Slashdot Mirror
The Secret Cause of Flame Wars
Mz6 writes "According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I've only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time. "That's how flame wars get started," says psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with Justin Kruger of New York University. "People in our study were convinced they've accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance," says Epley. The researchers took 30 pairs of undergraduate students and gave each one a list of 20 statements about topics like campus food or the weather. Assuming either a serious or sarcastic tone, one member of each pair e-mailed the statements to his or her partner. The partners then guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers. Those who sent the messages predicted that nearly 80 percent of the time their partners would correctly interpret the tone. In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time."
Sadly, Slashdot readers have known this for years.
Kids, this is why it's so important to properly use your <sarcasm> tags and your emoticons!
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
If you and your friend are having an argument through e-mail, you probably feel that you have to cover the whole spectrum of abrasiveness with each e-mail you send. In real life, you would have the social tact to start out with statements and leave room for yourself to retract what you've said or to give a little ground and end up mutually agreeing on something.
What seems to be my problem with e-mail is that I send a message and I run the topic into the ground in that first e-mail (saying everything about it). Now, that's written in stone like a Slashdot comment. No backsies.
And the fact that he might not get the e-mail for a while makes me want to accelerate the severity of the issue since we don't want to take two weeks discussing it. Had we been more gradual at accelerating the argument, things said could probably have been avoided. Secret? Not quite. I might end an e-mail with "...screw Oasis and Weezer, every Beatles' album is far greater than all of theirs combined." Now, in real life, I'd say that with a malevolent shit-eating grin on my face signaling that I know it's not true. But my friend might read it and imagine me with a stone faced militant music-nazi expression and my finger pointing into his chest. What ensues is a standard flame war. The cause of this is no secret.
My work here is dung.
Just goes to show that you should never assume that anyone is mean or out to get you, or react in such a way... or they will become VERY SOON!
Self-fulfilling prophecies, anyone?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
"I love Linux. It's great."
Serious or sarcastic? 10 euros for correct guess.
throw new NoSignatureException();
"Kids, this is why it's so important to properly use your tags and your emoticons!"
And people still have misunderstandings.
"People in our study were convinced they've accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance,"
On it's face, this statement is incompatible with:
"In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time."
It's no better than chance. It is better than Chance.
Nice going..
...will flamebait comments on this story be considered informative?
www.code-fix.com
This is the best article I've seen posted in years! I thought /. was on the decline, but clearly it is just reaching its stride.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
CowboyNeal solves all of my computer woes!
Choose:
A) Serious
B) Sarcastic
You suck!
1. Use emoticons and know how to read them.
2. When there are 2 ways to read something, assume the other end didn't want to offend you unless you have very good reason to assume they did (i.e. when the flame war is already running to the joy of the general audience).
Then again, if everyone knew those 2 rules and took them serious, trolls would probably go out on the street and set fire to real life objects... Maybe the world's better the way it is.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That much of communication is non-verbal is quite known. When it comes to business communication, it seems like the treacherous part of this is that so many people are using e-mail and IM for informal communication, and insert so much of our personality into our messages. They're simply not nearly as professional as letters were in the past.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Real Time chat (like IRC) is much more convinient than emails. I feel that it's often easier to understand tone on IRC.
I dunno, a lot of the flamebait that I've seen hasn't been necessarily based on the tone of the commentary. It has been due to the stupidity of the comments listed therein.
I wonder if it is 50/50 chance for the interpretation of dumb-ass-ed-ness.
The researchers took 30 pairs of undergraduate students and gave each one a list of 20 statements about topics like campus food or the weather. Assuming either a serious or sarcastic tone, one member of each pair e-mailed the statements to his or her partner. The partners then guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers. Those who sent the messages predicted that nearly 80 percent of the time their partners would correctly interpret the tone. In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time."
I call BS on that one, how can they say this stuff?
How can they figure anything conclusively in a study with a group of 60 students?
The recipients can't decide what is sarcastic or not?
WTF?
((Which half were you on? I was just being sarcastic.))
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Being able to correctly interpret messages in text form is a skill, if you're good at it you can get far more than 50% right. My rule of thumb is simple - assume the best, in other words, only be insulted if you're sure. Or put another way - "If you're in any doubt about whether or not I intended to insult you, I didn't. If I had, you'd know it."
That all flame wars erupt from somebody misunderstanding another persons tone in email.
In most of my experience, most flame wars kick in because of old fashioned beligerance. People see somebody that disagrees with them, and has the courage to say things that they wouldn't say to the other person's face, by virtue of being separated by miles of network cable.
Now everybody that disagrees with me is a G4Y A55FUK3R!
Actually, most flamewars are caused by Vim being much worse than Emacs.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Since the end of World War 2, a clandestine, shadowy organisation known colloquially as "The Illuminati" has been secretly instigating and orchestrating all major flamewars. Conflicts such as the Tannenbaum Crisis, and the ongoing battles at comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy were all sparked by this bunch as part of their twisted plan to control the world packet flow through decreasing the SNR on the Internet, and when it finally collapses, replace it with their evil commie New World Protocol. Fight the evil!
You know who they are.
They know who they are.
Don't you people ever read Indymedia? It's all in there!
sarcasm? americans?
hmm...
Simple statements with little or no context (and statements taken out of context) are misunderstood ~50% of the time.
--Captain Obvious
I'd love to name names, but I won't ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
When talking to another person, typically more information is conveyed non-verbally (including body language and spoken tone) than through the meaning of the actual words that are spoken.
This is one of the reasons why, for any profession where communication is important, it is difficult to replace face-to-face meetings with telephone calls or emails.
Of course, although body langauge and tone provide additional information, specific factual information must be conveyed by words and/or diagrams.
FREE - Java, J2EE and Ajax Audiobooks for Software Developers - www.DeveloperAdvantage.com
We have been writing epic stories for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and in which we've had to express complex emotions... So why can't we do the same over e-mail and or IM?
...
If you ask me we can't because everyone isn't an English grad' and likes to use as few words as they can get away with. Emoticons can help, giving indications to the meaning
I like Microsoft's now dead cartoon chat, in which your 'character' displayed emotions for you -- like emoticons but to an extreme. Too bad it never took off.
I don't think this is a problem we can fix. But sooner or later e-mail and or IM will be dead, and we will be using internet voice chat and or video communications much more widely.
For centuries, the "tone" of written litters, has been fairly easy to ascertain. My guess is that because letters took some time to arrive, because instant communication wasn't possible, that writers took great pains to make their intent absolutely clear. Any corrections or clarifications would be a long time coming, so extra effort was merited. Now, however, writers can be sloppy - if they weren't clear in the first place, they can quickly send multiple follow-ups explaining things.
