Spot on. I think it's tough, particularly as a young guy, to hold back on being overly confrontational. I used to be horrible to be around, not just professionally, but in nearly every way. Super fighty and abrasive.
I'd like to think that it was through mindful practice that I've managed to tame my aggression. Perhaps it is, partly. But the real reason that I'm a lot easier to get along with now probably has to do with aging out of the testosterone-flooded decade of my 20s.
I think it is mindful practice; I'm in my mid 30s and probably more abrasive than in my early 20s, despite having much less testosterone-fueled aggression.
Ha! Perhaps. I'm sure it's a lot of things. I also grew up working on fishing boats in Alaska and what passed for civil discourse out there would be fighting words in most professional environments.
Mindfulness is tough though. I've actually had to work pretty hard on being aware of my reactions and the intentions behind them. If I find myself getting upset, my face getting hot or my fingers tingling, then I ask myself what it is I want out of the situation I'm in. Usually the best way to get that is to take a deep breath and try to understand _why_ the other person doesn't understand my point of view.
Of course, being aggressive is a very useful trait at times. Learning when to use that trait is the tricky part.
While the author may have been a very talented engineer, there are also a lot of mediocre engineers (and members of other professions) who happen to act like jerks.
Don't assume that just because someone is crotchety, indignant, or combative that he/she is intelligent.
If an engineer is outstanding, their actions can speak for themselves, and they won't have to put on airs; if an engineer is mediocre, their only option to hide it will be arrogance.
There's a third type: the engineer who is outstanding but is addicted to being perceived as brilliant, so they layer extra arrogance on top, never conceding points, overstating facts and contributions, etc. to make themselves appear even more brilliant. When I encounter these types, I think to myself "If you just didn't feel compelled to overstate things, you'd be truly awesome."
I really like these two paragraphs towards the end:
Being kind isn’t the same as being nice. It isn’t about superficial praise.
It doesn’t mean dulling your opinions. And it shouldn’t diminish the passion
with which you present them.
Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on
the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and
considerate of the way your presence affects them.
This get's missed a lot here on Hacker News. Many people are often hostile towards content creators or other commenters.
It's perfectly OK to disagree with someone; but please consider doing so in a respectful and thoughtful tone. Remember that others often shut-down when they read criticism, even when well warranted. The way you phrase and present yourself defines whether you're giving criticism or critique.
To be fair, this is also incredibly exhausting. Most peoples' reactions to things are arbitrary at best and constant worrying about how they will take something is just way too much BS to put into my day. I bought pretty deeply into this philosophy once and it just made me neurotic and quiet at a time of my life where those things very much hurt me.
I think being selectively kind makes a lot more sense. I'm kind to children and animals and my loved ones. People at work, retail staff, etc should be prepared to not have their emotions constantly validated and deal with disagreement and other things that are unpleasant.
I'm not one of those "grow a thick skin, jerk" types, but there's this cheap sentiment I see about how everyone needs to be more kind and compassionate, and when its not phoned in, it usually ends up as a way to take advantage of others. Its easy for celebrity millionaire Kurt Vonnegut to write about compassion and be quoted by tumblerinas and its totally another thing for some kid no one gives a shit about trying to make his way in the world try to live it.
I find high-concept philosophies are often the playthings of the well-off and comfortable. If you're fighting for your living, its not a luxury most of us can have. Sadly, this often justifies hostility, but I think there's a sane middle-ground here, but curt statements like "be kind" just seems so classist and off-putting to me. Like a soccer mom telling me how wonderful the Maharishi is or how relaxing doing 4 hours of Yoga is (no, she doesnt work, her husband does) and after I got off a long shift and dealt with a lot of shit and a crappy commute.
