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> Communication is a game of compromise. Sometimes it makes sense to compromise on clarity or brevity to be nice. But when your goal is to solve difficult, material problems- it can be beneficial to prioritize clarity over all else.

I am not convinced that this friction exists. Often times things can be rephrased quite easily, e.g. "you're just plain wrong" can be "I don't think that's correct" or "I feel this may be mistaken".

These examples are simple, but in my own writing I've never noticed an example where I wanted to be clear, but wasn't able to do so while still being nice.

It is true that truly constructive comments are much harder to write, since they take significantly more effort: you need to carefully read the original article, think about it, maybe do a bit of additional research, etc, whereas a quick "this is just wrong because [X]" after reading the title is much easier.

> significantly more effort

Which often takes time. And limits engagement. The maintainers of pacman have a limited amount of energy they're willing to spend on free support- I'm happy for then to save effort wherever they can.

I wont argue that if you can be kind while sacrificing absolutely nothing else- absolutely be kind.

But anybody who has ever played a competitive sport or even team lifted a couch knows that sometimes barking an order is the best way of doing things- and you just have to have somewhat thick skin.

To live in a world where the perfect message always exists would be great. We dont live in that world.

Or, for example, on a battlefield.

Yeah, developing open source software is exactly like war

Shift the goalposts some more. The post I replied to made a point and gave an example. I added another example.

You're taking my quote out of context, I said it takes more effort to constructively engage in constructive and meaningful discussions, not that it takes more effort to rephrase a sentence; I explicitly said it doesn't.

If you don't want to engage in discussion, fine. Then just don't say anything, or just state that you don't have time. That's fine. No need to not be nice.

I actually used Arch Linux for many years and switched to Void Linux last week. There were several reasons but really decided it for me was that I had an issue and found a thread on the Arch forums where a mod was chewing out a user trying to get help with the same issue in such an insufferably assholery way that it was painful to read; he almost went out of his way to belittle the other person. Most of the time this happens because it makes you feel smart and good about yourself. That's the real reason people are assholes like this. I wrote about this a while ago in the context of Stack Overflow, but the same ideas apply here too: https://arp242.net/stackoverflow.html

> sometimes barking an order is the best way of doing things- and you just have to have somewhat thick skin.

This is probably the most condensing and arrogant thing I've ever seen on HN, and that's saying something. Users aren't idiots who need to be "barked at" at when they do something wrong or misunderstand something. You can always say exactly the same without treating them like idiots.

> "you're just plain wrong" can be "I don't think that's correct" or "I feel this may be mistaken".

That makes it sound subjective, unsettled and open to negotiation. Which may be inappropriate when talking about such things that are considered medical consensus. In a way you're just the messenger, not the expert who can elucidate minor nuances behind the statement.

Perhaps it could be made more impersonal (i.e. remove the "you") and providing a 3rd party as source. But inserting weasel words doesn't help when you try to convey rather strongly established facts.

Yeah, this exemplifies exactly the kind of attitude that this article is about: calling stuff "plain wrong" is not going to convince anyone of anything and you're just going to come off as a rather self-righteous arrogant twit. The "you" doesn't make one iota of difference, no one is even going to notice whether it's there or not.

Yet, some things are just plain wrong. The world does not improve by constantly coddling other people's delusions. Facts do matter, especially in STEM fields.

> Yet, some things are just plain wrong.

Indeed, they are. Which is more important to you, being right or making a difference?

Yelling at stupid people is easy and so satisfying. Debating with the clueless while staying calm and polite is frustrating, infuriating, and difficult. But if you choose the easy and satisfying path over the difficult one that actually works, you're just patting yourself on the back for being smart.

If facts matter so much, it's important to be able to convince people of those facts. And in order to do that, facts about the best way to convince someone are relevant. And the fact is, believing that the best way to convince someone that they're just plain wrong is by saying that they're just plain wrong, is just plain wrong.

If someone really cares about the facts, and not just owning their interlocutor, they'll look for effective ways to communicate, instead of holding on as tightly as they can to a method of communication that has pretty conclusively been demonstrated to be ineffective.

