True or false?
Let’s discuss this abstract quote about mailing lists:
At the end of the day, there are some people who deserve to be unpopular and we have no way to do that.
– Luis Villa March 17 2010, on his blog
Let’s discuss this abstract quote about mailing lists:
At the end of the day, there are some people who deserve to be unpopular and we have no way to do that.
– Luis Villa March 17 2010, on his blog
March 17th, 2010 at 11:59 pm
I wonder why you’re posting that quote.
Could you enlight us ?
March 18th, 2010 at 12:21 am
@Xav: Because I want to know whether or not one can deserve not to be popular.
March 18th, 2010 at 1:46 am
Are you interested in the semantic or the pragmatic interpretation?
March 18th, 2010 at 1:51 am
Everyone is entitled to natural rights. Popularity, however, is not a natural right; it must be earned.
March 18th, 2010 at 2:26 am
And furthermore, on any large mailing list there will exist two people X and Y, such that X believes that the quote applies to Y, and Y believes that the quote applies to X.
March 18th, 2010 at 3:41 am
I can’t find the mod-down button for this blog post… ;)
March 18th, 2010 at 10:05 am
@Benjamin Otte: The semantic one
@Jeff Walden: That’s not about deserving, that’s about either being or not being popular (aka Benjamin’s pragmatic interpretation, which I don’t think is interesting to discuss). If the answer is yes, then a next question is whether facilitating this technically is a good thing. And why is it good (will it improve something, and what).
But first things first. Can one person deserve not to be popular? Without a yes here, I don’t even need to think about the followup questions.
@Joe Buck: Yes, but to whom it applies isn’t really what I’m asking to discuss.
@Greg: That’s because I wonder. Either a comment doesn’t belong here, and then I remove it, or it does, and then the question is: can a person who commented here, when the comment belongs here, deserve to be unpopular. The question is about semantics and about ethics, not about pragmatics, in case Benjamin still doubts that.
So this is about asking the right question first before jumping on an implementation.
March 18th, 2010 at 12:03 pm
Oh, is it about me? ;)
March 18th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Some people set out to be unpopular.
March 18th, 2010 at 1:46 pm
@Stoffe: Again, that’s not the question. The question is whether one person can deserve not to be popular. The answer to that question either leads to a next question or marks any next question irrelevant.
March 18th, 2010 at 2:35 pm
Saying “a person deserves popularity” and its negation is very similar to saying “a person deserves power” or “a person deserves influence”. So his statement becomes:
“X person does not deserve influence.” [where influence = power, popularity, etc.]
We can argue backwards from Luis’s statement to try and recreate the reasoning. Perhaps the following.
“A person who uses influence poorly/in malice is not using it responsibly.”
“Only people who use influence responsibly deserve it.”
Then:
“X person uses influence poorly or to bad results.”
“X person does not deserve influence.” [where influence = power, popularity, etc.]
The first two propositions are the ones in question here and are raised by Luis’s statement.
Was this what you’re looking for?
March 18th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
@twilightomni:
Yes, but using your influence in malice isn’t in the same league of ethics as making yourself unpopular. Using your influence in malice is always a bad intention. For ‘using your influence in malice’ I agree with your logic.
However, having said something that isn’t popular isn’t necessarily a bad intention. And so you can’t continue the comparison, as it would compute to something illogical: “only people who never say something unpopular, deserve to be popular” (you can see how that leads to popularism, which isn’t necessarily an intelligent discourse).
Furthermore isn’t directing men’s actions to the production of the greatest possible quantity of happiness necessarily a good ethic compass:
http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2009/01/19/utilitarianism
Now, when the intent behind having said something unpopular is malice then that’s indeed comparable with your example.
However, intent can’t as easily be deducted from how poplar a person is (or from how popular what he said, is) as it can be with ‘using influence (or power)’.
And it definitely can’t be turned into a bad intention just by means of a democratic vote about it. That’s putting way too much trust in votes. Besides, the vast majority of people are utterly uninformed about what they vote for and if they would be informed the vast majority lacks the psychology skills to have any meaningful opinion about it.
