Burden tennis is an intellectual parlor game, wherein the players “hit” the “burden of proof” across the net from one side to the other. We see this expressed as “the burden is in your court” or “the burden of proof is yours”, with often both sides making similar statements.
Burden tennis can be a fun game to watch, but it is sometimes wiser to avoid being a participant.
Note: I did not invent the term “burden tennis”. I saw that being used on the net somewhere many years ago. But it seems like a good term.
This post is really a reply to Patrick’s post in the moderation thread. I’ve started a new thread, because the discussion really doesn’t belong there.
As far as I know, the expression “burden of proof” comes from law. With the assumption that the defendent is innocent until the charges are proved, the burden of proof is initially with the prosecution.
Even in courts, the standard of evidence is “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” for criminal trials, and “the preponderance of evidence” for civil trials. Both of those standards fall short of “demonstrated fact”. And both are ambiguous in meaning and ultimately up to the subjective judgment of the jurors.
I largely agree with hotshoe_ about this. The frequent demand for facts sometimes gets out of hand.
If I had required factual evidence for everything that my school teachers said, I would never have graduated out of kindergarten. The demand for evidence seems to come from the idea that “knowledge is justified true belief.” I see that as an absurd definition of knowledge. Children do learn from stories such as “Little Red Riding Hood” even though they know it is fiction. They aren’t learning facts. They are learning ways of interacting with other people and with the external world.
If I open a newspaper (either print or online), I may come across a sudoku puzzle and a crossword puzzle. Solving the sudoku puzzle is completely a matter of facts and logical reasoning. But solving a crossword puzzle has very little to do with facts. The clues are often ambiguous, and deliberately so. We never know if we have the correct answer to a specific clue, where “correct” means “intended by the puzzle author.” But, when we are done, we see that all of the answers fit together in such a way that it is highly likely that we have the correct solution.
In what follows, I’ll use the terms “sudoku evidence” and “crossword evidence”.
Sudoku evidence: demonstrated facts that lead to a logical conclusion.
Crossword evidence: things all fit together in such a way that the conclusion seems highly likely (or “consilience”).
When I deny that “knowledge = justified true belief”, I’m really suggesting that the bulk of our knowledge is in the form of a wealth of causal connections into the world such as would allow us to make good decisions based on crossword evidence.
Most of what we do and learn in life depends on crossword evidence, rather than sudoku evidence. At this forum, we sometimes see Frankie/JoeG asserting that there is no evidence for evolution. Presumably he is talking about sudoku evidence, and he might be right about that. But there’s a wealth of crossword evidence.
So, back to the burden of proof.
My own view is that the burden of proof lies with the one who wants to persuade others. When hotshoe_ says “Now I accept that as a consequence you may choose not to believe that I have stated a fact” she is saying that she is not particularly concerned whether others are persuaded. So, on my view, there is no burden of proof. And if others do not accept what she said, there is no burden of proof on them either. There can be a lot of useful and informative discussion without playing burden tennis. And most of our decision making in ordinary life is based on crossword evidence. Likewise, science is very much dependent on crossword evidence. Mathematics mostly depends on sudoku evidence. However, setting up a new and useful axiom system can depend on crossword evidence.
Open for discussion.
I demand evidence that it gets out of hand.*
Glen Davidson
*Oh…
Neil,
You’re neglecting the ethical dimension.
Suppose I casually mention to your neighbors, who have children, that you are a registered sex offender. I have no evidence whatsoever that the claim is true. If I’m “not particularly concerned” whether the neighbors are persuaded, does that lift the burden of proof from my shoulders?
Kind of depends on the consequences of false statements being made.
No one is inconvenienced if I lie about what I had for breakfast.
People are inconvenienced if I follow a scripture that says witches (or adulterers, or masturbators or apostates) must be killed or flogged.
If a government enacts or supports laws based on scripture, it matters whether the scripture is true.
Getting on to a frequent topic of this forum, I can’t imagine anyone being inconvenienced by evolution being true or not true, except people who would like to get on with enforcing laws based on scripture.
Granted. But that changes the topic away from debating.
