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Answer the Freaking Question

dougshaw.com

65 pointsallynbauer35 comments

I'm usually the first one to get mad at dumb chit chat, but I think this guy is the last one who should telling us how to interact with people.

In the first conversation, the person he's talking to is justifiably defensive. Usually when you ask when someone is going to be free without telling them why, it's because you're trying to coerce them into doing something they don't want to do.

In the second case, okay, that other person is being mean. But you did just ask them a really stupid question. You're wasting their time, not the other way around. They're making it clear that next time you should look it up on Wikipedia. And you should.

The third case shows how really socially disabled this guy is. This person is trying to be friendly. They're trying to entertain you and therefore build camaraderie with you. They're being nice. And you blow a gasket because you didn't get whatever you wanted from them fast enough.

You might want to take this test http://www.glennrowe.net/BaronCohen/AutismSpectrumQuotient/A...

The question asked was about a 3rd person named Joe, not the person being asked the question.

That doesn't really change anything, because I want to prevent by colleagues from being coerced as well as myself.

Best

  DOUG: Hmm, I'm curious if Joe can make a 3:30 seminar. 
        When is Joe's flight due in?
  YOU:  3 PM. ... What's the seminar?

Conversation potentially ensues.

When you ask someone a question out of nowhere, even a simple, factual question, they will immediately wonder why. It's what we do. Since you want information from them, throw them a bone and give a phrase-length preface to why you want the information.

Exactly.

The conversation could very easily go like this:

  DOUG: When is your flight due in?
  YOU: 3 PM. ... Why do you ask?
  DOUG: Oh great!  Could you drive me to the airport?  My
  flight leaves at 6PM.
  YOU: ...

If someone asks you when you'll be free, without telling you why, it's probably because they don't want you to know. They're trying to trick you. So you have a perfect right to ask.

Why does this trick you? Because it puts you in a situation where you've already told the truth and can no longer lie? Better is to have relationships with your friends where you simply can be honest.

  DOUG: Oh great!  Could you drive me to the airport?  My
  flight leaves at 6PM.
  YOU: Ah no, I'd rather not, sorry.
  I hate driving to the airport at this time of day.
  or
  YOU: Well, it's not something I really feel like doing
  today, but how about you buy me dinner when you get back
  in exchange?

Bingo! Exactly why I often choose not to answer a question... suspicions about what following imposition is going to be attempted by the asker (and require more energy to bug out of once I've already admitted when "my flight was due in."

[Yes, I can be unsocial at times: but -sorry- sometimes I prize my quiet time for creative restoration and reflection to donate it to a garrulous traveling companion.]

Amen. Also, your "simple question" may have 2 or 3 varyingly complex answers, and I don't know how much info you need, and the context for your question can make it much easier for me to give you an answer.

However, I try to explain that when I ask, "Why do you ask?" so people know I'm not just being a dick. Still bugs my wife, though.

People will take any opportunity to push you down the ladder. They worm their way through any small hole they can find and they attempt to change your perception of yourself to that of a lesser human being. It is even more petty when they do it in front of other people. It's a status game, and I luckily started to notice it while very young.

Unfortunately, there is not a lot of hope for people who don't see the problem with this practice and who have followed it for a long time, unquestioningly and subconsciously. And confronting them about it is only good for increasing the temperature of their head. That is, their temperament is volatile and effects the density of their head... makes it susceptible to temperature increases. Thus, hot headed.

This is one of those things that really, really, really annoys me. And it needs to become socially acceptable to call people out on it.

But I have a question. I skipped college, so I don't know. Do people still do this in higher education?

> It's a status game, and I luckily started to notice it while very young.

You see this often when engineers meet. If the group is new, and haven't established a status hierarchy already, they will quickly start throwing jargon around at each other, to show who is more knowledgeable and try to make others look stupid. That quickly establishes who is who on the status ladder and then the meeting or discussion proceeds on. I think of apes beating their chests and throwing sticks around to show their might.

Once you become aware of it, it is quite amusing to watch. I started chuckling during a meeting we had with 2 new consultants, and everyone started looking at me strange...

But there is an upside to it. To a certain extent it is necessary to establish a hierarchy, because a senior engineer's opinion is worth listening to a lot more than a junior's engineers opinion. Time is money. If Joe is a senior engineer and we have all as a group accept it, we will drill down and explore his suggestions, if Steve, a junior engineer proposes something, we won't consider it as seriously. For us to consider Steve's suggestions, he'll have to prove himself.

I think it is necessary to emphasize that this extends to professional domain knowledge. It is absolutely unacceptable to put anyone down because of their religion, sex orientation, skin color, or body shape. Otherwise, at least were I work, we have no qualms telling people they are full of shit, when it comes to domain knowledge.

