[Bmi] I was banned from connectionist mailing list?

[Ben Goertzel]

Hi John,

I think the bottom line is, if you want folks in the neuroscience or
cog-sci or computing or engineering world to take BMM seriously and
actually read it, you should stop putting political content in it,
unless that political content is very *directly* related to neural or
cog-sci issues....  You should use a different outlook for
disseminating your political views.

Regarding using an alias for your political articles, that's a
separate issue.  But as someone who lives in China (I live in Hong
Kong, but visit Beijing often), I'll tell you my view....  First, the
Chinese gov't is not dumb and if they care they could very easily
deduce who wrote your BMM politics articles, in spite of your use of
an alias.  Second, they don't really care that much what is written in
English on the outside-China Web....  To alarm them, you'd need to
write in Chinese and get a following inside China.   Anyway this is
just my observation and peripheral to the main matters at hand...

-- Ben


On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 10:29 PM, Juyang Weng <weng at cse.msu.edu> wrote:
>
> [Instructions to subscribe or unsubscribe are attached at the end]
>
>
>> On 3/30/15 2:55 PM, Yoonsuck Choe wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Hi John,
>>>
>>> As a first step you might want to drop the alias-based authorship of the
>>> Brain Mind Magazine and drop the political content. It is not difficult to
>>> infer who wrote many of those alias-based articles. Why hide behind the
>>> alias? Also, scientists don't come to the connectionists mailing list to get
>>> political content.
>>>
>>> I think it was not just the announcement of the BMM table of contents,
>>> but what was in the table of contents that led to the unsubscription
>>> decision by the connectionists list. Articles written by anonymous people,
>>> and political articles that have nothing much to do with science (to be
>>> fair, some were about science policy) may have been a deciding factor.
>>>
>>> Please feel free to share this if you want, but please cite the whole
>>> email if you decide to share, not just parts.
>>>
>>> Yoonsuck
>>> choe at tamu.edu
>>>
>>> Yoonsuck Choe, Ph.D.              Dept. of Comp. Sci. & Engineering
>>> Professor                       Texas A&M University
>>> Director, Brain Networks Laboratory       3112 TAMU
>>> Email: choe at tamu.edu, choe at cs.tamu.edu    College Station, TX 77843-3112
>>> WWW:   http://faculty.cse.tamu.edu/choe   Phone: +1-979-845-5466
>>> Lab:   http://research.cse.tamu.edu/bnl   Fax:   +1-979-847-8578
>>>
>
> On 3/30/15 5:12 PM, Juyang Weng wrote:
>>
>> Dear Yoonsuck,
>>
>> Thanks for the comments.
>>
>>  Juan is a real person, not alias.  He has his picture in the article.
>>
>> For politics related contents, it is often to use alias (pen names), as
>> otherwise some authors may face retaliations or nobody dares to speak out.
>>
>> The U.S. legal system protects witnesses/writers (by hiding their ID) and
>> it also protects freedom of press.
>>
>> What do you think?
>>
>> -John
>
>
> --
> --
> Juyang (John) Weng, Professor
> Department of Computer Science and Engineering
> MSU Cognitive Science Program and MSU Neuroscience Program
> 428 S Shaw Ln Rm 3115
> Michigan State University
> East Lansing, MI 48824 USA
> Tel: 517-353-4388
> Fax: 517-432-1061
> Email: weng at cse.msu.edu
> URL: http://www.cse.msu.edu/~weng/
> ----------------------------------------------
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-- 
Ben Goertzel, PhD
http://goertzel.org

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw