Re: Re: Forwarded from Rakesh

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
    Where Doug Henwood writes;

Doug,
You have a very
selective policy about personal attacks, Michael.

Doyle
To me the issue is not personal attacks, but how one feels about what
someone writes.  Sometimes someone has a thick skin for some people.  And
other times something hits a nerve.  That is the critical issue in
moderating is an awareness of the feelings not the specific words.  In this
case I think Doug can just say to Michael that Doug has had enough and that
would settle it.  Which is not the same issue as policing every last word
every one says for personal attacks.

Beyond this point of support of Michael, it seems to me that the issue is
much more complex.  Usually these comments come up in specific instances
like this.  On a larger scale this is typically how political differences
are expressed, lack of fairness shown in some social context and therefore
the rules of making something work right get raised as some solution.  On a
deeper level understanding why personal attacks have a impact upon debate is
a not just about agreements and rules for moderating.  In what sense does
saying something about another person the reason why people come into
conflict?  Why is it that with rationalists and with science there is such a
heavy emphasis upon dispassionate discourse?  Why has hate speech been a
significant aspect of legal remedies of conflict?

Marxist have always felt and Kuhn's theory of scientific change indicates
that science is not dispassionate.    It is my opinion that what underlies
these realities about human communications is a fundamental impoverished
theory of what emotions contribute to brain work.

The moderators role is arbitrary to a certain extent because emotions are
not directly tied to word content.  Secondly while someone might represent a
centered sense of emotion (calm low level felt intensities about word
content) concerning dialogues, there is no guarantee that someone else will
feel the same way as their style of doing brainwork.  What is possible is
not so much that people agree to not do personal attacks but that a group of
people can as a group maintain emotional integration as a group.

What is most evident with e-mail distribution lists is that being a part of
a typical group is qualitatively different from face to face contact.  How
emotional content is regulated obviously remains primitive and yet
tantalizingly open to regulating in new ways.  What seems possible is to
record feelings and measure their on-going contribution to a group, not just
the feelings that make personal attacks a problem.  We see in mass sports
the crowd effect of supporting a team.  We don't see in electronic forms
such crowd effects upon the writing sent in.

Some groupware products have ways to indicate emoticon like signals about
group feelings.  These signs of how people feel are far from understanding
what it is that rationalist are striving to achieve in limiting argument
from passion.  The fact that people use emotions to reason with has a long
ways to go in defining brainwork that underlies the comments Doug Henwood
makes above.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor