On 6/15/24 11:56, Tim Bray wrote:
We are not, nor should we be, amateur psychiatrists. I am among the many who left ietf@ because of what I perceived as repeated hyperoverentitled childish toxicity, and life is just too short. Maybe the people who were doing it had pathologies that explained their behavior. Maybe they were just trolls. We can’t know. Maybe they had made brilliant contributions, but so what: My decades in engineering professions have taught me that the consequences of tolerating disruptive assholes because they’re smart are overwhelmingly negative.
Not to dismiss your experience, but beware the effects of your
own prejudices in forming such judgments. If you assume that
people are disruptive because they're a------s, you're never going
to invest in them, and will never find out what they can
contribute. If you assume that smart people are more likely to
be a------s, you're going to be quicker to dismiss their attempts
to contribute.
I believe that IETF has become extremely toxic to neurodivergent
people precisely because management has attempted to encourage
such prejudices in the past, and this has done tremendous harm to
the organization and its ability to contribute to the Internet.
My experience from IETF long ago said that effort to "reach"
difficult people to try to let them know that their opinions were
valued, and to try to tease out their underlying concerns, were
often rewarded. (Note: I didn't say always.)
Keith
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