Just when I was preparing my own nasty contribution, you had to inject calm and reason into the thread.
In my own experience, if I, or my people, prepare any engineering document, such as a research report, there better be appropriate citations. If we prepare a manual, a) we cut and paste with shameless abandon and b) there are no citations. It’s the difference between a manual and other types of writing. (No one expects citations to scholarly papers on network or information theory in the users’ manual for their cell phone.) In fact, if I caught someone trying to find a way to rewrite things to avoid “plagiarism,” I’d probably chew them out.
Criticizing a manual for being a manual instead of a dissertation strikes me as a bit silly. I think Dr. Price has entered a culture (military and/or technical) of which he has neither knowledge nor appreciation, and imposed his own cultural norms. (Marc, wouldn’t that be a pretty serious violation of his own “cultural” norms?)
The only other point that approached validity was criticizing the HTTs for their research. On that score, I wasn’t aware they were over there to perform research. I wasn’t aware that the war was an experiment. Does he really think it serves anyone’s interest to have troops blunder about in complete ignorance of the culture they’re dealing with?
Overall, Dr. Price’s article didn’t offer anything of value. I’m sorry I wasted my time reading it.
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