Cheap sentiment just doesn't resolve the fundamental issue facing humanity today and probably until our final extinction event: we are all competing for the very same resources and competition can sometimes be ugly. It doesn't need to be truly awful and we shouldn't be encouraged to be overly negative and vindictive, but conflict and disagreement happens on a certain level and pretending we can kindly make it go away is just being unrealistic about our fundamental economic beings. Kindness is often taken advantage of as one party feels obligated to engage in it moreso than the other. This is a fairly large problem in gender politics where we raise women to be kind and then they find themselves at a disadvantage to men in the workplace who don't have these values.
Considering everyone here is visiting a hard-nosed libertarian-leaning entrepreneur forum about becoming wealthy quickly, but the second something pseudo-spiritual gets posted suddenly we're all Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree. We're not. If anything, the personality types here are very, very far from any sort of selfless ideal. Patting ourselves on the back because our six-figure salaries let us rise above the struggle doesn't mean the struggle doesn't exist and that struggle means acting in a rational, usually unkind way. High class pseudo-spirituality is such a hilariously hypocritical thing its a running gag on HBO's Silicon Valley, yet here we are Gavin Belson'ing it up. At least I'm honest with myself to say that, no, I'm not "kind" by these standards and that I will argue and fight with you when I feel its appropriate and more importantly -- I will not feel bad about it afterwards.
Sadly, most of the replies to my comment are fairly unkind responses telling me how much of a horrible person I am, especially to retail staff even though I gave no concrete examples of how I act. How ironic. If anyone is truly interested, I meditate daily and follow Buddhist ideals. I just refuse to go to the yogi-like extremes of insincere self-love in an attempt to con my way out of the struggle of Samsara. Accepting the reality of who I am is real mindfulness and liberating, and that person is not this uber-kind enlightened being who is 'above it all' and I doubt anyone here reading this is either. If anything, if ...
"If you're fighting for your living, its not a luxury most of us can have. Sadly, this often justifies hostility, but I think there's a sane middle-ground here, but curt statements like "be kind" just seems so classist and off-putting to me."
I've consistently found that (in particular when treated with kindness and respect) poorer people respond with kindness in much greater measure than wealthy people. Like the author said, kindness isn't the same as niceness.
> "People at work, retail staff, etc should be prepared to not have their emotions constantly validated and deal with disagreement and other things that are unpleasant."
The addition of "retail staff" here surprised me.
I'm a techie who took a break from tech and startups the past few months to help out my S.O., who owns a retail store. I worked the front counter, ran inventory, etc. for the past 3 months.
I had never worked retail before. I got into tech at an early age and skipped most of the "menial" jobs that typical American teenagers have. So working retail was eye-opening for me.
Retail workers get paid shit wages to deal with your crap. Yes, you. Whatever crap you've been dealing with, we have to take it with a smile and help you out. I've stood behind a counter and listened to a homeless guy ramble about anything and everything for 12 minutes (I had a small clock within view.)
Your attitude in this post indicates to me that you could probably use a bit of this type of work yourself. If you think it's beneath you, doubly so.
If you're curious what it's like for a techie/introvert/successful entrepreneur to work retail, I've been blogging about it. (Blog link in my profile) To be honest, the 3 months I spent there made me a far better person than any given 3 months I spent in the tech industry (I've run tech companies for 14 years now.) It humbled me, and gave me far more respect for my fellow human beings. And I learned there's nothing like the priceless joy in someone's eyes when you do something for them and can see pure joy radiate from them. I hope you, too, can experience this.
Not the OP, and cool story; however, what they're paid doesn't matter, it's a red herring. It's their JOB to deal with people and and it's not my job as a shopper to validate the emotions of the counter worker or my co-workers. Ring up my stuff, take my money, and let me leave.
You're chastising him for his "attitude"; what attitude? He's correct and he didn't display any attitude other than simple honesty.
GP's attitude is the same attitude you have when you claim "it's their JOB to deal with people" and when you equate being nice to "[validating] the emotions of the counter worker". Sure, their job is to deal with shitty people with a smile, but it's also your job (as a nice, respectable member of society) to be a person who is pleasant to deal with.
