X-Message-Number: 16303 From: Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 22:52:15 EDT Subject: I'm not your hammer "All of your problems may be nails but I'm not your hammer." -- Mike Darwin I confess, I like praise more than the next guy. It feels good to be thanked, praised, or congratulated on a job well done. I'm trying to be better about giving more of it when its due others, and to be more thankful when it comes my way. So, I thank Thomas Donaldson for his kind remarks about Kryos' work on the problem of improving Transport and reducing ischemic injury in cryopatients. However, this praise comes by way of criticism of Thomas' own cryonics organization. This is not the context in which I or anyone at Kryos wishes to be acknowledged. The reasons for this are as follows: 1) It is unnecessary: if you have a beef with a service provider, simply state it. Your message will be clearer for this. 2) It is counterproductive: if you want to make someone stop listening and get angry just say "Well, if only you were more like Jim's wife, she really knows how to cook and manage a career." Any variation on this will do for either gender. 3) It is manipulative: when you compare organizations and people in this way the usual aim is to goad one into action by comparing their actions to another in a way that is calculated to make them feel threatened. In most cases the result is simply to make them very angry. This causes them to stop listening to you or to do the exact opposite of what you suggest. 4) It usually hurts you most of all: Few people like to be dragged into a fight. Still fewer will thank the person who dragged them into it. Damning with praise, faint or otherwise, is likely to make both sides angry at you. Neither I nor Kryos feel any enmity towards any extant cryonics organization. Further, we don't want to be used as a whipping boy to solve other peoples' problems. Being so used could, however unjustly, cause us to have feelings of ill will develop where we wanted the reverse. That will make us angry. Enemies should be chosen more carefully than friends: they usually last longer and are more motivated. We'd rather do our own choosing. So praise or criticize as you will, but please try to avoid entangling the innocent in your battles. Thanks, Mike Darwin Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=16303