On Mon, 9 Jul 2007, Chris McCormick wrote:
On Mon, Jul 09, 2007 at 06:02:10PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
Ignoring each other also comes from the impression of talking past each other. Compared to hostility, it's more mature, polite, civilised and insidious.
Even better than ignoring,
It sounds like I mean that ignoring is better than arguing, but that's not what i mean. (what does "insidious" mean to you?)
it is possible to use non-provocatory language and to purposely disarm your own writing by eliminating emotionally charged content, and still communicate your point clearly.
OTOH the content is then still about controversial ideas and it's still about promoting some people's ideas at the expense of some other people's other ideas. This happens regardless of the amount of spin-doctoring performed to dull it.
Then again, maybe it's fun for some people to be argumentative, and their motives are something other than making better software and helping others.
No matter how fun it can be, I don't think anyone here is mostly arguing for the fun of arguing. E.g. for me, there has to be opportunity for some kind of learning that feeds back into thought processes that are eventually productive. Ok, I also write dumb mails sometimes; but we might not agree on which ones are. Sometimes, valid questions look essentially like trolling; but some mindframe's trollish questions is some other mindframe's theoretical underpinnings.
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