On 11/8/17 10:18 PM, Ben Finney wrote:
How many paragraphs of close parsing are we going to twist ourselves
through, just to avoid saying, "Yeah, sorry, that went a bit far. I
didn't want to alienate you in the pursuit of a demonstration of my
own correctness."
I don't have any aim of avoiding that. If I need to apologise for
something, that hasn't been made clear to me. If you're seeking an
apology from someone else, I can't do it for them.
You have nothing to apologize for. This started because of an exchange
between Steve and Jon. Steve has been notably silent during the ensuing
discussion.
What has been made clear to me is that we have a long way to go in
pursuit of allowing ideas to be held at arm's length, discussed and
criticised, with respect and compassion for one another.
Indeed. Beyond just respect and compassion, this discussion has
mentioned "changing people's minds" a few times. How's that going?
Calling an idea "arrogant" may or may not be reasonable (I'm divided on
this question myself). But is it an effective way to change the
person's mind? It's a great term to use if you want to smack someone
down, and convince everyone else that you are right. But it's going to
put the other person on the defensive, and you've lost your chance to
change their mind.
Both of the terms that have been brought up recently ("arrogant" and
"moronic") seem ineffective to me. If the goal truly is to engage in a
discussion that will bring everyone to a point of agreement, then we
have to choose words more wisely. These words seem to me to have been
chosen with a different goal.
--Ned.
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
