@jaggedappliance said in Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1:
What do people define as toxic? I've seen this word so often that it is losing its meaning. In many cases people seem to see it as simply saying swear words. If this is the metric then I am as toxic as the next.
Disclaimer: I know this may come across as preachy so I just want to say that I am aware that I'm not exactly an angel either.
Toxicity is down to individual perspective, things are toxic when people claim them to be toxic. People claim things to be toxic when they are offended. Despite the subjectiveness of the matter we can still infer some general rules to how we should interact with other human beings without offending them.
First I want to convince you that even if you are sociopathic and ignore all ethics it is still in your best interests to not offend people.
- Offending people creates an emotionally charged state. Emotions hinder efficient communication. You should hope for efficient communication, because that is the primary way of learning new things. You probably aren't running a particle collider in your backyard, yet you may still learn about the standard model from the comfort of your home.
- It is difficult to be productive when you are in an emotionally charged state. Especially in an open source community working toward a common goal, such as FAF, you should wish to maximize other people's productiveness. The more productive other people are the less you have to work yourself, right? Or perhaps these people are capable of doing things you can't do yourself, why would you throw away their abilities?
- People you have offended may not wish to work with you again, hindering your future prospects.
- Toxicity is reflective, once you have offended someone the chance that they will offend you in return goes way up. If this happens you have not only affected the other parties, but indirectly your own ability to think straight. Even if you think yourself thick skinned, there's a chance that the other party in their anger find a way to penetrate that layer of protection. Why take that chance?
I've only scratched the surface with this list. I would also list the pros of offending people, but I genuinely can't think of any.
I hope you see that it is strategically of vital importance that you do your best to avoid offending people. Now comes the hard part. Anyone may be offended by anything you say! But if you were to always stay quiet in order to not offend anybody, that would kinda defeat the point of communication in the first place wouldn't it?
This is where social skills come in. You have to balance the likelihood of someone being offended with the honesty of your communication. If you can say your piece without offending anybody, you should seek to do so, but if that is impossible you should at least dampen the blow as much as possible to minimize the amount of offense taken. Socially adept people are able to talk about offensive topics without offending anybody.
The social machinery is extremely complex. I have good news for you though: your brain is designed to deal with problems like this. Better than any machine learning algorithm we have come up with. So use it.
TLDR; There is no hard definition for toxicity since any behavior can be construed as toxic as long as someone was offended by it. It is in your best interests to minimize the amount of offense you dish out. Your brain was designed to solve social problems like this. Use it.