One can be pleasant without being nice, nice is making an effort and is unnecessary for most public encounters with staff while in a store. However, even then, no it's not my job to be pleasant to deal with.
They get paid to deal with customers. It's their job, end of story.
The reason people say it's exhausting to "be nice" constantly is specifically because of people like you. You've made up your mind on something that's completely outlandish and unfair, but you're going to attack him for being "unkind" because he doesn't agree with you.
Stop acting like that and maybe more of these "blunt" people would stop being so damned blunt to you.
> Sure, their job is to deal with shitty people with a smile
There is so much projection here I'm not even sure where to start.
Lets say I'm working with retail worker who has been trained to be as difficult as possible to stop my RMA attempt for something I bought that was broken. I can see things from her point of view and understand her paycheck comes from her financial masters who want her to deny my RMA, but that infringes on my return rights. Now I express this as clearly as I can. Guess what, now I'm an "asshole" because $big_co wants to be able to casually rip people off.
I pretty much got into a yelling match about a serious engine fault on my wife's warrantied car a few years ago. Its only after I was particularly nasty did they relent and do the work. Why does the guy making $12 an hour behind the counter want to deny me my entitled service? Because Jeep told him to limit this kind of very expensive work.
This is so much more complex than you make it. Niceness and kindness do not resolve the fundamental conflict we are having. If anything, it allows the kind person to be taken advantage of. If I wasn't at the dealer with my wife they would have steamrolled her the same way other mechanics have steamrolled her.
The world is a nasty place and how we handle it is situation dependent. Want me to be nice to you? Treat me with some goddamn respect and don't try to rip me off. Because if you don't, you'll deal with a lot of "assholes." "Assholes" who are just working schmucks trying to get through the day without being ripped off.
I think the "kind" people of HN need to stop calling everyone who disagrees with them or have different motivators "assholes." Disagreement, argument, and negotiation are fundamentals in life. Retail staff need to learn to handle that. Its a huge entitlement to be this snotty retail person who hates all his customers. The lady who wants to return the broken food processor isn't a "bitch" because she got you off your freemium game for a minute and she's not a "mindless breeder" because she fed her crying baby on your counter. Or "stuck up" because she had to answer the pediatricians call on her iphone while you were processing the return.
It's possible to be assertive and insistent and yet still be polite and calm about it. The cynic in me would label this as "fuck you said with a smile", but the pragmatist in me notes that "fuck you" really does get a very different reaction from people when said with a smile.
Think of communication as having two layers, an emotional one and a factual one. In your car example, the factual layer remains the same, "You are going to fix my car." But you can either combine that with an emotional layer of "And I am fucking pissed off with you right now because you fucking don't do your job, you useless twit", or you could layer it with "I understand that your job is difficult and you're doing the best you can, I don't want to make things difficult for you, but the contract clearly says that the car is under warranty, the car is clearly broken, and I'm not leaving until it's fixed."
And experience says the emotional one is more effective because most people are primarily emotional creatures. Nice and assertive doesn't work as well as pissed off.
Agreed, it can sometimes be exhausting. But I think being kind is (to be rather mercenary) very practical also: I've found it is much easier to get people to listen to and go along with opinions stated kindly (it is also exhausting to try to get through to people who've stopped being receptive because they're feeling attacked or shamed, or anticipating that feeling).
And it's definitely possible to disagree, even sharply, in a considerate manner - eg focus on the point of disagreement, not on the person disagreeing; avoid name-calling; point out that the issue you disagree with may be valid in other cases; etc.
The thing is - most peoples' reactions to things aren't really arbitrary. There are some outliers, and a good deal of individual variation, but by and large most human emotions follow pretty consistent patterns. It can be hard to see them (particularly when you're young and haven't had a lot of practice interacting with people), but the more you get out and make socially awkward mistakes, the more you can form a mental model of what's likely to be offensive and what's safe.