The recipient is also to blame. People have gotten quite sloppy with their reading - they go for the gist, and completely ignore the nuance of a written work these days. I cannot say how many times I have said, in an email, "I am emphatically NOT saying XYZ" and then had someone respond with "Why are you saying XYZ!?" People nowadays seem to hear what they want to hear, read what they want to read from a thing, and spend very little time looking for the author's intent.
What I find most interesting about this phenomena is that it seems to be done in the name of speed, and yet that very quest for faster communications is causing people to lose information and spend more time on pointless flame wars due to misunderstandings - overall slowing things down and leading to a less fruitful discussion than would have been had if people took the time to express themselves more clearly up front, and to take the time to read what someone actually wrote to them.
To very clearly show the difference between the older mode of correspondence and the current one, go and get a book of the letters of any number of historical figures. Both sides take great pains to express themselves and understand the other person, something that we very rarely do today.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
think that it can be particularly difficult to convey emotion in a text message, I feel that most people are fairly aware of when they are "flaming" someone and, in fact, do so with intent. The somewhat anomousity of the internet makes it a perfect breeding ground for such acts.
Is more sarcastic than I care for, foo! shame! flame!
This is why you use emoticons, you dumb bastards ;p
:D
When reading we use a dry voice for internal monologue that lacks any of the subtle registers we use in conveying emotion in our conversation. So anything we read comes off very stark. The problem is that most people writing completely ignore this and use a bunch of ironic or sardonic elements that get read as harsh vitrol. This is one reason why you should wait 24 hours after writing a harsh email: when you reread it, it will lack any of the subjectivity you had when writing it and you'll read it as if for the first time (and, hopefully find the bits that would have pissed off folks something fierce). The same way, it's good to use emoticons to soften all bits in the gray area. Heck, even managers do it now.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Another reason for flame wars online, especially with regards to games, and on Slashdot, programming languages -
:-)
A friend who studied psychology talked to me about the "crafty consumer" phenomenon. If we have purchased something we have looked forward to, we will disregard negative things about this and might even become angry if friends point out flaws in the product to us. This is because we all want to think that we are crafty consumers who have made the smart choice. Of course, WE would never fall for advertising, we think. So when evidence mounts that the purchase wasn't as good as we thought, we resist facing it until the evidence is overwhelming. Then it is a blow to our self-esteem and might even cause a depression ("Maybe I'm not as smart as I thought I was... and all that money wasted...").
This can be even more amplified here on Slashdot when someone criticizes something that we have spent a lot of time and intellectual effort to grasp. When someone bash our favourite language, we think our anger comes because we feel "love" for the language, but it has probably more to that with the fact that it is a blow against our major source of pride - our intellectual capabilites. And if the language is not as good as we thought, it might take a long time to learn a new language as well. So in time of economic downturn the stress of increased job insecurity, we get angrier and defensive more easily. See my sig...
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
And in the same paragraph, he predicted Slashdot:
/.'s Psychic-in-Residence: Psychic to the Geeks
This study took essentially random, disparate topics, from multiple boards, and sent them in emails, isolated from the context. Of course people are going to have a hard time ascertaining sincerity when they don't see the context! An meaningful study would have measured people's perceptions of posts on boards they regularly go to. The conclusion may be the same, but at least then it would be well-grounded.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
For this reason, I always keep away from any discussion of serious issues in email. Whether its an argument with the wife, an important issue with the boss or whatever, this rule of thumb has helped me stay out of trouble for the past decade or so.
Lucky for me, I was in college before I started using email and talk. No IM in those days. Kids these days aren't so lucky. Teenagers, for example, react quickly and emotionally anyway (read: drama), even in person. I can see how many of them can get themselves in to trouble "chatting" with their friends online, rather than just picking up the stupid phone and actually talking with eachother.
Look at the whole picture, not just the hole in the picture.
I always thoughed flame wars were started to make up for something small ... like big cars
Sorry, couldn't resist.
:P
At work, I find myself peppering my e-mails with these damn cute smiley emoticons even though I feel like a teenage girl (which I'm not, even on the Internet). Sometimes I'll respond with a terse message that basically says "I fixed your damn user error", and then add a smiley face at the end.
I think it means that I'm secretly passive-agressive, trying to cover it up with cute little characters.
I guess all those times when I think the chick was interested at me was only a 50-50 guess...
:D or whatnot, because she might just be doing that for her own amusement.
Never be deceived by those ^^;; or
Please direct all bug reports to
if there are more than two possible outcomes. I wouldn't mind being able to predict winning lotto numbers 50% of the time.
It's even simpler than anyone gives it credit for: it's an outgrowth of competitiveness. Flame wars occur usually because two people, polar opposites on an issue, come to loggerheads over the issue and begin lobbing verbal grenades at each other. This leads to bystanders joining in the fray and pretty soon even people who have no idea what started it or what it's about are firing their ill-thought sarcasm at others like a TOT artillery barrage.
I saw it on USENET for years before the modern incarnation of the Internet as Web came along. It's like rams at rutting time; they will bang their heads together heedless of the damage.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
The real cause of flamewars is to post a story about the cause of flamewars.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
I find this hard to believe. In fact, I'd say the "karma" system here is a good indicator of why it's hard to believe.
I don't think most people are shocked at what the moderator action is to any one of their particular posts. This is why some people preface what they are about to say with, "Mod me as you will...", or "I know I'll burn karma for this but...". People know.
The problem isn't with being able to convey intent with email (words). The problem is with SEMI-LITERATE PEOPLE trying to convey, and conversely intepret, intent with email.
If you take the time to be clear and articulate, there is no way it can only be 50/50 on someone understanding your intent, unless you are speaking to an absolute moron.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
It is difficult for most people to ascertain the tone of written communication due to their poor reading skills and the poor writing skills of the sender. Idiots need to go back to elementary school to learn something about grammar.
Can you guess the tone of this comment?
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
This is why precise diction--speaking and writing clearly--is necessary. It is often just as much the fault of the writer as it is the reader when a message's tone is misinterpreted.
There are devices such as certain words, punctuations or even emoticons that can help you give your message the flavor of meaning that you want it to have, provided you know how to use them correctly.
The skill to write well is a thousand times more valuable today than most people give it credit for. In a time when so much of our worldwide communication is written, we have to know how to properly build a written message instead of simply writing what we would speak and assume the reader will "get" it. You never know when you might offend someone.
Kids, this is why it's so important to properly use your <sarcasm> tags and your emoticons!
Well, when you're communicating with Americans, certainly...
semicolon right parenthesis
is that we're so stupid we jump to the conslusions that read insulting insinuations into things people write, and what's more we're so immature that we unthinkingly escalate the situation with hostile and sarcastic responses.
It's good to know our social "scientists" are spending our tax money on such important "research".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Because all of my emails consist entirely of pre-selected statements that I've been given, and none of the people I communicate with have developed an appreciation of how my writing style changes when I'm being sarcastic.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Hell, *I* don't even know when I'm being sarcastic anymore (thanks, K5!)
