Programmer Dude said:
There is also the common phenomenon of "keyboard disconnect".
It's easy to be a jerk when you're not face to face. I'd bet good
money most of these people wouldn't **dare** to talk like that to
anyone's face.
Funny you should mention that...
There's a coffee shop near where I live at which I often get together
with a few friends and acquaintances to drink coffee and talk about
flurzling with beebles. Since we're there quite a bit, a bunch of
students and random passers-by sometimes see us there and come over
and ask questions (often related to homework the students who study
beeble theory are doing), or just pull up a chair and listen (since
beeble theory, and flurzling in general, can lead to discussions that
are quite interesting once you understand the basics). It works quite
nicely; the coffee shop provides a convenient place where we can show up
or not show up, depending on whether we have the spare time, and with a
convenient combination of a public place and implicit boundaries that
lets us carry on a discussion independently of the people at the next
table but still doesn't make us seem too threatening to people who want
to join us. Even the management of the coffee shop likes us, because we
buy a lot of coffee, and sometimes people will even come in just to ask
us a question and buy coffee while they're there (even though nowadays
most people seem to prefer going to bars and spending their money on beer
while carrying on superficial conversations with drunk people instead
of talking to a few stuffy old intellectuals in a coffee shop).
There are a few other groups of people who accumulate in the same
coffee shop and discuss similar topics, like flurzling with bobbles,
or general flurzle theory, or even unrelated and mundane things like
playing guitar and programming computers. (One of the nice things
about living in a city with two universities is that you can discuss
pretty much anything in a coffee shop without people thinking you're
weird because you care about something like the political structure
of medieval yak herds, which apparently The Rest Of The World thinks
is pretty obscure.) There are even some people who discuss flurzling
with either beebles or bobbles (or even any of flurzling with beebles,
flurzling with bobbles, playing guitar, and the political structure of
medieval yak herds), depending on which discussion looks liveliest when
they come in. Sometimes students will hear us discussing flurzling with
beebles and ask us a question about flurzling with bobbles; since a lot
of the underlying math is pretty similar between beeble theory and bobble
theory, we can usually give them a reasonable answer to their questions,
but (especially if their question is about an area where the two theories
are different) we'll tell them that they'll get better answers from the
people who discuss flurzling with bobbles. Sometimes we even end up
comparing some of the finer points of the two theories, and often when
that happens a few people from one table will drop in and visit the other
table to compare notes. Those discussions are always the liveliest, and
(when they don't degenerate into arguments about which theory is more
useful and why or confusion over which theory we're talking about)
often shed light on some interesting ways of borrowing some ideas
(or even some parts of the theory) from one theory and using them to
simplify something in the other theory.
Last Sunday, somebody asked how to determine whether a sub-beeble was
isomorphic to a null space of a beeble field, and after some discussion
somebody pointed out that there was a way to generate a null space of
the correct order as a constant in the equations, and that once you
have that it's easy (almost, but not quite, trivial, even) to determine
whether the sub-beeble is isomorphic to that.
About five minutes after that result came up, somebody who had been
listening to us spoke up and said "Hi, I'm Ruth. Is the ability to use
a null space of an arbitrary order a recent development? I haven't
heard of it before." After a few minutes of collective "Huh?"-type
confusion, Rick (one of the people who's best at answering basic student
questions) realized that the question was referring to the discussion
of determining whether sub-beebles were isomorphic to null spaces, and
said that generating a null space of the right order had been possible
for a while, but being able to pull one out of the air when you needed
one was a recent development from a paper that Professor Stan Komtee had
published only a few years ago and that introduced several new concepts
that hadn't been widely adopted for flurzling yet. He (Rick) also
told Ruth that, since the discussion tends to jump around quite a bit
(and there's often more than one discussion going on at the same time),
it's a good idea for people who are returning to something that had been
discussed before to remind us of what we had said that was relevant to
their question or comment.
Ruth didn't seem to like that last bit much; she said that she liked
it better that way, and that it was annoying when people insisted in
refreshing everybody else's memory about what had been said five minutes
ago (or even two minutes, or even thirty seconds), and even more annoying
when people complained about her jumping into things without giving
enough cues to them about what she was talking about. When Rick (and a
few others) pointed out that, because of the number of different things
that got discussed in a typical two minutes of discussion, questions
without context were difficult to make sense of and that often the people
who gave the best answers just gave up trying to make sense of people
who did it often, she just said that if that was the case then people
should just ignore her, and that anybody with a short-term memory should
be able to remember what was said thirty seconds ago anyways.
For some reason, though, instead of acknowledging that following the
conventions that we had established to make it easier for everybody
would get better answers, Ruth just started yelling at us that if we
were going to ignore her, then, well, why weren't we ignoring her, and
why didn't we shut up and stop trying to make her aware of how best to
get good answers, since she obviously didn't want to know?
At this point, Rick asked her why, if she didn't want us to pay attention
to her anyways, she didn't just go away and stop yelling at us to ignore
her. At this point I doubt it would come as a surprise to you that she
neither did so nor provided a good reason why not. Instead she said that,
if everybody at the table (even the people who had been distracted from a
really interesting discussion about how to keep track of sub-beebles that
needed to be introduced into equations and making sure that they were all
accounted for) when she started shouting, could just remember what she had
been talking about before that, then they would OBVIOUSLY know that she
was only talking about being ignored by people who wanted her to provide
some context for comments she made, and that the people who wanted her
to provide context were obviously just narrow-minded control freaks who
wanted to make everybody conform to their idea of what was a good way to
make it easy to keep track of a technical discussion with a large group
in a public space, and that people who wanted to be able to keep track
of what was going on without spending half of their time reviewing what
they had been discussing before must be really fun to talk to at parties.
After a little bit more back-and-forth about why it was a Bad Thing to
ignore the conventions of groups she was dealing with, and especially
why it was a Very Bad Thing to be as rude as she was while doing so,
Ruth started pointing out that since we were in a public place, she could
do whatever she wanted to while she was talking to us, and that we were
being idiots for trying to be reasonable with somebody who obviously
wanted to make an idiot of herself by being rude to us.
At this point a few masochists began pointing out that despite the
fact that we were in a public place with no formal rules of conduct,
it was still expected that people would show decency and respect while
dealing with others, and that deliberately failing to observe the norms
and protocols of a group of people you had just joined was not exactly
what most people would consider showing decency and respect.
Ruth's response to this, I'm sure, will come as a surprise to nobody:
she kept yelling at us about how it was so cool to be able to get people
annoyed with her just by being rude to them, and that the people who were
trying to get her to either stop being rude to us or to just go away were
obviously making the problem worse by trying to get her to be reasonable.
More interesting was the fact that it was about then that somebody came
by and started telling the combatants that they really should be nice to
the poor innocent newcomer, and that really, if people were as rude to
him as they were being to Ruth, they'd be picking up their teeth by now.
This was when I started wishing that we were having this discussion
someplace sane, like usenet, so I could just killfile the thread or go
find something else to waste time on for a while when I got tired of it...
dave
