[CAUT] Forum format (was Re: Requirementsforcontributing/posting; RPT status

[Ed Sutton]

Ron-

I'm not sure I understand what you're agreeing or disagreeing with.

I find the lists useful in their current form, but cumbersome as references. 
Basically, one must invest the effort of following the lists in order to 
learn from them. That seems like a pretty fair arrangement to me.

If they are distilled to only what can be confirmed as objective, provable 
fact, a lot of good material will be lost.

Piano technology doesn't always converge to the one-and-only best way to do 
something. I would hope that any compilation of list material would preserve 
and express the divergence of opinion in a fair manner. The Wiki process 
tends to move all material toward a consensus, and will be dominated by 
those who spend the most time working the process. I don't know if this will 
produce a good result in our field. Sometimes divergence is much more 
interesting.

One possibility would be to compile all the posts by one writer (say, Newton 
Hunt), and see if they constitute a coherent body of practice. [Steve 
Brady's new book is one such coherent body of practice, well-organized, 
edited and clearly Steve's approach to concert preparation.  But you have to 
pay for it.]

If you want it to be free, the decisions will be made by whoever volunteers. 
I suppose anyone who wants to try re-organizing the material in a useful way 
should go ahead.

Ed Sutton


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ron Nossaman" <rnossaman at cox.net>
To: "Ed Sutton" <ed440 at mindspring.com>; "College and University Technicians" 
<caut at ptg.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 11:52 PM
Subject: Re: [CAUT] Forum format (was Re: 
Requirementsforcontributing/posting; RPT status


>
>
>> The CAUT and Pianotech lists are basically discussions of opinions. They 
>> work because we know the persons and their contexts, and the flow of the 
>> discussions. It will be no small project to try to convert this flow of 
>> opinions into settled and organized objective information. In fact, I 
>> suspect that when we remove the persons and opinions, there might not be 
>> a lot left.
>
> I disagree. If the information offered is graded and assessed as opinion, 
> according to who said it, without validation by logic, reasonable 
> scientific method, and trial by experience, neither list has any value 
> whatsoever for anything but light entertainment. This is exactly the sort 
> of attitude that, I expect, will render any distillation of either list 
> moot, misleading, and ultimately more damaging than informative.
>
> And who will be the one to make these decisions? As in what seems to me to 
> be more and more the case in every direction I look, the least qualified 
> will be the most active.
>
> I could well be wrong, and it might prove to be worth a try. I'll withhold 
> judgment pending the first installment.
>
> Without qualification,
> Ron N