[Martin Taylor 2018.02.25.23.14]
[Rick Marken 2018-02-25_16:15:39]
I didn't think Alex's question had any "beating your wife" aspect,
since you had refused to answer his earlier question, but instead
seemed to be doing what you could to avoid answering it. So when he
asked what I thought was a quite reasonable follow-up question,
referencing the style of your earlier answer, your lawyerly (using
tiny loopholes to answer something different entirely) response
prompted me to ask my question in the form of a forced-choice
selection that I thought you could not answer with a lawyerly
weasel-out. And it worked, so I guess it wasn’t a weird way of
asking, after all.
Don't you get tired of being infallible? You know exactly what
people mean that isn’t what they wrote, better than the writers do.
Bruce, for example, points out that equilibrium systems as well as
control systems resist disturbances, and he gives you a dramatic
example of an equilibrium system that resists a disturbance, so you
tell him he’s wrong because his example isn’t a control system and
only control systems resist disturbances. I think that’s called
chutzpah, is it not? Anyway, I’m sure that Bruce now knows that he
didn’t write that equilibrium systems resist disturbances, and will
thank you for letting him know 
In my message earlier today I suggested that you might actually read
the message that you were criticizing for things it did not say. Now
you say that I didn’t understand Alex, which wasn’t what I wrote in
the quoted sentence that led to your assertion. (I don’t suppose you
want to know, but what I did was allow for the possibility that I
might have misinterpreted Alex, so as to give him a way to correct
me if that was the case, in the knowledge that he would not offend
me by so doing.)
You treat other people's words in the same cavalier way you treat
mathematics. The truth is the way you want the world to be, quite
independently of logic or of the evidence before your eyes, just
like your current President and his cronies in Congress. You profess
not to be a Republican, but your approach to asserting the truth
seems very like theirs. It’s tiresome, and not at all conducive to
political discussion, let alone the kind of scientific discussion we
would hope to have when trying to build our understanding of what
organisms individually or in groups do, based on the solid
foundations provided by Bill Powers.
Thanks for an actual answer.
And no, the only "in" I have with any of the editors is that one
(the Editor-in-chief) helped me to get a couple of the equations
that looked fine on my machine to come out properly in their
required format. He did inform me also that you had been asked to
provide a response to be published alongside my comment, but that
you had not done so in spite of being prompted, and that therefore
my comment would be published by itself.
On that basis I expected your answer to be one of 4, 5, or 6. I
would have preferred 1, but failing that, I’m glad your answer was
2. I will be interested to see what you have to say, if it isn’t
hidden behind a paywall. I hope it is mathematically sane, in
contrast to the original paper.
Martin
···
Martin Taylor (2018.02.25.17.55)–
MT: Are you going to answer Alex's question
without going lawyerly?
RM: In what world is that answer "lawyerly"? I thought
my answer was quite straight-forward, especially
considering the “When did you stop beating you wife?”
style of the question.
AGM:
I meant something very simple: are you
going to face our critique seriously, or
play shell-game again?
RM: I'm afraid that will be up to you to
decide. Though I’m pretty sure I know what
decision you’ll make.
MT: Let me ask it in
another way. If this isn’t what Alex was asking, I will
apologize to him, but it is the question to which I
would like an answer.
RM: Wow, you didn't understand what Alex was asking and
nevertheless you say that my answer to him was “lawyerly”.
Do you guys ever get tired of yourselves?
MT: Which of the
following choices is true of your EBR response: (1)
already published, (2) accepted but not yet published.
(3) submitted but not yet accepted, (4) not yet
submitted but in progress, (5) not yet being written but
not abandoned, or (6) abandoned.
RM: Well, that's a pretty weird way of asking. But the
answer is (2). I assumed you guys already knew since you
seem to have an “in” with at least one of the editors.
