Badgering people for classified information

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FairAndUnbiased

FairAndUnbiased

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SanWenYu said:
While his quit is an unfortunate loss, I take the incident as mistakes of patchwork_chimera himself more than anyone else. Others do not have to cuddle him (but read on). If his possession of certain knowledge cannot be disclosed in public, he should watch his own mouth in places where most go by pseudo names. It is really up to himself to know when to disengage. This saying of "Not every inch needs to be fought over" applies to all, him included.

Even if he does have the authority on certain things because of his professional work, no one has to take every word of him on the face value. Authority does not equal to credibility. People make mistakes. People lie. Had he joined the forum longer and with more quality posts that have been verified by time, he might have been able to build up the credibility to fence off the skepticism from the beginning.

In the age of information war, it is expected that your audience will be skeptical of what you are saying. They will question and challenge you if they do not believe your claims no matter who you are. We have seen too many false claims backed up only by "trust me bro". It's just a natural reaction for people to challenge yet another "trust me bro" when they can. I would not call such challenge as attack.

I would not think that anyone was in this debate with bad faith. We cannot really read someone's mind and judge by his intent. As long as no current forum rule was broken, no one should be punished.

Now, if mods need to value certain members more than the rest and want to have different standards for them, please change the forum rules and make them clear. Then we will know that "trust me/him, bro" is good enough for claims coming from such members of higher value. Mods will also know when to intervene firmly before debates can potentially endanger such valuable members.
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I agree. I don't like the appeal to authority statements in any situation. I dunno too much about planes but for semiconductor thread, I could just say that whatever I post is factual truth without citation. But I don't, because working in semiconductor doesn't mean for I know everything about semiconductor. I don't post too much about lithography, design, fab process flows, etc. because I'm not a SME in that and if I do, I use citations and make sure people know the rest is an opinion. You don't even have to believe that I'm anything above a janitor to understand my points because I use citations as much as possible.

Related to this thread, if someone works in say, operational planning for air operations, do you expect them to be a SME at propulsion or aerodynamics? And if they use their position to say that because they are a SME at operational planning, whatever they say about aerodynamics or propulsion is to be factually believed, can you blame someone for being skeptical?
 
L

latenlazy

Brigadier
FairAndUnbiased said:
I agree. I don't like the appeal to authority statements in any situation. I dunno too much about planes but for semiconductor thread, I could just say that whatever I post is factual truth without citation. But I don't, because working in semiconductor doesn't mean for I know everything about semiconductor. I don't post too much about lithography, design, fab process flows, etc. because I'm not a SME in that and if I do, I use citations and make sure people know the rest is an opinion. You don't even have to believe that I'm anything above a janitor to understand my points because I use citations as much as possible.

Related to this thread, if someone works in say, operational planning for air operations, do you expect them to be a SME at propulsion or aerodynamics? And if they use their position to say that because they are a SME at operational planning, whatever they say about aerodynamics or propulsion is to be factually believed, can you blame someone for being skeptical?
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I think there’s a difference between discussing how we assess credibility and how we treat participants in discussion. The issue in this latest episode is the latter, not the former.
 
Blitzo

Blitzo

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At this stage there are no plans for any changes in rules given how difficult it would be to really implement such a rule.

It also is not against the rules for poor etiquette and being unable to read context alone to be punishable, which is why to this point no penalties will be dealt out.


But this forum does require the good will of people who are posting to engage constructively so everyone can get the most out of the forum, and that means being able to make personal judgements and to choose which arguments are worthwhile and not worthwhile and how far they want to take their own sense of nationalistic pride.
 
broadsword

broadsword

Brigadier
Since Patch had already indicated before to take his essays with a dose of salt, so when it comes to a debate on his claims, seeking more info from him for his logical reasoning is not undue pressure.

