You (and Joel Spolsky) are tone blind | Hacker News Reader

You (and Joel Spolsky) are tone blind

blog.inklingmarkets.com

42 pointsnate38 comments

I can't say I understand the example supplied. There's no way to say what the commenter said to someone's face without being insulting; he is explicitly implying that Joel is being manipulative and deceitful. It's the sort of thing you can feel free to think to yourself, but which is very rude to say.

Try this: Say this paragraph out loud, and find a tone where the primary message conveyed isn't "way to pull one over on us, asshole" (hint: there isn't one.)

You disguise a PR piece as an objective 'how to' in a national business publication, coming across as an authority, the underdog, and an all around nice guy who really cares about his customers. You're an engineer who claims to be 'weak' in the sales department, but all evidence to the contrary: nice 'sales hack'.

Even if you got rid of loaded words like "disguise" and took away the scare quotes, there's still no nice way to express that thought to someone. It's really tactless; any reasonable person would be insulted, regardless of the medium.

To generalize, I posit that a lot of "miscommunication" thanks to tone online is just a result of people feeling free (with the cover of semi-anonymity) to throw away any subtlety and confront people in a manner that they would never adopt face-to-face.

EDIT: Expanding on my last paragraph, I don't want to be overly critical of people who are very straightforward and speak their mind online, even if it seems rude; there's certainly a tradition of abrasively practical hackers. The commenter perhaps did everyone a service by opening for discussion something that other people might have left unsaid.

And I disagree, which is the point of the OP's article in the first place. I think the quote can be read as a genuine compliment - saying, "you put yourself down too much - it turns out you really are good at communication, and I'm impressed with your skill in this area".

Let's put the author's premise to the test, and add emoticons and exclamations:

Hmm, I guess I was wrong. That second version really does come off with a much more playful and friendly tone (almost completely thanks to the :P). Language is so sneakily expressive!

Yep - the difference between yours and mine is 4 characters, including a space.

Language is so sneakily expressive!

You're so right! For example, I wrote out a positive interpretation before hand to prime the reader into seeing what I hoped they'd see. Would it come across the same way if I'd put that interpretation right after? Probably not.

What's going on here is the textual equivalent of: http://www.barryandstuart.com/wp-content/uploads/illusion.gi...

I think the positive priming caused greater affect than the "! :P", and I propose the hypothesis that it's the "loaded terms" that determine tone, largely.

They are most effective if applied to the issue at hand; but they are also effective if a fragment makes them appear to so apply (Any reasonable person who takes your advice would be a fool); and even their mere presence in the visual field will affect the reader (disguise, weak, fool). A strong example of this is swear words.

Your priming passage includes warm, life-affirming terms and fragments (as distinct from their denotation): "genuine", "compliment", "really are good", "I'm impressed with your". I'm suggesting it's not just that you were priming the reader with that logical interpretation, but that you were directly influencing their emotional state with your word choice.

I really do think the first-quoted commenter in the article was being sarcastic. Although he later claimed he wasn't, I find that hard to believe. I don't think it's just the words that are used; but that those words naturally emerge from a person's attitude. If they have a kindly approach to others (or even if they are just feeling happy and optimistic at the moment), it will be reflected in their word choice.

Unfortunately, optimistic, cheerful people tend not to make good engineers, given Murphy's Law, so there's sometimes a relative absence of good-will and affirmation online - including here, on HH.

well done, tho adding :P kind of makes anything ok.

Your article makes you sound evil :P

It's like making a disarming face and smiling lightly while saying it, it makes it an obvious joke?

This is due to a difference in assumptions/metaphors, not tone. Many people assume that being a salesman is a negative, like a used car salesman. The original comment sounds negative if understand it through this frame. But, if you view sales from an entrepreneurial frame then the comment sounds like a compliment.

The whole situation is a result of a common communication problem, applied twice.