I agree that it's not worth constantly worrying about what other people think of you, but it turns out that's not usually what other people are expecting anyways. Rather, it's just that when you make a mistake, apologize, try not to make it again, and move on. Everybody makes mistakes - I've seen some folks I consider very socially adept make pretty embarrassing gaffes. But usually the folks who're viewed as socially skilled just brush it off and update their mental model of how not to offend people, while the ones that people get mad at are those who are either completely oblivious or react with defensiveness.
> (particularly when you're young and haven't had a lot of practice interacting with people)
What's with the potshots at younger people that I keep seeing on HN? Things like undermining their experiences, their abilities, or their viewpoints. "Pff, I used to think like you, but now I know better"; "I did the same thing, but then I realized that I was being a moron"; "Let me guess, you haven't <experienced/got X> yet? Then your opinion is useless"; "Young people without kids will stupidly work themselves to death for their employee because they have nothing better to do with their time".
I can't say that I've experienced that older people (talking only adults here) are more socially apt, or compassionate, than younger people. And that sentence was completely optional to the rest of the paragraph.
That's not a potshot, it's personal experience. It's making the point that social skills are a learnable skill that gets better with practice. There's no judgment implied there, and in fact I say elsewhere in the same post that everybody makes mistakes, even people with lots of experience (which is amply evidenced by this comment offending you, for which I apologize...)
Welcome to the world of the self-styled "kind" person. You'll find, more often than not, that they see themselves as wizened masters and can't stand young people because young people occasionally have the gall to say how it is, and that interferes with the elaborate dance we call office politics and general self-serving ass-kissing.
Just because you're good at office politics doesn't mean you're a kind person. It just means you're good at working people over emotionally and catering to them for your own personal gain.
There's a lot I want to unpack, here. I don't think you're wrong overall -- in a work environment, for example, you want to select for people who are able to take criticism in an effective, objective, and non-judgmental manner. That's a minimum bar of level-headedness you should have for people that you interact with regularly, as a general rule.
However, when you open with, "this is also incredibly exhausting", it indicates to me that either a) you find yourself surrounded with an unhealthy amount of hyper-sensitive people, or b) there might be more to the "be kind" methodology that you have yet to internalize. I carried around this attitude for most of my life, and just recently am I coming to understand that truly internalizing kindness, the way the OP describes, is not "exhausting" in any way, shape, or form (unless you have kids. Children break this rule in half).
Another thing that sticks out is "if you're fighting for your living". I agree that, if you're truly fighting for your living, kindness and compassion should take a backseat to climbing Maslow's hierarchy to the point of comfortable reflection. Given that your english seems to be good and you're posting highly articulate opinions on an Internet forum, I'd be very surprised if your line of work forced you to reject kindness as part of your job, and I urge you to consider a new line of work if at all possible.
> To be fair, this is also incredibly exhausting.
Empathy is a skill and, like any other, it gets easier with practice. Eventually the mental overhead is minimal.
Hmm. I don't think you have to be phony to be kind. In fact, I think it's easier to be kind, not more exhausting. If you think a little bit about how the other person might feel, you save an enormous amount of time dealing with them getting angry or upset. With egos out of the way, you can focus instead on the problem you both want to solve. This makes both of you look good and it might make a friend out of someone who could have been an enemy.
I'm a lot better at this today than I used to be, mostly because I don't take work so personally today. I still want to do well, but if I screw up, I don't take it as an indictment of myself as a person. This makes it a lot easier to, say, admit something is my fault QUICKLY -- if it is -- which allows us to focus on the solution instead of whose fault it is.
There are (IMO very rare) occasions where a soft word won't do the trick, and that is what the big stick is for. But almost everyone, even very obnoxious people, usually respond very well to a little bit of niceness, and it costs basically nothing to give it a try.
