[bsder]

> I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating.

So you'd rather people quietly knife you in review? Because that's what happens if you penalize people for public rudeness. Personally, I'd rather have a loud critique to my face than a polite one behind my back or, even worse, no engagement at all.

I don't need your politeness or friendship when I'm putting forth some new theory. I need accurate, engaged criticism and the number of people who will do that is vanishingly small. And a lot of the ones who will do that have social issues almost by definition.

[Frondo]

Accurate, engaged criticism is great, that stuff belongs everywhere.

"I wouldn’t okay this wrong piece of work as an undergraduate term paper" is not accurate, engaged criticism, it's mean-spiritedness under a veneer of toughness.

It's easy and fun to be rude and insulting, and when you can get away with it because of the subculture you're writing within, why not, right? Because being a dick is being a dick no matter who or where you are, that's why, and being a dick doesn't advance anything beyond your own momentary joy.

Every industry, every field, everywhere, will be better off once people get past being dicks just for fun, and give accurate, engaged criticism while maintaining civility.

[quanticle]

Every industry, every field, everywhere, will be better off once people get past being dicks just for fun, and give accurate, engaged criticism while maintaining civility.

I disagree. The blunt people (who come off as "dicks" to the outsiders) are like a community's immune system. They protect the community against the sort of people who take accurate engaged criticism, make one or two changes to fix specific issues, and then resubmit their work, wasting the community's time and resources, driving off the people who are making good-faith efforts to help the community. They're not being dicks "just for fun". They're protecting the time and attention of other community members by saying bluntly what many other people are often thinking.

Communities that have too many of these people become closed and ossified. Communities that have none of these people evaporate, as the core contributors just walk away and find better things to do than deal with people who are more interested in getting fame and attention for themselves than making good-faith efforts to advance the project of the community. The trick is to find a good balance.

[ubercore]

At least the quote pulled out here isn't useful critique, it's just insulting. I think that's the distinction being drawn here.

[shakna]

There's the constructive rude:

> Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP! ...To make matters worse, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is clearly total and utter CRAP even if it didn't break applications. ENOENT is not a valid error return from an ioctl. Never has been, never will be. ENOENT means "No such file and directory", and is for path operations. ioctl's are done on files that have already been opened, there's no way in hell that ENOENT would ever be valid.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

And then there's this:

> It's a Category 5 loon. Popular sources are full of anti-Copenhagen crackpot pseudoscience and of exactly this kind of bullshit – claims that the proper Copenhagen quantum mechanics implies superluminal or acausal effects (for the latter, see some largely confused fresh text by Nude Socialist about entangled photons in graves, London, and Beijing: this sort of stuff gets produced every minute, it seems) – but you may still find people who think that the presentation should be even more anti-Copenhagen.

http://motls.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechani...