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>For example, a person who thinks their math teacher is mean when the teacher corrects them will probably never become great at math

Not a math teacher, but I had a boss once when i was younger who constantly would tell me I only did a 99% job. I worked too fast and didn't finish the last little things. It pissed me off every time. He wasn't really that nice about it. He was a pretty blunt and straightforward kinda guy.

He was right though and it took a while but I eventually noticed that I did exactly what he said I was doing and it did impact things I did. Since I realized that, I hear is voice now telling me this before I think I've finished everything I'm doing and inevitably I find something I missed or didn't finish properly. In the end his blunt delivery of information and reasonable criticism did sink in and I feel like my attention to detail has improved because of it on anything I work on now.

Thanks for your input. Often critical people mean the best despite coming off as mean. That said, I think it is best if you are close with these people first so you know they mean the best. I don't think it's natural for individuals to recognize when someone means well but is coming off as rude, particularly when rudeness is defined differently for everyone.

For the unversed, my family's dinners can come off as abrasive. The reality is we just enjoy talking to each other in an uncivilized manner.

I used to be a boss like that. I thought people are always motivated to be better at their jobs. And that they are better at regulating their feelings. I was wildly wrong on both. Even though people learn that way, it is faster to impart learning by using slightly less confrontational approach. Specially if the relationship you are building is going to last more than a semester. I highly recommend reading https://www.amazon.com/Thanks-Feedback-Science-Receiving-Wel... to everyone. It helped me enormously to receive and give feedback in way which was conducive to build a feedback loop where people actively sought feedback on their work and received it with much more open mind.

Honestly, I wouldn't work for him again, but I did appreciate after the fact he meant well, at least that's how I've chosen to take it.

It's entirely possible to be able to grasp the content in a mean message, and also demand that the source be kinder. In other words, just because I might demand someone treat me respectfully does not mean I am mentally incapable of grasping the content of a mean message.

I think your argument conflates "there exist" and "forall" - certainly, there exist people that simultaneously demand niceness and are incapable of processing mean messages. But that's definitely not true for everyone.

So you can believe that people should try to grasp any valid meaning behind a mean message, and also believe that people should be kind.

I don't think GP suggested that some people can't grasp the content of a mean message. GP specifically wrote, "the premise that you don't listen to messages that are too mean," and not, "the premise that you can't listen..." Usually, people would be would be capable of grasping a 'mean' message's content, but they reject it because of their own passionate reaction to the 'meanness' of the delivery.

The first thing GP suggests is that communicating a message more 'nicely' means more people will listen. So I'm not sure what your point is here independent of what GP has already written.

I suspect GP is emphasizing the importance of stomaching meanness because that's the harder (and more rewarding) thing to accomplish. It takes some effort to phrase and intone things more gently. But it takes a lot more effort to unlearn your own rapid emotional responses to someone else's tone... And successfully doing so is like having a superpower in social interactions. It starts to seem like everyone is driving drunk with respect to their own emotions: reacting instinctively when emotions are so strong that they drown out or dulled down all the other information.

> I believe that this is an aspect of communication we need to talk way more about, since large parts of the population are currently handicapped like this.

> People often have good reasons for being mean, they could be tired, hungry, depressed or just spoke without thinking, those are really bad reasons for not listening if the actual message is sound.

How do you know if "the message is sound"? This actually has me thinking that it's an adaptive trait to pay more attention to people who have the energy to spare some kindness for others. Because clearly they're doing something well enough to either not feel tired/hungry/depressed or well enough to still have the energy to consider other people despite feeling any of those things.

I believe you can't know whether a message is sound until you've managed to work past/through your own strong feelings reacting to a message's pleasantness or unpleasantness. A heuristic which dismisses a message because of its unpleasantness or accepts a message because of the opposite is going to result in many, many false negatives and false positives with respect to message validity/usefulness. You can only pick apart a message's 'soundness' in the calm place that comes after emotion: where those feelings can be one source of information without their intensity overwhelming all the other information.

