Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

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>One thing that came up was a very candid comment about how "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid'

You can tell someone their idea is substandard without inferring their stupid, which is generally taken to be an insult. Tact in communication does matter. I don't think anyone needs to say "that is just stupid" to get a point across.

I've had plenty of tough conversations with colleagues where it was paramount to filter through ideas, and determining viable ones was really important. Not once did anyone have to punch at someone's intelligence to make the point. Even the simple "Thats a bad idea" is better than that.

>whenever the situation warrants it

Which will of course be up to interpretation by just about everyone. Thats the problem with so called "honest"[0] conversation. By using better language you can avoid this problem entirely without demeaning someone. Communication is a skill that be learned.

>The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus. Some contexts do and must require a high level of expertise before you can collaborate properly in them.

Linus took a sabbatical in 2018 to work on his communication and lack of emotional empathy. He's had to make changes or he absolutely risked losing the respect of his peers and others he respected. He has worked on improving his communication.

To follow Linus as an example, would be to work on communication and emotional empathy. Not disregard your peers.

[0]: Most often, I find people who are adamant about this line of thinking tend to want an excuse to be rude without accountability.

Sometimes, people do need a metaphorical kick in the butt though. Of course, that doesn't mean behaving like a jerk, and certainly not on a regular basis, but if you value politeness and conflict avoidance over avoiding actual problems, the culture in your environment will quickly deteroriate towards no one taking responsibility for anything. Why would anyone do that if they can't even be called out for messing something up, yet alone being held accountable?

In all of those projects and organsiations which value respectful language and inclusivity and all sorts of non-results-oriented crap, not much usually gets done. This is how you get design-by-committee lowest common denominator slop.

And even if you don't agree with what I'm saying here, "avoid criticising people" quickly turns into "avoid criticising their ideas because they might feel offended". There was a recent HN thread about AI-written pull requests and how people have problems with them, because tactfully rejecting 10k lines of pure bullshit is very hard without making the submitter upset. Guess what, if they were allowed to say "no, you aren't going to be merging slop you can't even explain" the average code quality would skyrocket and the product would be greatly improved.

>politeness and conflict avoidance over avoiding actual problems

Those two things are not coupled. You can maintain a sense of politeness in face of conflict. This is the entire basis of Nonviolent Communication, a great book about handling and resolving conflict in such a manner.

It’s extremely effective in my experience and results in overall better clarity and less conversational churn.

>Why would anyone do that if they can't even be called out for messing something up, yet alone being held accountable

You can be, that is in part a definition of accountability and you’re conflating a lack of accountability with some idea that it requires behaving in a manner that may be construed as rude, and that’s simply not true.

So like anything, you hold them accountable. You can do that without being rude.

>In all of those projects and organsiations which value respectful language and inclusivity and all sorts of non-results-oriented crap

I’m getting a sense you have a predisposition to disliking these things. They’re really important because they are, when correctly understood, results oriented. It frees up people to feel comfortable saying things they may not have been otherwise. That is very productive.

Abusive and abrasion language does not do that.

>This is how you get design-by-committee lowest common denominator slop

No, in my experience and many reports from others you get this for a myriad of reasons, but consistent theme is lack of ownership or organizational politics, not because people level up their communication skills

>avoid criticising their ideas because they might feel offended". There was a recent HN thread about AI-written pull requests and how people have problems with them, because tactfully rejecting 10k lines of pure bullshit is very hard without making the submitter upset. Guess what, if they were allowed to say "no, you aren't going to be merging slop you can't even explain" the average code quality would skyrocket

I don’t disagree with you because I don’t believe in proper criticism, I do. I disagree with you because the implicit messaging I’m getting here is the following

- you sometimes have to be a jerk

- therefore it’s okay to be a jerk sometimes

- somehow having an expectation of treating others with respect somehow equates to poor accountability

I’ve spent a good chunk of my years learning a lot about effective communication and none of it is about avoiding accountability, of yourself or others. It’s about respecting each other and creating an environment where you can talk about tough things and people are willing to do it again because they were treated respectfully

>you’re conflating a lack of accountability with some idea that it requires behaving in a manner that may be construed as rude, and that’s simply not true.

Yes, I'm conflating that. Maybe the two aren't intrinstically coupled, but from what I have seen, that seems to happen. When you forbid surface-level aggression, people don't stop being aggressive or frustrated. They just turn to more underhanded ways of aggression, like bullying or gaslighting.

