So you've made a mistake and it's public
meta.wikimedia.org
meta.wikimedia.org
> When you see others making mistakes, first help them see their mistakes and deal with them (e.g. by recycling this text, or by independently offering your analysis and answers to Steps 1 and 2 above).
> Remember you make mistakes too, and be tolerant of the time it may take people to accept that they have made a mistake. (But you don't need to allow them to insist they have not made a mistake.)
I especially appreciate this. Far too often I see people reacting to people's mistakes with anger and hostility, instead of first trying to 1) understand the situation, and 2) help the person who made the mistake (if there even was one) understand the mistake.
A little kindness goes a long way.
[Edit: formatting]
We all get it wrong sometimes.
Before I was into open source I was always afraid to show my code to anyone because of the critique I could expect. But some coworkers helped me get the confidence I needed to go open source (within the company, not public internet). Being completely open about everything and accepting critique publicly really helped me grow as a developer to also be open to others. I wonder if I would have made the same transformation if I was only critiqued in private.
On the other hand, it's not normal and not often practiced to go digging to see whose mistake introduced a bug and call them out in public on it - that would be what shouldn't be done at all.
Not only (technical) bugs are reported, but also design decisions and such. A lot of those things often come down to difference in opinion. I've seen some developers be really adamant about how a bug was actually a feature.
> The openness of issue trackers even helps elevate that.
I agree partly. For me it helped see things different and make a positive growth. But I can image some staying afraid to enter or be deterred really quick never coming back.
>> This follows the "praise in public, punish in private" maxim.
So like the previous poster said. I am wondering if Github et al. should not contain a private channel.
I have a email on my Github page. And besides spammers I sometimes get questions regarding my projects. I don't know if it is due to people not understanding Github that well[0] or wanting to contact privately[1]. But for some reason they didn't open a public issue[2].
[0] I've met a lot of technical people that just are afraid of Github because it is complex. Electrical engineers, mechanics, embedded engineers. People I figure would understand software development concepts.
[1] Asking a stupid question publicly could also count toward making a public mistake depending on how secure someone feels about themselves.
[2] There is of course also the discussion if issues should be your projects helpdesk next to being an bug tracker. And raising an 'issue' for something that might just be a question might feel strange for some.
And sometimes they are feature, and it's the users that are mistaken on what the project they are using is offering them. It's a fine line, I'm sure, but different projects have different goals, and those goals will align to a specific user's needs differently depending on the user.
> So like the previous poster said. I am wondering if Github et al. should not contain a private channel.
It might depend quite a bit on the project. In an open source project with many contributors, there isn't really any meaning to "private" other than "limited to a subgroup of the people that care", and those people may have little to nothing with the design and implementation of the items in question. In a project that is mostly driven by one author that controls it and accepts some patches, that might be a lot different, and criticism may be received differently.
There's a whole spectrum there, and even if you provide the tools to allow different types of contact, what's to prevent people from using the wrong tool most the time? Rust, PHP, Perl, Bind, Apache etc aren't going to benefit much for a private list for first contact of regular bugs, but people would use it. Meanwhile someone's random personal project is still going to get people making public requests even if they prefer them private. In the end, I think we're all better served by a "public by default" for open source stuff, and for things people feel is actually private (security related items, for example), they'll look up a private contact or personal contact for someone related.
I contributed to launching a few products. After countless hours of design debates, code writing, code review, the baby was finally ready to see the world ... but nobody cared. Not even a drive-by troll bothered writing "this is completely useless".
My Motto: "That product sucks, but wow! It made it on the shelf."
If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.
If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, so that every fact may be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses.
If he refuses to listen to them, tell the church. If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.
Amen, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
On the one hand, they were a cultural byword for a morally degraded profession at the time. "Tax collectors and prostitutes" is a phrase that comes up not infrequently in the gospels, and not just out of Jesus' mouth So apparently the practice of tax collecting was a little weird in the Roman Empire.
On the other hand, he was known for having dinner with tax collectors and prostitutes. One of his 12 disciples was a tax collector.
Tax collectors operating within this incentive structure were not likely to be very likable.
This was possible because it was a slave society, and it was possible for the tax collector to collect your children into slavery in lieu of unpaid taxes. In some areas in Anatolia, which were close to the border of the empire and thus had a significant military presence that the tax collectors could fall back on, so the local population had no possibility to push back, entire societies were ended because the Roman publicans collected all children once they reached the age where they could be profitably sold (circa ~10 years or so, and sold usually to sexual slavery), and did so for long enough that the populations collapsed, never recovered, and were eventually replaced by other populations transplanted from elsewhere in the empire. (Later, the power of the publicani was seriously curtailed, in small parts because even the Romans thought that some of their practices were abhorrent. Albeit mostly because of internal power struggles with the senator class.)
So yes, people in the provinces had plenty of reasons to hate the tax collectors.
What am I supposed to do with people who won’t learn from their mistakes (in the workplace)?
I’m directly affected by them as they increase my workload, so I can’t just ignore them.
I recently pointed out to a different coworker some whitespace inconsistency in a pull request in a similar fashion as I had pointed out a while back.
In digging deeper into both situations where I was the reporter or the reportee, the issue came down to legitimate lack of agreement on whether it was indeed a mistake.
For example, I sometimes write "too be honest…". I've known it is wrong for decades, but occasionally am still not able to see it. Still happens about one out of every fifth time.
Just use transformers :)
You might start by directly asking, "Why do you keep making this mistake?" It might be because they're careless, or lazy, or maybe they really don't believe it's a mistake (they just acknowledged the mistake to get you to go away). Or maybe they just need a little help, such as automated reminders to get them to check for those mistakes.
Sadly, there are people who will not learn from either kindness and teaching, or harshness and harrassment. In the workplace, you can make an appeal to the manager, but perhaps only after discussion with coworker has failed to produce the desired results.
If that doesn't help, ask the manager the same - emphasizing you are not attacking the person but looking for a way to stop wasting time on correcting the same repeating mistake which adds to costs and decreases productivity. That may generate some resentment (so trying to resolve it directly first is prudent) but if you avoid framing it as a personal fault it would usually help.
Public apologies stamp official guilt on the individual and therefore serve as a license for the mob to further punish them because now they have admitted their fault and therefore are 'officially' guilty of the crime. Public apologies, therefore, are the metaphorical equivalent of blood in the water for attracting sharks.
Maybe it's better to just ignore and maintain innocence because then at least there is some gray area? I don't know.
I think there's definitely some truth to what you're saying, but I also wonder how much this is a problem offline, I've not encountered it heavily, but I'm also not a particularly online person.
I'm not sure about that.
I think there needs to be a distinction between a private apology to specific individuals for specific wrongs vs public apology to an undefined amorphous set of people. The former is certainly the right thing to do and it also offers hope of redemption because the wronged individual can accept the apology and forgive (or not). In the latter case, there is no acceptance, there's only the mob who wants to make an example of you because they now have 100% proof of your guilt.
Note that those to whom you apologize may communicate that apology to "the mob", with the result that they have proof of your guilt as well as proof of your lack of forthrightness.
In the ultimate case, if you are following your own advice, Machiavelli and my bitter cynicism suggest that not leaving live enemies behind you is the best strategy.
The world would be a lot better place if everyone did (any number of things), but perfect compliance is just never going to happen. We cannot get people to not murder each other over shoes or sports teams. Any plan which depends on this compliance is doomed to failure.
Doubtless many people have made things worse with "non-apology apologies" [1]. But your brain wants to say "apologizing is right" because when done right, it is right.
To me, truth and reconciliation are self-evidently how we build a better world, and refusal to take responsibility for mistakes is self-evidently corrosive to the individual and to society.
To that end, an apology that allows s/o to "get out" as in "saw no further consequences" isn't necessarily what's being claimed, because it still needs to come with (some) costs, even if they are mostly symbolic.
And, yes, of course there are people apologising for all sorts of behaviour that's being criticised every day. A Google News search has about five dozen examples from just the last day or two[1]. If apologies are never beneficial, I doubt they would be used that often.
Apologies are also a central factor in the most formalised system of "being cancelled" we have, the criminal justice system.
As to "getting out" of "being cancelled" by "mobs" I wouldn't know since I already have trouble identifying what that's supposed to mean.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=apologized&client=safari&rls...
I have a strong suspicion that you know what I mean, you just don't want to recognize that. If you indeed know nothing about cancel culture, I envy whatever bubble you reside in, and I wish I could organize my life to never encounter it too, however it is not so for me. If you pretend not to know about it because you don't want to engage in discussion about it, well, I certainly can't force you.
> And, yes, of course there are people apologising for all sorts of behaviour that's being criticised every day.
You may find it hard to believe, but I actually know people do such thing as "apologizing". I do it myself once in a while. My question was in specific context of the comment "Agreed. Apologizing may keep the mob size small and insignificant." and related to this context, not to general act of apologizing and whether or not it is practiced in human society. I think you have missed this context and from that follows your trouble to identify what I supposed to mean. I think I made it cleared now, or at least did as much as I could to make it clear.
