Comment by macintux
7 years ago
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.
And FYI, I didn't feel you were being negative or anything, and I don't think you have the ability downvote to -3!
I took the time to answer to tell you about deprecation because I thought it was worth sharing given your message, and that you may find that funny (double deprecation, bringing it back from the dead!) as I did when I learned that.
However, our exchange was judged negatively by other people. In the end, I still give up. I can't please them. I don't understand their culture or how it is adversarial even after going though the discussion here (especially about the "funny" part).
I don't want to watch what I say or talk in fear on ow I will be misunderstood. This is not a dictatorship. But "inclusive" language start to feels this way to me.
> In the end, I still give up. I can't please them. I don't understand
I would hate to lose you. But you’ve got to keep up with the times. It used to be, for example, acceptable to call any theoretical person “him” if it was a person in a stereotypically male role. Now it’s not acceptable, and we all have had to adjust. When I was a kid, it used to be accepted and normal to make jokes about racial stereotypes, and most people only thought it was funny and didn’t assume racism of either the person making the joke or of anyone laughing. Now it’s different, and we cringe at the terrible things which we then accepted uncritically.
It’s a bit like that when cultures change.
> This is not a dictatorship. But "inclusive" language start to feels this way to me.
There are two different things going on, one mostly good – i.e. the societal move to less adversarial language – and one bad, the social media incentives which creates an outrage driven attention culture, which drives people to, like Cardinal Richelieu, scrutinize every tweet and find something in those words to cancel them.
You shouldn’t be afraid of the latter to a degree that you reject the former.
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!
I think that people call ‘communicating efficiently’ is full of phrases the message would actually be better off without.
In this case, leaving out ‘This is factually wrong’, makes the message a whole lot nicer and doesn’t change anything about the content.
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.
Interestingly, that's no longer correct.
Historically, yes 465 has been deprecated several years ago. But as many ISP and the largest email services kept using it, the IANA had to change its tune and 'resurrected' port 465 in this RFC.
It is funny: the RFC itself describes that as a wart, but reality is a harsh mistress.
Section 3-3 of RFC 8314 from 2018 has the details.
Well, "Interestingly" (what?) and "It is funny but" sound patronizing to my ears. I'd use that language if I wanted to rub someone's nose into it and subtly hint they are stupid to other participants, especially at that point of the conversation.
5 replies →
Note: I left the middle sentences entirely alone because they had a friendly tone.
> How would you phrase that ?
One way that comes to mind is along the lines of “It was deprecated, true, but it’s actually back in favor now because...”
> How would you phrase that ?
Maybe "I am not entirely sure I feel convinced that nobody would disagree with this description providing sufficient convergence with what might be argued is a valid way to interpret reality". Or maybe "that's being disingenuous", another classic of sophisticated kindness.
I disagree with that style of writing. Your example sentence comes off as heavily passive voiced rather than sophisticated kindness.
2 replies →