Comment by semiotagonal
7 years ago
I think what matters more than kindness is simply allowing others to save face. If being wrong incurs a social cost, than any disagreement is going to become more heated, which may be detrimental to the community where this is happening.
Of course, sometimes it makes sense to impose a social cost for being wrong, but that's different from raising the stakes of every disagreement unintentionally.
Let the other person save face. Nothing diminishes the dignity of a man quite like an insult to his pride. If we don't condemn our employees in front of others and allow them to save face, they will be motivated to do better in the future and confident that they can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...
Exactly! I've never read the book, but perhaps I've been influenced by people who have.
> Nothing diminishes the dignity of a man quite like an insult to his pride
This makes me realize how much the notion of “pride” applied to people feels such a dirty word by today’s standards.
Being proud of something, having pride in doing something is highly valued. Pride towards ourself is ridden with corrosive imagery from the cold war area, undue self boasting and narcism. I am happy with humility and openness becoming a better valued trait.
A book on Nonviolent Communication helped me a lot with conflicts. When studying it, one of the first things you learn that's really useful is how to not evoke defensiveness (or aggression) in the other party. A whole realm of new possibilities opens up; sometimes you have trouble believing you're talking to the same person.
Do you remember the title of the book?
It's Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication, third edition https://www.amazon.com/dp/1892005034
How about 'Nonviolent Communication' ?
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
It’s for this reason that, when I was still on Facebook, I would take arguments to private messages when they were either getting heated, or embarrassing for my counterpart. It would immediately change the tone of the interaction, as it was no longer a performance, it was a discussion.
The problem with Facebook and other shithole social media is that these networks promote Pavlov strategy which is actually really awful for any kind of discussion. Before the internet, using this strategy socially was called "gossip" and rightly recognized as damaging. It would be very interesting to see the effect of every post on Facebook having a big red banner above it that said, "THIS IS GOSSIP" (before the utility of that UI wore off like old school banner ads). People are incentivized to open with "exploitative" cheap shot comments in order to increase the largesse of their social signaling. This is why I flatly refuse to engage in certain kinds of "discussions" unless in a private group or chat or after limiting the audience of a post (and stating in the opening sentence that the audience is limited and therefore devaluing the post's capacity for exploitation by others). And we're back to the basic trust problem.
You can shear a sheep over and over, you can only skin it once.
How you say you are right matters.
Yes, but I know too much about saving face, and I don't like how it's growing in the west.
About costs for being wrong, last time I quoted a RFC about a topic I know well and said to someone that their information was outdated, I ended up downvoted as usual - even more in the reply, while providing a link to the RFC and even apologizing for insisting that the right information should be spread because how important it is - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21430096
In the end, I decided to stop caring. Now I stick to being factual. If I hurt someone sentiments and do not allow them to save face, so be it. Let the objective truth decide, social consequences (like karma) be damned.
Why not be factual without being aggressive?
> This is factually wrong. Your information is deprecated.
...
> Please read the outlined section 3-3 of RFC 8314 from 2018 that explain just that if you don't believe me.
You both started and ended your factual information with hostile phrasing.
You’re within your rights, of course, to keep being hostile with facts, but it’s possible to be both factual and friendly.
I am the person whom ‘1996’ corrected. I was glad to be corrected, and I upvoted the correcting comment. Even though I was of course bothered by having been proven wrong, and the phrasing was a mite adversarial, I disagree with those who may have downvoted the correcting comment.
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While I recognize that the language used here would normally be read as aggressive, I don't really understand why.
When someone speaks to me this way, especially in written form, I make it a point to assume noble intent. They are trying to communicate efficiently. I think it's an especially common style among programmers who are accustomed to "talking" to computers all day.
Still, I try not to use this kind of language myself. Sometimes you need to be inefficient in order to communicate efficiently. Leadership of many organizations has to fly across the world to have conversations face to face to accomplish efficient communication sometimes. It's pretty paradoxical!
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I have seen far worse passive-aggressiveness here (most often it's a variation of "why anyone would think X is beyond me" or "You do X ? I do Y because of reasons and I would certainly never do X but do it if you want.").
It might be a globish issue but I don't see any hostilities in OP's comments. [0]
> > This is factually wrong. Your information is deprecated.
How would you phrase that ?
[0] but I also believe that HN has members from many different cultures and lot of what is being discussed suffer from too much variety in communication style.
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It sounds like you believe that you're simply delivering the unvarnished, objective truth, but this method is just a different (and less-persuasive) type of varnish.
Even if there's some "protocol overhead", a more effective communication/persuasion style benefits both parties. Plus, it's more fun!