Hacker News Reader

Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

If you can automatically detect sentences where adding "Could you" would make the author sound more tactful, then why not just mentally add them and assume that the author intended to sound that tactful?

This is a slight modification of the principle of charity, something I think is incredibly important and underemphasized, especially for online text communication.

View on HN

That's a really cool concept. Write a medium article about it.

I can't tell of this is disengenuous or not..

I think that's the point.

> why not just mentally add them and assume that the author intended to sound that tactful?

Because, that could be the wrong action to take. Could you, Would you, Will you, I want you to, You should, The project is stupid unless you, etc.

Therefore, the author should communicate well enough to be understood.

Based on the thread here, many people interpreted the comment as a well-intended feature request, but instead of requesting the commenter to change their comment, it seems like it would’ve been fine to just use that charitable interpretation.

I’m all for being charitable in our interpretations of the motives of others, but I think a total lack of the most basic courtesy should be seen for what it is. The lower end of the spectrum being lazy, and the high end being rude, even charitably no positive interpretation exists IMO.

The link in your profile is broken, FYI.

Please and thank you are such basic concepts that honestly, I judge the hell out of people who don’t seem capable of it regardless of platform. If that minimal degree of politeness isn’t reflexive for you, again, the world at large judges you. Not to put too fine a point on it, but maybe “why not add it in your head” is the kind of thing thst gives some in tech a bad name?

It costs nothing to be polite.

This is a bit off topic, but just to blow ones mind: Finnish, which I am natively speaking, is lacking direct "please" word completely and I have to admit that especially orally I forget it often. (We make things sound nice by conditional, "could you", "would you be so kind" etc..) I have no immediate reaction what so ever how it would feel if someone left out "please". I understand the concept, but it feels horrible how much wrong I can go with native English speakers without meaning it. Thanks for the reminder! (thank you we do have;)

That’s not off-topic at all! Honestly, I’m ashamed that I hadn’t considered the possibility of a non-native speaker’s linguistic quirks, and what this tells me is that I need to continue to work on my snap-judgements. Thank you for reminding me that languages don’t handle courtesy the same way.

This was really nice to hear! Don't worry, one can only think through ones own mind =) I think this already helps, if everybody are just a bit more aware about that others might think differently, and not be deliberately mean. I have learned several languages, since Finnish is very useless in a large scale, and it always amazes me how in different languages it is also thought differently. I can only recommend!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com