The opposite fallacy seem to be quite common: People thinking some dubious message delivered in a sufficiently abrasive way must be a "harsh truth", and any counterargument just means "you can't handle the truth". This is why politicians and debaters use the harsh rhetoric: It works. People eat it up.

Well, it works when it's not directed at you and yours. There's a reason these people all have public relations specialists.

> The nicer you state your messages the more people will listen to you.

> The meaner messages you can stomach the more information is accessible to you.

• From the receiver's view:

Meanness implies conflict. It evokes threat, defense, flight.

Those are instinctive responses to an intent of attack. Suppressing those requires non-zero effort.

• On the other hand, from the mean person's view:

They are experiencing impatience or frustration with something they want to change.

Suppressing that requires non-zero effort.

It all comes down to who can put more effort into suppressing their instinctual responses at a given moment.

The non-sexy answer here is human interaction is almost always a negotiation. Sometimes being a little harsh is what the other party needs to hear. However in the wrong circumstance, it can turn people needlessly against your message... or, at worst, destroy your relationship with others. It's the same thing with being (overly) kind.

Tl;dr human interactions are complex and require emotional and situational awareness to maximize effectiveness.

Yes, and the state of people at any given time is a result of their recent interactions.

If I recently spoke to someone Harmfully Harsh, I will not be receptive to someone who is being Beneficially Harsh.

You cannot know the internal state of someone, so it does no harm to take that into consideration when interacting with them.

There's another dimension you can work on that I find seems to work much better.

Put your complaints in the form of a question. People will use whatever internal dialog they are comfortable with to unpack it in their own heads.

Doesn't work on everyone. There's a couple engineers at every job who will happily answer questions about their Rube Goldberg machines as if they were innocent questions instead of an invitation to be introspective.

Rhetorical questions annoy me even more than an opinionated statement. So yeah, YMMV

Do you think that a complaint in the form of a question is necessarily rhetorical? Couldn't it, in fact, be Socratic?

I see what you did there.

Who do you think you are, saying I did stuff?

The way I read or hear it every time there a “you stupid twat”, “haven’t you thought about that eh! Dimwit” closing line.

I can’t help it...

Rhetorical questions don't require an answer.

Questions like, "How can we have an audit trail for this solution, in case we have to diagnose problems?" demand an answer.

"This is a stupid idea and let me tell you why." invites a rebuttal, not a compromise or a re-think.

Another aspect to this is that the meaner a message is, the less likely it is to be said by someone who can grasp a very basic point about human nature.

Or, the meaner a message is, the more likely is to be said by someone who cares about subject matter way more than "human nature".

Or more likely to be said by someone one sees trees not forests.

Reading meanness as an indication of investment in a subject, is a mistake.

I hope you don't use Linux.

It's not just investment. High level experts do not care much about "human nature" as average persons do, it is also part of "human nature".

Also disrespect goes both ways. For many people, using "mean words" (e.g. "this is terribly wrong", "what a stupid mistake") is being disrespectful and offensive. For many experts, being incompetent or making repeated mistakes in your work is being disrespectful and offensive.

In any environment with more than one person, human nature is the subject. This is the message of the article.

What does being right buy you if it doesn't affect the change you're after?

I have this conversation at work. Team leads are Pollyanna types. Nobody wants to complain to an over-confidently happy person.

Meanwhile, if a tool we use or code I wrote is frustrating to use, I call a spade a spade. So then people open up about other stuff that bugs them. I hear everyone's fears and frustrations. I hear how bits of the code make people feel stupid. On other jobs I've gone out of my way to fix these problems. Often this doesn't impress your bosses (especially the bad ones) but it gets you plenty of respect from your peers and subordinates.

This particular system is such a Gordeon Knot that it's taken me years to see daylight. It's almost time for a new job and the code has just gotten to a place I wish it had been in on day 1.

> since large parts of the population are currently handicapped like this.

That is called fragile. It isn't genetic, but it is socially reinforced. I suspect people who suffer from fragility are more prone to depression and anxiety.