The English language (and even more so, in some other cases) is well equipped with nuanced words and structures that can accurately convey meaning, intent, tone, and information both simple and complex. Of course context is vital, but one of the most important considerations in any form of communication is an ability to preview what you're about to convey from the audience's point of view. When you send an e-mail to an informed co-worker, the circumstances surrounding the note probably make sense... but may not to the person to whom she forwards it.
Most folks simply don't have the skill, or take the time, to craft a message that carries its context with it. The ironic flip side to this is that when someone does take more time to write a more solid, contextually portable note, people not used to digesting that sort of thing presume it's either pretentious, condescending, or just verbose for the sake of verbosity. This is a cultural thing, and speaks to the continuing erosion in critical thinking skills and the obligation families feel to pass them along to children.
Anyone good with rhetoric knows how important it is to put yourself in your audience's shoes before opening your yap. The clearest communicators I know are the ones that are the most broadly exposed to the world at large, and take a deep breath before saying/typing anything, the better to ask themselves: will the person about to receive this e-mail get it? Five extra seconds can save hours of backpeddling, re-explaining something, or salvaging that business/personal relationship. But we've switched to celebrating speed and quantity of noise over quality of actual communication. This isn't going away any time soon, especially when entire generations are hitting their first email-enabled actual jobs thinking that "Dude" is an entire sentence.
The plague that is the use of "like" among teenagers (and stunted-growth adults) is at the heart of this. When some 16-year-old encounters a friend in the mall and says, "So, I was like..." and rolls eyes in a re-enactment of experiencing the emotions surrounding some other social interchange, the message gets across. That even works on the phone ("I was like, 'oh no you did-unt'"). But when all of the social warm-and-fuzzies that a young person feels happen without the need for a multi-syllable vocabulary, we can't wonder why they suck at both investing rich meaning in, and parsing full meaning from the written word.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
But everyone must be quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger;
a nslation=nas&st=1&new=1&sr=1&l=en
http://www.studylight.org/desk/?query=jas+1:19&tr
I disagree that this is the main cause of flame wars!
2nd degree sarcasm since 1981
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
So what does it mean when the metamoderation thing says that 90% or so of the users agree on the tone, and the research says that only 50% of the time the tone is correctly guessed? Kinda causes a breakdown in the whole moderation system doesn't it? I suppose that also means that by attempting to post something that may get modded up, you really are doing nothing more than gambling. So the highest karma people should probably be checked into gambling help groups!
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
And I thought they where talking about spitting wars between flamers. It would be a contest to see who could write something that could be taken two completely different ways. Then no conclusion.
My work here is dung.
For me, flame wars start for one reason and one reason only. As Dr. Evil put it so well:
"Why must I be surrounded by frickin' idiots?"
Claiming any other reason as a cause is naturally, ipso facto, evidence for the above. So there.
"According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I've only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time. "That's how flame wars get started," says psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with Justin Kruger of New York University. "People in our study were convinced they've accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance," says Epley. The researchers took 30 pairs of undergraduate students and gave each one a list of 20 statements about topics like campus food or the weather. Assuming either a serious or sarcastic tone, one member of each pair e-mailed the statements to his or her partner. The partners then guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers. Those who sent the messages predicted that nearly 80 percent of the time their partners would correctly interpret the tone. In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time."
In addition to being in the science category, this should also be listed under the Department of Redundancy Department.
You idiot!
</sarcasm>
Maybe it's just me getting older, but they're making a pretty big claim when their test group was a bunch of undergraduate students. I mean, it's a cliche that college students are clueless, hung over, self-involved, etc., etc., etc., and cliches get to be cliches for a reason.
More seriously, like any other skill, you get better at communication the more you do it (if you have any brains, and care at all what's going outside your own skull, that is). So I'd venture to say that a bunch of 30-year-olds would do better than those college students because they have moved out into the world and gotten smacked around because they didn't understand what people were really saying. 40-year-olds would do better and so on, up to some point at which the improvement would stop (probably when people started to think they know it all).
And there's the writing skill component. College students are learning to communicate, and from what I've seen of college grads their success rate is pretty spotty. It would presumably be easier to parse the tone of an e-mail sent by somebody who has more communications skill.
I could go on, but I think this is just confirming the experience of too many people, blinding them to the study's weaknesses.
Or maybe I just missed the point...
...flame wars are started by ignorant people who think that they know better.
There's something of a joke in there, I'm sure.
In other news 50% of recipients are American
"Microsoft is a horrible company. They screw their customers, produce crappy products, and control the market using illegal methods, then buy leniency from corrupt politicians. I'm glad they're such a good company, and I don't know what the world would do without them. The Xbox is a piece of crap that I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole, and I can't wait to buy one! And they were SO easy to get for christmas...I'll make sure to do business with them again!"
Okay, analyze THAT.
-PARANOIA is fun. D20 is not fun. The Computer says so.
-The Computer
Of course, they didn't mention that most flame wars are started by a) Thirteen year old boys who are new to the whole testosterone thing, or b) Borderline Asperger's Syndrome types who cannot understand emotions anyway.
After all, women are naturally better at communicating and understanding emotion, and without wishing to generalise, in most cases seem to communicate fine over the web without misunderstandings.
I'm getting haughty? With a soupcon of patronising, I believe.
Hang on...they tried to get a bunch of Americans to try and spot sarcasm?! Well, isn't that ironic...
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
The heck with things we buy; you should see how irrational we get over things we vote for.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Although I structured this as a joke (did you notice?) the point is quite serious. There have even been studies (at least one of which made it to /.) where people were more adamant in insisting that they liked something after they had selected it (as a gift, IIRC) for someone else.
And (perhaps most interestingly) the harder we resist changing, the more extreme we are likely to be when we finally do admit--not that we made a mistake, mind you--but that we were fooled by the foul tricksters that we once supported.
Happens in relationships too.
This (people not being in doubt) is one point of the study (users thought they were right 80% of the time) and it's at the root of a lot of disagreements, both IRL and online.
:o)
One of the reasons I don't read the "politics" section of slashdot is that people on both sides of any issue are so damn sure they're right. Generally they don't bother to think about (or perhaps even read) the responses from the other side. I can't understand how anyone can be as certain as people seem to be when discussing things online: are you really omniscient and infallable? Is there _no_ chance that you might be mistaken, or that the truth of a given matter might be something in the middle, between the poles?
IMO it's impossible to have a rational discussion with anyone who is sure they're right. Unless both sides can admit at least the possibility that the truth might lie between the extremes, they're just wasting time and bandwidth.