Also the related phenomenon where people walk through cities being casually and formally anti-semitic, deliberately crashing cars into groups of people, but call the other side "mob", because they complain about that on Twitter.
I think you are confusing your imagination with reality. Nobody - and by that I mean literally, without exaggeration, no single person who lives or ever lived - ever pretended that Harvey Weinstein raping women is the reason they don't want women on their team. Not "everybody", not somebody - literally no single person is pretending or ever pretended that. Moreover, you know that as well as I do, I am certain of that (because you don't know any such person, by virtue of such person not existing). So why are you writing these obviously false words?
> Because apparently "showing up at their colleagues' hotel room doors, naked and at night" is somehow just bound to happen in the course of standard operating procedures.
I do not know who told you that (I suspect you imagined it just as you did the above) but it certainly is not the course of any operating procedures at all. None of them.
> Also the related phenomenon where people walk through cities being casually and formally anti-semitic, deliberately crashing cars into groups of people, but call the other side "mob", because they complain about that on Twitter.
People who walk through cities being anti-semitic and people who complain about cancel culture are distinct sets of people whose intersection is minuscule. And you also know it. Also, cancel culture is not complaining on Twitter about somebody marching somewhere, and you also know it too. Again, you are writing words which both you and everybody reading them knows are false. What for?
It is not like actresses who lost careers because they refused Weinstein could ever get their careers back. And it is not like those who complain about securely harassment cold easily get new jobs - people are afraid to hire them.
Which is why you don't deny it either; you move on, avoiding the Streisand Effect as best as possible by not engaging. It's passive denial vs. active denial.
I'm not saying this is moral or good - I'm only saying that it seems to work for people. It's a question of game theory. We can get better apologies if we start to accept apologies and move on with our lives, but the mob wants blood and these days the public apology only serves as an admission of guilt, absolving the mob of any evil when they pull the person apart limb from limb.
"...absolving the mob of any evil when they pull the person apart limb from limb."
That's a little excessively dramatic, don't you think?
It's 2020, everything's a little excessively dramatic
If e.g. Kavanaugh had admitted assaulting Ms. Ford and apologized, do you think enough Democrats would have said "Apology accepted" and voted to confirm to make up for the Republicans who would be unwilling to vote to confirm someone who has admitted to sexual assault? As long as Kavanaugh denies it, everyone who votes for him can just publicly say that they believed his denial, whether or not they actually did believe it.
As far as Kavanaugh, obviously none of this applies if he is not-guilty, because few advocate apologizing for things you didn't do. However:
There are a lot of middle-aged adults who did terrible things when they were teenagers. Among those, the ones who own up and apologized are excluded from many positions of power, while those that deny it are included.
So for this particular subset of the population, we punish the best, reward the worst, and incentivize any fence-sitters to lie. Perhaps it's a bit OT, but something is clearly broken here.
That depends on the level of power the said adult has accumulated. We've witnessed people who were persecuted for most minor transgressions, and people who were forgiven for very major things (e.g. credible rape accusations, being an officer in the KKK, being a member of a terrorist organization, being in prison for murder while being a member of a terrorist organization, etc. etc.). That, of course, needs very powerful position and very powerful friends - which none of us likely has.
I also find it interesting how the issue of admitting to making mistakes is being conflated with apologizing. While they are related, there is an important difference: a person who will never apologize is merely immature, while one who never admits to making mistakes might be a dangerous liability to himself and others, and is unfit for positions of responsibility.
I mean, it is absurd expectation. Apology does not even absolve you if minor crime in legal system. Plus, Supreme Court has great only little checked power. I just don't see someone willing to use power that way as suitable, even if he apologized.
What I try to do is apologize concisely, but then feel free to ignore people who want to drag this out into "that was not a REAL apology" / "now confess to your OTHER crimes" territory.
But even in those situations, I see absolutely no upside in publicly denying your mistake at length, if in fact you've made one.
On the one hand, you have the people who are talking about when you genuinely make a mistake, and recognize it as such before public outcry.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have people that maybe feel that they were acting / talking / behaving in a way that is normal but are being told that they made a mistake. In these circumstances, there is usually the issue that the nature of the mistake is quite subjective.
In the former case, your strategy is probably a good one. In the latter, I think the "don't apologize" is probably the better way to go, for the reasons outlined by GC.
If possible, do not immediately make any statement and if in a organization, make an "we are investigating" response. Most mobs are moved by emotions and herd mentality so just being silent for a while can disperse the worst of the mobs.
Make an thorough apology (like the guideline here) later.
Most internet mobs just move on to the next totem pole to burn in days so this seems to work (and is indeed how a lot of companies respond if they can't just fire someone and get over it)
A real mob, such as campus students can be a bit more troublesome.
Perhaps apologies do "serve as a license for the mob to further punish". Even so, what is the result to your life or to an organization of doing what you suggest?
"Yeah, I made a mistake, shit happens, now I know better".
Though looking at current leaders of industries and countries, you could get away with just pretending you did nothing wrong.
This is legally because apologies from companies are so full of doublespeak and low value language that it’s a waste of my time to read, much less expect any understanding. Here’s an example from Pichai [0].
I do like the outage report style that some companies use [1] and think this is the way to repeat a problem and what you do to fix it. This takes the place of an apology or denial.
[0] https://www.axios.com/google-ceo-apologizes-past-sexual-hara...
Every time a person/company apologizes for getting caught, it demeans public trust in everyone’s apologies.
For example, if I make a commitment to somebody and then circumstances outside my control prevent me from fulfilling it, I may very well say "it's not my fault, apologising would be insincere". But to an external stakeholder what they see is they are wearing consequences and I am not accepting accountability. There are a million shades of gray according to how much I could / should have anticipated the eventuality ... but that makes it really not simple to make this kind of call, and I would have to say, if you are going to err, I would rather err on the side of apologising than not.
In my own company I try to apologize every time I screw something up. I know my position is unassailable, and my team members should have trust that their leadership is in touch with reality.
I am also cognizant of the fact that no hired employee has the same level of security, and it troubles me.
Refusing to apologize has the opposite effect.
Sure it has, for example Dan Harmon's public apology to Megan Ganz: https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/1/11/16879702/dan-harmon-ap...
Public apologies, therefore, are the metaphorical equivalent of blood in the water for attracting sharks.
What are some examples of public apologies that met all 5 of these criteria [1], but made things worse rather than better? Would you consider the possibility that maybe the apologies that made things worse were actually done wrong, but they could have helped if they were done right?
More generally, apologies, restorative justice, truth and reconciliation, and related ideas seem to me like the obvious and only way to we can heal from injustice in our society. Refusing to admit fault seems obviously corrosive to society, and to a person's ego.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/12/5/16710430/sexual-har...
[Edit: man, I feel stupid for complaining about downvotes, but I am really not sure how I could have been more constructive with my disagreement in this comment. I cited examples, suggested an alternative explanation for observations my parent described, and didn't criticize anyone. What did I do wrong? I am ready and willing to apologize if I made any mistakes]
The power advantage that young women have on men; due to evolutionary pressures. Harmon didn't mean to be attracted to her. It happened.
I know biology isn't important in 2020. But I listened to his apology and realized that the human nature discussion is never part of this situation.
Ted Chiang's "liking what you see a documentary" is a good case study of a world where attraction's turned off. As a woman, I sometimes think we aren't empathic enough about how attraction works in men. It doesn't mean they are excused for sexual harassment. I just think evolutionary pressures should be part of the discussion.
Neither person should be setup to fail.
If you are in a "cancel culture" situation, then people that surround you are not you friends, and they do not have common goals with you. You can not win. Best thing is to get out of that situation ASAP, if you can not - minimize your losses in any way you can. And continue looking to get out of this situation, because you can not win, and you will surely lose sooner or later. Try to still be kind to others - you won't fix the broken culture, but at least you can have a little island of non-awfulness around you.
A side effect of everyone getting 15 minutes of fame/infamy is that it means an increasing fraction of social interactions are one-shot. Often, the only time you will ever hear about someone is when they do something dumb that catches the Twitter zeitgeist. Once the moment has passed, they fade from view.
The optimal strategy for iterated prisoner's dilemma where you will interact with an opponent multiple times involves some level of fairness and give and take. The optimal strategy for single-turn prisoner's dilemma is to assume bad faith and selfishly betray your opponent.
Infer from that as you will.
I think that's a pretty good middle ground. Apologizing too readily might also signal you lack self-respect or confidence which may invite even more vitriol.
For example.
Progressives are widely known for their enthusiastic use of forcing people into public apologies for perceived crimes against the faith or for not acquiescing to unreasonable demands which can then be framed as a perceived wrong. I think a lot of the kickback against apologising that we're seeing is coming from the numerous public examples of this tactic and the follow-up where any good-faith apology will be used to make a further example of the heretic.