I’m glad you moved this discussion to a separate thread, Neil, but I don’t think you touched on the core point of my comment (which of course could be due to poor writing on my part). I’ll reproduce part of it here:
This isn’t a dinner party. This is The Skeptical Zone. This issue isn’t about “rights to the output of [your] mind” or getting someone’s approval. It’s not about playing games or making demands. It’s not about assuming people are not trustworthy. It’s about getting to (some reasonable approximation of) the truth.
You [hotshoe_] yourself have quoted Hitchens’ Razor (“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”) favorably. This is simply a pithy summary of who bears the burden of proof. In a skeptical environment, failure to support your claims is justification for not accepting it, regardless of the character of the person making the claim.
This isn’t personal. Either a claim can be supported or it cannot, regardless of who makes it. If the person making the claim can’t or won’t support it, the honest response is to retract it.
Perhaps you see this site differently than I do. I base my view on the site’s goals:
and on this comment by Reciprocating Bill that Lizzie added to the Rules page:
The game rules here are to apply the tools of skepticism (after all, “skeptical” is right in the name of the site). That means reason, logic, skeptical analysis, and, of course, evidence. In this forum all claims should be supported and any that are not are subject to challenge. If a participant can’t or won’t support a claim, that person should retract it.
Is this a dinner party like chat room or is it a forum for skeptical discussion? To the extent it is the latter, participants have an obligation to support their claims.
THIS IS THE SKEPTICAL ZONE!
Then if you think she has not provided evidence, it’s okay to dismiss her claim.
Personally, I think it’s okay for her to discontinue participation in that particular argument at that point. If she persists in repeating her assertion, then the burden of proof becomes stronger. Otherwise, accept what she said as only her unsupported opinion.
It’s a discussion site, not an argument site. If every assertion has to become an argument, then this will quickly turn into an unfriendly site and most participants will leave.
Patrick thinks that this is a “skeptical” site and ought to adhere to “skeptical” rules, even though there’s no rule stating any such thing.
If there’s any skepticism to be found here it’s a joke, and there are no rules for being a skeptic. Acting like a jerk is not “being skeptical.”
Seriously, the idea that all claims must be supported or retracted is confused (and patrick’s post here constitutes ‘evidence’ for a claim I made on the Moderation thread that in spite of his obvious enjoyment of this topic, his posts on it aren’t good). The requirement that all claims must be supported cannot be met–and if it could would lead to a vicious regress. Those who expect responses to repetitive ‘but why?’ questions aren’t emulating science, they’re channeling toddlers.
Some claims aren’t amenable to ‘proof’ and habitual requests for such proofs are silly. Does that mean support is never required for any claim? Of course not. The support necessary is dependent on the nature of the assertion.
I like the idea of “crossword evidence”. Susan Haack uses crosswords as a metaphor for how we do science. We have to puzzle out the best fit between the clues given us to by experimental data and our own stock of usable knowledge.
I also like the idea of “burden tennis”. Teed Rockwell uses that metaphor in an excellent discussion of the debate between Dennett and Chalmers.
I actually engaged in a bit of that today (though I had to play both sides). I was explaining the debate between dualism and materialism to my students. I pointed out that dualism avoids the hard problem of consciousness and intentionality at the expense of falling afoul of the causal interaction problem. By contrast, materialism avoids the causal interaction problem at the expense of falling afoul of the hard problem of consciousness and intentionality.
It’s a bit of a cheap stunt, since more sophisticated versions will avoid those classical problems, or try to solve them, or blunt the force of the objection somehow.
Point is, burden tennis is not restricted to the issues we have here. It’s bound to arise whenever people with deeply held and incompatible prejudices attempt to have a semi-rational dialogue.
And so it doesn’t seem like I’m being obscurantist here, my remark that my book must be a page-turner since keiths read it in about 7 minutes does not require evidence. Neither do my jokes suggesting that the requests for such support is ridiculous. This ought to be obvious.
Other claims I’ve made–that patrick shouldn’t be a moderator, that keiths is a quote-miner and liar are more serious and do require support. But denials that such support, whn given, is sufficient are not evidence for the absence of such support. They simply reflect an assessment by someone regarding its probity. People differ about such assessments and must make their own judgments, but the claim that those who want the most evidence for this or that are somehow epistemically superior because of their ‘additional skepticism’ is also ridiculous. The solipsist wins that game.
The assessment of warrant is tricky and there are bound to be differences of opinion. Those who are sure that their own tests are infallible need to leave toddlerhood and grow the fuck up.
