Re: Summary of the debian-devel BoF at Debconf9
Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> But really, the divergence from the discussion happened earlier,
> when the discussion degenerated into name calling (which is what ad
> hominem attacks are), or strawman attacks, which tend to derail the
> discussion by standing up irrelevant positions and arging against that,
> leading to thread bloat.
Absolutely. The original idea - at least the part with which I agree -
is only that the appearance of the terms are a probable indication of
digression. It doesn't necessarily attribute the "blame" of digressing
to the one who mentioned the "magic meta-words" or to the one who
provoked them into being uttered.
> Indeed, leaving logical fallacies unchallenged does nore to harm
> the discussion than pointing them out and trying to bring the thread
> back to a logical discussion; and leaving ad hominem attacks
> unchallenged poisons the discussion environment to the point that it
> detracts from the discussion itself.
That's beyond my (and AFAICT Bernhard's) point. I agree they shouldn't
be left unchallenged - at least in most cases - and haven't said they
should.
The point is only noting the digression and collectively suggesting
"taking it outside" (hopefully not in the knuckle-dragging sense).
What to do to practically achieve this after that digression has been
collectively noted, OTOH, is a matter to which I don't feel I have any
useful solution...
I believe I'm not the only one who feels an email saying "let's calm
down and get back to the point" to be pretty much useless, specially
after hitting the point of ad-hominem attacks or accusations thereof.
Cheers
--
Leo "costela" Antunes
[insert a witty retort here]
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