From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Mon Sep 29 2003 - 07:21:58 MDT
At 11:10 AM 29/09/03 +0200, you wrote:
>....i dont know who is responsible for this recent turn of nastiness
>because i havent been following this thread. but is it possible for us
>to not take ourselves so seriously that we have to graduate to hate words
>again? my encounters with it long ago left such a bad taste in my mouth
>that i would do anything to avoid it. it has not helped the CoV at
>all...and the recent break from it has been refreshing to say the
>least. can we not overlook rudeness and avoid retaliatory
>verbage? deserved or not, the CoV as a whole is the ultimate heir to our
>abusiveness of any a-holes within her hallowed halls.
Unfortunately, flame postings are the bane of the net. Solving this
problem could possibly give CoV a boost up, or (perhaps as likely) make it
so insipid that nobody bothered to be involved.
Meta analysis:
People are highly rewarded by attention. (The reason is rooted in our
evolutionary history as social primates in small tribes. See "Sex, Drugs
and Cults" for details.)
On the net and in some people, the kind of attention, positive/negative is
ignored. This results in people being rewarded by being flamed--resulting
more provoking, more flame. People are very often conditioned by the
responses they get in cases where they don't understand it at all. A
classic example of this is the psych classes that condition a professor to
stay on the left or right edge of a stage during lectures.
The conditioning for attention "rewards" is sometimes so strong that people
will take totally indefensible positions because they are sure to get
responses. A classic example is (or was) the (in)famous David Sternlight,
but I can think of at least a dozen examples on the
alt.religion.scientology news group over the past 8 years. There are many
good examples of the power of human minds to rationalize taking an
indefensible position because of the rewarding attention it garners.
*Part* of this is because a well thought out and written post gets few and
sometimes no responses. It takes a long time and a lot of experience on
the net to understand this, and some people never do get it.
I know there is a strong tendency to comment on postings you consider
incorrect. But there are times when doing so rewards people who are doing
it to bait others into "rewarding" them. It is possible for such people to
be recognized and once in a while a group will jointly quit responding to
provokers--who usually move on to another venue because of no rewarding
responses. It is possibly instructive for meta analysis to look at the
last dozen or two postings on the memetics list and prior to that postings
by "wade."
It will be amusing to see if there are any responses to this post. :-)
Keith Henson
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