Subject: Proper behaviour towards irritating persons (RE: I'm not going to listen...)

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 11:54:46 +0200

Since Nick Staff's response is edging towards the subject of proper 
behaviour towards irritating people on the IETF list, I thought it might be 
worthy of response.... I found no reason to respond to earlier messages in 
this thread.

I learned long ago some rules for reasonable behaviour on mailing lists.

Some of those include:

1 - Argue rationally. Use arguments related to what's being discussed. 
Support those arguments with facts. When the facts don't support your 
argument, shut up. RFC 3184.

2 - When you think that other people behave unreasonably, ignore their 
unreasonable behaviour unless your role requires you to respond to it 
("don't feed the troll"). Alternatively, complain off-list. RFC 3005.

3 - When other people respond angrily to the unreasonable behaviour, you 
may sometimes advise them that following rule 2 may be a better option.

I've chosen to apply my strongest version of rule 2 to mr. Anderson - I 
won't see his messages unless I look for them. The reason being that I do 
not wish to expend my resources in cooling down to the point where I'd only 
make reasonable responses.

I think that's a good thing for people to do when they discover that they 
have the same kind of reaction to mr. Anderson's posts as I far too often 
have. So in the spirit of rule 3, I have shared the information on what I'm 
doing.

Believe me, if I wished to attack mr. Anderson, there would be no doubt 
whatsoever that I wished to attack mr. Anderson. But I don't.

Or, summarizing my advice in a very short sentence:

  Killfiles are good for you.

That's all.

                     Harald

--On tirsdag, juni 28, 2005 00:50:30 -0700 Nicholas Staff 
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> You could also reasonably rule it obnoxious, childish, and pubescent.
> Moreover since according to your earlier post you don't think fact is an
> acceptable defense of a personal attack your response is at best a curious
> double standard.  Unless of course your comment about it being fact was
> just some snyde payback from an earlier discussion.
>
> Clearly Harald included himself in the conversation for the sole purpose
> of being a jerk and his success in that area was disruptive and
> deconstructive at least for me.

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 07:19:49 -0400

Harald,

For whatever it is worth, I'll add a few things to this, largely
as corollaries to you one-line summary, without commenting on
what fraction of Dean Anderson's postings (or yours) that I read:

--On Tuesday, 28 June, 2005 11:54 +0200 Harald Tveit Alvestrand
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> Since Nick Staff's response is edging towards the subject of
> proper behaviour towards irritating people on the IETF list, I
> thought it might be worthy of response.... I found no reason
> to respond to earlier messages in this thread.
>...
 
> 2 - When you think that other people behave unreasonably,
> ignore their unreasonable behaviour unless your role requires
> you to respond to it ("don't feed the troll"). Alternatively,
> complain off-list. RFC 3005.
>...
 
> I've chosen to apply my strongest version of rule 2 to mr.
> Anderson - I won't see his messages unless I look for them.
> The reason being that I do not wish to expend my resources in
> cooling down to the point where I'd only make reasonable
> responses.
> 
> I think that's a good thing for people to do when they
> discover that they have the same kind of reaction to mr.
> Anderson's posts as I far too often have. So in the spirit of
> rule 3, I have shared the information on what I'm doing.
>...

>   Killfiles are good for you.

(1) If one cannot read the comments of a particular individual
without an excessively high likelihood of responding in a heated
fashion, kill files are also good for the community.  Overheated
responses and the type of positive feedback loops (and sometimes
flame wars) they tend to cause are of benefit to no one.

(2) That principle is symmetrical: if, e.g., Mr. Anderson or Mr.
Staff find your proposals irritating and of sufficiently low
information value to be worth quietly putting up with, they
would be doing themselves and the community a favor by filtering
your posting out.

(3) People who take on roles that pretty much require that read
even irritating postings, such as ADs and WG Chairs, assume a
dual responsibility to the community: one of them is to try to
read postings and extract the signal from the noise and the
other is to deal quietly and equitably with the noise.  I.e., in
your terms, they are obligated to expend the energy to calm down
before responding and to respond only when that is really
relevant and useful.

And, for everyone, the corollary for everyone is that, if you
want your postings read, you should keep them calm and focused
on fact and logical reasoning and explanation.

     john

---

From: Colin Alston <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 12:16:24 +0200

> I learned long ago some rules for reasonable behaviour on mailing lists.

So why arn't you following ant of them?

> 1 - Argue rationally. Use arguments related to what's being 
> discussed. Support those arguments with facts. When the facts don't 
> support your argument, shut up. RFC 3184.

Your "facts" are my fiction. I would assume that RFC's are "Requests for
*comment*", so commenting by their request should be perfectly open - so long
as someone has a logical argument, isn't talking circles or being a 
plain crack
smoker, etc. If you're to treat everything written anywhere as a holy grail,
then you're not going to advance anything much.

> 2 - When you think that other people behave unreasonably, ignore 
> their unreasonable behaviour unless your role requires you to respond 
> to it ("don't feed the troll"). Alternatively, complain off-list. RFC 
> 3005.

Why complain? If they are really as bad as you think, it should be evident to
everyone else. I do believe most people here are adults, and throwing 
your toys
out of the cot as soon as you perceive something as a personal attack 
certainly
doesn't mirror the attitude that should be conveyed on these lists.

> 3 - When other people respond angrily to the unreasonable behaviour, 
> you may sometimes advise them that following rule 2 may be a better 
> option.

No, you can pass them off as a crack smoker and go about the discussion in a
reasonable way.