>I’m getting a sense you have a predisposition to disliking these things. They’re really important because they are, when correctly understood, results oriented. It frees up people to feel comfortable saying things they may not have been otherwise. That is very productive.

I see what you're saying, but I do not think this plays out in practice like that. It's not results-oriented thinking when you prioritise how the other person feels above all. Not to say you should never prioritise it (that's called sociopathy), but if you prioritise it too much, you can say less things, not more, because disagreeing with someone always carries the risk of offence, especially if you are going to say that their idea isn't the best. If you nurture a culture of honesty - and that does not include being abusive - then people will feel free to push back on bad ideas, and that is results-oriented thinking.

>I disagree with you because the implicit messaging I’m getting here is the following

The first two points absolutely, but I would like to push back on the third point. Not every idea deserves respect and hell, not everyone deserves respect either! It is the hollowing out of what the word originally meant. Ideally, you only respect people who deserve respect, who return it to you in turn. To be respected is a honour, not a right, because it carries implicit trust in your words. If you consistently have a negative impact on the environment, I do not think it is a reasonable expectation to continue to treat you with respect, because that wastes everyone's time.

If something needs to be said then it must be said, but you have a higher likelihood of the other person receiving the message if you drop the aggressive tone. You're also investing in them listening to you in the future, as opposed to avoiding you because you have a tendency to shame them for being wrong on something.

And if someone "consistently has a negative impact on the environment" you can still confront them without being abrasive. They can still be fired without calling them stupid. Adding that kind of tone adds no information except that you lost your cool. You're making it sound like every instance that warrants confrontation is about an intentional and repeated offence.

I've been in social circles where one can just say "that is just stupid" without that being a big deal, as well as others where people tend to write essays like yours to get a simple argument across.

I prefer the former by a lot, but of course you're free to spend your time in the latter.

> You can tell someone their idea is substandard without inferring their stupid, which is generally taken to be an insult. Tact in communication does matter. I don't think anyone needs to say "that is just stupid" to get a point across.

What's wrong with calling an idea stupid? A smart person can have stupid ideas. (Or, more trivially, the person delivering a stupid idea might just be a messenger, rather than the person who originally thought of the idea.)

Though, to be clear, saying that an idea is stupid does carry the implication that someone who often thinks of such ideas is, themselves, likely to be stupid. An idea is not itself a mind that can have (a lack of) intelligence; so "that's stupid" does stand for a longer thought — something like "that is the sort of idea that only a stupid person would think of."

But saying that an idea is stupid does not carry the implication that someone is stupid just for providing that one idea. Any more than calling something you do "rude" when you fail to observe some kind of common etiquette of the society you grew up in, implies that you are yourself a "rude person". One is a one-time judgement of an action; the other is a judgement of a persistent trait. The action-judgements can add up as inductive evidence of the persistent trait; but a single action-judgement does not a trait-judgement make.

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A philosophical tangent:

But what both of those things do — calling an idea stupid, or an action rude — is to attach a certain amount of social approbation or shame to the action/idea, beyond just the amount you'd feel when you hear all the objective reasons the action/idea is bad. Where the intended response to that "communication of shame" is for the shame to be internalized, and to backpropagate and downweight whatever thinking process produced the action/idea within the person. It's intended as a lever for social operant conditioning.

Now, that being said, some people externalize blame — i.e. they experience "shaming messaging" not by feeling shame, but by feeling enraged that someone would attempt to shame them. The social-operant-conditioning lever of shame does not work on these people. Insofar as such people exist in a group, this destabilizes the usefulness of shame as a tool in such a group.

(A personal hypothesis I have is that internalization of blame is something that largely correlates with a belief in an objective morality — and especially, an objective morality that can potentially be better-known/understood by others than oneself. And therefore, as Western society has become decreasingly religious, shame as a social tool has "burned out" in how reliably it can be employed in Western society in arbitrary social contexts. Yet Western society has not adapted fully to this shift yet; which is why so many institutions that expect shame to "work" as a tool — e.g. the democratic system, re: motivating people to vote; or e.g. the school system, re: bullying — are crashing and burning.)

In addition to what you and the person you replied to already said, simply calling something stupid conveys very little information. "Stupid" provides no context, no rationale, and no direction towards improvement. If your goal is simply to push someone away, stop them from communicating entirely, or shame them, then yeah, dismissing a person's contributions as stupid is the tool for the job. But if you want better contributions and are trying to improve a project, you have to put in more effort than that.

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