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by staycoolboy
2222 days ago
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That is why I said I'm ambivalent to the previous comment's statement about benefits from toxic personalities. I think your argument mixes up things you can control (skill) with things you cannot control (impulsivity), if the latter could be controlled it wouldn't be impulsive. And I admit that is a big gray area. There's a continuum of toxicity online, and there are going to be some moderation rules that are subjective. Unlike a pianist, I see the argument as more akin to web developers choosing not to implement alternate or semantic constructs which in turn excludes blind people. A visitor can't get better at not being blind. Of course, the analogy breaks down because blind people aren't adding noncritical discourse (aka what one mod may consider "flamebait"), but now we are back to subjectivity and affordance as to what is noncritical. We clearly know how to make the web accessible to blind people, but we don't have a universally clear way to make discourse available to people who sometimes suck at it. However, I can create as many accounts as I want, so I got that going for me. |
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First, we're not talking about a binary distinction; things aren't either "can control" or "can't control". It's a continuum.
Second, if it's really true that you can't control your impulsive behavior, that still doesn't change the fact that that behavior will make it virtually impossible for other people to deal with you in certain contexts. It's still up to you to recognize the impact that your behavior has on others, and to make choices about what you can realistically do or not do--or about how much work you are willing to do or how much risk you are willing to take to be able to participate in certain activities (for example, if it turned out there was a drug that enabled you to control your impulsive behavior, would you take it in order to enable you to do something you wanted to do?).
> I see the argument as more akin to web developers choosing not to implement alternate or semantic constructs which in turn excludes blind people.
Ok, so what "alternate or semantic constructs" could the programmers of HN, for example, put into their code so it won't exclude people who can't control their impulsive behavior?
> we don't have a universally clear way to make discourse available to people who sometimes suck at it.
It's not that we don't have a "universally clear way" to do this. We don't have a way at all. "Sucking at discourse" is simply not something we know how to accommodate for. The only way we know of to deal with it is for the person who sucks at discourse to learn how to not suck at it.
Perhaps at some point we'll have an AI or something similar that can mediate such discussions so all parties can participate. But we don't have anything now.