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Comment by macintux | Hacker News Reader

This is an argument I could have every day with commenters on HN were I so inclined. Being polite, helpful, and correct is vastly more useful to the world than just being correct.

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Perceptions about other people from their online comments are so susceptible to projection that it's important to practice suspending judgment. Tiny packets of text give us so little information about each other that they leave a lot of empty space for interpretation. We fill in those degrees of freedom from our imagination, based on our own prior experiences, which were in place long before that other person showed up.

Sometimes we fill the picture in favorably, but if there's anything in a comment that rubs us the wrong way—anything activating—then the picture we create is not a nice one. Since a forum like HN gets millions of posts a year, there are inevitably plenty of hooks to snag us in this way. If you stop and think about what that means experientially, it's sort of shocking: it means that we are surrounded by our own demons. Since everyone else is having the same experience, a forum like this is a community of people who feel surrounded by their own demons, not realizing that we are mostly creating them for ourselves. This is why disagreements degenerate so quickly, even though each party is sure that they're the one in good faith. It's also why you'll regularly see generalizations about how awful the community is, posted by users who participate in it every day. It's surprising that it can function at all.

By "demons" I just mean a composite of our own past painful experiences, which is the store we draw on when connecting the dots about someone else in a defensive way. This phenomenon isn't only online; it happens everywhere that people don't know each other well. But online, we know each other so little that there are more dots to connect.

> If you stop and think about what that means experientially, it's pretty shocking: it means that we are surrounded by our own demons. Since everyone else is having the same experience, a forum like this is a community of people who all feel surrounded by their own demons, not realizing that they are mostly creating them for ourselves.

I've been thinking about this all day since I read it. Thanks for this. It's a profound insight for me.

This along with BurntSushi's insight about emotional code smell makes this one of the best hn post ever for me.

> Being polite, helpful, and correct is vastly more useful to the world than just being correct.

This is only true when being "correct" doesn't really matter very much (certainly true on the Internet). One of the hard earned pieces of wisdom from age is that the situations in which there IS a "correct" AND it matters are far fewer than you think. Most decisions are a wash so it's fine to concede.

In addition, "polite" is in the eye of the beholder. I can oppose something politely and people will still scream about how unreasonable I am being.

The problem is that "correct" sometimes matters a LOT and has opposition for non-"correct" reasons. Those same people that you deferred to so many times in the past now get very angry when you suddenly put a stick in the ground and go "No. This is correct and it matters and I'm not moving on it." In addition you will find that there is an entire class of social manipulators who just like to "play poker" and will go absolutely apoplectic when you will not budge a decision without new factual evidence.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”--George Bernard Shaw

Going against your, and parents, commentary, this is a semi-accurate description of how I used to see myself:

"I'd rather be right than popular, and I usually am".

But I mostly wasn't convincing, whether I was right or wrong. And that's what I'm continually working on. Being convincing is arguably more important than being right in the first place. And to be convincing you need to know your topic from a number of angles, and you need to know the audience you're playing to. But you also need to know whose worthy of convincing, because there are some (plenty) that won't be convinced either way, so don't waste your time on them - know a lost cause so as to avoid committing self-denial-of-service.

To add to your very good insight, I believe that oftentimes it's not even a dichotomy. Being right does not give a right to be condescending about it, because it turns the conversation into emotional clashes by triggering a desire to oppose on the other.

But the very bad thing about that philosophy is that it makes one tend to default to thinking that it's others that are inferior and can't handle the facts you see so clearly... so if it turns out you were not right in the end, we've got the worst case scenario -- Now you're not just preventing yourself from learning and improving (which should always be the goal), you've become just like a troll, an asshole who's wrong.

> Being right does not give a right to be condescending about it

I agree. It takes discipline to be right without being righteous.

> Being right does not give a right to be condescending

Not to disagree, but, quoting the article, I'd like to "underscore the asymmetry" between people that are right and condescending VS people that are wrong, think they are right (or don't care if they are, most of the times) and are condescending just because they can or because that's the way they think you advance your career.

They read somewhere that CEOs have a bad temper and imply that bad temper is necessary to become CEO.

> Being convincing is arguably more important than being right in the first place.

Only from selfish point of view. If you are wrong and convince people to be wrong too, you just very likely made world less good place.

It is important to be right and double check yourself especially if you are able to be convincing.

Rightness comes in degrees. It can definitely be better to be _almost right_ but convincing than _completely right_ but unconvincing. In fact, all you need is to be _more right_ than people would be if you didn't convince them.

I almost get the feeling that a lot of HN commenters actually pride themselves on writing terse comments devoid of emotion and sensitivity to the receiver/reader. Too often, I write such comments myself, as well. It seems to be part of a larger effectiveness trend, down to even keeping vocabulary as minimal as possible, and avoiding literature because it's too descriptive, a waste of time.

Is it tied to HN or hacker/startup culture, SV mentality? To pride oneself on being an effective robot? No care in the world except building the next great thing, damned be everything else? Maybe it's about the types of people attracted to computers? I hear the same kind of response daily at work, I mean, generally, we're not known to be the most socially intelligent group.

Thanks for your work BurntSushi, Andrew, ripgrep is great.

As a general rule this is completely fine. However, sometimes being impolite and correct is desperately needed. As long as you are being impolite with great calm and forbearance.

My personal view is that being polite is what a decent person does until the other party starts abusing it.

In short, be polite and understanding by default but don't be a pushover.

Perhaps, but in most cases, people vastly overestimate how common that "sometimes" is, how desperately the "needed" is, and how great their own "forbearance" is. They bring this argument up as part of denying their own contribution to a conflict. It's so easy to deceive oneself about this that a better strategy is not to go there. Self-honesty about what one is actually feeling will mostly eliminate it anyhow.

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