Are rudeness rules necessary or desirable?

Question

I have been suspended from skeptics recently for "rudeness". I have written the following on physics regarding rudeness rules and rudeness in general:

In any human society, whenever a person isn't following natural rules of etiquette, this person is shooting himself or herself in the foot, since people will tend not to listen to something that sounds rude. Nobody in the history of the world has ever achieved better results by being impolitic, so it is not in anyone's self-interest to behave contrary to etiquette. You don't have to keep people from doing something which is against their best interest, they'll do that all by themselves. This is why etiquette is a fixture of all human societies, and this is why it is taught to young children.

My position is that this fixture of human society makes science impossible. Therefore one must violate etiquette at all times, suck it up, and take the blows. You aren't doing yourself a favor, but if enough people do it, the discourse improves, and science becomes possible.

The reason science is incompatible with etiquette is because of the first rule of politics: "when you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all". Applying this maxim led to Aristotlism, geocentric model and phlogiston, and meant that nobody was willing to criticize these. So you need to violate this rule of etiquette in order to do science, you have to call out nonsense as you see it.

Now the thing is, etiquette is etiquette, and if you violate one rule, in the eyes of the etiquette brigade, you violated them all. So the people who get targeted by etiquette rules are those who speak bluntly and challenge a position. Further, you only apply the rules when somebody is listening, because nobody bothers to enforce rules against people who are being ignored anyway. So you only end up applying etiquette rules in situations where they are censoring somebody.

I challenge someone to come up with one example of a user who violated an etiquette rule anywhere who was punished for it and the result was harmony. I can give many examples of users who did nothing of the sort who were accused of violating etiquette, because people didn't like what they were saying, and wanted to shut them up.

The general pattern of the use of etiquette rules means that science is incompatible with etiquette rules. More generally, any academic discourse is harmed by enforcing etiquette, and some, like philosophy, end up damaged beyond repair. All discourse is improved by throwing out the etiquette book altogether, and having absolutely no rules regarding how you say things (other than requiring legibility and prohibiting spam). People who wish to say "You are stupid, and your arguments sound like they were written in poop on toilet paper on an insane asylum, and oh yeah, you're ugly!" are not doing anyone else any damage--- nobody listens to them anyway. But these people don't really exist, except as imaginary straw-men brought up when you want to set up your etiquette rules.

... (irrelevant stuff deleted) This kind of politics destroyed Wikipedia around 2008-2010, where nearly all the major long-term contributors were purged, and article writing/editing dramatically halted. For example, I got banned from Wikipedia after I was told by the administrators that I could no longer speak in favor of unbanning Brews Ohare, a retired engineering professor who was having long (in my opinion misguided) discussions about the speed of light. It is important to make sure that this doesn't happen here.

The only way to do that is to take a firm stand against any sort of [etiquette] rules, and to make sure people aren't doing politics at all, but only looking at content. It is easiest to be sure of this when people are rude, since you can be darn sure a rude person isn't doing politics.

I firmly believe this, and I hope to bring this to the attention of people higher up. There is nothing to be gained from formal etiquette rules on a site with voting, rude people are downvoted anyway, and the system naturally rewards cooperation. What rudeness rules are used for is to shut people up, to censor them, and this damages the usefulness of stackexchange beyond repair.

Answer 1

In 3 years on Stack Overflow, almost all rudeness I have observed was of the destructive sort, with very few exceptions - one of them a user in the PHP tag who always knew his stuff, and was a godsend on a professional level, but also was so exceedingly abrasive that he was a net negative influence: where people started quabbling with him, any chance of reaching actual results was lost in the turmoil of emotion.

Rudeness, in my online experience, is toxic to the athmosphere, the community, and the business of calmly answering questions based on facts. I kinda see where your theory is coming from and in a way, I also kinda agree (yes, etiquette can be used as a tool of oppression, preserving the status quo, etc. and that needs fighting against), but it's not a sane basis for the interactions of a community of human beings. At least not a community that I want to be a part of, thank you very much.

