Re: tone policing

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 9/2/19 10:25 PM, Adam Roach wrote:

> On 9/2/19 8:55 PM, Keith Moore wrote:
>> 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. 
>
> There's an increasing recognition within the software development 
> industry that extremely smart people who are rough around the edges in 
> the way you describe ultimately cause more harm to an organization 
> than their contributions help.

I think we're talking about very different kinds of people here, though 
of course it's hard to tell because "tone" is so vague.

I've seen evidence of such increasing "recognition" too, at least in the 
form of articles on LinkedIn.  One of the things that disturbs me about 
such article is that there is often a chorus of response that are 
somewhat of the form "yes, smart people really do get in the way, and we 
need to get rid of them".   But there's a lot of difference between 
"smart people" and "people whose tone someone doesn't like" so I don't 
think it's appropriate to lump them in the same pile.

But because it may be the case that some people are thinking of "smart 
people", as people who use inappropriate "tone", I would like to drill 
down a bit further:

I don't think the issue is intelligence, mostly.  I think the issue is 
whether someone can see things from multiple points of view and is 
capable of compromise.   There are intelligent people are are good at 
those things.   And there are intelligent people who simply cannot see 
things from any other point of view and for whom no compromise will ever 
be acceptable.   So I think intelligence and ability to work toward 
compromise are orthogonal.

There are some rather famous examples of the latter kind of person, who 
have made extremely valuable contributions to networking and/or computer 
science.   But offhand I can't think of any who have been successful in 
a consensus-based standards organization.  I suspect that an intelligent 
person who can see things from multiple points of view and is willing to 
work toward seeing how to build a compromise can still be successful in 
IETF - or at least could do well in the IETF of several years ago (not 
sure about today).   On the other hand, someone who couldn't see the 
merits in other points of view and/or wasn't willing to compromise, 
probably wouldn't have ever felt successful or useful in IETF, and 
probably abandoned trying to work here fairly quickly.   So in summary, 
I don't think IETF has had too many problems with the kind of 
intelligent person who can't compromise.


But there is yet another phenomenon that is part of this picture, which 
is that some people are hostile to and prejudiced against people who are 
intelligent.   And culturally speaking, at least in the US (can't speak 
for elsewhere), there has been a widespread backlash against intelligent 
people.   This has certainly had a profound effect on US politics, at 
least.  Looking at the spate of articles (such as those you cited) of 
the form "intelligent people bad", it's hard to not wonder if that's 
part of the same trend.

In case it's not clear, I don't think that prejudice against intelligent 
people, or against people with different views (who might or might not 
be more intelligent than average) has any place in IETF, and I hope 
you're not suggesting that it does.   Quite the contrary, IETF 
decision-making needs to be informed by a wide variety of views, and 
emphatically not (for example) just the views or large corporations that 
are trying to own a piece of the "market".   IETF needs outliers 
(whether or not they're highly intelligent).

> When you dig into the rationale, a lot of this thinking translates 
> directly to standards development. See 
> <https://www.google.com/search?q=toxic+rockstar+programmers> for a 
> nearly infinite number of articles that go into why these people need 
> -- for the sake of the organization -- to either learn to contribute 
> in a non-toxic fashion, or be shown the door.

Again, we really need to drill down past vague words like "toxic".  
Quite honestly, I find your words in the subject message toxic, but I 
don't think your contributions should be censored for that reason.

Keith