Simply: we see ourselves in the gaps.

i.e. readers assume the writer shares their own values/goals. From that default, we build our mental model of the writer, generally by recording deviations.

Until a deviation is recorded though, our assumption is that there's agreement. That's why new information that violates our mental models can seem so surprising, even when we have no good reason to expect otherwise.

The common advice to 'never meet your heroes' is direct result of this dissonance.

Seeing the reply as an insult required Joel to assume the writer had the same values Joel did: a mistrust of sales and marketing. Ergo: any congratulations on an effective sales pitch must be a sarcastic insult.

And in writing that reply in the first place, the author clearly assumed Joel had the same values he did. That is, that the article was an intentional (and commendable) application of marketing and that Joel would appreciate an 'atta boy' from a peer.

Emphasis and emoticons can go some way into clearing up these misconceptions. But not even face-to-face communication really solves the problem.

This is a serious problem but I don't think this is as easily solved by face to face, or telephone, communication as the author seems to think.

I used to have a professor that claimed interpersonal communication fails 95% of the time. I now know he was using hyperbole to make a point - but it's still very often and only going to get worse from here.

The problem is we are all AWFUL are reading tone in text communication - and it's impossible to get better at it as the author points out with his example. We can only get better at communicating our intent correctly, not at interpreting the intent. This is also true of other communication though. We are very bad at reading body language, facial expressions, and all sorts of other non verbal cues. I suspect this is why the internet habit of using smilies and 'lol's began so early in the advent of the internet. A population of people who historically had more trouble than others with an already very difficult problem found an easy way to solve it in their new medium.

I think escalation in medium works most of the time is because we have more practice delivering our intent verbally . Going forward, however, I don't see any reason that might not change as younger generations get more experience with text based communication than verbal communication.

I don't know - I sure hope we get better at communicating subtlety through text, but it seems tough. I, as a fairly sarcastic person, have struggled with this issue for years. When I'd like to throw in some light sarcasm to my online communication, my options seem to be:

* Writing it straight and counting on the recipient knowing me well enough to realize that it's sarcasm - can be seriously disastrous if I miscalculated.

* Markers like :P or :) - communicates my intent, but comes off as overly cheery, especially when used multiple times in the same email or post.

* Something obvious like <sarcasm> tags - kind of spoils the art of it all.

* Make my sarcastic claims so over-the-top that the recipient cannot help but realize I'm being facetious - usually works, but it's a broadsword where I usually prefer a shiv.

I have yet to figure out a solution that allows nearly the same range of sarcastic expression as I can achieve face to face.

(And yes, I really have expended a lot of effort trying to be sarcastic online)

>I used to have a professor that claimed interpersonal communication fails 95% of the time.

Wiio's Laws (my favorites):

1. Communication usually fails, except by accident.

4. The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds.

6. The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/wiio.html

Has anyone else here been thinking "How can I implement a solution to this particular method of online communication?" while reading this article? I guess emoticons, bold, and italics seem fine, but perhaps there should be some professional standard or a completely dynamic and alternate device. (Like a program to leave voice messages on web pages to accompany text or something similar as an example. This is a bad idea by the way... I am just using it as a conversation starter on this topic.)

I know I certainly am. We're building a group chat application for companies (http://shoptalkapp.com), so this is a very real problem for our users. We'll definitely be brainstorming ways to overcome it. I think a good system for indicating tone could make online communication much more pleasant and effective.

Hmm,

Despite the limitations of the written word, human authors have been producing written works with profound emotional impact for thousands of years. And without emoticons!

It's true it requires concentration and imagination to read Shakespeare (with full impact) than it takes see his plays performed.

Still, a vast emotional "punch" can be contained in the written word, just requiring a bit of effort to extract.

Just a thought: if said work is of substantial length then you have enough context/space to express all the subtleties by other means. In case of the message limited to 140 characters or email one-liner you need some crutches to the same. Are we trading 5 lines of email for one ":)"?

