Re: tone policing

[Dirk-Willem van Gulik <[e-mail]>]

On 3 Sep 2019, at 16:23, Ted Lemon <[e-mail]> wrote:
> On Sep 3, 2019, at 10:04 AM, Keith Moore <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>> I'm just sending replies to people arguing for censorship.   What I wonder is, why aren't more people objecting?
> 
> I suspect the reason is that I am not the only one who sees excessively frequent posting of the same message as a form of censorship.
> Rather than responding again, perhaps you should listen for a while?


So going back to the issue at hand, rather than people and what they should do or thing; on technical mailing lists I find it common to see pro/con arguments near the core of a design of principle repeated. Often. 

Sometimes I feel i can attribute that simply to people relatively new to the matter - and who have not had the time to read up on the design; or the design being so specific that it is hard to relate to from an adjacent field. Or because technical designs often need a a fairly black and white take on things in order to be implemented on a computer.

But equally often - it simply is because the structure of a lot of issues is that desire or plan for feature N+1 gets stuck/hits some crucial bit deep down - and the same argument `why that cannot be done’ bubbles up again. Just like the speed of light or conservation of mass often blocks a fun addition to physics.  Or that you need UTF8 for XXX, or a type of `escaping’ of the next character, etc. Or a `get out of jail card’ into the land of MIME. Or ‘order’ on something like a struct.

And although some percentage of that is, or becomes, a natural reaction of jaded people; and arguably the `reject’ may come too soon or without careful study - I find more of then than not that a path I embark on to fiddle/improve a protocol; hits such a technical 1+1 needs to be 3 sort of snag.

So designing a set of social rules that is overly sensitive to such repeat-a(core)-argument seems a bit out of place for such a technical space.

Dw