wouldn't surprise me that more than half of asd wouldn't
>>understand paragraphs of dense scientific terminology, but you seem to
>>be claiming not only that almost everyone would fail to understand it
>>at first reading, but that they would all be so comprehensively
>>baffled that looking up the words they didn't know wouldn't help in
>>the slightest.
>>
>>In fact, given that in asd we're all struggling with diabetes, I would
>>have expected that some of those with no scientific background
>>whatsoever would be motivated enough to learn something of the biology
>>and medicine relevant to diabetes.
>>
>>> Otherwise, why post something that is, basically,
>>> meaningless?????
>>
>>I think you're confusing your being baffled with meaninglessness in
>>general.

> OK, how about if I said that I think that 80% of the people
> who would read that in this group wouldn't comprehend it,
> and would skip the information.

> Does that sound any more reasonable? It does to me.

Yup. And it seems to me that that shift in proportion completely
removes the basis for your argument. I'd say that for 20% of a
newsgroup to be able to understand a bit of technical conversation
between two posters who like to read the research is pretty good, and
is more than enough to justify the posting. I'll bet a lot less than
20% of the posters here understand the more technical discussions
about how to set T1 insulin dosages.

> Which doesn't change my opinion that they were _virtually_
> useless posts, and perhaps should have been in one of the

> sci._____________

> newsgroups instead of an "alt." one.

Suggesting that something which is understandable by only 20% of a
newsgroup is _virtually_ useless sounds like mob rule to me.

> It is simply short-sighted and non-productive to post dense
> scientific verbiage in a group like this.

Since some of us understand it, some of us like the challenge of
finding out what it means, and some of us like to see that some of us
understand it and would answer questions on it if we were interested,
what's your problem?

There are a number of posters here who suffer from what to the rest of
us are really obscure medical conditions which give them added
complications in dealing with their diabetes. They sometimes get
involved in technical discussions of their specific disorder and its
treatment which I'll bet less than 5% of folk here are capable of
understanding. There's certainly a lot that I don't understand, and
which I have no interest in coming to understand, but I'm very pleased
indeed to see that that there's enough variety of life experience and
education here that these posters are able to get some helpful
feedback here.

> I don't doubt his good intentions, but his communications
> skills are completely lacking.

Of course they are. If you've had a formal education is a subject then
you've been exposed to teachers who've had special training in how to
communicate the technicalities to people who don't know anything about
it. That gives you a big leg up in trying to explain it to someone
else. It's very hard to develop the communication skills for helping
non-specialists to understand a technical area if you're self-taught,
as he is.

> And, he apparently doesn't
> realize when he's wasting his energy.

Given the support he's got from other posters in this thread I can't
imagine how you can make that claim.

I'll let you into a secret. I sometimes come across postings here
which I can hardly understand a word of, yet I suspect that if only I
did, I'd learn something useful about my kind of diabetes. So I save
those posts for a future time when I have more time to try and
understand them. When I first started posting here there were many
more of those posts than there are today. I owe most of my education
in diabetes to the asd posts I didn't understand two years ago, but do
today.

--
Chris Malcolm DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]