Don't let that stop you, though
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
I like to call the logical consequence of this study, "Now everyone on the net has Asperger syndrome." :)
I actually came to the same conclusion many years ago. (I've been regularly using e-mail since '89) I found that the best way to counteract misinterpretation was to try my best to not interpret, to not assume I knew what the other person was thinking/feeling. As a result I have to ask people what they think and feel all of the time, but that's OK. Communication ensues, and that's the whole point, ain't it?
"What?"
"Did you just call me a moron?"
A fifty-something bloke once cycled at me on the pavement. I asked him "does your mother not let you ride on the road yet?" as he passed. He turned round, cycled back and hit me, for "saying something about my mother"! It took me an age to work out that he simply did not understand what I was getting at.
I vote we all use emoticons, and then ban people without typing skills from the net. And the pavement.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Uh, I think I found the problem: "30 pairs of undergraduate students"
Idiot.
Everyone knows that flame wars are started by linux users! :-)
Ok, actually not really
Register the editry.
Derek Smart
I tend to cringe at the sight of emoticons, largely due to their gross misuse. It's hard to keep your lunch down when seemingly every other message you see has "omg :o, u r hte suxxors!! :P :) :D". Still, they do have their place when used sparingly.
:grin: that followed it at least told me that he wasn't totally serious. Okay, so I did say it's a stupid example. I could just as easily figured out the non-seriousness of the statement by the scores of "Wow, great find. Oh, and You Suck!" messages that followed.. but still.
Stupid example: I recently joined a new web (woodworking) forum where I discovered an odd tradition. Somebody would get an incredible deal on, say, a new band saw and "gloat" about it. The customary response to that is "You suck!". Now the first time I saw that, I thought that the author had an unfortunate way of dealing with his problem of envy... but the
Personally, I use them in one of two cases:
1. If it's likely that my meaning could be misinterpreted (i.e., the recipient doesn't know me very well or my writing is clearly ambiguous)
2. I am writing in a forum that encourages their use
How about trying to guess "I love Microsoft. It is so secure!"
In other news, vertinox starts another microsoft vs linux flamewar on slashdot.
by Macs sucking, linux rulz, winbl0ws ownz j00, xbox will beat ps3, wait, no, ps3 will get beat by revolution, and firefox is better than opera....
I have seen friendships break over email exchanges. They got so worked up it was not even funny. One of them printed out all the emails and showed them around (they had many mutual friends).
50/50 accuracy? They sent simulated college student messages, like "omg i liek u, u wanna cyber, roflcopter!!1!" and the recipient said, "Serious or sarcastic? wtf, I'll flip a coin".
My work here is dung.
I always picture a sarcastic David Spade and that fat dude in the yellow shirt on the other end when tech support types use emoticons. Do they at all disambiguate emotions?
"The answer is NO.
All flamewars I have encountered have been due to:
1) Very opinionated assholes who just love to bash other people.
2) Two camps filled with said assholes that can not seem to get along (though most people just seem to ask WTF!?)
3) Posting dumb articles to elicit responses of said camps.
Simply put the cause of most flamewars is CmdrTaco and CowboyNeal!
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
I find that sometimes this gets abused. A person writes something absolutely scathing like, "I wouldn't expect a guy from {insert nationality, town of residence, etc.} to understand what I'm trying to say, so let me paraphrase myself in a 5th grade reading level and draw some pictures for your benefit", and when the other person takes offense, the original guy just says, "hey I was only kidding man, can't you take a joke?"
:)
Unfortunately, in our society, a joke that belittles the person you're arguing with is usually given more weight by an audience than the content of the argument itself. Comments like this are usually made on message boards to swing sentiment to one side without having to construct a logical argument.
The receiver needs to try and assume that the sender is joking, if there is any doubt whatsoever, but the sender also needs to consider the fact that it's hard to discern original intent in electronic text, and should try to write in a way that focuses on the issue, not on the person. This is a good skill to master for most interpersonal situations, even verbal, by the way. It'll make your marriage last a lot longer.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
I learned about this the hard way several years ago.
I had a contractor working remotely for me who incorrectly inferred the tone of an email I sent him (I am normally not a mean or critical person by nature). He replied testily, and I made the mistake of getting angry as well.
I tried to defuse the situation and asked him to meet with me in person, convinced that things had gotten out of hand unnecessarily. He actually refused (and refused to speak with me on the phone); you know how tempermental we software engineers can be. Our working relationship soon ended.
Anyway, I am now always very careful about how I word things, and if there is ever any doubt about the wording in an email, I will go back and change it before I send it out.
The second lesson is that if it appears an email was improperly interpretted, immediately clarify things, preferably face-to-face or at least with a phone call.
Everyone loves a good flamewar!
The original news item was written by Stephen Leahy, and it was carried by Wired news. The post here is a word-by-word copy of this, without any mention to Leahy. That is plagiarism.
is that there is a natural bias in people that when they are at fault, it's circumstance, and when someone else is, it's simply their fault. Just look at road rage.
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
SLASHDOT SUCKS!!!!!
One huge gaping problem in methodology here is the apparent researcher request that students essentially fake the tone of their email. So this study is in large part measuring how well the sender *acts* "sarcastic" or "serious." From my observations in theatre, most people are not very good at faking their "tone", compared to when they actually *want* to be sarcastic or serious. A better study would have asked students to write on subjects and send the emails to their friends, then asked the sender and recipient of the tone of the email, then compared the results, without asking the sender to fake their feelings. I'll bet the percentage would go way, way up.
Currently hooked on AMP
To quote the band "System of a Down" from their song "Cigaro":
My cock is much bigger than yours, my cock can walk right through the door, with a feeling so pure, it's got you screaming for more!
Woodland Ave.??? Should be Woodlawn Ave -- it's not like it's some obscure little side street...
"it seems to be done in the name of speed, and yet that very quest for faster communications is causing people to lose information and spend more time on pointless flame wars due to misunderstandings"
I think when an e-mail correspondence spins down to a flame, most people tend to spend even less time reading an e-mail. They could tell you they're wasting time with you, or that they're not interested in a fight. But the real reason is that doing something assuming the pain is never a motivator. How many times do you feel the pain seeing an e-mail landing on your INBOX, without even opening it, from that person who is arguing with you and trying to prove you wrong? It is natural that you don't spend much time on it. You have a life.
Of course this doesn't help if you're trying to get a message across, and your recipient is trying to spend as little time as possible on your e-mail. They often blame you for being ineffective in communication. The best thing I ever did when winding up in this situation is to drop the conversation, but I'm sure there are better ways to do it. I think this is definitely a case where prevention is more crucial than treatment.
I once had a signature.
