Hector Martin

You used the words "out of his way" and "deliberate"; that implies intent. Sure, intent does not matter if you look at it from purely the point of view of impact, but it does when you're trying to establish a dialogue about the issue.

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.

Tfw the tweet youre replying to said runaway _negative_ feedback and I can't overlook it XD. More seriously, well said and I totally agree with you :).

Closed loop gain has to be > 1 when phase of feedback is > 180 relative to input for oscillation to occur. Phase > 180 means multiply gain by -1, so negative becomes positive feedback.

That's a frequency-dependent analysis, yes. Usually the steady-state construction has negative feedback, which then becomes a positive gain of >1 at a given frequency due to loop delay putting the feedback out of phase.