On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 02:21:54PM -0400, Ted Lemon wrote: > On Sep 10, 2019, at 2:05 PM, Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > wrote: > >> Tone policing not exactly unknown in IETF but the strategy of > >> poisoning a debate by being disruptive is much more common. > > > > So is accusing well-intended people of bad intention. > > This is an example of tone-policing as a form of agenda denial. > Because Phil used the term “poisoning,” this gave Keith an opportunity > to respond to what Phil had said as if it were an accusation, and not > merely a factual observation. And so now we are talking about Phil > attacking Keith, instead of talking about how to have good discussions > in the IETF. > > :( Dear all, All of these threads are a DDoS on ietf@xxxxxxxx subscribers -- agenda denial and then some. There's no end in sight. I have no idea what anyone's victory conditions might be that might cause them to stop replying for now, much less long, to these threads. Because the SAAs and leadership have been intimately involved in some of the recent contentious threads, it's clear that they can't credibly use their authority put an end to this mess. Without victory conditions being clear and met, and without _consensus_, the best we can do is agree to disagree for now and kick this can down the road. This is probably all ultimately still tied emotionally to the mess that the SAAs created by their unequal (or unequal-seeming) "tone policing" of leadership vs. non-leadership participants, plus the RSOC / RFC-Editor debacle. One thing that's clear now is that psychology needs to be taken into account by the SAAs if we're going to have SAAs at all. By admonishing Adam R. privately but Michael StJ.'s publicly after his inflammatory response to Adam R.'s inflammatory post, the SAAs showed that tone policing is difficult, and that publicly calling people out often has the effect of making them more combative/defensive. We certainly saw RSOC be defensive before eventually issuing a mea culpa. We did also see that a mea culpa can defuse these situations, as when RSOC apologized for their failures in the RFC-Editor debacle. Apologizing will often make the apologizer feel better too. An apology from the SAAs for their failures, even though they were trivial in detail (by more severe in results), may yet prove helpful. Now, if the SAAs can fail so dramatically, maybe, just maybe, tone policing is a difficult thing to get right! To be sure, I know "tone" when I see it -- usually even when I engage in it or soon after. But, too, we mustn't be overly sensitive to "tone", because if the "tone" we get upset by is "debatably tone", then.. we're in for a lively debate. Insert the past three months of this list's archives as evidence! Perhaps there's only so much change in what is and isn't acceptable tone that we can tolerate at once without devolving into a self-DDoS. Or perhaps the only real issue is that asking to improve tone in the middle of a months-long series of testy issues... is not conducive to obtaining better tone. It may be the case that in an already-acrimonious context, every proposal that isn't utterly trivial suddenly becomes debatable and endlessly-debated. For example, the idea that RFC3005 authorizes or demands that SAAs act to move threads from this list, may be obvious to some, and perhaps only slightly irritating to others, but in this context it's anything but obvious or slightly irritating. The RFC3005 interpretation issue blew up all out of proportion. In retrospect that should have been obvious. For now perhaps dialing down the "trigger sensitivity" and giving each other a bit more credit, might well be the key to returning to more civilized times. Otherwise we're just retreading. So consider stopping. Just stop. For a while, stop. A long while. A few months maybe. The world won't end. We can return to these issues with cooler emotions later. Sincerely, with a heartfelt apology for the length of the above, but hope that it might help, Nico --