If you are dealing with this kind of thing then the tactic of take-cover and let the storm pass seems sane (pearls before swine etc). But if you're actually dealing with a genuine person or group who you've genuinely wronged then a real apology is warranted.
One other thing I'd add; if you have wronged someone and you've apologised and made genuine efforts to make amends. While it is on the other person to decide whether or not they will accept/forgive, it is not a requirement to indefinitely debase/lower yourself in the pursuit of obtaining their forgiveness. You can make efforts up to a point but you are not required to destroy yourself until they grant it. If the situation is unsalvageable then that's what it is.
For studys sake on how this can get out of control, there are numerous examples of shitty parents holding a past wrong over a childs head indefinitely in the raised-by-narcissists subreddit which illustrate the tactic in use by malicious types there.
This is rarely about the apology itself, but about establishing that something wrong has happened to begin with. The fact is, a lot of pretty messed up stuff routinely happens and is simply taken as a given. The apology is simply a marker that some behavior will no longer be considered acceptable. It's hardly even a measure of accountability, unless someone is so egotistical that taking responsibility is personally harmful to them.
One charming example is this one of Morgan Freeman during the metoo saga where he was "Sexually harrassing a reporter live on TV."
I don't know anything about the alleged situation, but pretty sure he moved on with his life and is still wealthy and largely beloved.
1) He was a beloved actor with a lot of public support.
2) His attempted character assassination was recorded on film and so any stories of how the victim was "traumatised" by his "sexual harassment" not only were publicly shown to be lies but they added to a more public recognition of my earlier point that progressives believe it is okay to lie about what someone has done in the interests of destroying someone they want gone.
3) His attack happened late in the metoo saga when people had been pointing out the flaws in the "believe all women" view; after the aziz answari situation failed to hold up to public scrutiny etc but before the Joe Bidden situation resulted in "believe all women" having "never happened".
Fundamentally the Morgan Freeman story demonstrates a number of things about progressive belief; their views on what constitutes sin is ridiculous in the eyes of anyone with basic common sense, they believe ends-justify-the-means and they are willing to carry out those means.
He was okay, others weren't.
Somewhat interestingly, given the topic at hand, in the immediate aftermath of those accusations, Morgan Freeman issued an "I'm sorry if I made anyone uncomfortable" apology, which CNN used in their defense of the news clip the GP has linked. I don't really have any experience in, or opinion on, public apologies, but I thought that was an interesting thing to share.
Another one that interests me greatly is the frequent use of the narcissists prayer in debate, have you ever heard it?
It goes as follows.
That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did... You deserved it.
I suppose I'll start the ball rolling. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/14/rosetta-come...
More than apologies, these two at least, are looking to punish.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez
[1] https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/aoc-activists-hint-b...
[2] https://www.wctrib.com/opinion/columns/4036749-Jennifer-Rubi...
2. Progressivism barely means anything. You can characterize virtually anyone who even just says anything positive about social change as progressive. Better to characterize her as a social democrat or democratic socialist, depending on your impression.
3. "Just the News" is an incredible source to list. A right-wing rag founded by the former editor-in-chief of The Washington Times. Might as well just refer to the actual tweets: https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1324807776510595078. They are about the typical denialism that follows reactionaries that did, you know, horrible things and not allowing their images to be blindly rehabilitated as public servants. Emphasis on remembering the actions of public servants, not whether someone will simply be denied employment.
4. Jennifer Rubin is a never-Trump conservative turned American establishment "centrist" (which is still a right wing position).
A pitfall of this mentality, at least in my experience, is that people I hurt are usually much better judges of whether I hurt them than I am.
Something I learned that helped is: you can hurt someone without being wrong. "I regret that my actions had this effect on you," is a good place to start a conversation when I'm not (yet?) convinced I would have done anything differently in hindsight.
Often, simply acknowledging that someone has been hurt by my actions, and trying to understand why, has yielded far better outcomes than sticking with my judgment. Both in that they affected party feels better, and in that I get to add a new dimension to my understanding of social dynamics.
It often doesn't matter how legitimate someones' complaint is according to my personal worldview; what matters is how the affected feel.
Check out "Thank You for Arguing" by Jay Heinrichs. It covers the same basic steps, but recommends to exclude the actual apology part. It's also a great book for other reasons.
If that perception isn't their, it comes across as a very different message ("I'm sorry you don't have a thick enough skin")
However, if you've offended some of the woke crowd then this may be worse than saying nothing at all. In your example, they would say you are rubbing salt in the wound with "I regret that my actions had this effect on you." If you aren't prepared to unambiguously denounce yourself, you may (unintentionally) make things worse.
It would be easier if people just talked more about their feelings even if they don't understand me. If I hurt someone and they just say something like "look I feel weird because of this and this that happened between us", then I can process and understand what went wrong. I spent some years running teams and doing management and I used 1v1s for this to really good results.
I do that and a lot of my closest friends also do that. I think people that expect you to read their feelings are the ones that are going to get hurt if they spend time around because they have unrealistic expectations. I can only feel my feelings, or get empathetic with people that have opened up to me before. I can't be apologizing all the time just in case, that's also ridiculous and even though a lot of people do it in, specially in California, I think it comes down as condescending and sometimes even egotistical.
>It often doesn't matter how legitimate someones' complaint is according to my personal worldview; what matters is how the affected feel.
I can't get behind this. Why am I responsible for the way the chemicals in someone's brain react if I say something that unintentionally hurts them? If i'm doing nothing wrong as you say and someone else is offended, or sad or hurt, that's honestly their problem.
People need to take responsibility for their feelings instead of making everyone else take responsibility for their feelings.
Why should I ever be responsible for the way someone feels unless i've done something intentionally to make them feel that way?
People's feelings are their own business, nobody else has the unintentional responsibility of random people's arbitrary feelings.
I do however find that if I actually take time to think about what's happened, a genuine wrong that might have been caused in a rush/unthought out moment is (usually) pretty obvious when looked back on in hindsight; there's usually an "aaah shit yeah that'd piss me off too" moment.
That's just a variation of "I'm sorry you're so impatient" or "It's too bad you have no sense of humor.": https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Apology#Acknowledgment_of_th...
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/celebrity/people-are...
The two you mentioned are bad, because they implicitly shift the fault on the person on the receiving end, because they make qualifying statements about the person without addressing your own actions that led to it at all. Very similar to the badness of "I am sorry you feel that way about what I said", because it only addresses the person on the receiving end and makes it sound like there is something wrong with them.
"I regret that my actions had this effect on you" is not bad because it doesn't do that. It clearly just says that you are sorry for your actions causing such an effect, without making any qualifying statements about the person on the receiving end, leaving the possibility of your actions being wrong fully open.
But these people are very biased judges.
It is a very human behavior, and it is easily exploited and in an emergent way exploits itself in whatever way is convenient in any age.
It is clear to me that there are very smart people and very stupid people stoking the flames on this human vulnerability that so few people care to notice.
I think the happy medium is where people are held accountable for their actions (ideally apologising for them if they really have done something wrong, which often times they have even if the response to that is overly vitriolic), and then allowed the space to make amends and move on with their lives.
I hold a very special loathing of anyone that weaponizes process in order to control others.
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst, Are full of passionate intensity".
The cheap response is to whine about "no true scotsman" but I'd love to see ideas on how to prevent groups actually getting corrupted in this way; it's probably in the "how do we create world peace" level of problems but the cycle is getting very wearing!
The major problem with the left leaning political spectrum in america is a somewhat blind authoritarian “respect” for “diversity” where what counts as diverse is rather restricted and generally doesn’t include disagreement on the subject.
The key missing ability is getting people to empathize with each other and not to confuse radical ideas which one finds abhorant and moderate ideas one finds disagreeable.
A cheap way to make this much easier is to ban labels like political party, gender, etc. If you stop sorting people (and yourself) into bins it becomes a whole lot more difficult to be so polarized as you aren’t dividing the world into us and them by dealing with a new human one by one.
"widely known"
You're interpreting your ideological position as normative and factual.
1. Go silent.
> Complete public blackout. No denying, no accepting. The people want retribution, not justice. The media blackout is essential.
2. Reflect on it privately and quietly.
3. If not in violation of #1, apologize to the individual people/entity affected in private.
4. Once the mob dissipates, address the issue publically in long form.
> It is very important that it be a boring, long and solemn take on the mistake. Blog, interview, podcast, whatever.
5. Don't blame. period.
6. Set a roadmap to rehabilitation/mitigation.
7. Actually follow #6
* Step 4b is a bad idea; it has too great a possibility of re-raising the issue.
* Steps 5, 6, and 7 are completely optional and probably not recommended. If Step 4a worked, keep in mind that the strategy you have got you where you are.
* Given the above, Step 2 is a waste of time.
This message brought to you by the International Society of Misanthropes.
