On 3/26/19 5:29 PM, Adrian Farrel wrote: > Well, no! We should be civil and polite to everyone, and we should not need > to behave differently to one subset. [no hats] Indeed! I'm puzzled by arguments suggesting that people don't know how to respond politely to someone who's wrong, anyway, and the entire cascade consequential to that. For example, if the goal is to have very smart people participating, it seems likely to me that the intersection of the set of very smart people and the set of very thick-skinned people is almost certainly smaller than the set of very smart people (and by definition cannot be larger). I also suspect that over the decades we've essentially selected for people who are rude and/or thick-skinned, and we've gotten into a situation that's self-reinforcing and very difficult to change. And a third issue is that it seems prudent to me to allow for the possibility that you're wrong, as well, and that it might be wise to leave yourself room to be wrong gracefully. And, of course, a fourth issue is that while sometimes people are just plain wrong, in many cases they're making different tradeoffs from the ones you're making and they have different priorities. In the interest of doing good work and producing quality results it would make sense to try to work that out rather than to assume there are only two choices in a given situation, one of which is "right" and the other of which is "wrong." I've seen chairs tolerate some surprisingly abusive behavior on the part of working group participants and I think dealing with that might be a first step towards developing a culture less likely to drive off people trying to bring work here. Melinda
