I intend this post most respectfully and with inestimable appreciation of the quality minds and expertise evident on ASR.
Debate and argument are critical in science. Argument for its own sake can be a source of revelation and healthy comedy. But in science, debate and argument are essential in the development of scientific truths. Working as a team, formal or informal, can foster marked human and epistemic growth. It might be an aspirational view of ASR that we most optimally work as a team to advance this science.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01217-1
Yet at ASR we are not bots and we are not (I would assume) AI. Human brains are not neutral and objective information processors, but instead are discursive and emotional organs that cause associated somatic and emotional feelings, behavioural trajectories, biases and lenses, and which are subject to life-long retention and conditioning (the stuff of trauma and hatred).
Even with specific training in communication skills that enhance civil discourse, cooperation and the goals of science, most all of us can still benefit from subsequent reminders to check our own feelings and our reactions in order to ensure that our replies and posts are not formed through our fight-flight circuits, but instead through
our cooperative, curious and intellectual capacities. I would love to publicly applaud the clear-headed posters I’ve read here who beautifully adhere to those latter abilities when things have been hot.
We do indeed possess the amazing capacity to be in mindful relation to our thought and feelings, and to weigh impulses against standards of wisdom and common care. I think we all known on some level that changing our mind and acknowledging, at least to ourselves, when we are wrong are very difficult and even heroic practices.
But just today some have posted their concern that ASR may be gaining some growing reputation for being, too often, mean-spirited. Sometimes when it gets hot it gets even hotter and more random. How often? To what effect(s)? Are there enduring patterns, liabilities and developing blind spots? Do we need to take stock?