My point is that we shouldn't just be looking out for our interests. We should be working co-operatively to look out for everybody's interests. Ultimately this benefits ourselves too, but that's not why we should do it.
6. Set a roadmap to rehabilitation/mitigation.
and
7. Actually follow #6
are against anyone's self-interest. It's about holding yourself accountable for you actions.
I agree that there are far more constructive ways of dealing with internal (family or company) errors.
Admitting fault can open one to liability (sometimes legally). Although perhaps it depends on how one defines a mistake versus, say, an outright fault that people could find morally wrong.
An example that's not perfect (and I'm not arguing/defending one way or another) is Louis CK with the #metoo movement.
It seemed to me that his response was sincere and correct on the personal level. He acknowledged those he'd wronged, made clear the victims were in the right, apologized, and expressed a desire to improve his behavior. For all that, he was demonized.
To some extent, it felt like people were saying: "My god, you admitted it. You're worse than Harvey Weinstein - at least he had the decency to deny his actions."
> people want retribution, not justice
This. People desperately want to feel like they championed a cause, and the cheapest way to get that kick is by demanding your head on a platter on Twitter.
Some people I had the displeasure of interacting with suddenly feel more ordinary. Thank you.
And the end result was that I became everyone's bitch. People would intentionally pick on me and be ugly to me and when it went sideways, the group as a whole would go "There she goes again!" and blame the whole thing on me and expect me to apologize and kiss everyone's ass.
I am much less free with public apologies than I used to be, though I am still equally willing to own my actions (a la "I did x. That didn't turn out well.")
There are some people in the world just looking for someone to blame and if they get it stuck in their warped tiny little minds for some reason that you are a good person to blame, good luck escaping their shit. Such people are a case of "The only winning move is not to play." and, unfortunately, you tend to find that out after the fact because they have burned you and will not stop burning you, no matter how above-board, high-minded blah blah blah you handle the situation.
Some people are just hell-bent on proving "No one is actually that good" because they have baggage, so trying to do the right thing consistently just makes you a target of their shit and they really need therapy, but aren't getting it.
Such people seem to be rather poor at letting things go and my impression is some of them will cyberstalk you for years after you try to leave whatever situation originally put you in contact with them.
(Edit: No, this wasn't about my gender. This detail has already been addressed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25087829)
Though the reality is that I have never been on an email list that was mostly female membership that wasn't poisoned by sexism. There is inevitably one or two men who have figured out how to participate in the discussion without the entire group wanting their head on a pike and you can't disagree with these men because a zillion women will jump down your throat and it ends up being seriously ugly (yes, I tend to be the woman daring to disagree with such men and having other women act horribly to me).
A more likely explanation is that when I was younger, before my health went to hell, I was fairly charming and likable. So I tended to be the center of attention and I think some people were jealous.
It was also a situation where (oftentimes) I would read the initial email and give my advice on their problem without first reading any of the replies and then my advice would change the direction of discussion because it was so much better than what had already been said. I tended to stand out and there were some people just hell bent on trying to prove that I "didn't know everything" and "wasn't above making mistakes" and "wasn't always right" and this kind of garbage.
Because I tended to stand out, the discussion on the list would end up revolving around everyone lining up to either be "for" or "against" me/my position and then I would hand everyone their head as the least worst answer because patting people on the head for agreeing with me was only going to deepen such problems.
I've spent a lot of years trying to figure out how to let my comments stand on their own and do what I can to refuse to let it become about me. There is no 100 percent cure for that tendency (of people to make things about the person who said them), but I've learned some best practices.
(Comment has been edited.)
Yes, generally speaking, that's a best practice and one I follow as best I can. Unfortunately, it can't always be followed without hamstringing one's ability to say something meaningful and address more important issues than the tendency of the world to geegaw at me for existing.
I wasn't asking for advice. Giving advice in a situation like this one tends to boil down to blaming the victim rather than trying to understand what they are saying about a larger social issue and patterns of behavior involving many people, not just themselves.
Sometimes, there are no good answers.
I'm going to go try to do other things now. If other people here want to continue to make it about me that my comment in this discussion happens to have been upvoted by other people, I'm not taking responsibility for that. It was my third comment for the day on HN and the other two have been utterly and completely ignored so far.
I have no control over other people's upvotes and a really poor ability to predict which of my comments will do well on HN. I spend about half my time going "That was brilliant. Why doesn't anyone appreciate me?" and the other half going "God, why is this being upvoted so much???" and maybe one percent of my time going "Yes, this makes total sense to me how this comment is being received." (Comment not intended to be mathematically accurate nor to cover all scenarios of how I feel about HN reactions to my comments.)
0_o
Toodle doo, y'all.
If you're only looking at racism or sexism or whatever, you're ignoring the bigger and more insidious social problems that are individual and pervade small groups and families everywhere.
When I first heard about micro-aggressions, I thought, wow, so that's what's been happing. That explains all those subtle insults, unexpected rudeness, quiet exclusions, etc. But I'm not in one of those special "marginalized" groups and being actually marginalized doesn't matter to identitarians because their politics is more important than people's welfare.
Oh, I'm not, that's what I meant by an extra level of problems, not that it explains everything, but it may exacerbate it by giving more things for people to key off of that aren't based on rational measures.
What I meant is along the lines of "yes, dealing with groups is annoying because there's all sorts of weird group dynamics and people making assumptions and not re-evaluations based on new evidence, and then it gets worse for those people that have identifying characteristics that allow people to make even more baseless assumptions.
As someone who has noticed their own knee-jerk reactions based on sex at times (due to a number of factors that mostly boil down to very little exposure to women in my specific field over the decades I've been in it based on small company sizes outside of major markets), I think you're either just entirely unaware of it, lucky enough to not be around it much, or oblivious to it.
To be absolutely clear, I have a bias on on initial interpretation of capability of women before there it information otherwise. This rears its head when I read something about a women in tech having a technical problem and assume it's because of their skill level before knowing anything about them, and it's done in a way that is beyond what I would assume about a man. It's ingrained, but I have noticed it, and try to specifically correct for it now. I would like to think it's made little or no difference in my interactions with women in tech because a) they have been extremely infrequent, and b) I try to not let my assessment of someone's skill affect how I treat them. That's probably optimistic of me though. I don't exactly feel shame about this, it's a natural part of being human. We have biases, we can either try to find them and acknowledge and/or try to work on them, or just live with them.
So what you have here is a very specific counter-example, of someone on the other side saying concretely it has happened at least for once. I doubt I'm unique in this. Most people have biases about all sorts of groups, that come out in large and small ways. Maybe you don't, or your biases are so small it's hard to note them. Forgive me if I think that's unlikely, and you have many biases for many different types of people, as everyone does, and as I do for in many other ways I'm not aware of, I'm sure.
I imagine the other side of this probably feels like people judging you for being underdressed ata group function at all times, no matter how much effort you put into it. People are going to make assumptions if you're the only person in jeans and a t-shirt at a group function of people in suits, and you'll have to prove yourself all the time to overcome people's initial assumptions. My guess is that for women in tech, life is like a bunch of that happening over and over again, unless they get a reputation that proceeds them. That doesn't seem overhyped to me at all, it seems pretty likely to me and a shitty thing to go through life dealing with.
I think women may actually get a better deal overall because so many men are trying not to be sexist that they treat them well, giving them a free pass on all those other judgable signals. Men might not even understand that a woman is revealing her inadequacy by wearing the "wrong" clothes, while they'll openly laugh at a man exhibiting "wrong" behavior.
Then, when you apologize, you’re never doing it to seek forgiveness. Apologies are simply an expression of regret that your actions didn’t align with your values.
How other people react doesn’t matter.
E.g. I’m sorry for A. I regret A bc I value B. B is important to me bc C. To better achieve B, I will be avoiding A in the future and striving for D and E instead.
And the only people you need to apologize to are the people who you actually hurt, not random people on the internet.
But as you say, it's also been my experience that apology and... "ownership"(?) are two very different things in American (Southern) culture.
"I'm sorry I did X" seems to signal weakness and invite criticism, if people are already so inclined.
"I did X. It wasn't the best approach / it was wrong / etc" seems to be perceived as stronger, while also taking responsibility for the mistake.
My gut says bullies key to subconscious signs of weakness, and the former is interpreted as such. While the latter projects subconscious strength, even while communicating conscious guilt.
We're all just apes in the end.
Exactly this, and one of the things I eventually realised is you have to simply ignore the jackasses.
Realising that face to face these people are most likely not terribly formidable is certainly helpful but the main thing is to learn not to give a s### what they think regardless. This isn't to say you should ignore everyone, or become proud, but that you should recognise peoples' behaviour for what it is and respond appropriately, which might include ignoring it entirely.
> My gut says bullies key to subconscious signs of weakness, and the former is interpreted as such.
