Comment by pdonis
6 years ago
> Someone may be genuinely interested in feedback.
> You may be genuinely trying to understand it yourself
> if you have enough education/experience related to X, you may actually have a better answer at first glance. They might actually be interested in improving it and open to your suggestions
If any of these things are true, you will either know them well enough to know how to talk to them about it, or they will ask you explicitly for your input. In either case, you will not need to write an article asking the entire Internet for suggestions on how to talk to them.
In other words, I am not saying the things you describe cannot happen; I am saying that the fact that the author of this article had to write it at all means none of the things you describe are happening in the case he describes. If they were, he would know it and wouldn't have had to write the article in the first place.
Not everyone is equally socially astute. Some people aren't good at inferring such things. Such people need to work at it to make their life work.
Even if you are innately good at it, you may not automatically know how to handle it well if it's a new context in some way. This can include being a foreign national or facing other cultural barriers.
The most socially astute people aren't simply "born with" such talents. They work at it on top of whatever natural talents they are fortunate to have.
> Some people aren't good at inferring such things.
And my advice to those people is exactly what I said: if you're not sure how to communicate what you think is a good suggestion, or how to ask a question you're curious about, without giving offense, because you don't know the people or their work well enough, then don't do anything. That uncertainty you feel is a clue: it means you shouldn't be doing anything at all. Heed it.
For many people, such advice boils down to "Just be a prisoner of your limitations and don't ever try to overcome them or grow as a person."
I cannot fathom why you have such a big problem with someone using a blog post to crowd source suggested wording to try to explore how to do X better.
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