Why don't you take your little suggestions, and shove them right up your ass? What a fucking loser. :)
An even better one is to replace "Thank you very much" with "Fuck you very much" in exactly the same tone of voice. Most people won't even notice, and if they do they'll think they misheard and you can "correct" yourself when you say it again.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Flame wars get started mostly due to the aggressive nature of the human being.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
>no better than chance
Um, no. 50-50 is not "no better than chance" when it comes to the tone of emails. That would imply that 50% of emails are friendly and 50% are unfriendly, and readers are getting half of both wrong.
Given this utter lack of understanding of probability and statistics, I'm going to have to doubt everything else the author says.
He'll probably take that as an insult. Well, fuck him.
This study only applies if you have randomly selected people emailing you a 50-50 mix of serious and sarcastic messages! If I'm getting an email from someone I know, I'd think my chances are a little better of knowing if they're sarcastic or not. And if I'm getting a message from someone I don't know, I (seriously) hope there's not a 50% chance that it's loaded with sarcasm, cause that would be bad for business... I'd email the researchers and tell them of my skepticism in their research skills, but they'd probably somehow interperit it as a death threat, and since they're studying email interperitation, use their expertise to get me arrested... wait is my tone too harsh? Who knows, damn text..
I think the article covers only one small aspect of flame wars: misinterpreting the tone of a message. That allows someone to get bent out of shape, but the real reason people are willing to engage in flame wars is because once they get bent out of shape they hide behind the relative safety of the Internet when they lash out at others.
In the real world, most people don't feel free to get all puffed up and lash out at others every time they get their noses bent out of shape. It doesn't make good sense because sooner or alter you are going to end up beaten to a pulp for having such a big mouth. With the relative anonymity of the Internet, however, many people (especially this volatile crowd) seem to lose all inhibition and come out guns blazing when it's not warranted.
It would be interesting to see what effect this change in personal boundaries has on comunication when flamers are not online; whether they are becoming increasingly more volatile in person.
No sig for you!
I think this study is correct in instances where the parties don't know each other well (or at all). I think the percentages go up considerably for pairs of users who know each other and interact outside of email.
That is why God gave us emoticons! :-) So people would know what our mood or tone is.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
I can't believe the amount of crap ./ has degenerated to. But this was the worst of the trash. Im canceling my subscription.
And yet I don't remember any kind of an outcry in the days of letter writing, when this should have been just as much of a problem. I think another problem is the speed of the medium. Because you get the email within seconds of the send-button being clicked, it feels personal and IRL. Also, because the email is so easy and quick to write, the author may not properly think of the impact of their statements, rather just quickly jot something down and send it, figuring the near-instananeous transmission medium means the recipient can ask for clarification. Personally, I find it easier to correctly interpret (although again this may fall into the fallacy of me trying to self-judge) handwritten letters than I do E-Mail. *wry grin* I find it even harder to correctly interpret phone calls, oddly enough. I do better at looking for "tells" in how someone states their position in writing than I do trying to pick up on voice intonations. In person generally works Ok, though, where one can get the non-verbal cues.
Overall, for online work, I always double-check what I'm writing to try to avoid unintended meanings and I make liberal use of emoticons to indicate non-verbal cues that are missing. *shrug* What more can one do?
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Maybe someone noticed this phenomenon on consumers, but as you readily applied this on choices of programming languages, we can see this is definitely much broader. In general, people don't like to be shown that they're wrong. If one likes something so much to a point that he/she associates oneself to that object, that person feels the pain when the flaw to that object is pointed out.
;-)
What I find more painful on Slashdot is how someone tries to pound the merits of their favorite language on you in a way that makes me think "what programs did you actually write in that language?" As to having my favorite language criticised, I'm lucky enough that my favorite language is not that popular.
I once had a signature.
Like mac box vs beige intel isn't more important!
oh wait...
If someone says that I smell funny, I can either laugh or get insulted. It seems that most people *want* a flame war, so they'll take the worst interpretation, and react to it.
I've known people who do that in real life. I'll say something like, "I really like those pants," and they'll respond with, "What does that mean? Do you hate my shirt? What about my shirt? Do you have something against my shirt?"
are you being sarcastic?
i don't even know anymore
no i have not shot my gun in the air and gone 'Ahh!'
The tone of emails is often misjudged.
College students are egocentric.
I'm glad we have professors around to tell us these things.
Most people who study writing are conscious of the concept of voice, be it something they try to make sure their writing has (fiction, humour columns), or try to make sure their writing lacks (front page journalism). It's hard to quantify what makes voice: You're reading, but it feels like you're hearing what's being said.
If you want to develop your own voice, it's pretty easy: Just say what you write out loud. That's it. It's pretty easy to write huge sentences that look great on paper but don't sound great when spoken (**cough cough EVERY KEVIN SMITH MOVIE SCRIPT cough**), but if you can write something, and then read it, and it's phrased exactly the same way you'd say it out loud (minus the "ums" and "likes" etc.) you're developing your written voice.
Anyways, if you can write with voice, you can put a tone of voice into what you're writing as well, and chances are pretty good people won't misunderstand you as much. They'll be able to infer subtext, get any sarcasm, etc.
...it's because they know the chance of getting an ass-whipping for being an asshole online is much lower than being one in person, which most of the spine-less bastards who start these "wars" are to chicken shit to do in eyeball-to-eyeball situations.
lopl
The clearest communicators I know are the ones that are the most broadly exposed to the world at large, and take a deep breath before saying/typing anything, the better to ask themselves: will the person about to receive this e-mail get it? Five extra seconds can save hours of backpeddling, re-explaining something, or salvaging that business/personal relationship. But we've switched to celebrating speed and quantity of noise over quality of actual communication.
I am inclined to agree with you there.
In my opinion, the surest way to improve one's writing--and therefore email communication--is to make a conscious and deliberate effort to improve one's speech patterns. Where the speech goes, the writing will follow.
I am becoming increasingly frustrated with people I know and/or work with who do not think before they speak. Their speech patterns are irregular, incomplete, and many times confusing; as a result, it takes them a very long time to write anything clearly, and many of their emails are downright obtuse. There are several people I know who could not speak in complete sentences if their lives depended on it: each statement is a rewording of the last sentence fragment in rapid-fire succession. This is not only difficult to follow, but also stressful to listen to. I can't imagine how often they are forced to clarify when communicating via written methods.
The ironic flip side to this is that when someone does take more time to write a more solid, contextually portable note, people not used to digesting that sort of thing presume it's either pretentious, condescending, or just verbose for the sake of verbosity. This is a cultural thing, and speaks to the continuing erosion in critical thinking skills and the obligation families feel to pass them along to children.
This is indeed a cultural phenomenon, but probably not for the reasons you suppose. When I send emails to my coworkers, I am balancing two forces: the need for completeness and the need for succinctness. I know if I write too much information, the person receiving the email will only skim it, and will need to call and/or reply to clarify, even though all the information they needed was right there in the text. This is usually not because they are lacking critical reasoning skills (these people are engineers, after all) but because they are very busy, and multi-paragraph emails can be a little intimidating. However, if I simplify the email down to the bare essentials, I run the risk of being misinterpreted on the other end. Thus, there is an ongoing struggle in my Outbox between clarity and context, and the fact of the matter is that emails containing both take much more time to write. I am willing to take the time, of course, but many people are not.
