interview questions

Lee Berman · 04 Jan 2011, 13:52 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2011 08:52:44 -0500
Subject: (urth) interview questions
Message-ID: <SNT123-W3C70FA1AC9F48F33CAA4BCF080 at phx.gbl>

>Tony Ellis: As Gerry says, the reference to Dollo's Law isn't inexplicable, it's
>VRT explaining why he can't use a pen properly.Regardless of which, I don't see what 
>point you're making. Dollo's Law is not going to give a dray horse tiny little organs, 
>and if it did it would no longer be a dray horse.

My point is that only Marsch could be aware of Dollo's Law, unless the imitation was
99.999% perfect, including the neural connections for Marsch's thumb.

My point is that a dray horse and a carabao are both 1 ton creatures. Only an abo/shape and
size-shifter could make the mistake of thinking a carcass would weigh 15 lbs. (and perhaps 
that a disguised circumcizer would be the right size to retract the organs of a 15 pound horse).

What I'm really saying is that even when we come to the realization that Dr. Marsch may have
been replaced by an abo, we don't really know. The evidence is contradictory. Before the Wolfe
interview quote there was a significant camp who argued that there was no conclusive evidence
that Dr. Marsch was replaced (Tony were you among them?).

I was pleased that in a recent post Gerry, amidst the rants of "simple and obvious facts" and 
"correct interpretation" there was an admission of: "Actually if it were 100% false or 100% true 
it would violate the rules of 5HoC, in which just about *nothing* is completely false or completely 
true."

So, based on the evidence there are a range of conclusions, from "nobody is replaced", to "one person 
is replaced" to "some people are replaced" to "all people are replaced". Tony you recognize that there 
is evidence both that Shadow Children are degenerated humans and predatory psychic alients in a recent 
post. Same principle, I think.

Is there one "best" conclusion?

>Jerry Friedman: I don't think we have to have prejudices on every point.

I do, especially in evaluating fiction. We are analyzing the words of another human being through the 
filter of our own brain which has been shaped by unique genetic factors, upbringing, culture, nationality, 
unique personal experience, etc. Nobody has exactly the same brain, therefore we all have prejudices.

Choosing a "best" conclusion to a Wolfe puzzle requires using your unique brain and thus, by definition,
is partially a product of predjudice. Wolfe has set a trap for us all. We are all human and we all want
to think "hah! Wolfe has set out all this false evidence for those dummies with other theories. Secretly
he is writing to those readers with the perception to recognize the truth. LIKE ME!"

That's why he won't answer questions. Look what happened with his revelations regarding Dr. Marsch and
Urth/Green.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net