Pretty sure you just proved the point.

That's an interesting application of Postel's law.

Had to look this up: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. The principle is also known as Postel's law, after Jon Postel, who wrote in an early specification of TCP"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

It reminds me of Conquest's 1st law:

> Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

I've received many unkind messages that I needed to hear, and was made better off.

It's possible that every single one of those messages you needed to hear could also have been said kindly.

Absolutely. But I was better off hearing it unkindly than not hearing it at all. Also, and unkind message might jolt me into taking it more seriously.

Yeah, I get curious about the latter. I get it, those jolts appear to help sometimes, but ideally we'd treat it with the seriousness it deserves whether it was presented kindly or unkindly.

The problem is that mean speech correlates with more damaging behavior downstream, like violence or libel. So it's a conservative act of self protection to ghost/avoid individuals who use mean speech. I for one tend to avoid them. And I question how much I could actually learn from them if they have yet to develop a basic sense of social decency.

This is the base case. I understand that there are more extreme cases where you "win" in some specific ways if you keep stomaching mean speech.

There's a limit to the "meanness" one can stomach, however, without some aspect, such as mental health, going awry. In short bursts it may be useful, but in the long run, meanness is not sustainable.

It’s not that you should deal with mean people regularly, but if a mean person tells you a useful piece of information you shouldn’t dismiss it just because they were mean. After that you’re free to avoid interacting with them in the future (to the extent possible — if you can’t avoid them then it’s a moot point anyway and you should still seek to get as much from them as possible)

> The nicer you state your messages the more people will listen to you.

Most of the evidence I see directly contradicts this. The most successful people I know are generally very nice, but can turn on the assholishness very tactically.

People don't remember Feynman's O-ring demonstration because it was nice, they remember it because it was a nasty takedown in spite of it not being strictly correct.

After 30+ years, my father could get most misbehaving high school students to stop with just a quip that embarrassed them in front of their peers. That may have pissed off the student, but it was less disruptive to both class and the student than having to stop class, send the student to the administration, and invoke overzealous cover-your-ass administration punishment.

In most successful projects I have been involved with, a single person dragged it's bleeding, broken corpse across the finish line. And, I assure you, they weren't always being very nice at the end--generally justifiably so to people in the way.

And, being nice in politics got us where we are today--a resurgent set of right-wing demagogues in multiple countries.

Sorry, just not seeing it. I"m not saying "You should always be a raging asshole," but I see precious little evidence that being the "nicer" person turns out better in the long run.

Game theory, in fact, prefers tit-for-tat, no? Be nice and forgive, but do punish those who deserve it.

> The most successful people I know are generally very nice, but can turn on the assholishness very tactically

I have a manager's manager that's great to talk to, and one of his stated talents is he can "take a passive-aggressive situation and remove the passive component quickly and effectively". He's great.

I think you're conflating politeness with empathy.

Shallow politeness may vary well lead to shallow politics, but empathy and actually being kind to other people is quite different in its outcomes.

Feynman's O-ring demonstration wasn't mean or nasty. It was calm, polite sharing of factual information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rwcbsn19c0

Just because one receives more information doesn't mean it's beneficial for the listener. There are plenty of times where bad information (like false statements) can cause more damage than no information. Why listen to a mean speaker if the message can be just as negative as it is beneficial?

> So we'd expect those who demand others to be nice to be less well informed than those who can tolerate mean communication.

Only if you are demanding that others are nice to you. You should demand that others are nice to others.

Yep. That math teacher might reach more kids by adopting a different tone -- but the one who actually suffers is the kid who can't listen to harsh feedback.

Filtering out mean opinions might actually be a good heuristic though that more often leads you to the right answer

It might or it might not, but if you follow this particular untested heuristic, you may not have the opportunity to change your mind (because you're avoiding any useful mean messages that could change your mind).

Also, I would bet that your perception of the meanness of messages changes over time as you restrict yourself to inoffensive ones, with your personal overton window for what offends you shrinking.