The other cultural issue is the blurring of distinction between different forms of communication. Email can feel very similar to instant messaging, when everyone in the office has automatic notifications enabled and responds to your emails almost instantly. The existence of instant clarification causes laziness of composition. Why would I take the time to craft a clear and concise email when the recipient can simply ask a question for clarification in real time?
Poorly composed emails are not necessarily a symptom of fewer critical reasoning skills; I think they are more the result of a shift in focus during communication, from a single point of context (such as a letter or a book) to interactive, real time textual communication (such as email or instant messaging). When writing begins to feel more like speaking, the two forms of communication will blur. Interactive, conversational communication allows instant clarification, and does not require rigorous composition.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
People writing emails, intentionally trying to convey tone, have only a 50/50 chance of actually succeeding at it.
I used to feel silly having "writing" as one of the skills I put on a resumé. Not anymore. Thank you, internet, for boosting my self-esteem.
if that if I get modded flamebait or troll, I can go off on a massive f'ing rant about how the mods can't figure out what the tone of my comment is. Thereby securing my place in the "I'm always right, your just don't understand me because I'm persecuted" hall of fame.
excellent
Petyr
Now you know why grammar, spelling and punctuation are so very important, dweeb.
Go on, flame me with an emoticon and I'll reply with a sentence which, when read, will require you take four years of psychotherapy to completely heal.
Make my day, junya! *cackle*
Cherrios.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Poorly composed emails are not necessarily a symptom of fewer critical reasoning skills; I think they are more the result of a shift in focus during communication, from a single point of context (such as a letter or a book) to interactive, real time textual communication (such as email or instant messaging). When writing begins to feel more like speaking, the two forms of communication will blur. Interactive, conversational communication allows instant clarification, and does not require rigorous composition.
You're right! You should have just said, "You're wrong," and then I could have asked for some clarification.
Kidding, of course.
I think you're generally right. There are just too many variations, though, on the poor-emailing-skills theme to explore them all with one thesis in mind. I think the real problem with the really poor cases (of both writing AND reading such) is lack of attention span. Some people just can't hold a concept in their heads all the way to the second paragraph. It takes practice to stretch out and tune your linguistic/symbolic/conceptual input buffer, and very few younger people are getting that practice any longer. The biggest narrative arc they can handle is exactly as long as a music video. Sigh.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Because there are no facial expressions to read, you pigfuckers, it is always best to assume that the person writing the goddamn e-mail message is actually in a very fucking cheerful mood and smiling as he or she writes. OK, morons?
Some people have verbal ticks (sphincter-face!) which come through in written form, shithead. These really don't imply anything about the way the writer feels about you and your ugly face. In fact, I love all idiot slashdotters and wish only the best for any of the fine (drooling freaks living in mommy's basement) readers. Sometimes this subtlety is lost in my written communications.
So, to sum up, always assume that unless someone clearly states a wish to offend your sorry ass, most likely no offense is meant, and you are juts stupidly misinterpreting a harmless verbal "style!"
Have fun on teh intarweb, buttsuckers!
I think the real issue here is, as some have said, the deterioration of our capacity to write effectively. If people would bother to write online as if they were writing a standard paper letter, then this problem would likely be largely eliminated.
While it is true that body language plays a very significant role in verbal communication, I don't think we can shift the blame on to that, or rely on emoticons. After all, how many times have you seen ":-)" written in old letters? Letters which, I would note, were often used to communicate deep, complex, and important issues. Physical separation is certainly an obstacle, but by no means a barrier, to effective communication.
We have been conveying thoughts and moods accurately for thousands of years now, and with the faster and more dynamic nature of internet communications, the task should be made easier, not harder. In conclusion, dont writ lyek ur a dumb ase lol.
so what you're saying is that you gain no information by seeing the email?
>So, basically you're saying that anyone who misunderstands or maybe even
;)
>disagrees with you is a moron.
>That's my interpretation of what you said, at least.
>Either you're trolling or you've just provided more proof that the article is true.
Nah, it's just proof that you are, indeed, a moron.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
>3 short comments, albeit hastily written. The three of them are true (well, I think so).
>Yet people considered that as a flamebait. Why? I don't know, and I've learned not to care.
Unless brilliantly obvious, short comments are usually considered flippant.
A longer post usually indicates that someone put more mental time into the piece. If it's well worded, this perception increases. If it presents a case in a logical manner, this perception increases even more, even if the reader disagrees with the logic or the case being presented.
Short posts are too short to have the opportunity to convey much, if any of these things, and thus I'm not surprised if they get discounted by many.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I felt like it was being very sarcastic.
The English language is well equipped with nuanced words and structures that can accurately convey meaning, intent, tone, and information both simple and complex.
English and all other spoken languages are geared towards speach where the communication is augmented with tone, expression, hand waving, and obscene gestures. It has the capability of accurately conveying meaning, intent, etc... in text only form, but it is much much much much harder to do than in a face to face conversation.
The advent of smiley's and things like [sarcasm] tags are an effort to address some of the shortcomings of english as a written communication tool. Expressions such as "I was like" are also useful because in written text they imply a certain level of familiarity which helps set the tone of a message. In the absence of such familiarity cues, a message will look a lot more serious even if the content is supposed to be two old friends joking around. This means there's a higher probability of misinterpretation.
Personally, I'm guessing languages tend to evolve to more and more efficient forms, that this is what we are seeing now, and that we should let it evolve. It's not like we could stop it anyway.
Thank you, you've just described the reason for every "flame war" I've ever gotten myself involved in.
I don't take kindly to a number of assertions made on the many forums I've visited in the past. In particular, I loathe the apparently widespread belief that one who "runs" a message board is, in spite of having no other redeeming contribution whatsoever, and, oftentimes, numerous character flaws (a liar, a thief, abusive, inattentive, uncooperative, even just plain _stupid_), somehow "better" than any other given member of the community. Failing to bask in the glory of the emperor's fine new clothes or suggest _you've_ done something worthwhile subjects you censorship and reprisal. This is what makes my blood boil, more than just about any other internet issue - including spammers.
It's cost me convenient posting priviledges in numerous places over the years because I just won't keep quiet and go along. Although circumvention is often laughably simple, more often than not I am so fed up with this group that participating in whatever is dulled or turns my stomach. That's the really sad part, that this kind of attitude is constantly costing us (in the plural sense, the Star Wars fandom for instance) creative, educated people who could've improved all of our lots otherwise. It should make everyone furious; it should be our _duty_ to willfully oppose it wherever we have the chance.
