Cardano

TheOtherDave, Thanks for your questions.

Just a quick comment. It's tricky to comment on some of these matters without allowing the comment to evolve into a full-blown essay.

I suspect the latter. I didn't detail what I think are the deleterious effects, leaving that for possible later discussion. However, among potentially negative effects are the following:

1. Those psychological effects which presumably motivated the essay of the OP, i.e., it's presumably not beneficial most of the time for people to be in a state of being offended.

2. A crying-wolf effect resulting from too many false positives. When there are too many false positives, then there's a tendency for people to pay less attention to what should count

Very good essay, katydee!

I think giving people tools to lower the likelihood of being offended is a worthwhile project. We live in an era in which there seem to be more ways of becoming offended than there were a few decades ago. People have always tended to be offended by personal attacks, but another layer has been added in recent times. That layer is based on identity. Identities can be based on race, religion (or lack thereof), ethnicity, political leaning, sex, sexual orientation, disability, etc. etc.

To an extent, we all perceive ourselves as having several identities, and we are more aware of that these days than previously. It's not that we... (read more)