Nice post,KN. I too like Haack’s stuff on ‘justifiherentism’ (or whatever she called it). The x-word analogy is a really good one, I think.
“Foundherentism”. A cross between foundationalism and coherentism.
Right, thanks. I like that neologism as well as her work on that subject.
I’m skeptical of Patrick’s version of skepticism.
keiths:
Neil:
No, ethical issues still arise in debates. The stakes aren’t often as high as in my sex-offender example, but they are still there.
Even walto admits that this claim requires justification, though he hasn’t provided it:
False accusations are an ethical issue, Neil.
Me too, although I hasten to add that he’s supported two somewht different ‘ethics of belief’ claims in the last two days. (But as neither of them are reasonable for the reasons I’ve just given, I guess that’s neither here nor there.)
Thank you Neil, for starting this thread – I believe it’s an interesting topic, somewhat related to the question “What triggers skepticism?” which I have been noodling on for a while now.
I like your division of evidential support into ‘suduko evidence’ and ‘crossword evidence’. We have to be very, very careful about ‘crossword evidence’, thanks to the way our minds function (or rather malfunction). All sorts of bits of evidence can be fitted into our worldview, making a nice consilient picture. But if we are viewing these snippets as supportive merely because they make a nice, compelling narrative, we may have failed to ever engage System 2. It is vital to a “Skeptical Zone” to challenge such ‘self-evident’ beliefs, in order to engage System 2. Someone may consider it ‘obvious’ that the death penalty acts as a deterrent, without ever having looked at the data.
If we allow unsupported claims to stand, we open the door for Cavuto-style rhetoric (google “Cavuto mark”) – smears and well-poisoning, argument by assertion rather than by data. Furthermore, ruling that a claim only acquires a ‘burden of proof’ if it is repeated is fairy obviously the wrong criterion to use: a commenter could indulge in a series of related, but separate, unsupported claims to paint the picture he or she desires.
I firmly believe that we should support the question “Can you support that claim?”. Done politely, it offers an invitation to engage System 2 where it had not perhaps been previously engaged. AIUI, that is the whole point of this site. I concede that it opens the door for a new brand of trolling, but this site’s rules cannot avoid incessant trolling anyway, so some variety might even be welcome…
However, as a sop to those of you who do not share Patrick’s and my view here, I will note that “Support or Retract” is a false dichotomy. IMO there is a third response allowable : “Just my opinion” or JMO for short. The original assertor is explicitly acknowledging that they are unwilling or unable to support the claim in question. The audience can attach due weight to the claim and everyone can move on.
Finally a subtle note on the Laws of Burden Tennis:
Serve: “Can you support claim X?”
Illegal return: “Why do you doubt it?”
Legal return: “Yes. See Avery, Macleod and McCarty1944 J Exp Med 79:137″
Legal return: ” It’s just my opinion, but why do you think I’m wrong?” but in this latter exchange, the returner of service has forgone the right to introduce new evidence; he is limited to rebuttals.
The reason for this rule has been explained by Patrick on the Varieties of Religious Language Thread.
Superficially, this looks great. In practice, the Gish Group by now has an impressive library of creationist books (Behe, Wells, Dembski, Dennett, Meyer, plenty of others), and access to motherlodes of mined quotes. Nor is it uncommon for creationists to provide a bunch of footnotes like your example, knowing that their target readership is vanishingly unlikely to discover that Avery, Macleod and McCarty don’t even exist, or never mentioned the topic, or flat refuted the claim footnoted in the text.
Then you have to roll up your sleeves and determine, after much effort and time, that this “legal return” in fact DOES NOT CONSTITUTE SUPPORT. It’s a fake claim.
Another approach is to cite a very long source (book or article), or one long out of print, which in fact doesn’t support the claim but you can’t tell without somehow digging up the source and reading it end to end.
We need to create a new list, like the Steve list, of all evolutionary biologists who have complained about being misrepresented by creationists.
Flint,
Yes, rallies in burden tennis can go on for a long time. Some would say interminably.
“Could you explain how Avery 1944 supports your contention?”
Of my recent rallies, two of my favorites have involved IDists citing an article, then following up by citing the specific figure that they claim supports their position, only to have me point out that the figure legend refutes their argument. The smarter IDists are careful to never get that specific. Which is, as a
greatman once said, ‘telling’.Very nicely done, Neil.