In improv acting we explicitly learn how status transactions work. Note that "status" in this context means something slightly different: http://greenlightwiki.com/improv/Status

Understanding status changed how I fundamentally view interactions. I've wanted to submit (or even write) something on this for HN, but I haven't figured an angle to do it from.

That was a very interesting read. Thank you.

Yes, it seems like improv, is really good at emphasizing and making explicit human interactions. This might be applicable to AI agent research and design.

If you do your write-up, I will gladly read!

Yeah, the first AI would pass the Turing test by insulting the researchers. :)

But seriously, depending on what you mean by AI (general or narrow), you're right. If it was interacting in a realistic social way with humans, it'd have to understand "status".

Actually, I know of some people working on AGI that are aware of the "status" concept. Although they seem to conflate the improv meaning with general social status. On Less Wrong.com they talk about it from time to time.

Sounds interesting. "Here's what I learned about status in improv class" sounds like a good enough angle to me!

A lot here are from SF. It's an improv hub. BATS Improv has classes, and I highly recommend them for really anyone. But specifically "nerds" would immensely benefit.

Improv basically teaches you to be relentlessly prosocial. You learn what an interesting social interaction (or scene) looks like. You learn conversation and organization skills; how to lead, how to follow, how to work on teams, how to speak. It's all roleplaying.

Actually, you learn the gist of what they would teach your in the "seduction community". Those are more specialized skills. But there's no social stigma attached. And that's not a knock on them either.

If you've ever laughed at improv being performed, it is nothing like the rush of performing improv, especially when it's not done well.

One of the more clever and disturbing ways to gain 'power' over an individual is to play the student in the master-student role. E.g. by having them teach you something - which is doing you a favor, you can gain their favor.

Ben Franklin: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=145544

For example, if someone is trying to sell you something you can have him/her be the expert and they may give you a better deal.

That was a perfect example.

Roleplaying as a "student" is playing a low status role, to the high status role of "teacher". In that instance you get what you want by playing low. But in another situation you might play high (for another to play low) to get what you want. You could bark orders at someone, and if they follow through they played low to your high. Of course, if this was a serious and non-consensual interaction it'd wear on the players after a while. Improv, since it's fundamentally about roleplaying, parallels BDSM.

Having a boss who was too serious about his high status role would suck, for instance. The fun ones are the ones who joke about their role.

Interesting read, thanks for sharing. While the context of this info is in improv acting, do you find the same status transformations applying to day-to-day life?

Has anyone used "status transformations" to their advantage in a real-world transaction? (haggling over the price of a car, for example). Personally, I don't think I could really alter my innate behaviour to achieve any sort of social advantage, but in the end this sort of information was useful for me to reflect on my interactions with others in my life.

Oh, absolutely. Altering "status" is something people do all the time to get what they want, albeit mostly unconsciously. Here's an improvisers view of the mechanics behind making a sale: http://biz-improv.com/wordpress/?p=22

I have a bunch of web resources (on improv) pertaining to status transactions. Feel free to email me, everyone.

That was already quite interesting to read out of context, but I'd definitely look forward to something you've written about it for an audience more like this one.

(So did I just raise your status?)

(Yeah, you did. ;)) And as an aside I think that upvoting and downvoting in practice becomes mostly about status raising or lowering. Subconsciously it's about the gain or loss of prestige of a comment (and person).

Also, it's interesting to read (HN) headlines with status transactions in mind. When reading a headline ask yourself, who got lowered? Who was raised? Take Microsoft takes a loss to Firefox The obvious thing is FF>MS, but who else is lowered or raised?

So here's an example of a conversation analyzed by Keith Johnstone's who basically the father of improv: http://www.thestage.co.uk/connect/acblack/improkj.php

I would submitted this a while ago, but it'd be hard to make clear what my intention for doing that was.

"... You see this often when engineers meet. If the group is new, and haven't established a status hierarchy already, they will quickly start throwing jargon around at each other, to show who is more knowledgeable and try to make others look stupid. ..."

Great observation. Mean girls and Queen-bee behaviour in engineers ~ http://www.amazon.com/Queen-Bees-Wannabes-Boyfriends-Realiti...

"... But there is an upside to it. ..."

In the natural world, "status hierarchy" is used to protect the integrity of groups at the expense of pions. So there is upside. You see it in Bees for example: ~ http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/sci-tech/researchers-unr...

"... I think it is necessary to emphasize that this extends to professional domain knowledge. It is absolutely unacceptable to put anyone down because of their religion, sex orientation, skin color, or body shape. ..."

