Goblin Squad Member
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Leave it to me to necro a dead issue.
Now that the "crisis" has mostly passed, what with LR2 over and the tensions that plagued us fading away I would like to, with hindsight as our tool, take a moment to think about what happened.
I will start out by asking nobody respond to this thread in public, excepting perhaps a bump or two if you feel it warrants it (for whatever reason). This is nothing more than my opinion, faulty as it usually is, and my way of publicly expressing it.
Just this past month we experienced a spike in the viciousness of our forum(s) and our posts. And while it is understandable to get upset, angry, have miscommunications, I found something worse than the acclaimed toxic comments. I saw us reacting to it.
To be short, we just had a bona-fide Salem Witch-cum-McCarthy style trial period where as tensions heightened and relations tightened, fingers were pointed left right, up and down, from customers to providers and back. Look, we all had a hard time and stuff, but we also not only caused it as a community, we fed the fires as a community.
So I'll leave you with this. Toxicity often isn't the original "bad comment" itself, but the vicious and decisive behavior with which we respond. Our reactions to the few terse comments was so disproportional to the crime it is staggering to look at. For every incident there was dozens of naysayers.
In Richard Feynman's Los Alamos from Below talk he said something I'll paraphrase:
"So these brilliant men went around the circle each giving their own idea. Some ideas were great, some were terrible. After about five we got the plan we used. Nonetheless we continued around the circle discussing all the various ideas with equal concern and at the end we all agreed on the actual plan."
So please, armed with the knowledge of our folly, next time just practice some patience and lets look at all the issues and points.
Also, after speaking to him in private I'd like to say that I now understand Loth'Xal's point of view and his ideals and want to apologize for the sarcasm leveled at him.
Thanks for giving me your time. Given it is way late, I probably messed up some of this, but please just think about it all.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm always skeptical of Feynman's stories. He always struck me as someone who pretended to be humble, but somehow ended up talking about himself a lot. Don't get me wrong: the guy was unquestionably one of the greatest 20th century physicists.
During this prof's PhD Feynman visited. He wanted to talk with the grad students about their research*. Anyways, he got all the grad students together to give 15 minute talks about their work with just him and the other students in the audience. At the end of each talk he gave the speaker advice. So this guy went home and followed Feynman's suggestion and it worked perfectly.
*My co-supervisor also met him and tells me Feynman wasn't fond of talking with faculty because of egos, though I could be misinterpretting
Years later this prof met Feynman's secretary. She told him a story about how every day she would print off new theory papers for him and put them on his desk. He'd look at the abstract and say "right" "wrong" etc. without bothering to read the rest of the paper.
One day his secretary finally spoke up, asking him how the heck he could know whether all these papers were legit or not based on only a cursory look. He then pulled open a drawer and showed her that he'd done a huge number of these calculations already.
When this prof heard this he had to wonder if Feynman's advice to him on his thesis meant Feynman had already done a good chunk of it and was classy enough to not tell the grad students that he'd beaten them to the punch.
Being a Feynman story there's likely some exaggeration in the above, but at least some grain of truth.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If I have an epiphany it is an exultant event, whether it was previously common knowledge or esoteric to others: the nut of epiphany is something nobody should be denied.
It is shoddily rude to dash water on the exultation of an epiphanist with the news that everybody knew that.
The person willing to discover is more important.