Without wanting to get too Homelander about it and, of course, I never would, but after a number of years of strength training it's always nice to know that if push came to shove you could probably snap the bullies in half with your bare hands. More seriously, being in physically good shape is highly underrated: it fundamentally changes who you are, and will change the way you think about difficult or challenging situations, making you more confident and capable of dealing with them. I can't really explain why this happens, but it certainly does - at least in my experience (one data point, I will grant you).
So I much appreciate what you're saying here.
You step on my foot. I look at you, and say "sorry", and pull my foot away. You abashedly also "sorry" and we move on.
Am I apologizing? Hardly! The full sentence is, "Sorry, did you just actually step on my foot, what the hell?" and your reply is "Sorry, yes, I did do that, didn't mean to, apologies". Then the problem is solved and we move on.
> But in the US, I've been pounced on for a casual use of that word, as if I'd announced failure and that I owed something to the other party.
It is precisely the opposite in circumstances like the above!
At least in the UK, that's not the full sentence, or it could be, but only with a change in tone ('SOrrY?!') - to me it's more like 'Oops my foot was in your way I think, so sorry'. (Said of course before you have a chance to think 'no hang on, I wasn't in the way, you weren't looking, this isn't my fault'.)
On the flip side, when someone runs in to me or steps on my foot or something, I'll usually just look at them, giving them an opportunity to politely say, "Sorry about that." My wife tells me that it is extremely rude when I do that, but that feels normal to me.
I'm really wondering if where we grew up is playing a big part here?
"Sorry" in regular conversation is a social nicety, very different from a sincere apology, even though the sincere apology may incorporate that same word.
I don't want to repeat it here, but I mentioned this in another part of the thread.
Half of my family is outside the United States, and I often use "sorry" in a similar context. For me it's cultural rather than regional because I'm in the southwest--and now that I think about it, I've never given much thought to people giving a non-apology "sorry." It could be there's a bit of a cultural mismatch here since there's an air force base nearby, and we often have people from the Commonwealth here (UK, Canada, Australia, etc).
I'm actually not sure what sort of answer that is now that I think about it.
For lighter things, like bumping into you, we might say "sorry" (as in, the English word), which sounds more casual and not as severe.
'Sorry' to me ranges from 'Excuse me', through 'ha-ha we both reached for that/side-stepped in the same direction at the same time', all the way of course to the serious 'I regret and apologise for what I have done' that it (solely) means elsewhere.
On the flip side though, American's are constantly telling me that I'm 'so welcome' when they don't mean it (or perhaps because they're used to 'thank you' having similar infrequency and sincerity to 'sorry'?) - so I think we're even. :)
(And sometimes it's followed by an 'alright?', which is practically a C21 howdoyoudo.)
“The readiness of the English to apologise for something they haven’t done is remarkable, and it is matched by an unwillingness to apologise for what they have done,” wrote Henry Hitchings in his aptly-titled Sorry!: The English and their Manners.
But there is also a difference between using "sorry" as an expression of sympathy when interacting with close relations, and public apologies.
I think so. I use "sorry" as a casual non-apology sometimes when I don't mean to trouble people for the same reasons as others up-thread.
It wasn't until I met my exgf when I realized that some people are perplexed by that. I said it in the context of "hope I'm not troubling you," and her immediate response was "why are you apologizing?"
Didn't help that I came back with "...I'm not?" because she insisted I was.
That said, my mother is Australian, so at least half of my upbringing is non-American, and I often don't give much thought to certain cultural discrepancies (even though I was born and raised in the US) because I have a hard enough time keeping my own straight. lol
The first two are often the same word or phrase, in asking for help or offering thanks. The third sound is usually when bumping into someone in a crowd, or in response to getting in someone's way. Or apologizing when it's taking a bit longer for me to understand a particular situation.
I have not traveled in Africa or Southeast Asia, so very likely that I am missing the point here. But I don't intend to take on the power to heal the whole world when I say "Sorry" with sincerity. I'm just trying to avoid becoming more of a problem.
Your latter statement implies an observation of a cause and effect relationship. "It was wrong", especially if followed by "because..." shows that you know _why_ it was a mistake and that you'll be able to rectify it in the future.
It truly is a thing for people to feel anxious and upset and apologize without understanding what they did wrong, and it is an admission of weakness. In a better world, it wouldn't be pounced upon. But in this world, I'd recommend that people keep a cool head and focus on observations of consequences, not acceptance of blame.
Not doing this makes even well-intentioned organizations and people feel slimy and dishonest to me. I'm evidently in the minority.
I think the biggest enabler was the response.
If someone said "I made a mistake and did X", the response was invariably "What are we going to do about it now?" or "How can we avoid doing it again?"
I guess part of it was a strong company identity and shared ownership. So it wasn't so much "You admitted a mistake" rather than "You admitted a mistake we all made (through you)".
It was weird, but I don't think I saw people get jumped on for admitting mistakes my entire time there.
I’ve been fortunate to work at a few places where we had a really good diverse mix of people. It was there that we had the best ideas, the best teams, the best support, and the best place to work from an HR perspective.
I’m sad to read this because this experience isn’t alone. So many I’ve talked to have similar stories. I’m glad you didn’t take their crap and you continue to do what you do.
When you've made a mistake or someone claims you have made a mistake, step back outside yourself and look at your behavior dispassionately. If you don't meet the standards you've held for yourself, then apologize and make things right. But if after really separating yourself from the situating and thinking about it, you still feel like you acted correctly - stand your ground and don't engage. Or explain why you did what you did and what the consequences would be otherwise.
Or if all else fails, give one of those evasive "I'm sorry you feel the way you do" non-apologies and move on, like corporations do all the time. This is really a form of boundary-setting, and basically means "I find your needs to be not worth my time and energy, so I will extricate myself from this relationship in as inoffensive a way as I can and devote no further energy to engaging with you."
I'm the nicest most contrite person you'll ever meet -- until I'm not.
So when do you apologize? An apology is great when you've hurt someone by making a mistake - which I would define as something you wouldn't do knowing how it would turn out. You've made a deliberate decision that in hindsight was an error of judgement. Hopefully that doesn't happen often.
What does happen often is a decision you make that hurt someone's feelings - maybe you declined to merge a pull request because the patch wasn't good, or you skipped a colleague's wedding because you were sick; in those cases you can maybe make it up to them or explain, but don't apologize - beyond the "I'm sorry I couldn't come, but I had a fever" one-liner, which is more sympathy than an apology.
If you generally live by your own values, and act according to them, then (in my opinion) you should rarely need to apologise for that.
Why did you need to do a lot of apologizing, I'm curious?
If I think of particular people I personally know who frequently apologise, it often seems to me that they are doing that to centre and prioritise their own experience ahead of other people's - which perhaps was exactly the problem in the first place. That type of apology can taste slightly sour.
I find that listening is a more important aspect of apologising than talking.
Maybe you're different than the rest of us, but I imagine that most people do things from time to time that don't align with their values, either because of an honest accident, or because of a "moment of weakness". Obviously we don't need to publicly apologize for everything though.
I'm not sure I've ever quite seen that dynamic, so I'm actually really curious for details. What kinds of things did you find yourself apologizing for? And then, what were people picking on you for? And what was the relation exactly?
If you're a moderator of a group who has to make hard decisions, depending on the group, it can be a thankless job since you'll always piss off half the people no matter what.
I suppose the original post doesn't talk about what does require apology vs. what doesn't. E.g. making a necessary and correct decision that still pisses people off is usually better done with empathy for those who it bothers, but not apology.
When someone of that ilk works as a moderator in an online community (or is otherwise influential in a group), it tends to wind up being a really awful cesspit while many of the members will feel they have "bragging rights" for belonging if they happen to be fortunate enough to be one of the "insiders" expected to do the bullying and not get bullied.
Its working for me so far. Dis agreeable people are my daily antagonistic target. Its a great sport.
I've run into something that is kinda-sorta-similar with regards to praising other people. I really took it to heart a long time ago that I should focus on building other people up and giving credit, always keeping positive, etc. That's not terrible advice, but I've found that if you give everyone else credit too often it shifts people's perception of you. So be nice, give credit where it's due, but don't turn away praise, and accept with good grace credit that is given to you. You want people to remember that you are skilled.
When I was in high school, I got in the habit of cracking self deprecating jokes because I was one of the top students. It was a means to try to put other people at ease and signal "I'm just plain folks and not perfect and please don't be intimidated. Please relax."
Later in life it only served to convince people I was a loser and/or had terrible self-esteem issues (or both). And there is no remedy for it once that happens because how are you supposed to explain the joke?
"Noooooo. You have that backwards. I'm so sure I'm better than you that I'm trying to bring myself down to your level and seem approachable!"
0_o
Yeah, no. Just no.
This document is a would-be harasser's checklist for extracting forced confessions and atonement schedules.
While I do agree with you for some things, some mistakes may actually be severe and need correction in a public forum and it has nothing to do with harassement.
"I'm sorry I funded Wikimedia Antarctica but..."