It's naive to think telling people "they are full of shit" won't have repercussions. If opinion is disregarded with such emotion it will have negative impacts on the team and team members. Queen bees use "homovanillyl alcohol" (HVA) to chemically interfere and suppress worker drones. Maybe in human teams, status is enforced through social pressure?

"... Evolution has provided queen bees with a chemical that selectively blocks aversive learning but leaves reward learning intact ..."

Now that's an idea worth exploring. How to knock down potentially inefficient ideas more efficiently?

> It's naive to think telling people "they are full of shit" won't have repercussions.

Yes, it does have repercussions. It usually doesn't come to that. But the benefit outweighs the repercussions. It creates a level of trust between us, because we cut through bullshit and passive aggressive "fake niceness". We yell at each other, but then we also apologize to each other.

We mitigate the repercussion by screening heavily based on personality when we hire. When we hire people we make it explicit that this is the environment. Candidates spend a whole day with us, we go to lunch together, we do a debug session, we ask them to participate in some mock-up or simple design spec with a group of engineers and white-board.

Some otherwise good engineers didn't end up working for us because we didn't like their personality, some were terrified that we threw the "f" word around too much, some thought us as not too "politically correct".

So far this has worked for the company for 20 years, I've been with them for 3 years and I really like it.

Unlike the conversations in question, engineers have something to back their status - proficiency, domain expertise. It's one thing to establish the expert in the room, and totally different to see who will be able to project the hardest empty shell of self-confidence around himself.

It is absolutely unacceptable to put anyone down because of their religion

Wait, I can't make fun of Scientologists?

You can, but do it in your own time, not at work.

If a consultant turns out to be a Scientologist, it will make me seriously doubt his sanity, as well as his moral fiber. That makes it very much relevant to work. Political correctness can be very harmful, if it causes you too ignore the real impact that who someone is can have.

Just be confidant in yourself and it shouldn't be a problem. So what if someone wants to imply that you're stupid for asking a question? Ask anyway, then you'll be learning while those who dare not ask are left behind. I guess what I'm trying to say is: Just chill out a bit and life gets easier and more fun :)

That's right play the game, don't let the game play you.

An answer of Why do you ask? is a common symptom of asking the wrong questions or not giving enough information.

  Q: What's the best type of elephant to ride to work? African or Indian?
  A: Why do you ask?
  Q: My car's broken down. I need an alternate mode of transport.
  A: Maybe you should try riding the bus?

I get this a lot with technical questions. Someone wants to use the wrong tool for the job, pose their question with the assumption that it's the right tool, and then get defensive when I ask for more information.

On the other hand, I see too many technical people assuming the questioner must be asking the wrong question on IRC and mailing lists.

This wastes time, and can be rather rude, when the questioner was perfectly correct to be asking the question the way that he was (and this is only determined after 3 minutes of arguing and insinuations about the questioners intelligence). This often turns into looking like the "even ruder" example with question two.

If a short answer is possible, why not answer it and ask why if you suspect that they were really asking the wrong question?

If you don't like how someone answers your questions, you don't have to ask them.

Also, the answers in example 2 suggest something false about linear functions. Take f(x) = x + 1. f(a) + f(b) = a + b + 2 != f(a+b) = a + b + 1

Uhm, the definition of a linear function is that f(a+b)=f(a)+f(b) and f(n·a)=n·f(a) (i.e. additivity and homogeneity).

Maybe you are thinking by a first-degree polynomial, which is a straight line when graphed?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_function

Relax dude.

Oh man, I smell meme potential :D

DOUG: When is Joe's flight due it?

YOU: Why do you ask?

DOUG: Oh... umm... there's a seminar at 3:30 PM I thought he would be interested in.

YOU: What seminar?

DOUG: The underlying physics of the violin.

YOU: Why do you think he would be interested in that?

DOUG: We talked about it once.

YOU: So, just because you talked about it once, you think he would be interested in spending time going to your hoity-toity physics seminar?

DOUG: Um, yeah, I do, and it isn't hoity---

YOU: Oh yes, the fluctuations of the harmonic oscillators will exponentially dampen the transverse waves of the vibrating string...

DOUG: Dude, shut the hell up. First off, that's nonsense, second off, we don't talk like that, and THIRD, you STILL haven't answered---

YOU (sarcastically): Oh, oh, I'm so so sorry, I haven't answered you question yet have you.

DOUG (gritting teeth): No, I just want to know when he will be arriving.

YOU: I have no idea, check the fucking monitors.

DOUG: WE AREN'T AT THE AIRPORT!

YOU: Yeah, I know, I'm just fucking with you, he arrives at 3:00. He won't make it to your seminar, and in my oh-so-humble opinion, he wouldn't want to go to your seminar anyway. Joe's a real man.

DOUG: FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU%$#!^%$@$%^!

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