> I've chosen to apply my strongest version of rule 2 to mr. Anderson - 
> I won't see his messages unless I look for them. The reason being 
> that I do not wish to expend my resources in cooling down to the 
> point where I'd only make reasonable responses.

So do that and keep quiet about it and go about your way? Are you one of those
people that feels that the internet is his home and every email demands to be
read and replied to?

> I have shared the information on what I'm doing.

No, you're making a noisy troll in a place it does not belong. This is 
starting
to sound like a local D&D web forum. Would the IETF like to install phpBB for
these kind of discussions?

-- 
Colin Alston <[email-masked]>

'CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, 
not as they
ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a 
cynic's eyes
to improve his vision. ' D

---

From: grenville armitage <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 21:40:40 +1000

Colin Alston wrote:

> 	[...] throwing your toys out of the cot as soon as you perceive
> something as a personal attack certainly

"as soon as" ?  you think this past week is the first time anyone's
had to put up with "mr Anderson" ?

that's funny. no, really.

cheers,
gja (i've hugged my killfile today...)

---

From: "Nicholas Staff" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 07:07:22 -0700

TIME OUT.

1. There was a last call for a BCP
2. It was suggested the BCP was at least in part based on erroneous data
3. Examples were given to support that claim.
4. Harald shared that he was irritated (thereby irritating the few of us who
weren't).
5. You (gja) write  "you think this past week is the first time anyone's had
to put up with "mr Anderson" ?"

There are those that can see the paradigm shift in the above timeline and
those that are the paradigm shift in the above timeline.

Please don't confuse this with an RFC.

Best regards,

Nick Staff

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
grenville armitage
Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2005 4:41 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Proper behaviour towards irritating persons (RE: I'm not going
to listen...)

Colin Alston wrote:

> something as a personal attack certainly doesn't mirror the attitude 
> that should be conveyed on these lists.

"as soon as" ?  you think this past week is the first time anyone's had to
put up with "mr Anderson" ?

cheers,

---

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2005 01:40:35 -0400 (EDT)

These are generally good rules.  Too bad you don't follow them.

Crocker, Royer, and Alvestrand et al should try to apply rule 1 to
themselves.  The fact that they engage in personal attacks (including
further attacks of "having to put up with Mr. Anderson", "Proper behavior
towards irritating persons [Anderson and Staff]") demonstrates that they
have no rational arguments to make.  It is an axiom that personal attacks
are the last resort of the wrong and weak-minded. I'll leave it up to
others to categorize those making the personal attacks.  They are very
vague about my "egregious irrational bad behavior", yet I am very specific
about theirs.

On the subject which brought their attacks:  I think it is an axiom of
civil society that accepting the claims of well-known, court-proven liars
is unreasonable and unacceptable. For some (plainly irrational) reason,
they find this axiom irrating. They are being unreasonable on this count,
not I.  By contrast, there is logic and wide civil agreement to this
axiom: its an axiom of society.  They just don't like that I've revealed
their unreasonable behavior, and don't like that I've revealed facts
they'd rather not have revealed.  They would prefer us to ignorantly
accept the word of court-proven liars unaware they are court-proven liars
on an RFC topic.

They don't like it that this fact of court-proven lying on the subject of
open relays has been pointed out, thus making it unacceptable as the basis
for an RFC.  But this isn't a trivial Homer-Simpson mistake on their part:
They are not shocked by the fact of the court-proven lying.  They do not
recoil from the fact. They attack the messenger of this fact. It is not a
mistake by their own ignorance of the fact. They knew about this fact.  
They intended to mislead. They are angry that the attempt to mislead has
been foiled.

And what they've had to "put up with" in the past has also been merely
unwelcomed truth about flawed schemes and false assertions.  Schemes which
were then abandoned by rational people, I might add.  And I've been
vindicated in many disputes on both spam and non-spam subjects, as well as
in disputes with spam radicals and liars. I am President of the League for
Programming Freedom, I have a fairly impressive resume, and a good
education with good grades at MIT, and my associates are leading people in
Computer Science. I have proven some organizational and political skills.  
I can articulate my arguments without excessive vitriol.  It is reality
that is annoying them.  I'm just the messenger: I didn't create these
facts, nor the court judgements, nor pass the laws.  They just hate the
facts that they can't dispute, so their only recourse is personal attack.  
The personal attack is a distraction and diversion from the facts under
discussion.

I will try to apply rule 3 to the rather spiteful and angry responses of
Crocker, Royer, Alvestrand, etc.  But it is good to know who prefers to be
associated with known, court-proven liars, and who would like to mislead
both the IETF and the public.  This knowledge is a useful set of facts to
be documented.  Eventually, there is always an accounting of such things.
It is just a matter of time.

The IETF and the ISOC have rules and codes of conduct that should be
enforced impartially by those in charge. Redress in several documented
instances has not been made. These cases will not be forgotten, and the
longer they are ignored, and as patterns develop, the more serious the
problem becomes. These problems don't go away because those in charge
ignore them. They fester in the public mind, and harm the IETF and the
ISOC.

Dean Anderson
Av8 Internet, Inc

-- 
Av8 Internet   Prepared to pay a premium for better service?
www.av8.net         faster, more reliable, better service
617 344 9000

---

From: Mike Truskowski <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2005 06:31:13 -0700 (PDT)

Dean,
You are wasting my time and personally yours.

Please take this somewhere else or at least take the ietf mailer
off your emials.  Others have indicated a lack of desire to
hear your comments also.

Mike