So you are two persons, your work person and your home person. Sounds very exhausting to me. "C'est le ton qui fait la musique". I'm sorry for you that you have to deal with a lot of shit but 4 hours of yoga (this is exaggerated of course) is not so much if you have an 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work, 8 hours relax schedule. It seems to me you need to change some things in your life. And then you can also be a nice person.
A soccer mom is a very valuable person who also does work, work that kids appreciate a lot, don't be so belittling. If you are jealous of her, try to find a partner with a good career that allows you to be a soccer dad.
> Most peoples' reactions to things are arbitrary at best
"Reaction I do not understand" is not the same thing as "reaction that is arbitrary."
Frequently a decision that appears to make no sense starts to do so when you put yourself in the shoes of the person who made it. Their experiences in life have been different than yours (guaranteed!), so there will be no shortage of cases where you look at something and think "A" while that other person looks at the same thing and thinks "B." But that doesn't make either of you arbitrary; you both have reasons for your interpretation, they're just different.
> People at work, retail staff, etc should be prepared to not have their emotions constantly validated and deal with disagreement and other things that are unpleasant
But that was the whole point of the article: it's possible to disagree with others in a way that is still respectful. Keeping that bit of respect in what you say is really all it takes. You don't have to agree with everything they say or spend all day pumping sunshine up their skirts; you just have to have enough respect for them to hold back from turning objection into insult. It's stopping at "I disagree with you" and not taking the extra step to "and therefore you are a bad person."
> Its easy for celebrity millionaire Kurt Vonnegut to write about compassion and be quoted by tumblerinas
Let's say I read your comment and, instead of taking the time to try and address your points directly and individually, I just fired back something along the lines of "you're quite a sperglord."
Would you be comfortable with that response? Would it feel pleasant, or even neutral? Or would it feel like a personal attack -- something that would make you feel an impulse to lash out back at me?
It would feel like an attack, of course. Why? Because I'm not dealing with you as an individual. I'm just picking you up and stuffing you into a bucket with a label on it. It would be dismissive, and people don't like being dismissed.
Now ask yourself: having said all that, can you imagine someone else feeling the same way -- and reacting the same way, as if you had attacked them -- when you dismiss them as a "tumblerina"?
> I just fired back something along the lines of "you're quite a sperglord.
> Would you be comfortable with that response? Would it feel pleasant, or even neutral? Or would it feel like a personal attack -- something that would make you feel an impulse to lash out back at me?
Just as I don't care about your feelings, I also don't care that you thing I am a sperglord. It's your opinion and you're entitled to it.
I agree that we must be nice (smiling, saying "thank you", being polite, etc). I see it as a social convention, a sort of rule like driving in the right side of the road and following the traffic signs. It makes society work smoothly and we, as social beings, are hardwired to react positively to it. Now being kind... That just assumes an emotial investement in the other person, which I simply don't have with 90% of the people I interact daily.
To conclude, I'll respond to the OP's article. It's not the author's fault. His co-workers don't want to work with him because he wasn't nice, besides him being more than capable for the job. IMO it shows how unprofessional they are.
This a million times. For lack of a better term, I find a lot of managers refuse to work with anyone but a "Uncle Tom" geek who will just say yes to everything and smile politely and never, ever correct bad ideas or wrongful assumptions. This leads to bad implementations, impossible requirements, unrealistic deadlines, bullshitting, and other issues people have to deal with.
If you can't work with the guy who occasionally says, "Whoa this is a bad practice for reasons x, y, and z," then that says a lot about how broken that culture is and not a lot about that person.
Yes, kindness is incredibly exhausting. It requires you to consider the impact of what you say and do, and not just blindly forge ahead. Every single time you do or say something. It takes quite a bit of energy to do that, and just ignoring other people's emotions makes life much easier.
But dealing with an unkind person is also exhausting. And many people will, at some point, choose to not interact with that person unless absolutely necessary. That might be worth considering as well.
