Hector Martin

This is what I mean by loop gain. These days a lot of discussions seem to start right off the bat with effectively "Look at how evil this person is". People are immediately boxed as the "other side". This is not conducive to productive dialogue. It just brews more disagreement.

There’s a serious and real problem with this idea, though: When we force people to constrain their tone— to minimize ‘loop gain’— we’re also effectively forcing victims to expend mental energy to massage their arguments into a form that shows no upset. It’s inherently silencing.

All too often in these discussions there’s a really notable asymmetry between the sheer amount of bad the two sides have to deal with. Folks who suffer PTSD, for example, have to deal with this constantly from all sides. Dave has to endure the occasional harsh criticism.

If we suggest that all arguments must be filtered down to an impassionate discussion tone, aren’t we inherently either: - forcing people already bombarded from all sides to expend the energy of putting aside their upset; or - excluding those same people from the conversation?

But this goes both ways: if we have "passionate" arguments that just devolve into escalation, we're either forcing those who are quietly victims but do not agree with the criticism to expend mental energy to provide their point of view, or excluding *them* from the conversation.

Obviously *I* am speaking from a position of privilege -part of why I can afford to spend time and mental cycles on this- but I have several friends who are much less so, yet are sick and tired of unproductive drama on social media. It's demoralizing to them.

Think about it, how would you feel if some people drove discourse about topics that deeply affect you personally in ever-escalating directions, and attempting to dampen the situation requires both *your* mental effort and possibly even losing friends over it?