Comment by saghm
1 day ago
> Oh, so people are annoyed at me because they aren't getting the point, maybe? The commenter who mentioned Steven Covey knew what I was talking about
I mean, sure, if you think that there's literally no way for you to improve how you communicate to more effectively convey your ideas, then yes it's because of the other people and not something you can address. One person getting the point isn't a sign that everyone else is going to though. If your goal is to be persuasive to enough people that you don't need to risk downvotes though, you might find more success from looking closer at why you failed to get the outcome you want than from trying to justify it as not your fault. As I said though, I don't have any agenda here; I didn't downvote you, and if you're happier with the outcomes you're getting rather than being open to trying to communicate differently, it doesn't bother me! Given that you seemed upset about the downvotes though, it seemed like maybe you genuinely wanted to learn what might have caused them so you could try to avoid it in the future, so I was offering what seemed like the reason to me.
> Everybody secretly knows that what they call compromises ought ideally to be creative mutual preferences, and not involve either or both of the parties having to put up with things and having their goals degraded
Not quite, I'm saying that it's not really a secret (at least not intentionally); it's just that common definition that most people understand the word to mean includes both win/win and lose/lose. It's totally understandable that this might not be your understanding of the word, since there's no way to really find out which words you might not understand the same way everyone else does, short of looking up every single word in a recent dictionary, which isn't a particularly fun way to spend time.
It's fine, I got a conversation, that's all I wanted. Thank you, by the way. No, I won't modify my behavior. :)
Re: the definition, that's exactly what I said in the first place! "Often people don't make the distinction and call both things compromises", I said. I'm promoting making the distinction because I think it matters, a lot.
Ah, I didn't originally read what you said as promoting a distinction as much as arguing that the distinction already exists, which I think is where some of the disconnect is. Looking back at the comment that spawned all of this discussion, I think I put more weight on the initial opening that to me reads as stating the distinction as a categorical fact already than on the conclusion with the quote you mention. If I had to guess, I'd say that how carefully people will read each part of a comment is probably inversely related to how much content in the comment has come before the point where they're reading that part, so people who disagree with the first parts will weight later parts that convey more nuance less and less as they continue to read. Since you're happy with the outcome you got here though, fair enough that changing what you might say the next time isn't appealing!
The idea that there should be a semantic distinction certainly is more interesting than my original interpretation of what you said; I'd need more time to figure out whether I agree with it or not, but this type of philosophical discussion is definitely the type of thing I enjoy (and I suspect you're right that it's also something that a lot of people here would similarly be interested in discussing).