Does that mean you have to constantly agree with others? Not at all. But there are different ways of disagreement. One choice is "Well, you're wrong, and stupid, and here's my way". Another one is saying "I hear what you said, and I acknowledge you feel that way. But I'd like to point out there are things you might have missed". Sometimes, pointing out those missed items is the kindness.
Fake kindness - "I love everybody so much, and we all should just relax more" - is something you rightfully abhor. And I think you are right that it is a plaything of the privileged.
But concern for another person's wellbeing? I've experienced it from a wide gamut of people of all ages and classes. From a 3-year old sharing their cake, to a middle-aged manager taking hours to help me understand my career, to a 80-year old woman living on a meagre income, concerned people living next to her would feel welcome in the neighborhood.
If I could ask a favor of you, consider that kindness. Not the reshared Vonnegut quotes, but simply living with an awareness of others emotions. Not in deference to those emotions, but with respect for them.
What an odd post. Speaking of irony, I find it hilarious that you feel the need to single out "tumblerinas" while inflicting us with the details of your ponderings on the nature of human kindness (apparently it's inherently insincere!).
But you still don't seem to have a point beyond that it isn't good to ignore real conflict while faking nice and it's annoying when affluent people assume all people can adopt their lifestyle.
I'd suggest you go back to basics and figure out what it could mean to be kind to others while still getting what you need and not being a doormat. Because at this rate you'll soon start accidentally quoting Mean Girls and treating it as a coherent life philosophy.
What part is exhausting?
Emotional fallout can be expensive in terms of time and mental energy.
I don't know you, so this isn't a critique of you directly, but if being kind takes special effort you're doing something wrong. It shouldn't take much work at all. You don't need to be a mind reader and try to predict peoples reactions to things, most of the time it's just being mindful of how you act in certain situations and if that behavior really makes sense (for instance: if someone comes to you with a novice question, do you make them feel welcome, or do you make them feel stupid? Either way takes the same amount of effort, but one has a much better long term payoff.)
> most of the time it's just being mindful of how you act in certain situations and if that behavior really makes sense
I think if this comes naturally to you then you're perhaps more gifted in that area than you may want to give yourself credit for. In my experience most people have a hard time being mindful and it's definitely exhausting at first. I certainly have trouble with it and it takes work to remember.
I reference the perennially over-quoted Kenyon commencement speech by David Foster Wallace only because he put it - where "it" is the trouble most people have with mindfulness - much better than I ever could:
> If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
> The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
> Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
> Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
Why not both? In general, strive to follow the robustness principle: be liberal (forgiving) in what you accept, and conservative (delicate) in what you output.
"Text does not communicate tone" is a huge problem. You can solve that by deciding that certain types of communication should be done face to face.
Being kind can be more concise. Here is an example that my fiance recently pointed out...
I think the single biggest mistake people make in communication is reminding the other person they are incorrect when that does not change the content.
"As I told you Monday, the reason is X."
"I have not heard from you when I asked for feedback, so I am following up."
"We could have done it the other way, but since you already set it up, let's use this."
It is amazingly tempting, almost everyone does it, and your communication becomes an order of magnitude more benevolent when you edit those clauses out.
For more ideas on how to be concise and kind, I highly recommend the parenting book, _How to Talk so Kids Will Listen, and Listen so Kids Will Talk_. It is not just for parents. What works with 13 year old kids also works with 30 year old kids.
> You can solve that by deciding that certain types of communication should be done face to face.
And in the case where your only relationship with these people is online in the first place? (As in this community, but also in quite a few FOSS projects or remote-only companies.)
It never hurts to be aware of the issue. Beyond that, try to stay within community norms. Every approach will have failure modes. Know and accept which ones are likely with what you are doing, and deal with them when they come.
In some communities this will mean that you are very straightforward and technical. Don't say anything emotional. Always work from facts. If you are misunderstood, note it, apologize for the misunderstanding, and move on.
In other communities it might mean that you actively solicit input from decision makers, and carefully avoid controversial topics.
