"Never pass up a chance to keep your mouth shut"
Words my Dad taught me as I was growing up, but only really sank in the last 5 or so years ago.
Words my Dad taught me as I was growing up, but only really sank in the last 5 or so years ago.
I kept quiet. I decided bitching was too tiresome / nobody was getting anything done, nobody was getting better by having complainants flung at them.
After I established relationships with various folks across the groups, I had folks from every team come to me / were available to me in ways they never would for each other.
My job was 2x easier as far as getting help / information / cooperation compared to the folks complaining non stop.
There were groups I agreed with / disagreed with (one group was straight wrong about nearly everything), but throwing a fit just made for worse relationships.
I still made suggestions to folks whose job it was to manage these groups, politely, gently, often quietly, but if they did or did not fix it / repeating myself wasn't a big focus for me.
I've long since given up on right and wrong (well outside real moral issues) and more about how to get to the end as best as possible with the relationships / people available.
> having or showing behavior that is respectful and considerate of other people.
You can be polite while not facilitating the counterparty in a way that's useful to you but in the short term feels like you're giving up something. People often can't get past that temporary feeling of losing so they don't venture into it.
“Your team isn’t pulling their weight”
The immediate reaction might be “Yes of course we are, how dare you!”
Now you have two options. It sounds like they have rejected your premise. Do you double down and try to force a verbal capitulation? “No, you are all really doing nothing!”
Or do you leave the seed you have planted: “Oh, alright then, good to hear it.”
The second option works way better. What they said in their immediate reaction is not predictive of the longer-term response. The longer term reaction might be that the team quietly increases their performance. If you went the confrontational approach, you would have ruled that out.
Even moral issues don't have objective right and wrong. The idea that there are base moral facts is ridiculous, and without fully understanding each others priors arguments about ethics are rarely productive.
Sexual abuse of toddlers?
Unprovoked abduction and torture?
I think there certainly are base moral facts at the extremes of behaviour. Evil exists. Malevolence exists.
But I agree that most behaviour isn’t so extreme as to be easily judged without the understanding you describe.
> It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
This even shows up in tech - Bill Gates isn't exactly known for widespread political opinions, and while we all know he was probably not a great person early on, he's now generally contributing to universally approved causes, and otherwise just there, so to some extent he's a symbol of the possibilities available through tech.
Meanwhile, you've got Elon, who I think would be reasonably similar - if he could stay the hell off Twitter and stop overpromising so goddamn often. He could have ended up as a symbol for the commercial space revolution and the surge of EV popularity, but instead he's polarising and often hated.
Generally, polarisation isn't great for authority figures. Even in politics this is sort of true - relatively centrist parties often have broader appeal than extreme views. (Though because politicians are our means of changing things, there's also an aversion to politicians with no opinions at all.)
You probably haven't been following Gates lately. His reputation has tarnished in the last couple of years.
2. Divorce
3. Melinda hinting that 1. had something to do with 2.
If the quote stated "If you are ignorant on a topic it's better not to discuss it" that would be advise. (Though less quippy).
But I read the quote as essentially saying:
"You are so incredibly stupid you should never, ever attempt to speak to another human being ever again, on any conceivable subject".
But maybe some people don't take it that way.
The advice has been written and uttered in various forms for millennia.
> If the quote stated "If you are ignorant on a topic it's better not to discuss it" that would be advise. (Though less quippy).
Your quote would be different advice; it doesn't have the same meaning nor implications.
> But I read the quote as essentially saying: "You are so incredibly stupid you should never, ever attempt to speak to another human being ever again, on any conceivable subject".
How many of your personal experiences are you reading into a context-free aphorism of the ages? Friendly suggestion: you may be making this same mistake when interpreting words in other situations.
What meanings or implications does the aphorism have other than "some people (fools in this case) shouldn't ever talk?"
We've established you think I've misinterpreted the aphorism and that you suspect there's something socially off with me, but we haven't established what you think the aphorism means. Go on, educate me.
In the end it's the crux of the whole thing. Is [X terrible thing] something that's like the weather, something that it's useless to yell at? Or is it something like climate change, also nearly useless to yell at, but with enough fighting and unity we could actually make a difference? And the answer for any really difficult question is going to be an hard one, no pithy saying will tell it to you.
(Though, agreed, far too much shouting is of the irrelevant, angry, useless kind.)
Social media not only removes that moment of reflection, but it actually spreads explosive verbal diarrhoea. The commercial platforms are incentivised to encourage conflict and divisiveness because it drives traffic therefore profits. If everyone was encouraged to be nice and friendly on social media, people wouldn't spend as much time on it, so less eyeballs on ads and less profit.
I don't think that is the complete picture though. Having spent some time on alternative platforms that don't have the profit motive, I have noticed there is still a tendency for many people to be slightly outrageous, presumably simply because it attracts more engagement, and those sort of people like the attention. Say something sensible and you're not going to get loads of people replying "I agree", so after spending a lot of time writing sensible comments you end up wondering if anyone has actually even read them and you start to think - what's the point?
I wonder how (or even whether) you could design a platform that encourages sensible and penalises outrage.
—A Russian (or Italian) saying
(works either way, as it turns out)
The outcome doesn't matter, so it's time wasted.
I would rather reveal my ignorance or say the occasional dumb thing than remain bogged down by my own ignorance or stupidity because I adhere to some proverbs about silence that I read on the internet. Making those mistakes is how I grow.
My uncle taught me that one.
I bet if you tallied the executives of F500 companies, you would find a vast majority of them do not have a blog, or even a Twitter. And of those that do, you'd find most of them using it as an explicit asset (e.g. a VC tweeting for "thought leadership" that increases dealflow, a CSO building an audience to sell to, etc.). You will not find many of them tweeting personal political opinions, certainly none outside of the orthodoxy.
IMO, it's a miscalculation even to post thoughts aligned with the orthodoxy — you don't know how the environment will change. Five years from now, maybe we'll be cancelling all the people doing the cancelling today.
What you talk about is what I would prefer the world to be, but the reality is everything depends on marketing and especially marketing in social media.