Every time the ball is in his court keiths whiffs at it, and I don’t think it’s because keiths isn’t trying to play the game.
What’s up with that?
DNA_Jock, as I said, I think the appropriateness of requiring a defense or further evidence depends on the nature of the claim being made. If somebody says, e.g., “Well I think there IS a God,” it makes sense to ask for evidence for the claim that there is a God (and, IMO, even for the apparent presupposition that their concept of God is even coherent). But what about the claim that the person BELIEVES it? Do you think they need to provide support for THAT?– e.g., must they show that they go to church regularly, that they say their prayers at night, etc.? That’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it? (It mirrors FMM’s cuckoo claim that we all believe in God whether we realize it or not.) It’s equally absurd, IMO to suggest that someone who says they believe in God really should say only, “Well it’s my opinion that I believe in God” or provide a defense.
So I hope you’ll agree with me that such claims as THAT don’t require support. Maybe that seems like those personal belief type claims are the only kind that ought to be given that waiver. But I don’t think that’s right. The scientist who has confirmed her experiment might be asked, “Well how do you know your instruments are all working correctly?” and maybe the answer, “I tested and re-checked all those gauges first” won’t satisfy this doubter. How much must we do for those with OCD?
Or what about the person who uses the principle of non-contradiction when making an argument. Should we require such a one to say, “Well, it’s my opinion that nothing can be both true and false at the same time?” Again, that just seems silly to me.
Or, to take a case which has weirdly fired up somebody around here, what about somebody who says (sarcastically) “I think this book must really be a page-turner, since my wife read it in about seven minutes.” Is there some further preparatory arrangements that have to be noted, in your view?
Again, suppose someone says something along these lines: “Joe is intellectually dishonest and a coward.” But then denies that that violates a rule against ad-hominems. What additional “evidence” do you think needs to be brought to show the statement is rule-violative? Keep in mind, there’s no limit to the amount of evidence that may be claimed to be required. Isn’t it just a fools errand at some point?
The point is, Jock, there are no hard and fast algorithms one can depend on here. As Aristotle noted, we have categories that we can’t get past, and insistence that we do so isn’t only silly, it’s actually counter-productive in any legitimate search for truth.
God exists.
Prove it!
Prove that I have to prove it.
But you have the burden of proof.
Prove that I have the burden of proof.
You must support your claim or retract it.
You must support your claim that I must support my claim or you must retract it.
yada yada yada
I think that sort of colloquy shows the problem with insisting that everything must be supported. It’s just a request for an infinite regress. I think it’s clear that God claims require support, that the burden is on the theist, and I think that you (and theists generally) agree with that. But, as your dialog above suggests, patrick’s ethic-of-belief doesn’t follow from that.
That’s sports announcer coverage of a game of burden tennis.
It’s true, there is no objective burden of proof.
But normally human beings work like this: It takes some kind of convincing to believe. So the conversation is one between the unconvinced and the convinced. If the convinced wants the unconvinced to be convinced, they should try to convince them. They don’t do that by saying to the unconvinced that they should justify their lack of conviction to the convinced.
This is how it works on pretty much any subject, whether it is god-belief, belief that you are the strongets person on Earth or whatever. Problem is, god-believers usually has some weird double-standard when it comes to god-belief. On the subject of the existence of god theists want to have a totally different standard and ruleset than they would normally use everywhere else in their life. This is perfectly encapsulated in this picture:
http://40.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kssq1jxGoT1qa95s8o1_540.jpg
Even religious believers normally use conventional logic in their everyday life. But for some reason if the subject changes to whether their god-beliefs are justified, the rules suddenly change and they go nuts about pushing away a burden of proof they accept as perfectly rational on EVERY other matter.
I like this because it makes the burden of proof into nothing more than a function of psychological properties–and a piece of advice. I think it follows from it that people are prudent not to (not: “shouldn’t”) be quite as sure of things as they often are. The more convinced you are, the higher the “burden.” Will you pay 50 bucks if you’re wrong? Will you pay $50K? How sure ARE you?
It makes a nice rule of thumb, I think, because it leaves all the moral posturing that some are so fond of here to one side. “You must recant.” “NO. You must blow it out your hole.”