This discussion, twilightomni, is, however, what I’m looking for, yes. Thanks.
March 18th, 2010 at 4:22 pm
Popularity _is_ decided by vote: if many people like you, you become popular. And indeed the voting might be based on bad information: people become popular by saying things that are utterly wrong, or even because somebody _attributes_ a popular statement/attitude to them.
But IMO in the context of mailing lists, where the goal is to get stuff done, this kind of voting is not bad: it reflects whether a user behaves according to the standards of the other users. Of course there is the danger of suppressing useful changes in the accepted behavior (because people who start behaving differently become unpopular and leave quickly); but I think the overall idea is good.
March 18th, 2010 at 5:04 pm
@olivier: Again, how popularity _is_ decided _is_ not the question (that’s the pragmatic interpretation of the question, I already replied to Benjamin and others that the question is about the semantic or the ethic behind it).
In my opinion isn’t “because the goal of mailing lists is to get stuff done” sufficient reason not to first answer the question “whether or not one can deserve not to be popular”. I think that an answer to that question is a critical dependency. Without an answer to it there’s no point in even thinking about follow up questions like ones about the implementation.
IF the overall idea is good, then in what context is it good? To get things done? So to get things done, you’re going to make it so that certain people deserve not to be popular? Right?
If this indeed becomes the new ethic in GNOME, can it then be written down somewhere officially? I think certain newcomers will want to know about this before they join. Don’t you agree?
March 18th, 2010 at 5:51 pm
“At the end of the day, there are some people who deserve to be unpopular and we have no way to do that.”
The quote is misleading and quite unrelated to the discussion you seem to be interested in.
The voting interface would only be a means of visualising a person’s popularity, not influencing it.
March 18th, 2010 at 6:01 pm
@Bob: This blog item _isn’t_ about the voting interface, this blog item is about the quote.
The quote sheds a light on the intention of proposing a voting interface for some mailing lists. And that intention is what this discussion is about.
So the quote isn’t misleading at all, and actually is it directly and completely to the point.
What is misleading is that you try to change the subject to the voting interface itself. That, isn’t the point.
March 18th, 2010 at 6:04 pm
People are not made unpopular by the crowd, the make themselves unpopular with the crowd.
If they do that, they deserve it.
It’s not rocket surgery.
March 18th, 2010 at 6:13 pm
@Bob: This also isn’t what the discussion is about, that’s the pragmatic interpretation of the question. We already handled this earlier. Have you actually read what other people have written before you? If not, please do that before commenting further.
Reading isn’t rocket science.
March 18th, 2010 at 6:37 pm
That’s not the pragmatic interpretation, that’s the pragmatic formulation of the semantic interpretation.
March 18th, 2010 at 6:50 pm
I don’t think you can’t approach this from a objective stance. The awarded attribute (popularity) is subjective in nature and as such the statement makes no sense.
March 18th, 2010 at 6:57 pm
@Bob, You see the words “and we have no way to do that” in the quote?
I know that in your stubbornness you’ll resist from not being blind. So I’ll repeat the quote once more:
“At the end of the day, there are some people who deserve to be unpopular and we have no way to do that. — Luis Villar”
Now consider, with your ‘rocket surgery’ brains, that you wrote that “only people can make themselves unpopular”. You wrote that, right?
Then what is the meaning of “and we have no way to do that” in Luis’ quote? Perhaps you were saying that Luis doesn’t understand your ‘rocket surgery’? Because only the people themselves can make themselves unpopular. Right? Wouldn’t that obvious ‘rocket surgery’-truth render the part “and we have no way to do that”, ridiculous?
This discussion is about the intent of that quote. EVEN if you disagree, then still is this discussion about that. And you know why? Because ‘here’ I define what the discussion is about, not you.
Given that the quote contains “and we have no way to do that”, my conclusion is that the intent is “trying to gain a capability to do that”. That is what this discussion is about.
