Rishon Rishon

Detail thinkers, Holistic thinkers - Part 4

It has been bothering me that I haven’t related to Steven Den Beste’s central point that getting nitpicking emails frustrates him. (I do have something to say about that, and I might in a future post, but a the moment I have no time.) The reason for that is, despite what I said, and despite the actual post that I linked to, what I really had in mind (I just realized this now) and wanted to talk about was Steven’s Chinese Water Torture post. In that post he describes his reaction to the sheer quantity of email – not to nitpicking emails in particular. He says:

Almost all of these letters were friendly and helpful. But the cumulative effect of them is like a piledriver, especially when I'm not 100%. A friendly slap on the back can be bracing and supportive, but a thousand slaps on the back will probably kill you, and certainly leave you black-and-blue. None of these people know each other; none of them knew what anyone else might have been writing to me. But I receive them all.

This strikes me as the reaction of a man who wants to relate to each email holistically – the way he would like others to relate to his posts – the only really meaningful way to relate to them, as he sees it. But, as I have said, this is a relatively slow process, impossible to apply quickly to large quantities of data. The knowledge that most of it will turn out to be holistically irrelevant must be particularly galling.

Perhaps it will be of some comfort that hardly anyone expects him to relate to his email holistically.