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Comment by arduanika | Hacker News Reader

"Good listeners do often reflect words back—but not because they read it in a book somewhere. Rather, it’s cargo cult advice: it teaches you to imitate the surface appearance of good listening, but misses what’s actually important, the thing that’s generating that surface appearance. The generator is curiosity."

Interesting. What are other examples where the commonplace advice is just a symptom of the root behavior/attitude you want to cultivate?

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I'd say that true of almost all good advice. Good advice should probably usually be interpreted as "try to be the kind of person that would do this thing naturally."

Most self-help advice about interacting with people is pointing out ways that get some desired interaction effect. They may be true in that they are pointing out those real characteristics which lead to those effects, the result of putting them in a book and studying them makes the reader a student of manipulation. Depending on the student and the target of the trained interaction, it may work as intended or it may label the student as a manipulator to the target.

In less abstract terms, it is not hard to learn the “tricks” and notice when people are using them on you, and it becomes incredibly irritating being around people who interact with you on that level.

Basically, if you’re interacting with people because you were told to do it that way, it’s probably manipulation. Teaching people to be empathetic and interested isn’t very easy and the more popular methods of faking it are pretty transparent.

When you reflect words back, the speaker feels like you get where they are coming from and feel comfortable sharing more details. My understanding is that reflecting words back is a passive way of making the speaker get into more details whereas asking questions is an active way of getting into details. Hence, acc to me the author did not truly understand the consequences of reflecting words back and is getting the same result through a different method.

On reflecting back, in some cultures it is not accepted as a good listening. It has rather seen as "stating the obvious". Some Eastern cultures, being a good listener is understanding the meaning behind the words. These cultures tend to have more shared life style between community members instead of common individualism in Western cultures. However being curious is somehow different and it helps in both Western and Eastern cultures.

Not sure this applies only to eastern cultures, when someone does this to me I think they're more concerned about making me feel heard than actually hearing me. If I'm saying something I assume you're listening, if suddenly you show me that your first order concern in the conversation is to show you're listening rather than immediately engage, it generally comes across as calculating. Just engage directly with the subject and apologise if you misunderstand.

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