I'm entirely happy with the way rudeness is moderated on the SE network, and wouldn't want to see it change. I can not remember an instance where I felt a serious, important viewpoint was suppressed during the enforcing of politeness.

If you want to be active in a largely unmoderated forum that tolerates and even welcomes rudeness, you can always resort to YouTube and its comments section.

Answer 2

The problem with the firmly held belief that the Earth was the center of the universe was not one related to etiquette, but instead one related to oppression and control.

The people who lived during those times were not disallowed from being rude. Instead, they were completely silenced, as the ideas they presented were a threat to the religious status-quo.

Galileo had no option to politely disagree. He was completely shut down. In some societies, even today, people are put to death for simply disagreeing.

Disagreeing and rudeness is not the same thing. If you disagree with something I've said, it's possible that you and I can be utterly frank with each other in expressing our opinions. You're also more likely to convince me to see things from your point of view with facts, evidence, and compelling data to support your case.

But if our conversation degrades into me calling you stupid and telling you to shut up, then that's when the learning stops. There's no longer a debate about what is right; instead, the message you're trying to convey is lost.

Note that I couldn't see what you wrote that the Skeptics mods deemed offensive. I am assuming they deleted the comments, so I'm not saying you called anyone stupid; I'm just using the above scenario as an example.

When getting into a heated debate with someone, there is no rule here that says you can't disagree with them, but try to do your best to stick to constructive arguments and avoid personal accusations. From looking at most of your activity on Skeptics, your contributions overall appear to be pretty positive.

Answer 3

Every community/society has rudeness rules. They have to exist. We teach our children that certain behaviours are not considered polite - this is no different in any community and is part of what defines it.

You live in a larger world now.

What is acceptable in your society may not be acceptable in another, or the larger world as such.

If you wish to be part of this other/larger world, you need to adapt your behaviour or accept being branded an outcast (at least until you have changed the opinions of the majority).

In other words - grow up (or am I being rude?).

---

My point of view is very personal - having moved to England from Israel (Hi Ron, perhaps we were neighbours once?), I had to adjust. I am now married to a Brit, who firmly believes that 99.9% of Israeli are rude... Different standards.

Answer 4

I might accept your argument as applied to scientific discourse. I might not. I'm not a member of any of the science communities here, and it's not for me to tell them how to operate.

Stackoverflow.com, on the other hand, isn't science. It's engineering. How Java works is not a theoretical question. It's a practical one. By definition of the venue, any question that belongs on stackoverflow is not looking for an answer about a theory. There's no Schumpeterian creative destruction to do. There's no Thomas S. Kuhn-ian revolution that takes place from time to time that changes the right answer to the questions. The community can deal with the moral equivalent of bizarre ideas about gravity without having to be rude to anyone.

So, as I see it, your argument, to use your chosen tone, is bullshit.

Reverting to my usual preferred tone, I just don't buy it. There's always room for civil discourse. We have a moderation system so that disruptive or crazy stuff can be pushed aside; there's no need to call someone stupid to accomplish that task. I note that you don't cite any evidence that skeptics has a problem that only rudeness can cure, or, indeed, that skeptics has any problem at all. So you're entire tirade is just floating in the air.

Rudeness is just bullying, if you ask me, and if you can't make a functional intellectual discourse without it, either the venue is broken or the subject is broken. In the case of philosophy, I'd pick the subject, but I doubt anyone here wants to read an extended discussion of that question.

Answer 5

I'm going to waste everyone's time with a second answer here, because I had a moment of inspiration about this soggy mess overnight.

When the trilogy started out, it was entirely about computers. People who work with computers are certainly capable of heated arguments, but, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever been burned at the stake over an argument about the relative merits of teco and vi.

Then we got area51, and proposals for sites on topics which have far lower combustion threshold temperatures. (In the case of Physics, we perhaps also got a site owned by a community that has a widespread norm of very blunt speaking.)

