Re: tone policing

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 9/2/19 9:24 PM, Melinda Shore wrote:

> It seems to me that if the goal is to have free and constructive
> discussion, it's important to acknowledge that some language/"tone"
> can militate against that happening, and create a hostile environment
> in which some participants may (and, as we know from experience, do)
> choose not to speak, choose not to continue to participate, and so on.

I do acknowledge that this can happen.   But I don't think it's a 
justification for discouraging people whose "tone" one does not like, or 
for favoring the contributions of those whose "tone" seems more 
pleasing.   Rather I think we need to try harder to understand those 
whose "tone" is harder to deal with, because quite often those people 
are the ones who have rare and valuable insight.

Part of the problem is that preferences for "tone" are nowhere nearly 
objective.  It's just another kind of prejudice.   I suspect we all have 
such prejudices, but the thing to do is to try to work past them rather 
than insist that others cater to our prejudices.

I'll give a personal example from long ago, of one of the (several) 
reasons I have a problem with "tone", and one of the reasons I think 
it's mostly another form of prejudice that should not be encouraged:

When I was a grad student, my assistantship was being what we then 
called "sys admins" (and what are now sometimes called "IT people").  
Our jobs were to maintain the department's computer systems.   This 
started as a group of three grad students (with minimal supervision) and 
eventually was around eight.    We were a good team; we all worked 
together and made decisions in technical discussions in which everyone 
was free to speak and decisions were (mostly) based on technical merit - 
if you could convince someone that an idea was likely to work well and 
be implementable with the resources we had, it was likely to win 
favor.   We got a lot of useful work done and built a really nice 
environment for our faculty and students, well ahead of its time.

At some point the department decided to hire one of us full time as the 
technical director of the admin staff.   Nothing else really changed 
except that that person worked more hours than the rest of us.   We 
still worked together well, we still made decisions the same way.

The problems started when new people came on board.   They couldn't 
understand the way we had traditionally made decisions through technical 
discussions and consensus.   They insisted that we should not be able to 
argue against the technical opinion of the director, even though the 
director insisted that it was okay and that we should, for discussion 
purposes, act as technical peers.    Eventually the director found that 
he couldn't get any work done because the new staff members were so 
upset.   So we had to stop having those discussions and stop making 
decisions that way.  And the quality of the services suffered and 
eventually became much more expensive.

"tone" wasn't the problem at all.   There was no disrespect intended, 
implied, or in reality.   But the new people couldn't manage to see it 
any other way.

If that is like the problem we're seeing in IETF, where newcomers simply 
don't get the culture, we do ourselves no favors by claiming that "tone" 
is the problem.   That's why I think we need to drill down some more.

----

IETF has a decades-long history of having peer-to-peer technical 
discussions, of eschewing hierarchy in technical matters, of being open 
to input from anyone.   This culture has often served IETF, and the 
Internet, quite well.   It's not perfect, and there's certainly 
opportunity for improvement.   But it's a LOT better than one based on 
hierarchy.

And while I think we should be open to constructive changes to our 
culture, IETF has its own culture for valid and important reasons.   The 
idea that we should instead adopt the "professional" culture of 
business, seems like a disaster to me. We're not a business, we have a 
vastly different purpose.   Our job is not to follow the whims of 
corporate overlords or to gain favor of stockholders who are seeking to 
make quick money.   We necessarily have to think longer term and look at 
a much wider range of interests than a typical business does.   The 
typical business approach to decision-making is an extremely poor fit here.

> But I'm trying to understand the broader context here, as well.  What
> we're asking for is no more stringent than what's expected in the
> typical workplace, conferences, other technical bodies, and so on.

Many workplaces are profoundly dysfunctional, so those are not good 
examples.   As for other conferences, if they're just academic 
conferences where people are presenting rather than trying to make 
decisions, I agree that a different approach is appropriate in those 
contexts.   But I don't think they're good examples for IETF either.

> In many cases, it's less.  Do you feel that the typical workplace,
> conferences like RailsConf, and technical communities like Mozilla's are
> unsafe for honest technical discussion?

As far as I can tell, for typical large corporate workplaces, the answer 
is yes.   I can't speak to the latter two, having no experience with them.

Keith