Am I the only one who gets tired of the first sentence of so many replies being along the lines of "I understand where you're coming from and I respect you as a person, but..."?
Be respectful, but if you disagree, just disagree. Don't patronize.
Be respectful, but if you disagree, just disagree. Don't patronize.
But when I'm dealing with non-techies, I see a use to preface any opinion or question with some sort of disclaimer of that sort. I do this in order to lessen the probability that they take offence to what I say and then become uncommunicative. On more than one occasion, I thought we were having a productive conversation about their problems with the software and I find out (when they inexplicably become angry) that they thought I was insinuating their incompetence or lack of intelligence or something.
I think the terse, abrupt style that I and many other techies prefer, comes across as needlessly insensitive to non-techies and we need to be mindful of that if we want to allow them to contribute to this community. (We do like teachers, accountants and shopkeepers commenting on startups in education, finance and retail, right?)
Not to the extent of prefacing everything with patronizing verbiage, but to be mindful not to be too abrupt. Because many people take that as being disrespectful (in my understanding).
Neither does it help that computers can be especially complicated and finicky (looking at you windows).
However, I've concluded that on the Internet there is no such thing as a good discussion (oh no, a universal statement! Well, let's say there aren't very many good discussions). Perhaps this is due to the vast amount of research material easily accessible to online debaters -- there is no incentive to work together with another individual to come to a conclusion, since the conclusions can be more easily found elsewhere.
Instead, people write things like my diatribe here to "correct" perceived mistakes in others' statements but in the end someone is right and the other is wrong and compromise basically never occurs.
In such a situation, the best thing you can do is make sure that you're the person who is right. Whether you couch your opinion in pandering terms or you state it harshly, the only thing that seems to matter is correctness. It's no longer worth my time to continually attempt to be polite and kind in internet discussion.
tl;dr you're right about that.
That would remind people of the true nature of their words and help them remember that the commenter is just stating what he thinks is right and not an attack against the reader's personal state of world. That where I think all useless arguments start from. There's a difference in reading "Water is dry" vs "I think that water is dry". I try to implicitly "hear" that prefix myself each time I'm listening to someone talking.