On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 05:40:47PM -0700, John Doty wrote:
>
> On Feb 24, 2006, at 5:06 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
>
> > I don't know Marc personally, but I strongly suspect it's just a
> >matter of presentation and perception...I don't think the guy
> >actually intends to be crappy.
> >
> > Many people, especially net-newbies, type into an email
> >composition window without thinking of how things are going to be
> >taken on the other end. Even after communicating via email for 20+
> >years, I am guilty of this myself sometimes...so I can easily
> >envision a less-net-experienced person (no offense Marc) easily
> >falling into this trap.
>
> http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70179-0.html?tw=wn_index_2
>
> Electronic communication between strangers is often a disaster. I
> work on multi-institutional international projects and although we
> communicate by email, chat, telephone and even video there's no
> substitute for meeting in the flesh. It's often the only way to
> really calibrate a person's attitude. After enough real meetings with
> someone you have some chance of understanding them in the virtual
> ones (but misunderstandings will still crop up).
>
> Politeness surely helps, although I know some people whose attempts
> at politeness in email always seem sarcastic.
When I was on primary school I was told that I am rude not greeting the
teachers good day when I meet them in the corridors. Since then I
started to say "good day" every time I met a teacher. After some time I
was told that I am rude because I said good day to a particular teacher
several times in a single day.
Fixing this would already require holding a table in my head and
remembering for every teacher if I greeted him or not, plus reset the
table every midnight.
The whole system basically consists of a greeting generator (me), a
teacher which has to maintain a similar table for all pupils, then test
whether the pupil complains to politeness by checking if his greeting
generation is according to the rules and table content, updating the
teacher's table and resetting it every midningt, then reporting to the
parents, and parents regulating the pupil's behaviour in a feedback
loop.
Considerable mental resources can be gained by optimizing the system
this way: the pupil removes the table and doesn't do anything. THe
teacher removes his table and every time he sees a pupil he hardwires
the output of the politeness test to "passed".
One autistic guy I know says that social rules are just an arbitrarily
created problem, a social construct, a bullshit. Sometimes things
suggest that he's right.
Note how much time was spent on this list interpreting e-mails
emotionally, polling on whether mail is rude or not, and figuring out
how to write things politely. And how much time on actual solving of
problems?
Maybe you could gain significant developer resources by scrapping all
this social shit and going directly to the core of the things ;-)