Everything you say after the but negates everything you say before it and now you're only trying to justify your actions. Simply, "I'm sorry I funded Wikimedia Antarctica." and proceed to describe what you learned: "I neglected to look at relevant data before doing so. I see how that affected my thinking and I'm committed to doing that in future deals."
I can't stress how much more impactful my apologies have become with people simply by leaving out that "but". Even my relationship with my wife has improved because of it and I've noticed she's started to leave off the "but's" as well, which really makes me appreciate her apologies a whole lot more.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Apology#Which_elements_shoul...
> When the offender takes full responsibility for one's wrongdoing, a simple statement saying "I am sorry." may help build the trust. This is particularly true if there is a story of good relationship with the offender; In most cases however, it will be insufficient.
It doesn't explicitly address "I'm sorry, but..." phrasing, but does suggest limiting apologies to specifically acknowledging what was done (and the pain it caused), accepting responsibility, and expressing regret.
Two more worth thinking about: Explain vs. excuse. While your feelings and justifications may explain your bad behavior they do not excuse it.
Not your fault, but still your problem. The (wrong) idea that an unexpected circumstance can excuse bad behavior, because it’s not your fault.
"I apologize for shouting at you. I was short on sleep and frustrated about something else. I was wrong to take out my frustration on you."
vs:
"I apologize for shouting at you but I was tired and frustrated."
An explanation can make the apology stronger because it demonstrates that you realize what it is you're apologizing for.
We had been working unwise hours for several days, and we got the fix together, and I made a mistake: I pushed it directly to production.
Man, my boss was really mad; no one had been getting enough sleep and we were all stressed. I apologized profusely and said it would never happen again. Fortunately, the fix was correct, so this could have been worse.
Ok. Do you notice what's missing from this story?
We never addressed the flaw in our deployment which made it possible to push to prod without passing test.
Apologies are for when you harm others. Some mistakes do, and some don't. A blanket policy that a mistake is an occasion for apology and navel-gazing is culturally harmful, because it casts mistakes as personal failings, when they are frequently the result of institutional or procedural shortcomings which can and should be addressed.
In such a situation, multiple mistakes were made. If that work culture could somehow support honest, open, and humble approaches to understanding the problem, there would be multiple people either apologizing or, better, taking ownership of their contributions and working towards preventing them in the future (the thing you identify that did not happen). Such a culture is, unfortunately, very unlikely due to the incentive structures of company hierarchy.
The role and power of the individual for whom we're setting these expectations is very important and it's very unhelpful that this isn't considered either in that wiki page or in so many comments (not yours, yours is good). Is the person that made a mistake very powerful and do they have a PR team? Their approach will probably be purely cynical. Is it a company? We should stop anthropomorphizing companies. Is it a junior colleague? Was it truly a personal error on their part or higher up or systemic? Was it a manager harming an employee? On a moral and societal level, we have to consider those harms and whether owning a mistake and apologizing is desirable or even sufficient - perhaps they should just be fired or we should consider their actions to be a crime. Or maybe "we" in this scenario is again PR thinking intended to protect the company, in which case the apology is carefully wordsmithed to avoid liability and has no real value.
When dealing with actual, non-hypothetical humans, you should be able to set your ego aside to meet them on a human level and address them as such.
Too many in this thread fear of being perceived as weak, but I find that being an unapologetic asshole is just as bad.
“Because I was worried about how people would react to X I decided to do Y”
Then after that you can write all the stuff that they list in this post.
I think it helps a lot to get the audience into the same situation you where in in their minds before understanding the context of how you actually screwed up.
How many apology posts do you write? Why would you need to write any? I don't understand why any apology needs to be public.
There are lots of occasions where we made a change the players didn't like, or we screwed up in a way that led to economic damage to some players, or just had an operational issue that led to a bunch of downtime.
Here is a random example of onee of these.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2603061/page/1
The full timeline is valuable since you can look back on it and determine what went wrong when, so you can determine what changes need to happen to prevent these same issues in the future.
One thing I find is that incident reports such as these are most useful internally, but when communicated externally, they demonstrate that you're taking the underlying issues seriously and are committed to addressing them.
Modesty and realizing you've made a mistake are good qualities, no doubt. But those traits will be used against you if you foolishly think others will be also acting in good faith when they publicly point out your mistake. If you wish to publicly apologize that's fine, but don't for a second fall for the notion that this will appease the mob. They want blood when they smell it in the water and each apology just squirts more blood into the water for them to feed off of.
A proper apology—one that (1) acknowledges the specific harm caused, (2) acknowledges responsibility and remorse for specific choices, (3) explains how they hope to make amends specifically to the aggrieved party—seems to me to be self-evidently the only possible way to heal a community.
Doubtless many people have delivered "apologies" that omitted one of those elements, or even all 3 elements ("I apologize if anyone felt offended"), and thereby made things worse for themselves. But to me it is self-evidently corrosive to a community and to a person's ego to adopt a practice of refusing to acknowledge mistakes.
For an example of the good that can come from a proper apology for a serious harm, consider Dan Harmon's apology to Megan Ganz: https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/1/11/16879702/dan-harmon-ap...
We don't owe war criminals reconciliation, but they owe us the truth.
Often, those supporters have been on the receiving end of pretty serious hardships themselves. That doesn't justify supporting war crimes, of course, but if you don't acknowledge those hardships, you create resentment and the seeds of future strife, rather than healing.
but I've also seen it wrongfully directed towards oppressors who never knew good relations with their subjects: we can't 'reconcile' if we never were friends.
I think you're misunderstanding their claim.
They are not making a claim that denial is better for society.
They are making a claim that denial is better for the accused (and only in certain situations).
"The accused" is interesting framing. I would hope that no one expects the innocent but accused to apologize for something they didn't do.
For the accused who are guilty, if we agree that denial is worse for society but currently better for the guilty, what can we do to change that, so that it is better for them to acknowledge fault and worse to remain in denial?
If there was a way to neuter this power, or better ensure the punishment enacted by the mob fits the crime, less people would advocate for denial.
As it stands, public shaming often goes way overboard.
For those interested in hearing more stories of this: https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_ronson_when_online_shaming_goe...
The problem is when this same internet mob protocol gets applied to average citizens. The internet mob deals massive amounts of damage to a person's reputation and psyche. And, there's no way to temper the punishment to meet the crime. For your average wrong-doer, it's extreme overkill.
Take, for example, the woman who recently got called out for making racist comments to a black man in the park. She was clearly in the wrong, but her entire life is ruined now due to the internet mob. The punishment did not fit the crime.
Why is it worse for society? Guilt is already an emotion that exists for society, not for self-interest, it relies on morals, which all are learned through other people. If people are leaning more towards denial, it means that the cost for an individual to do something immoral is already too high, doesn't leave much room for mistakes that people inevitably make from time to time, so more people denying might be a natural feedback loop to make more space.
I have no idea where this idea comes from. People will attempt to avoid consequences even if those consequences are just.
Are you new here? No, so you shouldn't be surprised by these techbro echo chamber responses?
Alas.
Most of those places eventually go bust, but they can ruin a lot of people's lives before the final collapse happens.
Step 3.2 feels forced and a little Orwellian. Even something as hazy as invoking "bad judgment" -- and leaving the scene -- is often sufficient, at least at first. If errant people need a bit more time to process reality's sudden slap in the face, I'm in favor of giving it to them.
Eventually a lot of them do reach a fuller understanding. Or they redeem themselves in other ways. In the right settings, a little bit of mercy can be very powerful
There wasn't much drama then. Just some mockery I wasn't even aware of (I didn't follow Twitter). I learned of it one year later, when some institution "awarded" the worst mistakes (they wrote pretty funny piece).
> Yes, there may be some drama, in the short term.
It was the only mistake of any consequence I've made in over 4 years working in this domain. Yet some people still use that one error to publicly question my competence and my ethics. As if they didn't realise the perverse incentives that results from punishing honest disclosure.
For the rest of us cooking up an apology from a recipe is feel insincere, an apology is a ritual sure showing how its done ruins the illusion. On a higher level this type of process-over-vision thinking has ruined the goals and ideas of Wikipedia, a site which in the 00s seemed world-changing and lead it to it's decline in the 10s and to what I predict will be its fall in the 20s.
I hope to be wrong about WP, I hope for a new wave of optimistic idealism to swallow up tech again, bringing about a new era of amateurism. But with the professionalisation of even the free software community I have, I must admit, all but given up hope.
mediawiki is used by a lot of organizations for internal wiki stuff.
Maybe the most elitist
On the other hand, I find a community like Stack Overflow to be much worse because the BS can strike any time, any place. Between questions marked "Off-Topic", and snarky replies, and the non-replies ("We won't answer your simple question because you should not be asking that!") you can't avoid the negativity.
The only winning move is not to play.
In subreddits which are non political you'd still see people injecting nastiness.