I only hope others have the courage and wherewithal to see through the FUD and follow suit.
Really, picking undergrads to e-mail each other and try to guess the tone...
Example e-mail:
I rly lv teh cateferia food!
now, identify whether the d00d typing this meant to be sarcastic.
Pavlov's Dog ate the bell, and now he's barking at Schroedinger's cat all the time... -Me
Aw, come on - you know as well as I do that "anyone good at rhetoric" loves nothing more than to hear himself talk. And the more obscure words he can throw into a paragraph, the better. Why does he do this? To show how he's better. I used to do this sort of thing all the time, before I got a freaking brain.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
"The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time. "That's how flame wars get started," says psychologist ..."
No that is NOT how flame wars start, you $@&@)%^)^ idiot-like $^()@^$!
Aw, come on - you know as well as I do that "anyone good at rhetoric" loves nothing more than to hear himself talk.
You may be confusing rhetoric with "liking to argue and talk a lot." I'm reminded of the old saw, "I'd have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have time."
Meaning, someone with good native (or practiced) rhetorical skills is often the most succinct person in the room (or on the message board). If you have a good grasp on how your audience will digest what you hand them, you can keep it quick and to the point, in the way that will best serve to get your message/info across. Tidy, terse, rhetorically useful prose pushes the reader along the shortest path from uninformed to informed (or from unpersuaded to persuaded, etc).
The people who like to hear themselves talk are more often the intellectually rudderless vocabulary regurgitators, not the sharply insightful or subtly persuasive rhetoriticians.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Ah...yes...flame-wars.
That would be my fault.
Sorry everyone! I also would like to take this opportunity to apologize for cancer, blatant stupidity in traffic, the death of JFK, and the Cuban missile crisis.
--
Can't we all just get a...something?
A bong...no, that's not right...or is it?
A wang...nnnnnnnnnnnnnnno.
Uhhhhh...
Why? Let's look at the procedure: The researchers gave the students a list of 20 statements. The students then selected one of these pre-written statements and emailed it to someone else, and when they did so, they thought "okay, I'm being sarcastic," or "okay, I'm being serious."
Let's say the statment I selected was "I really like milk." I either emailed that statement while thinking: "gosh, I really DO like milk," or: "actually, I'm lying. I hate milk." And then, what, the person who receives the email is somewhow supposed to deduce, from a sentence which I didn't even write, which of the two I was thinking?
My god, people. How about I flip a freaking coin, and then you try to guess how it lands? I wonder if you'll do "better than chance," whatever the hell that means.
...Sigh.
Writerati
Jeez - you're doing it right now! "Look at me, I know what rhetoric means." I've got terse down to a science.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
and Sepulveda
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
You: Annoyed by lucid correction of your fallacious connection of rhetoric with hot air.
Me: Still willing to point out that while good rhetoric is succinct, not all terseness (even that which is "down to a science") is constuctive.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
At least on the internet, you can decern the difference between
"I helped Jack off a horse"
and
"I helped jack off a horse"
See, in the "real world", that would've caused quite the commotion.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
I do, though, like your sig. I've seen it many times, and lamented that the only people who get a smile out of it are the ones who know that the rest of them won't care anyway.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Maybe it is time to pick a language that accurately transmit human emotions, or at least, better than English (and Spanish): lojban.
Pupeno
Feb 1999 1 US dollar would buy 1.19074 Euros
Feb 2006 1 US dollar will buy 0.839585 Euros
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
My theory is that flame wars start when people go *looking* for one. In 90% of the cases in which I had a flame war and typed and typed and kept at it with tireless, dogged determination, it began to emerge that they had a chip on their shoulder before I ever came along. Thus, the person flaming you already got out of bed this morning pissed off at a certain category of people and you were the closest fit to project their agression onto. I've seen this happen hundreds of times. It at least makes a flame war more interesting if you approach it with the attitude of "Let's see what I can learn about human nature this time!"
If you read it you'll find a mistake that showed up in the Wired piece. People in their experiments didn't have the a 50/50 chance of detecting emotional tone -- instead, the chance of picking correctly the intent was no better then random chance. A much more interesting interpretation than 50/50.
There is a long history of academic research substantiating Eply/Kruger thesis that we don't interpret the emotional content (or as they call it, para-linguistic content) of text very well. The first academic paper that I've found that deals with this topic goes back to:
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/context/1589611/0 Sproull, L. and Kiesler, S. 1988. Reducing Social Context Clues: Electronic Mail in Organizational Communication. Readings in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 684--712. Los Altos, California: Morgan Kaufmann.
I've written more about this topic and other sources for the cycle of flames in my blog at Flames: Emotional Amplification of Text.
Most people feel free to state their thoughts more directly, without sugar-coating, in e-mail. Many of these same people have been socially conditioned to not do that in face-to-face interactions. The same person who writes, "That way of doing it is wrong," to a coworker in e-mail would never think of uttering the same words verbally face-to-face, even if they genuinely hold that opinion.
On the flip side, most people mistakenly interpret e-mails as offensive because they mistakenly intrepret any sugar-uncoated message as a personal attack against them, regardless of the medium. The person who implemented the flawed approach, who is told, "That way of doing it is wrong," whether by e-mail or verbally, tends to mistkanely interpret the comment as a judgement on their performance rather than as a merely factual observation about the approach itself.
In other words, recipients of communication seem to always be eagerly looking for any opportunity to twist anything they hear or read into a negative judgement against their character. I don't know why that's the case, but it seems to be a general truth of human nature.
One theory of mine is that most people are fundamentally insecure and constantly worry about what other people think of them, and so they tend to anticipate that anything said by anyone must be about them and must be negative.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
As annoying as they can be when overused, isn't that part of the purpose emoticons serve?
:-) " online.
Saying "you're a jerk" with an amused grin on your face in real life is somewhat of the equivilent to saying "You're a jerk
I find it amusing that the deterioration of our language in many cases is cause by an overabundance of vocabulary. I think more words, with very subtle shades of meaning, can allow more depth in our communication. However, most people use these words with slightly different meanings almost interchangably, and that confuses the reader. What, exactly, is the difference between "paradigm," "model," "precedent," and "situation?" If you don't know the difference, don't use the words.
Exactly! Thank you so much for bringing this up! I *hate* when people use words in complete ignorance of their meaning. Please, folks, if you're not sure what it means, *just don't use it*. It's that simple. Really.
I once had a flame war that went like this: (I'm the 2nd, and every 2nd thereafter)
-You shouldn't shoot trespassers because that's violent.
-Fighting in a war is violent too. Are you against that?
-I don't answer strawman arguments. [provides link to strawman] [This is where my anger starts rising.]
-I know what a strawman is. How is it a strawman?
-Because I'm not talking about soldiers, I'm talking about trespassers.
