Okay, this is not "Devil's Advocate" because I think she is *partly* right. And I think we're at risk here of "glossing over her well tuned language". I'm just gonna put stuff in quotes because I don't feel like scissoring parts of the original.
1. To begin this discussion with respect, *spell her name correctly*. (I like to joke it was 5% of my old job because I have an eye towards these things.) Its *Denelle*. Not "Danielle". And then the last part of you calling her "Dixon-Fire" is just ad hominem. ...
-TaoPhoenix
By all means
@TaoPhoenix, go half-Devil's-advocate or whatever it is you intend to mean there, but please don't accuse me of
ad hominem.
Argumentum ad hominem is defined as a logical fallacy - an argument against the person - rather than a reasoned argument against the point being debated. I would never intentionally employ that fallacy, as it is one step towards the abandonment of reason.
I would make four points about your remarks there:- 1. You might consider that you know better than I what I was doing, but as far as I was aware I was intending neither debating a point nor putting forward any particular argument. If you think I was, then you are confused. Thus, saying that I was making an argumentum ad hominem would rather seem to be inapplicable and a mistake of relevance.
- 2. In fact I was very simply mocking the post, having a Yorkshireman's typical zero tolerance for people who utter facile BS and doublespeak (please call a spade "a spade") and for people attempting to tell me what to think. Therefore, if you are unable to see that it was mockery, then you have my sympathies.
- 3. I also have a Yorkshireman's typical zero tolerance for people who make the mistake of sporting silly, jumped-up or affected or pretentious names or double-barrelled surnames without anticipating potential consequences/mockery of same from schoolboy humourists at least, and who make what seem to be egregiously poor BS and doublespeak posts for all the public to see. They must expect some comment - indeed are inviting comment - and mockery is fair comment and free speech. If one puts oneself in the coconut-shy, then one should be unsurprised if people throw balls at oneself.
- 4. If someone would seem to take it upon themselves to be the arbiter of free speech in the apparently mistaken belief (QED) that free speech is whatever they decide it is, and then advised me to censor my speech accordingly, regardless, then have I got news for them. The most polite way I can put this just now, and without wishing to offend the reader's finer sensibilities, is in the words of Rhett Butler: "Quite frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."
I think you seem to have started off with a couple of wrong premises, so your comments might kind of gone downhill from thereon.
For example, where you write:
"We are trying to get to the root of the problem – but not just through research. We are also working to develop products, features and engagement supporting a great user experience and commercial sustainability."
This is very nearly completely correct!
From experience (see the spoiler), I would suggest that you may have just been suckered.
Spoiler
At one point in my "career" I spent 4 years as a product manager and senior marketing consultant with a large computer company called EDS, where, because I had studied Marketing 101 and was interested in the subject, they gave me 6 months training in the theory and application of something called the Holden VBM Methodology (VBM = Value-Based Marketing), and then let me loose to guide the development of marketing strategy for two of their business units in the Asia-Pacific region - Finance & Banking, and Healthcare. F&B was pretty straightforward, so I trained up a promising junior to deal with that, which released me to focus on Healthcare, which was a relatively new and complex market that EDS was entering.
One of the things I had to do was develop a marketing communications plan, which detailed things like the purpose, medium, audience and feedback collection that we needed for all the communications messages that we needed to put out to develop the market in a planned direction. A fairly complex task. Part of that involved the Healthcare services group feeding me with material for things like press releases and brochures, and I led the team that sorted through all this material and decided on the plan and delivery of marketing communications. We systematically filtered out any redundancy, clichés, buzzwords and other BS, because our target audiences (which included cabinet ministers, the Minister of Public Health, surgeons, hospital CEOs, doctors and nurses) were relatively very sophisticated and would see right through it and that would then devalue the currency of the messaging (what we had to say), in their eyes.
Furthermore, they would not have appreciated being spoken at as though they were gullible idiots. You actually only get one shot at doing this right the first time. Once devalued, restoring the perceived value of our messaging would have been like climbing a vertical sheet of smooth steel greased with butter - i.e., impossible. So we did lots of dry run testing on sample and guinea-pig audience members.
The end result was that we had a Healthcare communications lexicon, and our messaging spoke only of substantive facts - e.g., defined deliverables, quantified, achievable tangible cost-benefits - and did not confuse benefits with features, and used no meaningless value-judgements, clichés/buzzwords/BS.
So the lexicon expressly excluded terms such as, for example, Agile, better, great, good, bad, best practice, global best practice, thought leadership, white space, excited (and variants), zero-sum, bottom line, responsible (used "accountable" instead), engagement, problem (unless very specific), user experience, sustainable (and variants), opportunity, investment, etc. (and lots more besides).
I say this because because the lexicon (see spoiler) that we used excluded several of the terms used in that sentence that you state is "...very nearly completely correct!". In my view, it is in fact far from being a satisfactorily cohesive statement.
Let's analyse it a bit:- "We are trying to get to the root of the problem..." - yet the problem is apparently undefined/unspecified, so good luck with finding the root. This would seem to be BS.
Is the problem the "...users who choose to block content as a way to control their Web experience" or the debate about them "... and the commercial interests who monetize that content." How can a debate be a problem? Simple. Remove the debate then. Maybe the idiots blocking their content need to be made to see the light of day?
- "– but not just through research." Eh? So it's not going to be a fully scientific approach with theory matched with observations. That could make for a novel approach. This would seem to be BS.
- "We are also working to develop products, features and engagement supporting a great user experience and commercial sustainability." What on earth does that mean? "We're going to suck some ideas out of our thumbs and see if anything that tuns up can be helpful?" But oh! Those cliché alerts: "engagement", "great", "user experience", "commercial sustainability". The only one I could suggest a real meaning for is the last one, possibly relating to either revenue, or profit, or both, but it's not clear whether that would be referring to Mozilla revenue/profit or the advertisers, or some other entity. And this would not be any purely accidental string of words, it would seem to have been very deliberate and purposeful.
Somebody would seem to have gone to great pains to make this BS up in such a way as to be as inoffensive as possible whilst ameliorating the truth of whatever they could actually be intending to mean under the surface. It's called "softening the approach" where there's some bad news about to be (possibly reluctantly) delivered.
This would seem to be BS and/or deliberate and purposeful obfuscation.
____________________________
Now I could be wrong, of course, but if I had thought that the post warranted more serious discussion by me, then rest assured that I would
not have mocked it. I couldn't
not mock it, given that it was such a gobsmacking LOL moment for me when I read it. Brought tears to me eyes. Absolutely classic.
But I did post it
because I thought it might be worth reading or even discussing by others in the forum. So by all means
do discuss it, and aim some valid comments at me if you see fit, but please
@TaoPhoenix, don't try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs in the process.
