On 15 May 2013 00:31, Chris Keating <chriskeatingw...@gmail.com> wrote: > Thank you Michael for the thoughtful post!
Yeah, agreed. I always look forward to reading anything Michael's written. He doesn't write frequently, but when he does it is always good. > Email, usenet, PhPBB, wikis and the like means there is a technological > method of ensuring that responses can be written and shared instantly (and > angrily) and, indeed, in heated threads you can quite happily exchange > messages which provoke an emotional response quickly enough that your > flight-or-fight reflex is being triggered repeatedly over a period of hours > with every ping of your inbox. Yeah, this is true. I used to deliberately build into my day walks, so I'd have time to reflect on things before responding. But of course that strategy broke when I got my first mail-enabled phone :-/ I do deliberately wait an hour or two, often, before replying to mail on our lists because it's so easy to get triggered and reply in a way that makes things worse not better. Sometimes I'll write a draft response, reread it the next day and be kind of horrified by how badly my reply misunderstands the original mail. (Like, I will feel attacked where there really was no attack. I'll interpret something in the worst possible way rather than the most reasonable way.) It's the [[Michael Shermer]] thing: if we ignore the rustling in the grass and it's the wind, no harm done. But if we ignore it and it's a tiger, we're dead. So rationally, we behave as though everything is a tiger, without necessarily realizing that reflexively doing that has a pretty high price-tag. Anyway, yes. Patience, maturity, self-control and generosity for the win :-) Sue _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
