My bad. I linked to the email from Discourse rather than to the topic in DIscourse. The link above is fixed. It just points to the source of the quote from Bill Leach.
Yes, I agree. Also the converse: “The problem with you is that you just won’t admit that I’m right.” Part of this is not tolerance so much as curiosity about what they intended by the words they used.
Debates and conflicts are inevitable. That they get ‘heated’ is not. What are the differences between a cool and hot debate? Which of these differences advance science? What is ‘heat’ in a debate? My sense of what ‘heat’ means here is the expression of aggression, frustration, anger, and the like. When you say debates can get heated, do you mean something other than that? Aggression can take the form of ridicule, misquotation or misleading quotation out of context, seeming paraphrase to a form that can be trivialized, and so on. It can be couched in deniable form. These are all breaches of trust and good faith. The juiciest examples are on display among our politicians.
Yes! But I’d avoid the parent-child relationship perception. The sin/sinner version has problems too, though I’m sure Augustine meant well.
A good start, I agree. I think the differences are more involved. For example, one can contend to win without getting ‘heated’ and arguing ad hominem. One can be in conflict while collaborating to resolve the conflict and move on to longer-term goals.
The vast majority of conflicts that we encounter, we resolve easily scant if any awareness. We both approach a doorway from opposite sides, one waits briefly, or more rarely (e.g. in an emergency situation) both turn sideways and brush by each other. For each, contesting who goes first would delay reaching their destination, and they control reaching their destination with higher gain than being King of the Road.
Contention is when at least one party in a conflict controls winning the conflict with high gain. Here is where it gets more complicated. DIverse variables can be controlled by winning conflicts. It may become important to enter into conflicts in order to control those ulterior CVs, which possibly are not consciously acknowledged. A person who is involved in a lot of conflicts may have more than the pursuit of science at stake.
I well remember a wise principle of science that I learned from two great scientists independently and twenty years apart, Zellig Harris and Bill Powers. A scientist must first do his or her best by every imaginable means to disprove the favored conjecture or hypothesis or model. This is the basis for scientific collaboration. Willingness to be wrong is that fundamental. When you enlist colleagues to collaborate in this challenge process, good, productive debates ensue, and the conflicts in those debates are conflicts of ideas, not of persons.
However, when we lose sight of that principle and defend our favored ideas by every means imaginable, the debated conflicts go off the rails and into conflict of persons. This abandonment of the basis of collaboration evokes emotions such as disappointment, annoyance, impatience, infuriation, and disgust. Heat indeed!
There are members who experience that kind of heat as unsafe. They go away, or they lurk without actively participating, or with some luck they may find a safe corner of the forum to work with like-minded peers. I know from direct testimony that this perception of safety is why we have so few women involved with PCT.
The latter. “The Discourse community” means collective control by all the members. Everyone has perceptions of what it is to converse in a collaborative, professional way. It doesn’t matter if those perceptions are not perfectly identical (harder to gauge the higher in the hierarchy they are), and the gain of control surely varies. And everyone is able to resist disturbances to control of those perceptions in one way or another. For example, one can
- Post a private message to an individual.
- Reply to a post that concerns them.
- Post a topic about the issue in the Troubled discourse category.
- Flag a post that is disturbing. This post says the purpose of the flagging mechanism is “for the community to be able to protect itself from the worst users, even without a moderator present” by putting enough flags on the topic. (How many depends on the DIscourse-assigned trust level of the flaggers.)
- Several people were assigned the moderator role when the forum was created. They will get a message about the flag, and will be able to take any of the above actions to alert the community, if so moved.
I doubt this list is exhaustive. What other means can we identify?
Relying on everyone to engage in collective control is an act of trust. Without that trust there is no community.