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Comment by avip | Hacker News Reader

As an Israeli, I'm fully accustomed and conditioned to tell others their solution is idiotic and their ideas are dumb. But having worked abroad, I've come to depreciate this "quality" more as just bad taste and lack of manners, and less as "straight talking".

It really adds little to the conversation. It's just an IDF inheritance that should be eradicated.

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I think PDI negatively correlates strongly with social safety. In the IDF you are unlikely to be punished for speaking up, and in general that's true in Dutch and Israeli culture for locals talking to one another. Frankness is not punished. In more hierarchical societies where you can be put in jail for pissing off the wrong cousin, frankness can be severely punished, and stories are abound of such.

So when the social consequences shift for an individual who is moved to a new setting, then the PDI for that individual will shift hard. Hence you find this working abroad and you've adapted your communication style. But we can do thought experiments on the PDI for the following situations:

- Arab talking to Israeli, inside Israel vs inside home country - Israeli outside Israel talking to Jewish vs non-Jewish person - Consumer Salesperson (small commission product, very frequent close opportunities) vs Enterprise Salesperson (large commission product, lots of confirmation pre-close meetings across org, leading to the final sale)

I think in each case the PDI will correlate with the negative consequences for the speaker speaking out of turn, once they become habituated to the situation of course.

I remember asking an American vet what the communication style was within the US military and he said, "Someone who outranks you tells you what to do and there's always someone who outranks you."

How you would describe the communication style within the IDF?

It depends on your commander, you can buff your commander and tell him he is suggesting something stupid, though if he pushes it you have no real option but to do it. Though if the specific commander was all too happy to assert his rank you knew not to bother.

I guess it also depends on what unit you are in, there is likely a very big difference between fighting units (infantry, armor, artillery) with which I'm more familiar and the back-office units.

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