Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

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Warning: completely unrelated to thread topic.

Poor grandparent got nuked in the votes, but I actually think this is an interesting discussion. It ties to my thoughts about politeness and behavior on the internet, which ties to my thoughts about the same IRL. Dale Carnegie, "How to Win Friends" type stuff.

Is it effective to "hedge" your arguments/posts/words with a "now I might be wrong" / "you may know more about this than me" / "I'm not a lawyer" ? I spent 4 years hearing sales gurus tell me to not do it, exude confidence. Then I had Dale Carnegie and my favorite manager ever tell me the exact opposite. I've tried both, and the "Carnegie" method seems to work best for me both online and off.

It's not just "IANAL" - the most positive responses I've seen on reddit, twitter, and here have some sort of "hedge." When I employ it, I get great responses (and lots of upvotes, which is other than response rate and quality of responses the only measure we can really use). When I don't, I get downvotes.

Sometimes the "confident asshole" approach works here and on reddit, but it can backfire HORRIBLY - see the absolute nightmare situation happening over at ArenaNet - some guy didn't quite hedge in the right way and caused a total breakdown of community/developer trust. What a mess. I bet the developer wouldn't have felt quite so attacked if the commentor had hedged a bit better. See also, any email chain Linus Torvald gets involved in.

Now this just starts a whole other discussion about whether someone should "have to" hedge, etc etc. I'm just voicing my thoughts here, curious what others think.

Linus uses hedging language quite a bit actually, eg. http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1807.0/01744.html

Another way to hedge, but without obviously doing so, is to rephrase the statement as a question.

For (a super basic) example, instead of going with:

  Now, I might be wrong... but you should probabably do foo, then bar.  That would avoid baz completely.

Rephrased as a simple question:

  Would it be better to do foo, then bar?  That seems like it would avoid baz completely.

Perhaps give that a try? :)

This ArenaNet situation sounds interesting. Could you post a link to it? I don't see much in search results.

Here's a couple analyses:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17565218/arenanet-guild-w...

https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/10/17550276/guild-wars-2-aren...

https://www.pcgamer.com/fired-arenanet-dev-calls-dismissal-a...

In short, a woman working at ArenaNet, the company running GuildWars2 (an MMORPG), posted a twitter thread about her thoughts on designing narratives in an MMO. A prominent (male) streamer of the game responded with his opinion, which (as he stated) was a disagreement of her point of view. To this, the ArenaNet employee expressed her opinion that the streamer was explaining to her how to do her job, and implied he was doing this because she is a woman.

Quite predictably the exchange exploded into a shitstorm of epic proportions, which supernovaed when ArenaNet responded to the incident by firing the employee.

I think the response by the community at large to the woman's firing is despicable, and the firing was probably not justified. But, I have been thinking a lot about the words of the exchange, and how much of a clusterfuck the situation is. The exchange itself is, in my opinion, not black and white. To be fair, I say this as a guy, so it's entirely possible that I Just Don't/Can't Get It. I accept that and am happy to be pushed back on.

The words:

>ArenaNetEmployee: {{29 tweet thread discussing character writing in MMOS}}

>Streamer: "Really interesting thread to read! However, allow me to disagree slightly. I don't believe the issue lies in the MMORPG genre itself..."

>ArenaNetEmployee: "Today in being a female game dev: "Allow me--a person who does not work with you--explain to you how you do your job."" {{quotes streamer}}

I feel like this whole shitstorm could have been avoided if the streamer had hedged just a bit better, or instead had asked her opinion. Basically, in the discussion, setting her up as the expert (which she is), while still expressing an opposed position. This is basically what hedging does anyway.

This is a really unique point of view. I think conversations would be improved with this mentality.

It might be a bit hard to swallow, though. Who's to say that a streamer is less qualified to analyze character writing in MMOs? After all, the writer is usually not the one impacted by the game. Streamers are.

I know nothing about this situation, though. </hedge> I'm just saying that it would personally feel difficult to adopt this mindset if I felt like I were qualified to express a dissenting opinion.

Well, yea, the guy is definitely qualified to have an opinion, and probably the developers should take note. In this case it just set of an unfortunate misogyny finger pointing nightmare that led to the ridiculous firing of two employees.

To your second point, that's another thing I think a lot about. Honesty, in its many forms. I value honesty tremendously, because how can two individuals (or a community) operate in good faith if people are being dishonest with each other? However... we are irrational. When I was a recruiter, going to a company with my candidate's actual rate, and then turning around and giving my candidate the actual offer, would lead to bad tastes on both sides. Instead, I'd lie to the company, tellm my candidate was asking for more, then then around and tell the candidate that the offer was less than what they were looking for. Then I'd let both parties stew for a bit, give the candidate a call back, and lo and behold I got them an extra five bucks an hour like magic (citing the actual offer). Then, both parties would feel they had really gotten the most possible value out of the transaction and be happier for it.