This wave exists, we’re just old. Go talk to 16 year olds who are building virtual reality machine learning apps in their bedroom.
Web is no longer the frontier. We’re old and out of touch. The kids no longer hang out with us. Hence you see a lack of youthful idealism.
Those VR meeting apps still need to connect to other computers, and if you get serious about machine learning the cloud is invaluable. Phone apps are also usually less local-friendly than desktop apps.
Just because kids aren't using email or websites as much doesn't mean that they aren't using the internet more.
Although personally, I wouldn't cry if the internet matured into a sort of academic database. Mass-scale social connectivity should probably move to local intranets, like airdrop and local-area IM platforms.
For sure, everything uses the internet. But not the web.
Point is most of us aren’t hanging out where the kids are hanging out. And we don’t have as much time to just hang out either.
So what's the newer, cooler, current version of what HN was in 2010?
Is IH are more supportive crowd? A resounding yes, but that’s because as a group it was designed as a support mechanism for people looking to earn a salary by working solo.
HN is like the opposite of IH with respect to salary: it’s maintained by a VC entity and many hackers here draw high salaries working for trillion-dollar, billion-dollar and upstart tech companies.
HN was designed to be a water cooler for stating & demolishing arguments, with the occasional cheer to YC-funded startups, so it’s not surprising there’s a lot of healthy skepticism which often comes across as cynicism.
Is there an example of public crowdsourced resource of the comparable to Wikipedia size which managed to generate meaningful content without such kind of processes/bureaucracy?
Yeah, there probably are widespread cultural problems.
Hyperbole aside, I imagine most of “the actual work” (as you say) of maintaining any open source volunteer encyclopedia for decades has got to be the community culture and processes, not any technical artifact.
If you think the work of Wikipedia is “just” the words in articles, well, this is the same mindset of everyone’s favorite debunked critique of early Dropbox.
I might take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges maybe reload it a few times. What percent of the changes are to policy space? (the article name begins with "Wikipedia:") And what percent are to regular articles / discussion of articles (article name is normal, or begins with "Talk:").
I think you'd be surprised because the vast vast vast majority of edits are to the articles themselves.
> Perhaps the only area where editors are as zealous they are about creating obscure processes, is in policing what content should they should fit into the their volumes.
This is important. I'm not sure if you're referring to notability, or sourcing, but both are critical to making an encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
That's unfair; there are plenty of even more toxic communities, you just don't hear about them as much because they're less prominent and easier to ignore or forget.
I wonder if this is natural. Those in the community who care more about just making a good encyclopedia are eventually forced out by those who are interested in power games and process. I've heard it mentioned before (I forget if it has some formal name or not) in regards to companies where the people who primarily want to prioritize the goal of the company are eventually replaced by those who primarily want to implement and navigate bureaucracy because they can outcompete them on the local level, even if the company is worse off in general.
Never heard it put like that, but it's pretty on point. The bigger changes I've seen in free software these days, all the way down to systemd, feel very corporate. People try to argue whether it's corporate or not but even that feeling when enough people feel it is detrimental to free software culture. A culture which isn't very much minded or respected by our corporate cousins.
I do not understand peoples literal obsession with grading apologies these days. I've screwed up in big ways in my life before and I had to apologize. The harder work was eventually forgiving myself so that I could move on. I cannot imagine how the expectation that someone is going to be waiting around to grade and critique my apology would weigh on me. I can't even begin to imagine the mindset of someone who engages in that kind of activity must be, what other benign or symbolic things do you question in life? What other baggage have you carried all your life and used to wallop people over the head with?
This "you owe me an apology" trend is wild. Certainly, if you screw up you should apologize if the situations suits it. Rarely are those situations so black and white though. Leaving this to the jury of the public to take sides, to form camps, and to inevitably invade with their pitchforks is the stuff that the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp controversy is fueled by. If someone has wronged you bad enough, take them to court, deal with it there, and leave it there. If things got to that point then no apology will make anything better. At that point, everyone has lost and we're just trying to maintain order.
When I see people grading apologies on Twitter (and at times here) all I see is people propagating a reason to abuse public figures and at times companies. If someone has come to the point of writing a public apology, whether you think it's for damage control or not, it takes some level of humility and self-evaluation. Maybe that triggers nothing, maybe it begets change even in some small way, and maybe it leads to some life altering conclusions. Humans are not machines and we can't just cast people out because we don't feel the vibes of someones apology. For a culture like tech that likes to comment on how terrible cast systems and social hierarchy are, we seem awful quick to throw people into an "other" category because we feel some type of way.
Personally speaking, I think people who grade apologies have a darkness of their own and that darkness begets darkness. The darkness that calls for a public apology and eagerly awaits its arrival for swift and empirical dissection is no better than the incurred darkness of the act itself.
This is one of the biggest challenges with building a self-governing online community: The people with the most time, energy, and desire to be in charge are often not the people with the most to contribute. As the bureaucracy grows, actual contributors are increasingly disincentivized from participating in the governance because it becomes such a distraction to actually producing content. At the extremes, these communities end up with highly-political community governance that spends much of their time with political maneuvering and focusing on a handful of fringe issues, while the actual content creators end up operating largely independently.
If you ignore the politicking and realize it's mostly a distraction, there's often good work still happening on the core content.
When Wikipedia came out I was hopeful that the governance model enabled by the web would be able to solve some of those age-old problems.
> that you are sorry about the harm/damage/waste/confusion your mistake caused (being specific would demonstrate understanding);
I have big problem with apologizes, you don't owe apologies because you made a mistake, apologizing will not change anything, you can easily not feel the apologies you are making.
I'm quite good at apologizing, because I need to do it so often. I get lots of practice.
The American abhorrence for admitting fault and/or apologizing is quite mystifying to me. It's really corrosive.
I've spent 40 years, promptly admitting mistakes, and repairing, where possible.
WFM. YMMV.
It's also something emotional. I grew up overseas, so I guess it never happened for me, so I sort of stand to the side, bemused.
Even at the individual level you'll see advice like "never talk to the cops" because it could possibly be used against you in the future.
[0.] https://www.scmedicalmalpractice.com/blog/2015/08/does-sayin...
This happens even in work environments where it's unlikely your coworkers will sue you. I feel like perhaps it's more about competitiveness - I've seen plenty of times people raised in US use any kind of admission of mistake as a bludgeon to get advantage, get more political capital or belittle someone elses project. I guess it's considered to be a good thing to grasp any advantage over others?
I don't accept this premise. Americans don't have a lot of the cultural baggage that leads to this. If anything, Americans are quick to admit fault and address root causes. We don't have a cultural history of beating around the bush, saving face, deferring to elders who are clearly wrong, etc. Individual exceptions abound, but I think on the whole Americans are ready to admit fault most of the time.
Mistake 0 is assuming there's an "American abhorrence" or a tendency held by "Americans on the whole". It's difficult for any American, much less anyone outside of America, to have interacted with each of its distinct, and often wildly divergent, subcultures to find a genuine common thread.
Covers the apology "step" in detail and treats it as "a form of ritual exchange between both parties, where words are said that allow reconciliation".
--take responsibility
--explain how it happened
--explain the steps you're taking to prevent it in the future.
(Luckily this final step has never been an issue for me, but: if it keeps happening, or you have to repeat this process too many times for different issues, prepare a resume and pursue some strong "professional development")
Look at JK Rowling.
Would many people say that she made many public mistakes? Sure. Does she care? Probably not. Why? Because she thinks she does the right thing and many people think the same.
For my startups's new engineering hiring process, I recently wrote the boilerplate part of the email I send when requesting a first Jitsi/phone technical meeting, after a prospective team member has passed the initial meeting with the CEO.
Part of this is to tell them the purpose and format of this meeting (e.g., no surprise coding test, start to get a sense of each others' abilities and what it'd be like to work together). But then the majority of the text is to convey the culture we're going for, and the professional mode it's safe to be in for the interview (which is different than some other places, and than some standard advice).
I'm shooting for the engineering&ops culture to be what I call in the boilerplate "honest and earnest". And that it's safe and encouraged in this culture to say "I don't know", "that's a problem", "I made a mistake", "I need help", etc. And that it's safe and encouraged to be in this mode in the interview, as well (and I will be, too).
In work (and in the interviews), I absolutely don't want people thinking they should be posturing or cultivating social media-like distorted images, avoiding pointing out system problems, getting into conflict of interest situations with personal career advancement vs. the interests of the team and our work, etc.
I'm sure we'll refine this over time, but I believe that an honest&earnest culture avoids a lot of problems around mistakes, including helping to avoid mistakes in the first place, and avoiding compounding them when they do happen.
No one will care of remember whether you found some way to apologize. The only thing groupthink will remember is whether you could be intimidated or not. If you can’t be intimidated groupthink will quickly grow bored of you.
Humans make mistakes. Over and over. People need to forgive.