I started this blog item with the idea that “adience is smart enough that I don’t have to explain every fucking detail; they’ll read what they are commenting on”. But clearly …
March 18th, 2010 at 7:00 pm
@erik snoeijs: Who’s statement? Luis’ or Bob’s? Or maybe a statement from me?
March 18th, 2010 at 8:34 pm
I’ve had enough of the meta discussion about the discussion, so I removed a comment from Bob that was again discussing about the discussion (instead of about the subject of the discussion). It’s really clear what the discussion is about, Bob. Really, it is.
March 18th, 2010 at 9:44 pm
Sorry, had the page open for a while without refreshing. I was refering to the original quote. To me the quote refers to some objective attributation of popularity, which is simply non-existent.
Now i can assume he actually meant it in a different way, but since we are discussing the quote and not what Luis might have meant, it is simply a empty statement that at best has some totalitarian ring to it, but even then it makes no sense to formulate it as such.
March 18th, 2010 at 9:49 pm
Seconded Erik snoeijs. That’s pretty much what I was saying in the removed comment. Probably not as eloquent though.
March 18th, 2010 at 10:18 pm
@Bob: Fine, then now it has been eloquently said?
@Erik snoeijs: I agree that the original statement is mostly empty. I didn’t mean we can’t discuss what Luis might have meant: I wrote earlier that I prefer the discussion to be about the intention of what he proposes. This, I guess, comes pretty close to ‘discussing what Luis meant’.
This is how I see it, I’ll start with the context of the quote:
“Ducky: I agree that there is some risk of that, but if the options are popularity contest or flame-fest, I’ll take popularity contest every time. At the end of the day, there are some people who deserve to be unpopular and we have no way to do that. And like I suggested, some steps could be taken to minimize that, like making the minuses private/anonymous.”
We could listen to this extra proposal of making the minuses anonymous but this doesn’t change anything about the intent of the proposal. It just protects the people pressing the minuses from having to expose their identity.
If ‘private’ means ‘not displayed’ then that does indeed go into the right direction (but about that I don’t know what was meant, and you can see that this gives the proposal a completely different intent: it’s not about making people unpopular anymore then).
The preceding quote “if the options are popularity contest or flame-fest, I’ll take popularity contest every time” strengthens my concerns about the intent: which seems to be to turn the mailing lists into a popularity contest.
Furthermore aren’t the options just either popularity contest or flame-fest. The flame-fest option is a false choice. But I didn’t want to go in depth about what the options are in this blog item.
The reason for that is before discussing options, the right exercise is asking the right question: what do you want to achieve? If that is to have a way to make people unpopular (which is what the quote plus context seems to be saying), then I question that intent.
When the intent is questionable, is it then worthwhile to consider the proposal? In my opinion is any proposal inherently broken if its intent is wrong.
*edit*: I had a “you ask for context” somewhere, but you aren’t explicitly asking that.
March 18th, 2010 at 11:31 pm
ah ok, sorry, I saw “intent” in a much too narrow field. Interpreting it as “what is the goal underlying the statement”.
Also I’m afraid I couldn’t read the linked article earlier today because that server was unresponsive and when I posted my second reply I was on my phone, so I didn’t feel like browsing away from this page.
However, having read that, and Luis’s blog.
I don’t think he meant it as crude as it is stated now. His blog post was obviously a what-if scenario/exploration of how mailing lists could evolve.
Within the context of soft social cue’s I think he indeed meant Private as only visible to the poster. Because the intent of such a “minus” would be to politely cue to the poster that he is showing unwanted behaviour. Not so much “rating” the poster, and “warning” others.
Although I would agree that that is more or less how it is written now.
Which is I think the core of the potential mistake in Luis’s wording in the quote. The word Popularity should probably not have been used.
What I think he is trying to say is that currently there is no good way of politely pointing out unwanted behaviour to a person, not in anyway that will de-rail any average internet discussion.
Of course “unwanted behaviour” is again subjective, but less so then “popularity” I think.
