The advice to avoid idioms that may not be universally understood is good. My further issue with the misuse of "straw-man" (which really is not, or should not be, separable from "straw-man argument") is that a "straw-man" in the established usage is something that is always intended to be a failure or designed to be obviously and fatally flawed. That's what makes it fundamentally different from a trial balloon or a first crack at something or a prototype or an initial design proposal -- these are all intended, despite any remaining flaws, to have merits that are likely worth pursuing further, whereas a straw-man is only intended to be knocked apart as a way to preclude and put an end to further consideration of something.
On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 10:38 AM, Sean Owen <so...@cloudera.com> wrote: > Well, it's more of a reference to the fallacy than anything. Writing down > a proposed action implicitly claims it's what others are arguing for. It's > self-deprecating to call it a "straw man", suggesting that it may not at > all be what others are arguing for, and is done to openly invite criticism > and feedback. The logical fallacy is "attacking a straw man", and that's > not what was written here. > > Really, the important thing is that we understand each other, and I'm > guessing you did. Although I think the usage here is fine, casually, > avoiding idioms is best, where plain language suffices, especially given we > have people from lots of language backgrounds here. > > > On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 6:11 PM Mark Hamstra <m...@clearstorydata.com> > wrote: > >> <rant>Alright, that does it! Who is responsible for this "straw-man" >> abuse that is becoming too commonplace in the Spark community? "Straw-man" >> does not mean something like "trial balloon" or "run it up the flagpole and >> see if anyone salutes", and I would really appreciate it if Spark >> developers would stop using "straw-man" to mean anything other than its >> established meaning: The logical fallacy of declaring victory by knocking >> down an easily defeated argument or position that the opposition has never >> actually made.</rant> >> >> On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 5:51 AM, Sean Owen <so...@cloudera.com> wrote: >> >> BTW I wrote up a straw-man proposal for migrating the wiki content: >> >> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-18073 >> >> On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 12:25 PM Holden Karau <hol...@pigscanfly.ca> >> wrote: >> >> Right now the wiki isn't particularly accessible to updates by external >> contributors. We've already got a contributing to spark page which just >> links to the wiki - how about if we just move the wiki contents over? This >> way contributors can contribute to our documentation about how to >> contribute probably helping clear up points of confusion for new >> contributors which the rest of us may be blind to. >> >> If we do this we would probably want to update the wiki page to point to >> the documentation generated from markdown. It would also mean that the >> results of any update to the contributing guide take a full release cycle >> to be visible. Another alternative would be opening up the wiki to a >> broader set of people. >> >> I know a lot of people are probably getting ready for Spark Summit EU >> (and I hope to catch up with some of y'all there) but I figured this a >> relatively minor proposal. >> -- >> Cell : 425-233-8271 >> Twitter: https://twitter.com/holdenkarau >> >> >>
