RE: You're being overemotional
February 22, 2015 at 7:48 pm
(This post was last modified: February 22, 2015 at 7:53 pm by bennyboy.)
Sorry, guys, but I disagree with you. It's not like you are engaged in verbal communication. You are typing. Things don't just "pop" out-- they are considered and typed with conscious awareness of their implication.
So what does it mean to a reader of your posts? It means that he/she will have to read more words to understand your actual point, if in your emotional state you have bothered to have one. And for what? So you can unburden yourself, on unwilling others, of your own feelings. This is the intellectual equivalent of some perv rubbing up against me while standing on the subway, and I enjoy it about as much. What's worse is that when you are expressing anger, or using language to demean others, you are contributing momentum to the social context you're in-- people will get defensive or offended, and entire threads can be made unsalvageable for those people who were hoping to engage in meaningful conversation.
I teach my children to control their emotions. I teach them that if they want their ideas to be taken seriously, they have to say them more cogently, not just louder, more often or with increasingly strong rhetoric. And frankly, I assume that any normally developed adult engaged in writing in a forum will have mastered that level of discipline as well. Now, I'm not referring to either one of you specifically, or saying you are childish people. I don't know what posts you feel criticized for, and I can't comment on how I would feel about them. But in general principle, words meant to demean or "correct" the personalities of others should be avoided, in place of logical ideas.
I'm proud of AF for the long thread with Heywood recently. Heywood was accused multiple times of violating a basic understanding of set theory and committing logical fallacies. But (partly because of Heywood's own emotional restraint), people for the most part controlled their mode of communication, and that thread did not end up in cat memes, images of Star Trek characters engaged in head slaps, or a flame war. And that is as it should be.
So what does it mean to a reader of your posts? It means that he/she will have to read more words to understand your actual point, if in your emotional state you have bothered to have one. And for what? So you can unburden yourself, on unwilling others, of your own feelings. This is the intellectual equivalent of some perv rubbing up against me while standing on the subway, and I enjoy it about as much. What's worse is that when you are expressing anger, or using language to demean others, you are contributing momentum to the social context you're in-- people will get defensive or offended, and entire threads can be made unsalvageable for those people who were hoping to engage in meaningful conversation.
I teach my children to control their emotions. I teach them that if they want their ideas to be taken seriously, they have to say them more cogently, not just louder, more often or with increasingly strong rhetoric. And frankly, I assume that any normally developed adult engaged in writing in a forum will have mastered that level of discipline as well. Now, I'm not referring to either one of you specifically, or saying you are childish people. I don't know what posts you feel criticized for, and I can't comment on how I would feel about them. But in general principle, words meant to demean or "correct" the personalities of others should be avoided, in place of logical ideas.
I'm proud of AF for the long thread with Heywood recently. Heywood was accused multiple times of violating a basic understanding of set theory and committing logical fallacies. But (partly because of Heywood's own emotional restraint), people for the most part controlled their mode of communication, and that thread did not end up in cat memes, images of Star Trek characters engaged in head slaps, or a flame war. And that is as it should be.
