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."
"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.
...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!
Was that sarcasm? or are you just being a smartass?
</sarcasm>
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!
Man, all these jokes about the difficulty in detecting sarcasm are so funny!
My in-depth study* of internet flame wars have shown that the root causes can be traced to these four men: 1 2 3 4
As a fun game, can you guess which one thinks he is the Son of God? (Hint: There is more than one answer.)
*By "in-depth study", I mean smart-ass remarks I thought up over my morning coffee.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
(Note: This is my attempt at humor, if you don't like it you can KMA!)
Cool! New Acronym! That's "Kill My Aunt", right? Said, done.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
And in the same paragraph, he predicted Slashdot:
/.'s Psychic-in-Residence: Psychic to the Geeks
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.
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
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.
I don't have that problem, because I'm always right to begin with.
I'm taking the 50/50 chance here that you are a Simpsons fan:
"There is no emoticon for what i am feeling!"
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
"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.
Wait, wait, you forgot a big one! http://www.whitehouse.gov/
This sig is false.
Yeah, nothing says 'please be my friend' like intentionally being weird.
Now you tell me, what's my tone?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Look! I don't need to read some crap article telling me about what causes flame wars.
.. and you all know you are, OK?!
[/sarcasm]
It's the fact that most of the people in 'ere are dicks
The skill to write well is a thousand times more valuable today than most people give it credit for.
Did you just end a sentence with a preposition?
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
How old? I wanna know if I'm closer to Depends usage than you are. What's the cutoff age for taking daytime classes in college, I mean, the age they call security if they catch you talking to a female student?
We should be concerned with deterioration of language to the point... cannot help to reverse any possible erosion of language arts skills... re there any English teachers in the Slashdot audience...? ;-) Is there a doctor in the fish?
I like prescriptive grammarians
KMA = Kick My Ass
Live forever, or die trying.
www.tomgpalmer.com
T. OMG Palmer?
Is that guy's middle name really OMG?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I've never meet an atheist or agnostic who didn't believe in something he or she could not properly support.
Of course I do, if it seems likely. I'm just not religous about it.