I agree that the mentioning of flame-fest was indeed a false choice, but that is a well known arguing/debating technique, and there is no reason why anyone who replies to that couldn’t introduce a third possibility.
I think his intent is to actually create a third option that he excluded in his reply. By “educating” (for lack of better word) people who show unwanted behaviour, in a productive fashion.
Now personally I think that is slippery slope territory. When looking at it, the potential is there to create group pressure to discourage certain ideas from discussions, not just behaviour.
If I would go to a religious christian forum that employed such a system I am pretty sure I would get lots of soft social cue’s that my behaviour was unwanted, no matter how “eloquent” I made my case.
However, it is also true, which gets directly shown by his comparison of a real life situation with a mailing list, that such group pressure already happens in real life, and that in certain measures it is a wanted effect.
It’s a pickle, and I am unsure if the pro’s outway the con’s
March 18th, 2010 at 11:56 pm
@Erik Snoeijs: I think that is a very good analysis and I agree with most of your conclusions.
- I hope he meant Private as ‘only visible to the poster’. That would be a good evolution, and would represent a far better intention (as it focuses on improving the quality of the debate itself, and not on the popularity of the people involved).
- It at least felt to me (too) that what Luis wrote down, especially in the comments of his blog, is basically about “rating the poster” and “warning the others”. For example the quote “there are some people who deserve to be unpopular and we have no way to do that” concerned me (which is why the True or false?” title of this blog item).
- I agree that unwanted behaviour is less subjective than popularity.
- I agree that on mailing lists there is already sufficient group pressure.
- I first want to learn about the intent before introducing a third possibility.
March 19th, 2010 at 3:32 am
Good people can be unpopular too. But then they just get tired of trying to do good with so many people being assholes around them, that they go off and find better things to do with their time, and actually make it possible to succeed at doing the good things they desire to do.
Popularity has nothing to do with the quality of the person’s personality. If it did, then Hollywood would be dead already.
March 19th, 2010 at 11:28 am
@dobay: Precisely, and this is among the reasons why I question the entire idea behind trying to determine the popularity of people on mailing lists.
March 20th, 2010 at 12:09 am
Good point. As long as one doesn’t hold the converse as true: the fact that someone is unpopular does not *necessarily* mean they are good. It’s just that there is no correlation. In other words, the kind of inertia generated in a mailing list community (groupthink, essentially) is not in itself a good indicator of what’s good and bad - even though the GNOME community (IMO) does tend to view it as such. Some even seem to be preaching groupthink as some kind of recipe for success. A grave mistake, in my opinion.
March 20th, 2010 at 2:57 pm
@Anders Feder: 100% agreement
March 23rd, 2010 at 7:42 am
pvanhoof: Of course you can deserve not to be popular! If you’re the kid who barges into every conversation making a nuisance of yourself at school, people will correctly gravitate away from you, and then you learn your lesson and work to remedy the situation. But beyond that, the presence or absence of popularity doesn’t necessarily say anything about whether it’s deserved. The new kid on the block might not deserve to be unpopular at the moment, but it’s unavoidable that he will be for at least some period of time. The bully may be popular (or perhaps not, at least in his own mind) for that reason, but that doesn’t mean he deserves it; he’d be better off being shunned so he could learn the error of his ways.
But do you act to facilitate one way or the other? The question is too generalized to answer. Some tactics are acceptable (say, inviting neighborhood kids to a party so he can get to know people); some are not (permitting the bully to be beaten up so that his “friends” desert him). Without knowing the precise tactic, it’s not possible to say more.
(You should install a plugin that allows people to subscribe to comments. I only happened to return to this post so soon because it showed up as a link in the dashboard of my own site; otherwise I’d probably have returned in a few weeks or so when it reached the month-old limit Google Reader imposes on unread items after which it prevents marking them as unread. I’ve found Subscribe to Comments works well for me.)
March 27th, 2010 at 10:18 am
@Jeff Walden: Thanks for your comment. I installed the Subscribe to Comments plugin you mentioned. Let me know if it doesn’t work for you somehow.