It is sometimes difficult to distinguish the convinced believer from the adamant doubter, but there’s no real requirement to do so here, since there’s no axiom system being appealed to–just a sort of fortune cookie “moral.” Obviously, courts can’t do that, and empirical investigations require us to start somewhere. But for internet “debates” I think this is excellent. Much less moral indignation if one realizes one is just puffing because of one’s own “certainty” and the more of that one has the more one is wise (not “has”) to do viz. those who don’t agree.
Or, in order to halt the regress, something is supposed to be Given (in the pernicious sense) in order to serve as a “foundation”.
The correct response, I suppose, is to follow the lead of Peirce et al. and say that the request for justification occurs in specific contexts and is motivated by specific purposes. It’s not a move to be iterated endlessly. (If it were, argument could be implemented by an algorithm.)
Walto, have you read any of Frederich Will? His Beyond Deduction is quite excellent — actually, much better in pragmatist epistemology than anything written before Michael Williams and Susan Haack.
I own a copy of Induction and Justification but I’ve never read it. I may have mentioned before that Frederick Will is pundit George Will’s father, and the son once told a joke his father liked to tell regarding spinach and mayonaisse, but I can’t remember it–in spite of it apparently always cracking Fred up.
Incidentally, about a decade after buying that book, I picked up something on induction by Virginia Held that looked good, but which I’ve also never gotten to. Do you know her work at all?
I’d like to restore the blockquote and move all the extraneous italics above, but I don’t have the edit link for that comment for some reason. That happens occasionally when I post using my phone.
That’s a false dichotomy, not to mention incorrect. There are plenty of arguments on this site.
The question is, what kinds of discussions are aligned with the goals of this site. My view, based on the excerpts I’ve already posted from the Rules page, is that this is a site for skeptical discussions. That means that asking for positive claims about reality to be supported with logic and evidence is not only acceptable but should be expected.
Expecting participants to skeptically evaluate assertions using logic, evidence, and other tools often grouped under the umbrella of the scientific method is not inherently unfriendly.
From another of your comments:
Is your primary objection the risk of “burden tennis”? Let’s take a recent comment from Mung as an example:
By recognizing that this is a site for skeptical discussion, we short-ciruit this silliness. The person making the positive claim has the burden of proof. There is no need for an infinite regress, that is simply one of the guidelines for rational discourse expected on this site.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a risk of chasing supporting claims down a rathole. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of the “Why?” game with a three-year-old knows how that can happen. In practice, though, it becomes readily apparent who is participating in good faith and when the core area of disagreement has been reached. This risk is not a reason to discard the principle that claims should be supported or retracted.
It’s also not to say that everyone is bound to interact only in this fashion. It just means that if someone chooses not to support his or her claims then other participants are justified in summarily dismissing those claims. No extra rules, just a recognition that this is The Skeptical Zone, not The Make Stuff Up Zone.
Which claims are ‘the positive claims’ in mung’s discussion, patrick?
Very well put. I agree completely, including your points about asking politely and allowing the reclassification of what initially appears to be a claim to be an opinion.
In fact, I’d like to see this added to the Rules page, if Lizzie also shares the sentiment.
You agree with him agreeing with you! Remarkable!
The Quote Mine Project is a start on that, but it hasn’t been updated in a while.
The easy stuff first:
Umpire: (2) is a request, not a claim. Game over.
On to the more subtle stuff.
walto, you appear to be conflating claims about external reality with claims about the claimant’s internal mental state. The former are subject to confirmation/dis-confirmation; challenging the latter is generally rude and, at TSZ, generally a rule violation. Your example about the church attendance of people who claim to believe in God seems almost deliberately bad. A better example would be “I am a life-long Red Sox fan.” “Really! What’s with all the Yankee memorabilia in your basement?”
Claims about the claimant’s own mental state almost always fall into the JMO category; marshaling evidence to dispute such claims may be relevant in court (mens rea) or in a parent-child interaction “if he’s just a friend, then how come…”, but not elsewhere.
God claims usually fall into the JMO category, without any need for further clarification:
(Side note: if there’s a difference between these two claims, I, err… well… I don’t give a f#*&)
On the other hand:
Extend beyond the obviously-JMO category.
