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Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

And even if it was and watching sport or going down the pub was in fact an extremely safety-conscious environment compared with the sterility and politeness of, say, the aerospace industry, it's not entirely clear how encouraging people to either escalate or laugh off would help them deal with actual danger which generally requires neither of the above...

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It's not about the social actions, it's the traits they represent. Are you quick-witted? Do you freeze or overreact and lash out, behave erratically? Do you stay calm? Can you think fast enough under pressure to choose to say and do things that result in laughter or de-escalation, or escalate in a way that shows you're communicating on the same level (i.e. tease back, but not overdo it and insult the other person)?

If I can't stay calm and think rapidly under mild social pressure without threat of bodily harm or lost lives, I personally wouldn't feel honest in telling my teammates, "yes, if you or I are in a situation with risk to life or limb, you should trust that I'll handle it appropriately and protect myself and/or you."

People have tried to study groups like Medal of Honor recipients, and found that they have a wide range of different backgrounds and personalities.

Our assumptions about who will succeed in the most difficult situations don't seem to hold up.

Sorry, without some sort of data I’m refusing to believe that social adeptness has anything to do with ability to act in an emergency or other high pressure situation.

My own experience in tall ships and shipyards, where there are plenty of life and death decisions is not that.

There are people that I can fluster easily in a social situation that are perfectly calm and capable in high pressure dangerous situations. There are people that are practically insult comedians that I wouldn’t want driving a car in the same parking lot.

Not to mention that people doing boring, safe jobs behave like that too. Trust me, when I have the banter with my friends in the pub, I'm really not evaluating whether I can rely on their accountancy or web design to save my life

What actually seems to be the common factor is male groups in informal settings

No, I don't think ability to banter has any relationship with ability to properly handle those risky situations. There's zero intrinsic reason why someone who freezes when insulted must also freeze if a bay crane lift starts going wrong, because to me they are clearly different kinds of stress.

> sterility and politeness of, say, the aerospace industry,

I work in that industry and can say with confidence that statement is false.

Sterility and politeness is variable, but I also work in that industry and have yet to encounter a situation where the banter resembles that of a largely risk free but comparably male environment like, say a sports ground or pub lunch with friends I've known since we were kids.

Which is a good thing really, because I wouldn't want to think that people were actually determining fitness to be trusted with a soldering iron or embedded systems design based on their witty comebacks or tolerance for jokes about their wife.

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