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Subject: 
Re: I think we stepped in something.
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general
Date: 
Wed, 8 Aug 2001 00:56:28 GMT
Viewed: 
151 times
  
In lugnet.admin.general, Shiri Dori writes:
I'll reply to this, but really without considering Jesse at *all*.

Understood.  I don't feel comfortable with it either.


Uhh, I don't neccessarily agree that 2 is *completely* unmalicious. Now,
granted, kids telling fibs on the net are plenty (1) and they don't always
realize what's wrong with that. But still, I see case 2 as being *worlds*
different than case 3. I can't point my finger at the difference but I feel
it exists, and is quite large.

Yeah, I know what you mean..., I can't seem to wordify it either.
There is a difference.  I guess I could have better described
2 ("the kid") as someone who (may or) may not be doing these things
deliberately, but they have the capability to process criticism
from others modify behaviour accordingly.  They have the capability
for self-control, they just need to harness it.  Maybe that better
differentiates it from case 3.


But what of someone in category 3?  If the person is left on
their own, well, we've seen what happens.

Have we? I don't know of anyone on lugnet that fits in that category. We're
all crazy to some extent, and I'm sure enough people have mental problems
here, but that doesn't affect their postings... I can't think of anyone
(*except* Jesse) who's given us reason to believe that their posting is
inefficeint <sp> because of behavioral problems. Jesse may or may not be
fibbing with regard to that; but I don't want to discuss his case right now,
only the general implications of this.

His would be the first case of it I feel that I have seen here
on LUGNET.  I believe this partly because of my own hypotheses
and because of his (questionable) psuedo-admissions to that effect.
I was not familiar with the conditions he mentioned, but I was sure
to look them up.  They certainly seem to fit the bill.


Many of us have
variously categorized Jesse with degrees of "badness", assuming
that his "disruptions" were willful, and that he wasn't interested
in taking anyone's advice.

Well what if he *can't*?  Maybe it's simply an unfortunate
truth for him.  But it is not *intentional*, he just can't help it.

That's not the message he's sending. Whenever someone points something out,
he usually doesn't say "I have such and such problems" but rather "who are
you to tell me what to do". In fact, he hasn't been consistent about either
of these.

This is where I was trying to speak more in non-JAL terms.  I
believe I'm perhaps thinking of cases where the mental issues are
more extension than those who replied to my post are thinking.
The cases where "medication can help" (as Frank mentioned) hadn't
even ocurred to me.  More I was thinking cases where there's no
such help, and this person probably has very real difficulties
functioning independently in society.  Unfortunately I don't know
of any specific "syndromes" to name.

I'm thinking in such cases the person can't "send any message",
as you suggest.  Their behaviour would be totally impossible
to map to any kind of logical patterns that rest of us may try
to apply.  Self-contradiction, inconsistencies, emotional swings,
etc., all seemingly at random to us.  The person has a condition
that prevents them from processing the feedback of others and
interacting in general in a "tolerable" manner.  That's the kind
of situation I had in mind for case 3.

If you tried to work with the person to help correct behaviourial
issues, it could blow up.  If however you just indulged the
person, exchanging "mindless" banter about subjects they're
interested in, etc. (basically = special treatment) then they
could be happy as a clam and hardly be a disruption at all.
"Passive" interaction could keep everybody happy, but "active"
interaction could cause a blow up.  This was the sort of
situation I had in mind, with JAL as a suggested possible case,
but more I was thinking in general possibilities.


I would like to see LUGNETers toss out some ideas about how
this could be handled in the future.  Perhaps LUGNET Admin could
develop some SOPs (standard operating procedures <G>) for
"debugging" rare cases such as this.  Contacting the poster
off-line, asking some questions, feeling them out to try to
assess which category they may be in.

Who would do that exactly? Would you have someone in *charge* of that?
Uhhh... I'm not sure I like that. The behavior police? Rings bells back to
the lugnet council... that didn't turn out very well.

Good question.  (And I've never heard of "The Council" <G>).  I
guess I was trying to come up with a catch-all technique for
sorting out cases like this before they became ugly.  I always
try to mechanize things---that's the engineer in me  ;]  But I
guess these cases really are so very few and far between, and they
are so unique, that such mechanization is impossible.  For the
most part I take it that Suzanne and Todd administer LUGNET, the
site, but don't have any inclination to "tend to" the goings-on
in the forums.  I tend to think this is A Good Thing, too.  But
would that then leave it up to the masses to try to work
with someone who is having behaviourial problems that cannot
be helped?  I'm worried we would see a case of full-blown
flame wars when, basically, everybody agreeing instead to give
the person some special treatment and a wide berth could make
things run very happily.

I'm not sure I was able to word that coherently...


Perhaps move on to
requesting communication with a parent, etc.  Communication like
that could very quickly flush out what the issue is.  And
then the other LUGNET users could be made aware of this somehow,
and tactfully, such that they exercise a little more patience
and tolerance in that special user's regard.  I dunno, maybe
they even have a little brick appear next to their name on
posts (web-interface only, I know), or whatever.  Just something
that hopefully would make difference.

Hmmm. I see good things and bad things about this... in doing that we're
singling people out for being "different".

Yes.  And as I said to Matthew, I don't agree with it.  But if
it could actually honestly help that person participate happily
in something like LUGNET, and others were able to tolerate it,
would it not be okay?  And I'm thinking of cases of behaviorial
difficulties where there may not be any level of self-awareness
at all..., they wouldn't even "realize" that they are being treated
differently than others.  I guess I'm advocating cases of "what
they don't know can't hurt them".

Or maybe the people I'm conjuring up just don't exist..., at
least not such that they would participate in written forums.

KDJ
_______________________________________
LUGNETer #203, Windsor, Ontario, Canada



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: I think we stepped in something.
 
I'll reply to this, but really without considering Jesse at *all*. I agree that this should be an issue, on some level... (...) You could say so, yes... (...) Right. I think one of the three applies to every single case I can think of (which aren't (...) (23 years ago, 7-Aug-01, to lugnet.admin.general)

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