Excellent and important point. I think that’s a part of my uneasiness that I hadn’t been able to verbalize abstractly up until now.
In order to have a comment policy in place, the act of pointing out language-to-avoid should have a standard and formal form which does not decrease the status of the pointed-out speaker, and perhaps even more importantly, should not increase the status of the pointer-outer.
In order to have a comment policy in place, the act of pointing out language-to-avoid should have a standard and formal form which does not decrease the status of the pointed-out speaker, and perhaps even more importantly, should not increase the status of the pointer-outer.
I don’t know if this is possible, but that may be because I’ve been spending time in an environment which is particularly poisonous that way.
I will say that shaming people for ignorance has to be treated as intolerable.… without shaming people who don’t know better than to invoke that sort of shame.
Could you clarify: in order to encourage people to admit ignorance and take correction, you want to remove the perception of low status in taking it?
That sounds great, but I’m not sure how you get there. Out of people I believe to be mistaken or ignorant, I do respect more those who admit a mistake, than those who defensively generate huge threads full of denial and obfuscation, but in the case where I’m only skimming, I can’t often be sure if they’re wrong and it’s not worth my time to understand and judge.
I suppose you’re talking about social correctness and ignorance of expected behavior, and I was thinking of general correctness and ignorance.
I think there’s more status lost here in being incorrect than rude. So maybe discouraging offense-giving is a simpler problem.
To not raise the status of the pointer-outer, we could require that the pointing out is done anonymously.
To make it formal, it might be useful to make it part of the UI: rather than posting a reply in free text, you would click a “bad language” button and mark a checkbox for the policy you consider violated. Reducing the bandwidth of the channel in this way might make it harder to communicate elaborate moves in a social-status game using it.
Not lowering the status of the pointed-out speaker seems harder: one could make the whole exchange not publicly visible, but would a private message be sufficient to enforce the guidelines, especially since there might be disagreement about what constitutes a violation?
Allow anonymous posting, with a checkbox. Not really anonymous, you have to be logged in, but non-mods don’t see ID.
Anonymous posts don’t display until a mod explicitly permits them.
Special rules for anonymous posts: be very polite, be very on-topic or validly critical of another poster’s delivery. Posts without extra effort to politeness beyond the norm will be summarily junked.
Result: this gives us criticism with no status modification, it also gives us posts with on-topic views which a poster might have good reason to disown in public, but still consider true.
The only way I can see that working is to avoid doing it publicly, either by telling someone in a message or by some other function, like a ‘Private Reply’ button that leaves a comment only the target commenter can read.
Excellent and important point. I think that’s a part of my uneasiness that I hadn’t been able to verbalize abstractly up until now.
In order to have a comment policy in place, the act of pointing out language-to-avoid should have a standard and formal form which does not decrease the status of the pointed-out speaker, and perhaps even more importantly, should not increase the status of the pointer-outer.
In order to have a comment policy in place, the act of pointing out language-to-avoid should have a standard and formal form which does not decrease the status of the pointed-out speaker, and perhaps even more importantly, should not increase the status of the pointer-outer.
I don’t know if this is possible, but that may be because I’ve been spending time in an environment which is particularly poisonous that way.
I will say that shaming people for ignorance has to be treated as intolerable.… without shaming people who don’t know better than to invoke that sort of shame.
Could you clarify: in order to encourage people to admit ignorance and take correction, you want to remove the perception of low status in taking it?
That sounds great, but I’m not sure how you get there. Out of people I believe to be mistaken or ignorant, I do respect more those who admit a mistake, than those who defensively generate huge threads full of denial and obfuscation, but in the case where I’m only skimming, I can’t often be sure if they’re wrong and it’s not worth my time to understand and judge.
I suppose you’re talking about social correctness and ignorance of expected behavior, and I was thinking of general correctness and ignorance.
I think there’s more status lost here in being incorrect than rude. So maybe discouraging offense-giving is a simpler problem.
To not raise the status of the pointer-outer, we could require that the pointing out is done anonymously.
To make it formal, it might be useful to make it part of the UI: rather than posting a reply in free text, you would click a “bad language” button and mark a checkbox for the policy you consider violated. Reducing the bandwidth of the channel in this way might make it harder to communicate elaborate moves in a social-status game using it.
Not lowering the status of the pointed-out speaker seems harder: one could make the whole exchange not publicly visible, but would a private message be sufficient to enforce the guidelines, especially since there might be disagreement about what constitutes a violation?
It seems that if you buy this policy, no UI change would be necessary. Just a policy of sending PMs rather than making it public would suffice.
I would generalize, as follows:
Allow anonymous posting, with a checkbox. Not really anonymous, you have to be logged in, but non-mods don’t see ID.
Anonymous posts don’t display until a mod explicitly permits them.
Special rules for anonymous posts: be very polite, be very on-topic or validly critical of another poster’s delivery. Posts without extra effort to politeness beyond the norm will be summarily junked.
Result: this gives us criticism with no status modification, it also gives us posts with on-topic views which a poster might have good reason to disown in public, but still consider true.
The only way I can see that working is to avoid doing it publicly, either by telling someone in a message or by some other function, like a ‘Private Reply’ button that leaves a comment only the target commenter can read.