Mark Leavy wrote: ↑Sun Jul 31, 2022 9:56 pm
Thoughtful post. And "hey!"
waves hand.
Your comment above is the only part that eats at me. And probably because I just want better than that. I think that that prescription (
work on our civility and tolerance) is probably the best approach in a community of average folks. A community that I have no interest in.
But, by any measure,
this community is above average. And in such an environment, I believe that the proper response to "incivility" is
better speech. And by
better I mean intelligent, witty, scathing, truthful and trenchant speech. Pablum is for toddlers - and is needed on some forums. Forums of toddlers. But on a forum of adults - well, steel sharpens steel.
Better is good. But sometimes better isn't enough, because the solution lies elsewhere.
Let me continue with my ICE analogy. Is it possible to build an engine with such perfect selection of materials and such precise machining that it needs no lubricants at all, ever? Probably not. And if it was, it would be so fantastically expensive as to be a curiosity, not a practical machine for the masses. Imagine a department full of genius mechanical engineers working on the problem of how to make the materials and tolerances between parts so ideal that they can accomplish this impossible, unnecessary goal. We would chuckle a bit. Because with all of that intellectual firepower, they're working on the wrong problem. They could just add some lubrication and then move onto an as-yet unsolved problem. Wouldn't that be a better use of their talents?
I think labeling interpersonal civility as a tonic for children and average people is making the same mistake. On the contrary: civility is the way we can have these "steel sharpens steel": discussions in the first place. Let's not forget that the thrust of this thread is "what happened to those discussions?" Well, we stopped being able to have them because we cared too much about sharpening our arguments and not enough about keeping our debate partners from getting cut. Let's lean into that analogy: you improve your martial arts skills with sparring, but the goal is never to actually hurt your sparring partner. If you do that, you're doing it wrong, and training incorrectly.
And now something less abstract: in my job, I work with highly above average people on a daily basis. People whose idea of fun is to volunteer, for free, to perform professional-level software engineering for which they could easily be paid six figures--often in their spare time
in addition to their six-figure software engineering jobs. Real geniuses. In my personal and professional experience, the more exceptional a person is, the more they need coddling, hand-holding, and the tonic of interpersonal civility to avoid shutting down, self-destructing, or losing all ability to be productive. Average people in my experience have much thicker skins than exceptional people. They're used to be being insulted, underestimated, and thought of as stupid. They've had the experience of failure, a lot. They have some armor. They're resilient and adaptable. But exceptional people are accustomed to success and being thought of as exceptional, so they don't have this resilience. They're sensitive and inflexible. To perform properly, they need people to re-arrange the world around them to be more comfortable and less upsetting. They can move mountains, but you have to first order their world so they can do it.
In other words, a community of intellectually exceptional people needs more care paid to people's feelings to avoid it exploding, not less.