[Sigia-l] Rant about bad IA practice.

[Christina Wodtke]

I suppose no one on the list really wants to know where that came from, 
but my sense of self-importance makes me eager to confess. After I sent 
that mail, I immediately stopped viewing the list, and deleted without 
reading, so I would cool off.

Stewart Dean wrote:
> Christina's responce wasnt a personal attack but the troll thing, well without being overly defensive I've been part of this group for a while and I was essentialy saying 'A sucks - if I'm wrong tell me why'.  

It wasn't a personal attack (I hoped that the Monty Python quote would 
help moderate it) but rather an extended burst of anger at the body of 
assumptions we carry, both around best practices and around what we 
think are wrong with them. I have been questioning best practices since 
the first bubble (when they certainly were too new to be best) to 
earlier today. Stewart's email, redolent of Jakob's rhetoric, reminded 
me of so many other pronouncements -- many made by me in the past. No 
one hates cigarette smoking like an ex-smoker, and no one hates 
publicity-generating generalizations like one who has been proved stupid 
in the past.

Lately I have been driven mad by ignorance; my own, my profession's, our 
sister profession's. Sitting on this list, IxD, IAI, reading Adam's mad 
rant on IA, I see complacency and howling. What if instead we take the 
time to learn instead. I'm reading up on Dunbar numbers and Bayesian 
weighting. What are you doing with your time?

Okay, off to unsubscribe or at least filter, and read and work again.