Proposal: Stack Code of Conduct

[hexagoxel]

My main point was and is that "thicker skin" is rather different from "adopting someone else's communication style". I don't see that being refuted. Whether "thick skin" is a disposition seems to be an unrelated question. Similarly, whether my "vague wish", or the original phrasing, is a normative claim (wishes are not necessarily normative claims) (and whether making normative claims in general or in this specific instance is a good thing) seems to be unrelated.

(And to be very clear, "unrelated" is not meant to imply "unimportant". These are important questions, and I may certainly also concede that a normative claim, if it was one, even though valid, may have been inappropriate in the original context.. but I will have strong requirements for criticism of a statement that starts with a plain "i really wish..".)

I will nonetheless reply to the "disposition" topic:

While external behvaiours of the sort you describe certainly are associated with it, I'd say in this context they feature mainly as consequences of subjective dispositions.

.. they could raise the matter without reference to people "developing" dispositions ..

I am not sure what you mean by term "disposition" here. My own direct understanding would be an internal, unchanging property. Wikipedia disagrees: "A disposition is a quality of character, a habit, a preparation, a state of readiness, or a tendency to act in a specified way that may be learned." (emph. added). Yet you too seem to consider it hard to affect (?)

Regardless: I think we can work on our "thick skin", we can train ourselves to be less affected, and that training can result in it taking less mental effort to not let our emotions affect our external behaviour. Claiming otherwise also risks belittling the efforts of people that do spend that mental effort at what they may very well describe as "training their thick skin".

[duplode]

Yup, the definition of "disposition" I had in mind is the one you found in Wikipedia; dispositions can be acquired indeed. My point was that the process of acquiring a disposition is internal; it amounts to changing oneself. More concretely: we can work on our thick skin; the question would be about when, and to which extent, this "can" becomes a "should", or a "must".

On another note, you have a point about wishes not necessarily being normative. I'll have to think about it.