So then what do you do in interpersonal communication? Are you upfront and honest about your feelings regarding your qualifications? Do you state your opinions forthright, while still being polite? Or do you "play the game?"

I guess it boils down to your values. If you want to consistently be liked more, listened to more, and "get your way" more, you heed the wisdom of the ancients and do the Dale Carnegie. Even if it hurts.

In my experience though, it stops hurting very quickly. Turns out a lot of the times I was confidence in how right I was, I was way off base... And I usually end up learning something by seeing things from the opponent's perspective.

I don't know a ton about the situation -- I do know that the streamer in question was active enough with the community that an NPC in the game was named after him, though.

Some missing details, which I would call critical.

1) The day before there was a big AMA where players and developers talked about the story design, initiated and organized by the game studio. The fired developer was a prominent figure in the discussions, and the twitter thread was seen by most as an further extension to that AMA. People can have different opinion about this, but its important to know the context of when the twitter thread appeared.

2) The initial response by the community at large was both on reddit and on the official Guild Wars 2 Forum to not fire anyone. It was only later unearthed that the developer had also celebrated when cancer victim John Bane died at age 33. At this point many have pointed out that the community changed view and could no longer support having such individual in the community, and a massive thread called something like "Developers should also have to follow Anet own conduct policy" was created.

Hedging is useful, but there is some lines which companies and communities are unlikely to accept. Celebrating the death of cancer victims is one, and is likely not something any one want to be associated with. The second aspect is to not responding to art criticism with labeling the person as sexist to 10k followers, which given the close connection to Anet organized AMA and the fact that their name is directly next to the message could make Anet legal liable for slander. Third, game developer is closely connected to community management and there is a good reason why conduct policies exist and get enforced. One could argue in defense that twitter is "personal" and out of the conduct policy scope, but that is very much up to discussion and it seems that the guild wars 2 community is generally in favor that such policy do cover developers talking about the game on social media, especially in connection to community events.

Reading what's in the articles and twitter the firing sounds too much. On the other hand I don't see the guy needing to be even more courteous. She could tell him that his idea doesn't work, there are complexities he wouldn't understand or that she doesn't want outside opinions or whatever. Calling him names for no real reason and inventing gender bias to me is pointless. Yes he could have bias in his heart but you can't start judging people assuming things.

If you start making silly things about gender than the real problems gets lost and you hurt the cause that you are trying to promote. The subsequent twitter posts doesn't read good to me either. But some of the backlash against her was equally or probably even more so outrageous. The anonymity and distance that social media gives it users seem to in general bring out the worst in people except for rare exceptions.

Just my opinion of course, but I see the basic problem as employees using twitter. Many companies encourage employees to use twitter, social media, etc. for more direct interaction with customers, the community, etc.

What is often overlooked, is that in communication you are first an employee of a company, and your own opinions and feelings come way later.

As is clear in this example, not everybody can do this (all of the time).

She is certainly entitled to this opinion. But as an employee, she should not have expressed it. Most likely the company didn't reflect on this before allowing/encouraging her to use twitter to communicate.

I'm speculating that the company didn't have a communication strategy to contain a shit storm. And in the end just fired the employee. Firing the employee only makes sense if she has a history of causing the kinds of issues.

Again, just my personal opinion.

> could have been avoided if the streamer had hedged just a bit better

If you find a live claymore in the middle of the company meeting room, exploding it can be avoided by circumspect behavior.

If that's all you do about it, you might as well start calling it "boss".

A lawyer wouldn't have to hedge and say "IANAL." Why would we expect Torvalds to hedge? He's the expert in change of his project.

Etc..

A lawyer can be wrong, and so can Torvalds, but yea, they may be more likely to be wrong.

Nobody has to, but in my experience, you do seem to get a much more positive reaction when you do.

At least in Western culture, it seems a well played "humble" character is admirable, especially when it is known that the particular person has absolutely no reason to be humble.

EDIT: I don't expect anybody to hedge "just because", but I expect that a person with extremely good interpersonal communication skills to hedge.

In small talk, yes, be polite and humble everywhere.

In science and engineering, I prefer it has some meaning. If you're sure in what you're saying, have data to back it up, dealt with it before - say straight. If it's a guess, say it is a guess.

So I would not spend time guessing was it politeness of lack of facts behind that hedging. Btw, I upvoted GP :)

Sure, but a lawyer / Torvalds / any SME might want to hedge that their opinion is strong or not.

There's a pretty darn big difference between "my gut feeling is that this approach is too complicated, but I've not analyzed the problem sufficiently to know whether my gut is correct" and "there's no way this is the right architecture, it'll have harmful impact, and there's lots of better ways to do it".

It's imo especially important to do so from positions of authority where others might be less critical in accepting ones statements as truth.

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