[austincheney]

> Directness isn't condescension, period.

Then we wouldn't be having this conversation. This conversation is here because people are offended I used the word coward and not at anybody specifically. I call them cowards because the behavior stems from intimidation. Everybody has fear, but its how people respond to it that determines bravery/cowardice. That said it isn't a surprise that cowards would be angrily offended at the mere thought of such a characterization even when not directed at them.

You have no idea how many horror stories I have heard from legal that boils down to my boss is mean. After further investigation more than 90% of the time the person making the complaint needed a mean boss because they were a piece of crap.

> And then you continue in this path, characterizing those who wouldn't respond to you as lacking "balls"

Yes, people who down vote for a minor disagreement of opinion or because their mortal soul was shredded apart by their deeply profound state of offense don't understand what the down vote is for. It isn't there to reinforce an echo chamber. The down vote is there to push down comments that are completely outside the conversation at hand or that demonstrate bad behavior. The big tears of sensitive people isn't an indication of bad behavior.

When I down vote a comment I always reply saying why I am doing so unless somebody else has already said it for me. It is the mature courteous thing to do.

[pritambaral]

I responded to you, not because of any of the reasons you mention, but because I genuinely wanted to point out to you your mistakes. It appears I have done a poor job of it, and I'm unlikely to succeed with further tries.

So I won't try very hard, and you might pardon me for the brevity:

1. Flight can be a perfectly sensible alternative to fight, and isn't always cowardice.

2. Fear isn't the only possible reason to avoid an endeavour.

3. Not every offence is taken angrily.

4. Not every offence is taken for the same reason.

5. Taking offence isn't exclusive to any single group, let alone "cowards".

6. I am a "mean" boss who also has to deal with people you dislike dealing with, and even I agree I am being uncouth when I call someone names because of their ineptitude, or other technical reasons.

7. The downvotes you are receiving aren't necessarily only from people who fall into those two extreme characterizations you describe.

8. There are no big tears here, only downvotes and people trying to talk to you.

9. Explaining every downvote due to bad behaviour gets tiring, eventually; though, here I am, and I haven't even downvoted you, yet.

[austincheney]

> Explaining every down vote

This is written as an excuse of laziness, which doesn’t makes sense. Clearly there is the energy to become emotionally responsive. That is the nature of an echo chamber, destroy that which is disagreeable for comfort.

The rest of your points are all assumptions and stereotypes to qualify bad behavior. If you really merely disagreed with an opinion you would ignore it. There is something more at play if you feel the need to silence or destroy an opinion.

While I understand this all stems from immaturity and a vain need to somehow qualify it I will leave you with this:

https://www.bartleby.com/130/2.html

[pritambaral]

1. Energy to downvote < Energy to explain.

2. Discouraging bad behaviour != Echo chamber

3. Rest of my points: specific refutals of your mistakes.

4. I didn't even disagree with your opinion, and I'm telling you this for the third time now. I didn't even downvote you, though I want to, especially now.

The very first site guideline about comments says "Be civil". You break that, complain about downvotes (which breaks another site guideline), and when someone tries to reason with you, you up the snark (which breaks the first guideline), and refuse to see/read anyone's point of view except your own.

Forget your misguided ideas that all you presented here is an opinion, and that every one who disagreed with your comment is fragile, thin-skinned, and thin-skilled, and examine just your behaviour here. Are you really, truly, surprised anyone wants to discourage such behaviour around here?

[austincheney]

Your down voting without an explanation is how you exercise the echo chamber. The logic of your thinking makes sense and is agreeable, but you aren't putting the pieces together correctly. You may not be able to see it due to an informal bias I have started to study.

Because the behavior I am seeing here is also frequently seen offline as well I am writing a paper on it for my coworkers. It is pretty interesting stuff to research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_processing_sensitivity

Essentially, SPS appears to be a form of advanced processing in the brain. The brain of a SPS person will process certain stimulus much faster and aggressively than a common person resulting in a deep emotional experience. The research indicates 15-20% of adults may fall into this description. The positive result of this scenario is an intrinsically deep set of experiences from an exceedingly minor trigger.

The primary negative result is a loss objectivity. A stimulus that results in a deep emotional experience is distracting to anybody. Such a distraction may likely effect all adults similarly. The difference here is whether the person is sufficiently triggered by a given stimulus. The given distraction warrants a response at cost to a broader consideration for the given subject or a wider distribution of inputs.

The tragedy of this is that adults cannot properly self-regulate their behavior when compelled to a strong emotional state. This is problematic because emotional equilibrium is what allows the adult brain to self-reflect on its behavior and apply controls as necessary to adjust the behavior. The self-regulation generally occurs as the emotional state cools over a brief time period. If a SPS person is more deeply and frequently compelled to a deep emotional state they likely cannot achieve the necessary modification controls present in the behavior of other adults.

The research also indicates a SPS person may pause on trivial things to allow for deeper processing of the resulting emotional state or triggering stimulus. In social settings this would appear awkward as the timing and observed delays would appear strange followed by a response, even if not spoken, that other people may not well understand.

Conversely I occupy the opposite end of this spectrum of abnormal. I am hyper-objective, which comes with its own sets of pros and cons. Hyper-objectivity is generally extremely rare yet blessed for strengths of analysis and logic. People with this sort of personality are often, and undeservedly, considered to be smarter than average when such assumptions are grossly inaccurate. These people will frequently analyze common things to a degree of specificity most people generally don't care about.

The cons of a hyper-objectivity personality type is apathy. Since empathy is a deep form of listening an analysis hyper-objective people are great at it, but this is not reflected in their behavior. Instead all that most people see is that hyper-objective people don't care about emotions, which is mostly accurate. People like this area completely aware of this and how weird it is, which results in some abnormal decisions. It is easy to use empathy as a weapon to manipulate people or crush them with their own emotional states, and that is certainly an anti-social behavior. Hyper-objective people can modify their own behavior in response to social stimulus with far too great of ease which could appear somewhat sociopathic.

The general lack of regard for emotions has the interesting side-effort of an anti-Dunning-Kruger effect. Instead of an incompetent person who feels superior to their peers a hyper-objective person may in fact exhibit superior work performance but incorrectly believe themselves to be inferior despite evidence to the contrary. The resulting bias then compounds the problem by wondering why you can complete a hard task and your coworkers cannot. If you suck then they must super-suck, which isn't correct at all.

If you are an SRS person I recommend pointing that out to somebody you are close to offline so that they may provide you pointers when things get weird.