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Comment by pkdpic | Hacker News Reader

> the recurse center social rules foster collaboration and psychological safety, consider using them

> No well-actually’s > No feigned surprise > No backseat driving > No subtle -isms

There seems to be something really magical about the Recurse Center social rules. Or maybe their admissions process. Or both. I did a batch a couple years ago and I was stunned at how fun and drama-free people are there. I've heard occasional stories of negative experiences but nowhere near what Id expect for a group of passionate intelligent creatives working at vastly different levels of expertise.

Anyway glad to see the RC rules propagating and love this idea. I'm inspired to try to start a computer club at my 5yo's school! *crossed-fingers

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Reading the list for the first time its amazing how well it captures some of the worst parts of "nerd" culture. Interacting with kids and public school will help you navigate regular jerks, but it was always frustrating joining an anime club, programming club, etc and finding these exact people in there, but being unsure why these normally quiet people are actually just as awful and instantly regretting even making the effort.

How do they make that work, you think? Could you say a bit more?

One weirdo can severely mess up group dynamics, which is deadly for a small nascent club-type thing.

What if you have someone join who's ferociously intelligent, and not outright evil but just inherently socially maladjusted? You just kick em out if they can't help themselves to continuous "well actually"s, even though they mean well? That in itself might create drama...

Overall, not arguing over the minutia of the rules probably is the best way to do this. I liked the way ggerganov just ended the anti-jt PR drama that started on llama.cpp by banning both participants. Sometimes if you just stop things, they go somewhere else and that's life.

Basically, I take that as a simple mix of "don't feed the trolls" and "we don't behave like that here". Sounds pretty pragmatic and enforceable, in fact. Thanks.

It’s funny because going back to that discussion, people thought it was heavy handed but I agree with you. I hadn’t even heard about this drama, so I think it worked.

Any public school teacher should have some good advice on this one. Clubs have a lot more leeway on solutions!

In talking about how they manage to keep it so drama / toxicity free with other alums all we can ever really do is speculate. But people being asked to leave seems to be very rare so we've often concluded it must be in the admissions process. Admissions interviews sound like they are very different experiences for different people but I know that in mine at least there were moments where I could have responded with toxic behavior but didn't. At the very least it seems like any pair programming interview gives ample opportunities to accidentally violate those rules so they might be naturally selecting folks who already organically follow those rules rather than having to artificially conform to them. All speculative though who knows.

Anyway to actually answer your question I think that unfortunately asking people to leave is the mechanism by which they enforce those rules after a few attempts to course correct. I believe I heard stories about that happening but didn't witness it personally and it seemed clear that they weren't interested in broadcasting those instances to the larger community.

Have faced "feigned surprise" from coworkers in my career and can confirm that it is very damaging for self-esteem. Remarkable that this is so widespread that it found a place in the list as one of just four rules of behaviour to avoid.

How can this work in practice? "The sky is green". How do you answer this without breaking the first rule?

> A well-actually is when you correct someone about something that’s not relevant to the conversation or tangential to what they’re trying to say.

So, as long as the conversation is about the colour of the sky, (or about green things) you can just answer it.

Well actually, credibility is lost from the entire conversation for everyone if “well actually’s” aren’t allowed.

> The best rule of thumb is, if you’re not sure whether something needs to be said right now, hold off and see what happens. You can always say it later if it turns out there’s no way for the conversation to move forward without your correction.

From the context, it sounds like it's not so much about "don't correct people" as much as it's about "don't uselessly correct someone to showcase your own knowledge and not advance the conversation".

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