-Yes, but an implication of your position is opposition to working as a soldier. For it to be a strawman, you have to state how my argument attacks a misrepresentation of your position, and how that differs from your actual position. So how does it?
-Because I'm talking about shooting trespassers. You're talking about soldiers. Big difference.
-Okay, so further explain your position so as to show how it distinguishes between the violence of a soldier and the violence of shooting a trespasser.
-I already did.
-No, you didn't. You just said that you oppose shooting trespassers because it's violent. Yet it's clear the violence is not sufficient for you to oppose something. This I showed by bringing up soldiers.
-We're not talking about soldiers. You need to show why shooting trespassers is wrong. You instead invoked a strawman about soldiers.
-Look, a strawman is not a generic catchall for "arguments I disagree with". It refers to a specific fallacy of attacking a position different from the one under discussion. Whenever you call something a strawman, you need to know exactly how the argument it attacks is different from the actual argument you are promoting. You obviously can't even do that.
[goes on forever]
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
Not only I use emoticons, I also use [grin] to ensure the readers know that it was a sarcasm/joke to avoid misunderstandings.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I think that because we are using advanced forms of technology to send information, we feel the need to make things develop more quickly.
/.ers*) over something the other person posted in her(I'm assuming female) public LJ. The post angered me and I left a comment telling her how wrong I thought she was. This angered her and she replied back with some accusations/assumptions of what my political mentality was and demanded that I explain myself because she saw nothing wrong with her post.
Exactly! I once got into a semi-flame war with someone on LiveJournal (*can already hear the hissing from the majority of
Well, after taking a day to think out my argument, I posted back with indignance dripping from every word that I had typed, explaining to her, point by point, what had been wrong with her post(s).
Three days went by (there was a weekend) before she replied with a somewhat calmer, but nonetheless ticked-off reply to my previous reply. There were some points that I disagreed with completely, but within that reply I found a nugget of logic that made me go back to her original post and notice my error in interpretation. Ouch.
However, this deflated my prior anger to the original post and left me with a nice feeling of relief. Some other things came up in real-life and by the time I got some time to reply (which was about five days later), I had gotten over almost all of my knee-jerk anger over her last reply.
I calmly typed up a reply in which I 1) admitted my mistake, 2) told her how relieved I was to be released from my anger, 3) thanked her for her last reply, and 4) apologized. I also made a note that I was not being sarcastic about my reply (if I was, it fails as satire). Oh, and 5) pointed out a mistake in one of her previous arguments but indicated that I didn't want to really argue about it any further.
Two days later I got a reply from her. No anger, no name-calling, nothing. Just an honest reply from her thanking me for attempting to defend my opinions rather than just leaving a flame and disappearing. The really nice part was that she apologized to me for making the accusations/assumptions concerning my political mentality. It seems that the few days she took in typing out her prior reply had helped her put her words in perspective, which in turn had given me more insight into what she had really meant before.
All in all, things ended quite well (I have a much better opinion of this person now). It's amazing how taking some time to think things through rather than letting the emotion of the moment dictate your words can change how people can interact over the net.
All it takes is a little bit of creative effort, you know, like wiping your sock across the wet toilet seat first, then tapping it with your foot making it sound like you set it down...
Hmmm... Wouldn't putting the seat up in the first place have been easier? Or wiping with toilet paper? Walking around with a wet sock like that doesn't sound too sanitary or comfortable.The study says nothing about being able to ascertain tone in real e-mail messages where cues for tone may actually be present. It says that it's impossible to ascertain the state of mind of people sending canned e-mail messages which (having been composed by someone other than the sender) have no cues for tone. Probably should have been published in the Annals of Improbable Research instead of a serious journal.
Dude. That's, like, a lot to read.
I think people should put better use to the and tags in there documents, without it the sub-text is hard to understand.
Dude. That's, like, a lot to read.
omg lol
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Are vi vs. Emacs flame wars actually real or are they always done for fun? It always seems to me that these sorts of messages are written by people who remember the old days when such arguments were real and are just having fun. But maybe I'm misinterpreting the tone of the messages. I've never been certain because to my eyes both programs are so ancient, anachronistic, and underpowered compared to modern IDEs that no sane person would ever pick them over pretty much ANY modern IDE. I only use vi when I'm editing config files in an ssh/telnet session. It's about as tolerable as using notepad is to do the same thing on a windows box.
Cow Cube
The reason for this is egocentrism, or the difficulty some people have detaching themselves from their own perspective, says Epley. In other words, people aren't that good at imagining how a message might be understood from another person's perspective.
:)"
Man, this is giving me flashbacks. I'm not trying to be sexist, but it's definately been my experience that women do this more often (or maybe I just ignore guys more often). Anyway, I had online female friend who not only misinterpreted half of what I wrote (and took offense), but the fact that I didn't accurately predict how she would interpret my remarks was also my fault. All I said was, "You're fat.
Who knew?
Crap, that's not what I said.. See, she's even got me remembering it wrong! Women...
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Happy Valentines Day
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
I find the passive voice one of the more potent modes of expression.
:)
Examples: "The cat was flogged", "The house was burned", "The man was hanged until he breathed no more"
The nuance conveyed by the passive voice in those examples is one of completion of an act unto someone or something. It's got nothing to do with avoiding or taking responsibility (unless _I_ were the one who commited the act).
Another thing: Your 'example' of overuse of punctuation was simply an example of misuse of punctuation. One cause of misuse can be that one doesn't know the conventions, and therefore litter the page with punctuation. I doubt, however, that any person not endowed with legendary stupidity would put a random punctuation mark in between each and every word when writing prose.
I agree completely and to the tee with your assessment of how similar, but different words are brought to converge in meaning. Were I to blame anyone, the blame would go to English composition teachers that advice their students to use synonyms (so as to be less dull, I suppose).
With emoticons: Yes, they're easier to type. Yet I think the reasons they are popular are that they bring in visual elements outside of the range of language. If I write smile , it is a completely different experience from the simple
While I can agree that emoticons and faux-HTML tags can help to clarify the intent of a message, personally I find it easier to just say enough to make my point clear. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it makes for a very poor way to explain in print. The collective we have become so used to shortening and truncating what we say that we have forgotten how to write, and instead of relearning the skill we have substituted it with characters, abbreviations, and software-interpreted markup language to the point that I rarely meet people who would be able to write a pursuasive essay even if they set out to do so.
Unfortunately along with this, most people seem to have gotten to where they tune out that which requires their attention, instead relying on sound-bites, catch phrases that are unignorable, and outlandish exclamations to actually get data to penetrate. I'd be rather surprised if many people have read this far into my comment, for example. People need to learn how to read just as much as they need to learn how to write.
Thankfully vestiges of literary decency still exist, even if they aren't mainstream anymore. Hopefully trends will eventually return to that, but I'm not going to count on it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.