A variety of approaches will work. But following strategy X in a community that is set up for strategy Y is a recipe for disaster.
Based off of my vague memory, in "How To Win Friends and Influence People", one main point is not to contradict people. In text or in person, never tell someone they're wrong.
In general, when I want to correct someone's understanding I frame it as a failure of my own understanding. Like, hey, I'm the asshole here, would you do me a favor by going over this one more time for me? This is great because it allows the other person to graciously concede your point, and to feel like they're the one helping you. It's also great because when it turns out you're wrong, you don't have to backtrack.
Additionally I find it useful as an exercise in suspending belief. Sure, I think I'm right, but let's set that belief aside for a moment and explore our understanding. Nothing misleads people more than the conviction that they're right.
I rather liked that book and want to disagree with many of the points it tries to make, but find myself choosing not to.
It is not economically or socially beneficial for me to be as blunt as I am - but my personal morality triumphs over both of those. If someone is wrong, they are wrong and I will let them know they are wrong.
It won't win me any friends and it isn't beneficial for me to be as blunt as I am - but I don't treat life like an economist, trying to maximize use out of people and my relationships with them.
I feel the same as you, but I'm come to realize most people have a deep seated need to be win friends even at the cost of being right. Your response, like my own, is very Aspie.
I fit into that "aspie" category as well which likely manifested itself in ways similar to you and the person you are responding to earlier in my life.
Now at 41 I'm probably indistinguishable in action from the group you've categorized as having a "deep seated need to win friends" not because I do actually have such a need, but because I realized my need to be vocally, publicly "right" was mostly a manifestation of a core lack of confidence, something which has since been mostly alleviated. Also, in retrospect, I was actually wrong about a lot of things I was sure I was right about because I was intelligent but not wise and the two are often divergent.
Well, you can't win "friends" by avoiding conflict. A friend is (among other things) someone you can have a fight with, and then make up. A friend will tell you when you're wrong -- and when you're right. A colleague, peer, acquaintance or fellow traveller isn't the same thing as a "friend". Any such person might become a friend -- but not because you held off being honest.
All that said, there's a difference between being honest and blunt, and being needlessly honest and cruel.
As mentioned in this thread, in text, tone is most certainly an issue.
The photographer Howard Schatz did an interesting series, where he takes
photographs of actors "In Character", among others Ricky Gervais[1], and he
says at one point: "The other thing about it is:
Comedy comes from a good or a bad place.
And I think that the funniest people always
comes from a good place. Two people can say
the same thing, and one person can be so
nasty and vitriolic -- and therefore not funny.
And the other can be, you know, a celebration.
You know, you can be in on the joke." --Ricky Gervais
I strongly believe cooperation yields better long term outcomes for everyone, and because of that I pick low cost pro-social strategies over low cost anti-social strategies. I don't frame this as "trying to maximize use out of people". I think about it as sparing people from having unnecessary unpleasant interactions.
I see telling people they're wrong as selfish. It's almost never necessary, and in a probabilistic sense is not the most efficient way to make them correct, because instead of just changing their mind, they have to tamp down their ego, avoid getting ticked at you, and then change their mind. Bam: you've just made their lives harder, for the satisfaction of being explicit that you're more correct than they are.
A reasonable question. Perhaps it's not and there's no reason for anyone to take any time to say anything when someone's wrong.
But if they do take that time and say something, then it's not unreasonable to consider the goal. Is it to demonstrate superiority and massage ego? Unkindness works well.
If it's to help someone correct a mistake, do better next time or bring their conversational partners thinking closer to theirs on a subject, then kindness is likely to work better.
Personally, I prefer to work with someone who's right and delivers the message in a way they think I and my other colleagues will respond well to, than someone who's right and delivers the message thoughtlessly, or in a way designed to maximise their own pleasure.
