How harmful is “harmful”?

Conflict is not a bad thing. That is, if it leads eventually towards clarity and understanding rather than confusion and misunderstanding. And it’s almost always better to have a conflict openly than to sweep it under the rug. Fear of conflict is the second of the five dysfunctions of a team.

And even though anger tends to cloud people’s judgment, it need not be terribly destructive. If the angry person can manage to cool down and eventually keep an open mind in spite of it, it’s not so bad. The problem is that people often get stuck trying to prove that they’re right, placing blame and defending whatever position they started with at all costs.

One factor that exacerbates this is when different discussions get mixed up. When discussions get heated, you will often you get a discussion about the discussion mixed up with the original discussion. A debate about a technical matter may be conducted in parallel with an altercation that addresses the relationship between the participants. This is confusing in itself. Keeping these discussion apart will help maintain clarity.

In this vein, let me address the criticism I got in my latest blog post (“Comments considered harmful”) regarding the appropriateness of the “considered harmful” idiom. This is not a technical issue, so let me give it a separate treatment.

A response I got was:

If ever there was a posting to which the “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful posting applied, it’s this one.

To quote my own reply:

I have read that before. I fully understand the argument and agree with it in general terms. In particular, I agree with the idea that ‘the writing of a “considered harmful” essay often serves to inflame whatever debate is in progress..’

In this case though, there seems to be no debate in progress in the first place. I am trying to make my point strongly enough that people will at least notice it.

If the rest of the blog post had been over the top, then I would probably have been shooting myself in the foot. I don’t think it is, though.

I find the idea of “considered harmful considered harmful” valid, but over-generalized. Sometimes, a little conflict is needed to wake people up. Sometimes, you need to have two opposed camps for a while to make the difference of opinion clear before you can come to agreement.

When it comes down to it, it’s an empirical question. I choose to measure the success, or lack of it, of my provocative title by the actual responses I get. Few of the commentators seem to have been derailed by the title. Some had specific technical objections, and that’s fine even when I don’t agree with the objections. Some asked me how specifically comments might be harmful. That also is totally relevant and, in fact, helpful.

Let me try to be even more precise. My aim in using this kind of title is not primarily to provoke, but to (over)simplify the message to make it easy to get some idea of the content by reading the title. If I had said “comments are not always useful”, it would be so vague that anyone could embrace it. I would rather make it clear that I’m pushing a point of view that many are going to disagree with. Maybe I’ll choose differently the next time, but I’m not promising anything.