On Fri, 9 Dec 2016, Steve Holden wrote:
On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 9:13 PM, John Lee <j...@pobox.com> wrote:
I remember Dan Ariely reporting research in which some students were asked
to sign the MIT honour code before taking a test (in his book "Predictably
Irrational" I think). It was found those students cheated less than a
control group. But, MIT doesn't *have* an honour code (according to
Ariely, at the time)! The hypothesis is that we need reminding about these
things to behave better -- and the code itself is not so important.
In which case if more people did what Daniele did, and called out
unacceptable behaviour, we would get reminded but only after something at
least mildly unacceptable had happened.
Yeah. Some of that is inevitable I suppose.
FWIW I have to admit I always cringe just a bit at "unacceptable" in this
sort of context. I prefer "bad". Less authoritarian, but clear (my
philosophy: the truth is out there, but it's hard to find, and we might
always be wrong). IIUC some people on this list genuinely think being a
little disrespectful here to recruiters is the right thing to do when they
are perceived to be being disrespectful themselves. Though I think that's
a mistake, as usual I have to try and remember it might be ME who's
mistaken, that merely telling people they are mistaken is, and should be,
unpersuasive, and so trying to force them to behave my way is in the long
run ineffective and possibly harmful. (hope that doesn't sound like a
personal slight, not intended)
Many mailing lists (used to) publish a monthly FAQ, a practice neither
python-list not this one has ever adopted. I wonder if this might be a
low-bandwidth way to discourage high-bandwidth incidents?
Maybe so
Of course this solution is now about thirty-five years old, and I realise
you young kids like the shiny we stuff, but it might actually give us an
impersonal way of setting everyone's expectations before things get out of
hand. If they do so quickly, we can always take the sting out of any
response by pointing to a web copy of hte FAW and saying :you may not have
yet been am member of the list long enough to see this."
On the principle above, it could just say "Be good"
<0.5 wink>
After all, we aren't looking to discourage *people* here, but behaviours.
+1
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