The people who set out to set up Christianity were faced with a daunting problem: how do you operate a 'QA' site on a topic over which any number of wars have been fought. The literal, people get dead, kind of wars.

Note that these are QA sites. There are not discussion forums to seek philosophical truth, or the modern equivalent of medieval 'disputations' between Christians and Jews in which the Jews lost either way. They are intended to be forums in which experts answer questions from non-experts. Of course, experts will disagree on some things, but for a site to be successful in this format, those cases have to be the minority.

In any case, the initial moderators and such of some of these site on hot-button topics decided to adopt a very conservative approach to dealing with controversial topics: very tight moderation. Call it censorship? OK, if you want, call it censorship. I'd call it an experiment to see if you can do a QA site, at all, on the subject.

Ron Maimon, the OP here, finds this approach deeply disturbing and offensive. In his own words, it's 'against his religion.' Well, OK, Ron, then the sites that adopt this approach are not for you.

Ron goes on to try to generalize his point of view to argue that his point of view -- that all attempts to moderate for civility are inevitably bad, and that any site, on any topic, that does anything of the kind, is doomed to failure.

Well, stackoverflow.com is a funny kind of a failure.

It is interesting to me that the management has chosen to allow the entire spectrum from the sites he objects to on the one extreme to the physics site on the other. (Always taking his descriptions at face value.) Most sites here, of course, are in the middle; and most of the commentary here has been from people who spend their time curating the middle and who aren't too interested in being told that they are committing some sort of crime.

In any case, the bottom line here is that "the management" has chosen to allow sites to operate with the rules of engagement that Ron objects to. Maybe those site's will fail by his criteria of failure, and maybe they'll fail by the management's criteria.

I think that there are two clear things here: (1) the management is terminally disinterested in hosting sites that consist of a food-fight about a topic like Christianity. That's not a path to commercial success. If Ron or anyone else things that such a venue should exist, pardon the expression, God bless them in their endeavour to set it up elsewhere. (2) The communities of the many middle-of-the-road sites are not interested in being told that their moderation of incivility is evil or doomed to failure.

Answer 6

I agree with the thrust of your arguments. And without knowing the specifics of the case you're referencing, it sounds pretty ludicrous for self-described skeptics, of all people, to be banning contributors for "rudeness". Maybe next they'll start banning people for corrupting the youth.

For people who care deeply about the truth, one of the most fundamental things to learn is, the "facts" everyone "just knows to be true", are guaranteed to be wrong. Furthermore, people have hidden assumptions that are fundamentally, perniciously wrong, and, if you directly, effectively challenge those assumptions, they will get extremely upset.

The historical figures most effective in speaking uncomfortable truths are often targeted for persecution. Naturally, the persecutors don't have the courage to explain their true motives -- you're exposing me as a fraud -- but couch their reasoning in terms of sanctimonious bullshit, or etiquette, or respect for authority. Ordinary people, too ignorant, or gullible, or cowed, or apathetic, silently assent to the persecution.

So all that's to say, I agree that rudeness is good. I'm disappointed in the response here (minus 28? really?), and I would have expected better. The down-voters here are lame if you ask me; although, in their defense, they maybe have not really understood your argument. This site is Stack Overflow-centric, where the issues you raise are probably less pertinent than on Physics or Skeptics; there's not much politics in the kinds of specific programming questions that SO traffics in.

Answer 7

It is interesting that even as an answer is effectively censored, the argument is made by a 47K rep meta user that "there is plenty of discussion in here", illustrating an almost unbelievable capacity for expressing two mutually exclusive ideas at the same time. The answer is completely wrong about free discussions not occurring on SO, so let's censor it. This insanity is nothing new on SO meta.

Answer 8

I think that due to the policy against discussion and the active discouragement of discussion, SO has long ago crossed the point of no return into actual Herbert Schildt'ness where more than half of answers are subtly and fundamentally wrong.