[TeMPOraL]

Unlike being poked in a vital organ, communication is a repeatable exercise, so reasonable people can keep communicating over the lower-fidelity medium until problem is resolved.

Face-to-face communication may be ideal, but it has huge overhead and limits. Compared to the scale of communication text (especially one over the wire) enabled, I think the world is much better off with the tech than it would be without it.

Now Slack per se, that's another story...

[lostjohnny]

> reasonable people can keep communicating over the lower-fidelity medium until problem is resolved.

That's a very high expectation.

In reality the opposite is true, the less human interaction there is, the more people polarize around their ideas.

[coldtea]

>so reasonable people can keep communicating over the lower-fidelity medium until problem is resolved.

And has empirical evidence, of people communicating in text mediums, from USENET to modern social forums, proven the above?

[TeMPOraL]

Yes? I mean, I don't have issues communicating over text on HN, or the subreddits I frequent, or the Slacks, IRC channels and the mailing lists I'm on, ...

What the empirical evidence shows me is that there's a (possibly very large) chunk of population which I would call unreasonable on a good day, that I only get to observe on the Internet, but can't ever find in meatspace. I know what's going on over at YouTube comments, or /r/all, but such people are all mysteriously absent from my meatspace circles, with no effort on my end to specifically identify and avoid them. I sometimes see them speaking unreasonable things when I pass them by on the street, but that's the limit of my exposure [0].

It's kind of similar to what Scott identified[1] as "dark matter people", except they seem to be inhabiting all the non-niche Internet forums.

Point being, if you exclude unreasonable people, text-based communications are fine. If you include unreasonable people, I wouldn't trust face to face communications either; if someone wants to abuse you with words, they can do that just as well in physical proximity.

--

[0] - Actually, the closest I've ever been to talking with such people was the couple of times during my university years when I ended up on some completely random party with people I didn't know. This suggests to me that there's a strong but barely noticeable filtering/selection effect in meatspace social networks. School selection, or workplace selection, aren't random enough to break out from it.

[1] - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin..., C-f "dark matter".

[coldtea]

>What the empirical evidence shows me is that there's a (possibly very large) chunk of population which I would call unreasonable on a good day, that I only get to observe on the Internet, but can't ever find in meatspace.

And it doesn't occur to you that it's the nature of the communication (online vs face to face) that might be a factor in this?