That’s the question in my mind as I read Joel’s latest.
Yeah, occassionally people are assholes. Welcome to the human race. I first started getting on local BBS’s way back in the early eighties, I was on usenet by 1986, and on the internet not long after. I was on gopher. My user id number of slashdot is 1081. My point here is I’ve been around a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of comments. I’ve seen a lot of flames (best flames: in the Asbestos Sewer on the old rBBS1 bbs at UofI- kids today have no imagination in their insults), and a lot of topic drift (worst case of topic drift: alt.sysadmin.recovery on usenet, where the average time on-topic for a thread seems to be about 3 comments). But I have to say that the bulk of the comments I’ve seen have been (more or less) on-topic.
They’ve just been confrontational. There are some kudos and thank yous (which are always appreciated), but the vast majority of comments are “You’re wrong, and here’s why”.
And I wonder if that isn’t the problem.
An example of what Joel Splosky is talking about right here from this very blog. I go and write an article about how great Postgresql is, and some MS SqlServer-bigot has to come along publish, on my blog, sullying my great post, a comment like:
I’m sorry, but that’s REALLY, REALLY slow and actually too slow for the stuff we do. On Microsoft SQL server 2k5 with a similar machine to yours, loading a million records from a CSV takes at most 30 seconds, and I can expect 100 million to be done in an hour. PostgreSQL is very slow in my experience and your article didn’t change my mind :)
Of course, what’s even worse about this horrible, horrible comment is… he has a point.
(As a side note: it turns out I was prematurely optimizing things. We now have several other tables in the 40-60M row range, with lots of columns and multiple indexes and not partitioned, and performance is just fine. Insert rates of 20-30K records/sec, fast access. To the point that we didn’t realize that the tables had grown quite that large until I want to dump one to a file, and wondered why that was taking so long… But this is a topic for a different post).
Oh, if only we had disallowed comments- I would never have had to hear the dissenting view, or confront an uncomfortable fact. Or, heaven forbid, admit I was wrong. Anything but that.
Ok, I think that’s enough sarcarsm for the moment. The reality of the situation is that the scientific method, our judicial method, and even how the founding fathers saw how our political debate would work, are all based on confrontation. In an open, fair, and rational debate, the truth tends to out (this isn’t gaurenteed, there is a large stochastic element in the process, but the tendency is obvious). And it’s not like even the queen of science itself, physics, doesn’t get mean, petty, and irrelevent- read Joao Magueijo ‘s “Faster Than the Speed of Light” for examples of just how bad the scientific review process can become.
Comments aren’t about somebody else listening to you- comments are about the original poster listening. Which is why comments somewhere else are not the same thing. What are the odds that either Joel Splosky or Dave Winer will read this blog entry? Slim to none. And they probably like it that it that way. Because I’m noise. Because I’m confrontational, and disagreeing.
What Dave Winer and Joel Splosky seem to be looking for is an audience. They don’t want to listen, they want to speak, and not listen. Personally, I’ve had a belly full of that sort of thing. If I want to be an audience, I’ll watch CNN, thank you very much. Instead I read Daily Kos. Because with dKos I, and others, can respond. Watch and see how many comments, how many diaries, even how many front page diaries, are of the form “Markus is wrong- and here is why”. As a whole, and on average, dKos is more correct than CNN, because there is a correction mechanism in place. Because people disagree, even with Markus, and Markus listens.
Joao had to go through a world-class flame-war, and “the reeducation of a PRD editor” in order to get his paper publish. But guess what? At the end of the process, the paper was better for it. Because in between the flames and irrelevencies were real, legitimate, points. After all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, people disagreeing with you are helping you, if you’ll listen. If you’re right, then engaging them help illuminate that you’re right, and often will change their mind. If you’re wrong, they’re helping you to become right. If your goal is to be as correct as possible, then people challenging you are your greatest gift.
If you post a comment to this blog, I will read it. I may or may not respond to it, but I will read it. I am listening.
Joel and David aren’t. And, you know, that makes me less inclined to listen to them, too.
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