He quit to keep a margin of safety and we don't know his threshold. We think it is unnecessary, but don't blame anyone.
 
coolgod

coolgod

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I feel like certain users on this forum are clearly biased towards Patchwork. A normal user on this forum viewing this thread would observe that a new member on this forum is spouting some details on F-22 and claiming they have information that others don't have. Some older users on this forum asked for evidence or don't appeal to authority. Somehow this situation lead to some people claiming the new user was harassed and baited into revealing classified info?

Clearly, the new user shouldn't have appealed to authority in the first place, I don't see other SDF members claiming on the internet they might have ties to IC even though many regularly post detailed information on PLA systems. Claiming that one has classified info adds nothing of value to the discussion, it is a weak argument. Besides, why should SDF members trust information from US IC community in the first place? The job of those people is to literally collect info on their adversaries and deceive their adversaries. Patchwork is knowledgable about certain topics, but even assuming he does possess info on the F-22 that we don't have (regardless of its veracity), why would he share that info truthfully with us when his job explicitly requires him to do the exact opposite?
 
Maikeru

Maikeru

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Andy1974 said:
IMO he should have been given a VIP Professional flair and respected a bit more, members harassing him should have been banned for a couple of weeks.

Members that talk a lot of crap and harass people should be banned. I propose that forum members use the ignore button then webmaster could ban users that are ignored by many people.

Straw poll about banning heavily ignored members: Like to agree, Angry to disagree.
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Kind of tempting fate as I may be on a few ignore lists, but I gave you a like. ;)
 
11226p

11226p

Junior Member
Registered Member
While having Patchwork leave is sad and a loss for this forum I'd like to remind you that this is the J-20 thread which already has been derailed for multiple pages and discussion regarding his leave should rather be done in the Members Club Room than the flagship threads
 
Blitzo

Blitzo

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coolgod said:
I feel like certain users on this forum are clearly biased towards Patchwork. A normal user on this forum viewing this thread would observe that a new member on this forum is spouting some details on F-22 and claiming they have information that others don't have. Some older users on this forum asked for evidence or don't appeal to authority. Somehow this situation lead to some people claiming the new user was harassed and baited into revealing classified info?

Clearly, the new user shouldn't have appealed to authority in the first place, I don't see other SDF members claiming on the internet they might have ties to IC even though many regularly post detailed information on PLA systems. Claiming that one has classified info adds nothing of value to the discussion, it is a weak argument. Besides, why should SDF members trust information from US IC community in the first place? The job of those people is to literally collect info on their adversaries and deceive their adversaries. Patchwork is knowledgable about certain topics, but even assuming he does possess info on the F-22 that we don't have (regardless of its veracity), why would he share that info truthfully with us when his job explicitly requires him to do the exact opposite?
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In the short amount of time that this member was here, he has probably been single handedly one of the most high yield content posting new members that this forum has seen in the last five years, if not more.

Not all opinions are equal, and not all users on this forum provide equal value either.


However, even leaving aside his already impressive track record in his time here -- or let's say if one was ignorant of it -- ultimately there is a better form of conduct than demanding evidence that coupe not be provided, and using arguments of bad faith to try to attack their credibility

This is made all the more egregious because the only reason people were hounding him was because the idea of F-22 having some superior performance over J-20 in a domain of combat was so seen as so egregious and unacceptable.

If that person had said "J-20 is equal or superior to F-22 in all domains" then people here would have gleefully accepted it without challenging the basis for what evidence they had.

I will move this discussion to a different thread shortly.
 
coolgod

coolgod

Colonel
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Blitzo said:
In the short amount of time that this member was here, he has probably been single handedly one of the most high yield content posting new members that this forum has seen in the last five years, if not more.

Not all opinions are equal, and not all users on this forum provide equal value either.
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I respect your opinion and your length of service on this forum, but don't you think your comments here are a tad biased and denigrate the older users on this forum? Maybe other users don't have expertise in your field of interest, but your value judgement on every SDF member's contributions seems a bit strong.
 
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