This originally appeared on LinkedIn. Archiving it here for posterity (and accessibility).
Dear Jon THE REVELATOR, we need to answer your comment handling inquiry in Censorship in the Procurement World with a quadrant, because they (the Big X and Big Analyst Firms) won’t understand the discussion otherwise.
| Personal | Not Personal | |
| No Claim | 1. Delete | 2. Ignore |
| Valid Claim | 3. Insult, Respond | 4. Debate |
1. If the response has no claim and is personal, such as “You’re an @ssh0l3 and a gr!nch!“, you can delete. Flame wars are for Facebook and X, not business networking platforms.
2. If the response has no claim and is not personal, such as “Hey, I like the colour blue too!“, then you just ignore it, even if you feel it is totally irrelevant. Maybe it’ll distract from the core message or core conversation in the presence of a weaker mind, but take the high road, even if you are preying on that weaker mind as your next sucker, err, client.
3. If the response has a claim, but also has an insult, respond appropriately. e.g. if you get something like, “You’re dumber than a doorknob for not believing in our messiah, Gen-AI, because early results haven’t disproven that intelligence won’t emerge someday if we just give it more cores and more data.”, then it’s okay to respond with something like “Dear disillusioned cultist, if you look at the underlying science, i.e. the math and algorithms, you’ll see that it fundamentally doesn’t even support the capabilities being claimed now and cannot support support the emergent intelligence you so claim. P.S. Please don’t drink the punch at the X-mas party, your employer is almost bankrupt and since it doesn’t want to fold, it has to cut it’s biggest costs somehow …”
4. If the response is just a claim to the contrary with a reasonable argument, such as “your methodology is no better than anyone else’s, and may in fact be worse, as success rates as a whole have not improved and, in fact, for technologies in your hype cycle, have actually gotten worse so you shouldn’t be claiming to be able to provide visionary leadership to tech leaders“, then it’s a perfectly valid comment and question, should not be deleted, and the poster should respond with whatever evidence they have to back up their bold claims. (And if they are just two wild and crazy guys who are all in all just inept strangers in a strange land, so be it! The truth must come out!)
Basically, what we’ve done with your leadership is to just expose the truth about these Big X and Big Analyst cults, who seem to all subscribe to the “𝐖𝐞’𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐥𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭, 𝐧𝐨 𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞” mantra, as I’ve had multiple comments deleted by all of them too!
(And the comments I made didn’t even contain a single mention of f6ckw@ds or tragic quadrants!)