Likewise, in your example:
The fact-based conversation can continue: “How did you control for the possibility that X?” “Well, in that case you would expect to see…” etc. The conversation (with a 3yo doubter) might continue to regress to the point where we hit “Because I view the LNC as axiomatic.” Whether it satisfies the doubter or not is beside the point. It’s the sane members of the audience that matter. As Patrick has noted, they’ll be able to see the difference.
Rumraket wrote:
I like this. It is a very good point. Unfortunately, people are not always this rational, and rhetoric plays a big role in the convincing business. Often the claimant is not seeking to convince the unconvinced by rational means, but rather just sow seeds of doubt – engage System 1 for at least some of his audience, muddy the waters, as in “Have the Democrats Forgotten the Lessons of 9/11?” and “Is the Liberal Media Helping to Fuel Terror?”. Note that Cavuto adds an extra layer of deniability by phrasing his allegation in the form of a question; as Jon Stewart put it: “Is your mother a whore?’ What? I’m not saying she’s a whore. I’m just wondering out loud if she is a whore. All I’m saying is that reasonable people who have banged your mother for money can disagree.”
But the Cavuto mark is not necessary. Unsupported allegations can be delivered as statements. Interlocutors should be able to challenge such allegations, asking the claimant to “Support, Retract, or JMO”.
As Exhibit A for agnotology and truthiness, your honor, I give you the US Presidential primaries.
A needlessly Guanoed comment is here.
Here’s the bowdlerized version:
walto,
Why not? No one’s taking the seven-minute part literally, but your statement asserts — incorrectly — that I raced through your book, and the motive behind it is pretty clear. Why should your claim be exempt from challenge?
It’s an excellent example of what DNA_Jock describes above:
Imagine if every commenter consistently paused and asked the following questions of him or herself…
…and refrained from clicking ‘Post comment’ unless the answers were both ‘yes’.
With those questions as the criteria, which of the following comments would have seen the light of day?
walto:
hotshoe:
Kantian Naturalist:
I don’t think most people will take walto as asserting that you raced through the book. It is normal to presume that walto was not looking over your shoulder, so has no idea how long it took.
My read is that walto was implicitly asserting that your comprehension of the book was poor, and suggesting that maybe you raced through it. I think most people would interpret walto that way.
Even on your version of what walto asserted, that would not make it a lie. For a statement to be a lie, it must not only be false, but the person who made the assertion must know or believe it to be false. I see the move to guano as appropriate.
And here I am wondering why you have posted three quote mines.
Dunno how y’all know I wasn’t just deprecating my book with my remark about it being a page-turner. But whatever. I’m enjoying.
Neil:
That was a remarkably stupid move on your part, Neil, but it makes my point nicely. Thank you.
Irresponsible comments like yours are exactly why it’s important for TSZers to be able to challenge assertions and ask for evidence.
You just claimed that my three quotes are quote mines. Back it up. Let’s see your evidence.
walto,
That isn’t the issue. We’re talking about your false claim that I raced through the book.
ETA: And, of course, your other false claim.
I think the claim that they’re essentially different and putting them on the same footing is a conflation is controversial. I don’t think, e.g., that we may be any more certain of our “sense-data” or the contents of our “minds” than of the colors of our desks. In my view, these are all subject to varying degrees of error. You may be right about additional lack of politeness of expressing doubts in one case but, for all I know that’s cultural. I take it a “prove it” in response to “Wow, this isn’t only yellow, it’s lemony!” is also pretty irritating.
The point is that judgment is required in all these cases and if one is wedded to burdens, I’d say that a strict rule about when recanting is required seems to me to require a burden that you can’t meet. Patrick says “some claims are ‘positive’: those are the ones where evidence is required!” But I’m pretty sure he can’t tell me which claims are positive, or why a claim about one’s beliefs isn’t positive.
keiths, why argue about this endlessly? Just post a picture of your eyes and some sort of (notarized) reading speed assessment we’ll all see for ourselves. And if you believe that people here actually think somebody else is a bigger quote miner, etc. than you are, provide your objective evidence. That’ll settle this once and for all.
After all, I’ve never claimed to be infallible!
Patrick,
I disagree. If you make the positive claim that the sun is a star, and I disagree, I would say the burden of proof is on me.
Amen.
Thanks are due to whoever fixed my italics issue above.
walto,
Please print this comment and post it on your monitor.