A counter-example in six words:

For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn

is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. http://www.litkicks.com/FlashFiction/

See, no emoticons :)

That sort of works as fiction, in part because it is so ambiguous - it could be anything from a tragedy to a farce.

Well, there's the works of Sapho and Haiku as example of evocative short works.

It does take effort to produce such things. And even then they require some cultural context.

True, but not everyone is Shakespeare.

I think the answer, if you don't wish to mark up your text, is to be verbose in your intentions. A message like "Great idea." is easier to misinterpret than "Great idea! Seriously, I never thought of it that way." Qualifiers can go a long way. They might be clumsy, but I think they're the best alternative.

I was expecting a hit piece of sorts, but was surprised to see that the point of this article isn't Joel, but just uses an exchange Joel had on here as an example of a larger problem.

If I were the submitter, I'd correct the title to remove the "(and Joel Spolsky)" as it emphasizes the wrong part of the article and isn't present in the actual title.

would be more correct to have (even Joel Spolsky)

The fact that we all seem to assume Joel is above the standard communication defects found in all humans concerns me.

Someone that is viewed as a good communicator will be viewed by people as having overcome/conquered such shortcomings whether it's true or not.

1) Emoticons and internet lingo (lol, brb, lmao, etc.) do have a place in "professional communication". They aren't just for teenagers.

This is good advice. I've fallen foul of this problem on many an occasion and now liberally (but not excessively) use emoticons to communicate theme's and feelings as needed - it really does help :)

Look, that wasn't a tone problem, it was a content problem.

Whether or not ed was sarcastic or complimentary, nevertheless his comment made people realize that Spolsky could stand to gain financially from the article. Putting that on the radar (even if it was in the form of a compliment) was a hit to Joel (even if he didn't intend the article as PR).

All the smileys in the world wouldn't make that content issue go away.

Surprisingly just a :P makes the whole thing less of a hit.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=933630

The reason Joel interpreted it as an attack, though, is because the commenter used words with negative connotations, like "disguise". I would have written the post with different words, and I bet Joel wouldn't have gotten defensive in that case. It would be the same content, but less accusatory tone.

So while using ":)" is helpful, so is using words with positive connotations if you're trying to be positive.

On that note, even insults are better when delivered using words with positive connotations.

While I agree that the lower bandwidth of the written word leaves room for more understandings, it's interesting that sometimes the opposite is the case. I had a professor in grad school who was notoriously harsh to students (people would sometimes leave his office crying). Somehow I discovered that, over email, he was warm and encouraging. The easy fix was to simply do all important communication by email.

Actually, that seems like a pretty good argument that people should use italics or bolding for emphasis more often. They are used to modify the meaning of the phrase, as he demonstrated, just like our tone of voice. The exact mechanisms are different, of course.

I like the article's advice about "graduating" communication (a better word than "escalate" which suggests opposition); but I'm ambivalent about the other suggestions. If the tone is wrong, adding emphasis can just make it seem more sarcastic (by being over-complimentary in an ambiguous situation). But if they convey a tone of warmth in their own right, then that problem doesn't arise.

Quick poll, when you read;

Do you mentally dictate the content of what you're reading?

Do you have a general tone for content of suspicious origin?

Do you have a general tone for content of trusted origin?

Do you use the general tone of the person writing if you happen to know them?

What other markers influence your tendency to switch tones?

Albeit there is an echo-effect in the back of my head, content interpretation (for me) is non-vocal, but rather abstract; and as such, there isn't much tone difference between sources. I do, however, multiply everything being said by the merit of sources.

Absolutely. I especially "use the general tone of the person writing if you happen to know them?". And if I don't know them... all bets are off and I read as _I_ would use those words.

Another question: have you ever decided on a tone for a particular writer and then much later saw a video of the person talking which completely blew away all of your assumptions?

big catchy arrogant title, no balls to back it up.

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