Continued in the comments...

There's an interesting follow on debate in the comments of Reza's last post "The Trouble with Scientific Data".

Enjoy!

Why Not Just Call?

Paul and Reza discuss why Paul wrote a novel instead of picking up the phone. This back and forth is taken from the original blog post comments.

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Monday, January 21, 2008 8:04:00 AM: Reza said...

What!?!?!
I can't believe you have time to write that response but you don't have time to discuss it over the phone! Boo.

We are talking about two different things here:
1) accuracy (or lack thereof) and
2) effective communication and persuasiveness.

Let's talk offline. Setup a time.
R



Monday, January 21, 2008 10:51:00 AM: Paul said...

It was the night of the second greatest game in Giant's History!!! I realize that I don't care but I figured you'd be watching!!!

So yes, yes I'll call...

My starting position for our future conversation is that they are not completely separate topics. Accuracy, simplicity and effective presentation are inexorably linked.

Talk to you soon my brother!


Some Friends Voice a Preference

The next day a bunch of our friends got on our case about taking the debate offline. We agreed to keep posting, thus this blog was born.

Frankly I (Paul) was glad to keep it on-line. I've debated Reza live, and it's not a fair match. I've lost a debate with him where he agreed with me but took the other side just for fun.

The Division Bell

Two weeks ago I posted a very positive review of the Story of Stuff video. On seeing my post my friend Reza checked out the video and had a very different opinion of the video.

Reza and I usually agree on stuff like this, so our differing opinions on the Story of Stuff was a bit of a surprise. We started debating via comments on the original blog post which is a bit tedious. I tend towards uncontrollable verbosity and the comment window only fits a few sentences...

Just as we were about to take our debate off-line, some of our friends noticed the debate and actually asked us to keep it online. Tired of the comment system we agreed to move the debate to a joint blog.

So this is it. I'm going to copy the existing comments from my blog to this blog and we'll continue the debate here.