The best thing about facts is I have no need to convince people of anything. Facts are true whether we believe in them or not, and someday reality will come along to inform us of those facts rather painfully if we choose to ignore them.

It’s of course best to be polite, but we should not prioritize kindness over correctness. Not in fields of knowledge. You are either right, or you are wrong, there’s not much grey area in computing and STEM.

> The best thing about facts is I have no need to convince people of anything. Facts are true whether we believe in them or not, and someday reality will come along to inform us of those facts rather painfully if we choose to ignore them.

You might be willing to put up with the consequences of other people being mistaken, but most people aren't.

Take climate change - is your attitude "well, the tides will rise and swallow the cities and so on, but there's no point trying to convince people to minimise the damage, because at least I'll be proven right in the end..."?

Pragmatically speaking, it is often incredibly important to be able to convince other people of the truth, if you want to be able to cooperate with them. That really seems so obvious as to go without saying.

> "you're just plain wrong" can be "I don't think that's correct" or "I feel this may be mistaken".

I read these sorts of communications as passive-aggressive and patronizing 100% of the time. I'm certain I'm not the only one. And your assumption that your rewording was a constructive comment is unwarranted and condescending.

"I feel this is wrong" isn't nicer than "This is wrong", they mean different things. Ultimately someone has to state facts, if you always hedge everything you say with "I feel like ..." then that person can't be you, so someone else has to do that job. Worst case everyone else hedges everything they say as well, meaning that everyone has to construct their own facts from the mess resulting in huge inconsistencies in understanding.

> But when your goal is to solve difficult, material problems- it can be beneficial to prioritize clarity over all else.

For those problems, it is also a priority to induce the clearest thinking, cognitive capability, and relevant memory possible from all parties.

Anything that adds cognitive load to the other parties will not help - and "clear, tell it like it is" speech with no awareness of social consequence is often rather ineffective as a way to access clear thinking from everyone in the room.

Brains just don't appear to work like that.

Speech isn't free (as in effort) either though. There is an overhead cost to the person talking, and reducing that is just as valid as reducing the burden on the listener.

> But when your goal is to solve difficult, material problems- it can be beneficial to prioritize clarity over all else.

That's begging the question. You take it is a given that when solving a problem clarity and kindness are mutually exclusive, but you've provided no evidence to support that.

What if that problem is "convince your grandma to quit smoking"? It seems that telling grandma she's been smoking away 9 years of her life is somehow "unkind", and yet we all do very similar things as a society, such as putting disgusting images on grandma's cigarette packages, with clear warnings that smoking is a very serious health hazard - and very few people seem to take issue with this or find it unkind.

Fine. Both are bad. What's your point?

I think it's a good point that these "ends justify the means approach" arguments and ultimatums are fully sanctioned by society irregardless of evidence that those who don't change their behavior end up more self destructive, etc thanks to the additional hostility.

Theyre not mutually exclusive.

Human communication is impossible to get perfect. You have to strike a balance between a bunch of priorities. I could write an essay on this topic, but nobody would read it. Thus I sacrifice clarity for brevity, and make a comment that can be read in a minute.

If I highly prioritized kindness and told you how much I respected your viewpoint and appreciate your taking the time to engage with me- that would naturally require a number of words. Which means I either make my comment longer- which reduces engagement, or I shorten the meat of the argument- which reduces clarity.

So you can see how these different priorities can come at cost of one another. While I'd like to find the ideal sentence every time I communicate that sacrifices nothing- I just dont have the communication skills to do so.

> If I highly prioritized kindness and told you how much I respected your viewpoint and appreciate your taking the time to engage with me...

... you would be patronizing me, not showing me kindness.

When kindness transitions into patronisation depends on the listener. There are people for whom all kindness in speech is patronising.

> Is it really Bezos' manners that hurt her feelings? I would imagine that that realization hits hard and does damage on it's own.

How do you get people to stop self destruct? In the end you give up and just become cold.

I have sick relatives who dug their own graves. Not my responsability.