Most of us skate right up to the edge of disaster on a daily basis, and aren't even aware of it. One distraction and you forget you had something frying in the kitchen; or you crash your car; or you reply-all by mistake; or you bitch about your boss on the team-wide Slack channel instead of the 1:1 channel you thought you were on.
Shame is a really strong emotion for me, and I feel terrible when anyone spots a mistake. At one point, I left the site and didn't return for three days because I saw there was a notification for me. Which turned out to be positive feedback.
I feel far worse about my own mistakes than about those of others.
What I don't get is people doubling down on obvious mistakes. Show some contrition and your standing will net benefit from you screwing something up. Trust me on this: I'm German and we have made that principle semi-official government philosophy. Whenever I see, say, Turkish nationalists deny the Armenian genocide, or Polish wikipedia deleting articles about local anti-semitic incidents, I wonder if they seriously believe their actions won't make them look both guilty and somewhat stupid.
Oh, while we're at it: Only by participating have I learnt what a vast enterprise the whole of Wikimedia actually is, and how almost all of it is open to the public. It's the only non-profit organisation at FAANG-scale (except Amazon I guess), and you might want to check out, for example, what Graphana looks like at scale: https://grafana.wikimedia.org/d/000000605/datacenter-global-...
If you make an honest mistake on, say, WikiData, nobody should jump down your throat. That's not productive and the context is one where some degree of empathy should be expected. It's a commons. And trust me, I know how internet nerds can be on a commons - internet nerds that often get things very wrong in their criticisms but will swear and yell at you while leveling them.
That context is important. The goal that I hope we all want to push for a data commons is a productive shared environment. But when it becomes narrative or editorials, now there are very serious political and scholarly issues at work and popular narratives are frequently self-sustaining via institutional norms. You can cite hundreds of documents and publications for a popular liberal (like lib dem) narrative even if it's no better supported than a position published by an esoteric scholar in Maine and win any arguments about which should be included in the definitive encyclopedia entry on the topic and which should be quietly shoved aside. Even disagreements listed in these pages tend to be relatively popular narratives that are not particularly disagreeable to those in power, or have become popular enough despite that opposition and are the exception.
Turkish nationalists denying the Armenian genocide on Wikipedia will be drowned out by process: the dominant media and scholarly narratives (which are roughly correct). But what would we see on a page about Evo Morales back in October 2019? Would we not see the repeated dishonest narratives and headlines of the New York Times? In fact, we would: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Evo_Morales&oldid.... No contextualization, just the implication that the NYT narratives are a good resource. And here is the closest snapshot in time to that wiki page: https://web.archive.org/web/20191112031842/https://www.nytim...
In short, mistakes should always be contextualized by the roles of those involved, the goals sought (and hopefully shared), and a desire to get at the truth even if it's uncomfortable.
I would add:
If this mistake happens in the business context, commit to a root cause analysis, perform such with all involved parties and stakeholders, use a methodology such as Toyota’s Five Whys, identify areas for improvement, share your report, and resolve issues in a timely manner.
The above will not only improve your processes so failures are less likely, it will also demonstrate a commitment to quality and improvement to all observers.
No.
You are allowed to make mistakes. You don't have to default to sorry.
This is allowing the mob to own you. To an extent they do, so maybe to have to let them bully you. But try and resist.
Sometimes you will be sorry and sometimes pretending to be sorry will get you something you want. But it should be your choice.
In my experience getting consensus from all involved that a mistake has indeed been committed is the very hardest part of the whole process.
Just thinking out loud...
In this current world, people will send you death threats for releasing a game too late. You'll get doxxed for an unpopular opinion and you'll be beheaded for showing a picture of a person.
It feels like saying you were wrong will only put fuel onto t he fire. But I can only hope I'm wrong.
People make mistakes. Not a big deal.
> Step 0
Totally agree.
> Step 1
The rest of these steps however is complete BS. Here’s generic answers.
> What led you to make it?
The rest of the data I had on the subject, so far.
> Were you acting on bad information?
Who precisely rates information as good or bad?
> Without sufficient information?
Sufficient for what?
> Were you pressed by a deadline or by a strong opinion from someone else?
None of the above.
> Were you following a broken process?
No.
> Did you act on the basis of circumstances you wish were the case rather than the circumstances that are in fact the case?
WTF?
And so on.
This BTW is one of the most common source of mistakes I encounter. When offered choice between A and B, people routinely evaluate A in some ideal situation X which is not real, decide that A does not match this situation very well, and discard it, choosing B - while failing to notice that in real situation B is even further from achieving the desired outcome.
Example: we consider building option A and B for a feature of the product, and we know users like feature B much better, so we don't choose option A, even though we have neither resources not budget to actually implement B properly. As a result, we get half-implemented broken B instead of somewhat-less-liked but working A, and the users end up hating the whole thing. Seen it so many times.
Let it be original when you apologize, let it come from you with all your perfections and imperfections. Let the world come to term with the real you and your explanation on _your actions_.
This seems unreasonably sane, compared to actual real-life investors.
I think it would be a lot more impactful with a mistake that wasn’t endemic to the relevant profession.
How about: “I failed to realize that economics is a social science, and treated it as a field of mathematics”..?
Sooner or later we all make mistakes, but very important to remember that if you're the one holding the pitchfork - your turn might be up next. So, be kind. And if you're the one making the mistake: figure out what/why/how. And try again.
I apologize unreservedly is far better.
If an apology is genuine, heartfelt, it requires no qualifications. If it is qualified something is not reconciled.
I agree that in hypothesis, an issue could be moot or open, but do you really think this predominates?
I am by the way a serial offender and a serial apologiser. I know from bitter experience how hard it can be to accept fault and apologise for hurt caused.
The internet enables anonymous bullying on a never-before-seen scale. It also enables anonymous ghosting as a defense against the bullies.
Generally when you make a mistake on the internet the best course of action is to just move on.
How do you all approach telling another when another are making a mistake? Usually the other person may get defensive or a conflict may arise.
but
just want to point out the "leader of the free world" doesn't follow any of this and well, job title
so apparently it's not the only "solution" as it looks like doubling down also works
I am not sure Trump will follow https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/So_you%27ve_made_a_mistake_a......
So your statement ... you're making a truth. You're saying what you want it to be, even though there is tons and tons of evidence against that point (that the main stream media is intentionally ignoring and refusing to cover).
It goes both ways and our social psyche is now fragmented.
And I hope you'll retract your dangerous statements once the court cases are resolved and the recounts finished and not a single state is overturned.
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/the-return-of-american-co...
There are a lot of irregularities and several states have already forced hand recounts because the margins are so close.
In PA and NV, they kicked out GOP observers. Why? Even if there is no foul play, that is a terrible thing to do. It. Looks. Bad. And it's illegal. Votes need to be tallied in front of both parties. They may have invalided hundreds of thousands of votes depending on a lawsuit.
Election fraud and voter fraud are very difficult to prove. America is no stranger to it (Remember Bush v Gore and Diabold voting machines?) But I think people had some hope the system was that corrupt. They were wrong, and America is.
The lawsuits in PA regarding kicking out GOP observers have been thrown out repeatedly, at this point the Trump campaign had to drop the claims about GOP observers not being allowed in from their lawsuits. Because there is zero basis to any of it.
The margins are close enough to recount, and nobody is arguing against a legal recount. But any reasonable person also recognizes that historically recounts don't change totals by tens of thousands of votes, so it is very unlikely to matter. The Florida results in the 2000 election you mention were much much closer than any state is in 2020.
Voter fraud is not at all difficult to prove. Many studies ballots have been analyzed in excruciating detail after elections, and surely will be done again this election. Voter fraud in the US is always extraordinarily rare. So far this election, one single case has been found in PA, and it was from a Trump supporter submitting a mail in ballot for his dead mother.
Not only are your claims untrue, they are so unfounded that there is hardly anything at all there to even refute https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/11/13/trump-vote...
I'm sure a lot more people would be successful with absolute zero morals - e.g. Hazing your young son for trusting you, as told by Trump Jr
> But admitting to a mistake is good
>
Yes - if that is what you care about. But from what I see not so many people in the world care about "good". They just "want more".
For example, when a customer reports a problem, and I admit that there is a bug and explain a workaround some of them will say: "you have buggy software, bla bla I will use Google". But if you say: "Strange. This might some very strange setup issue - here is the workaround" - no problem.
Of course, some of our customers love honesty but the vertical I'm working in, honesty is not a thing.
Depressing... I know.
^Obviously trump is not a genious
> But isn't it true that organization/individual X made a mistake and didn't follow this process at all?
> Yes, it's true. And how did that work out?
Trumps behavior hasnt changed before he was elected or after the last election. As PotUS Trumps behavior was a bit less popular than another choice (not a relative landslide like 1984, 1972, 1964, etc). Granted, the political money machines have a lot to do with spinning the viewpoint of Americans, so it is possible that the election was not a good representative model.
I dont think the 2020 is a compelling single indicator of policy effectiveness on either side.