I especially like that you validate their question and then convincingly explore the nuance to the situation, framing your response around their question. Then you make your ultimate position subjective ("Personally, I prefer...") instead of trying to make it some objective truth ("it's better to be kind."), which allows that the others person's position is also subjective - merely a personal preference - and thus changeable.
The communication was so effective I chose not to respond to it.
I personally prefer (there it is!) to work in an environment where being incorrect isn't such a big deal everyone thinks you have to walk around eggshells in order to point it out.
I responded to another poster in this thread and told them they may just be in the wrong place. Or to put it another way.
But he effectively communicated his mindset quite well, right?
I also think there are degrees to how much one can avoid contradicting others. I also want to be able to take contrary positions in meetings without hedging and without people getting upset or other nonsense. I don't think that has to be avoided by "walking around on eggshells". If it had that effect in my life I would never have adopted it.
Additionally none of my comments are really about cultural proclivities: I am opposed to trying to rigidly enforce communication standards within a group. "Sorry MReiland, you didn't state your position about why we shouldn't be using the braid data structure with enough sensitivity." The thing you're taking a position against sounds terrible but isn't really the thing we're talking about.
this is the quote that I initially responded to, emphasis mine.
> I see telling people they're wrong as selfish. It's almost never necessary, and in a probabilistic sense is not the most efficient way to make them correct, because instead of just changing their mind, they have to tamp down their ego, avoid getting ticked at you, and then change their mind. Bam: you've just made their lives harder, for the satisfaction of being explicit that you're more correct than they are.
That's the context of this conversation (a statement made by YOU).
If I can't approach someone about improving/fixing/changing something being worked on then I have no interest in working with them, and I have enough control over my own life that I don't have to.
If someone is really going to insist that I need to spend my time trying to work with them, they're going to get dismissed and I'm going to go on with my life.
I have enough control over my own life that I don't have to deal with those sorts of issues. Perhaps if you're working in a job where you feel forced to have to deal with other people's bullshit than you suddenly feel as if it's important to start worrying about this sort of thing, but I'm not there.
And no amount of communication is going to put me there.
> If I can't approach someone about improving/fixing/changing something being worked on
I think maybe we're misunderstanding each other. I'm not saying don't approach someone to improve/fix/change something. I'm making a statement about manner of approach. Being unable to approach people when they're wrong is intolerable. Being an asshole about it will make you intolerable. The statement I made is about finding a middle way.
One might view that as a form of perfectionism - for me it all depends on what you're trying to optimize.
I've lived much of my life like that - but what's my goal here - to be right? Or to be happy? To me being happy means working towards harmonious relationships. I'm not going to pretend someone is right when they're not, but I might be a bit more diplomatic in my communication.
I'm not sure I get the morality angle. Is it immoral to chose not to contradict someone? Not in my moral code.
That's the thing about morals. They change from person to person and society to society. What is immoral in one society might be neutral in another - or even moral in another!
I find misinformation and ignorance to be a detriment to humankind in its entirety. It drags us down and hides the truth behind the world and how it works.
People believe things that are wrong - myself included. When I am wrong, I hope for others to correct me.
Spreading wrong and misinformed beliefs, to me, is morally wrong. What good comes from spreading wrong information?
my personal morality triumphs over both of those. If someone is wrong, they are wrong and I will let them know they are wrong.
So, your personal morality requires you to not only offend people, but to reduce the odds of them hearing what you're saying because you choose to deliver it in an unkind manner. This is absurdly self-serving of you, and really only goes to show that you're not actually interested in "[letting] them know they are wrong", but rather in demonstrating that you are right to the detriment of personal relationships.
Ironically, that behavior is not even self-serving--it's self-defeating if your goal is to persuade or convince. Probably the worst way to win someone over to your point of view is to tell them that they are wrong.
>> If someone is wrong, they are wrong and I will let them know they are wrong.
In that case, they will probably not understand that they are wrong. There's a saying that people will not remember what you said, but will remember how you made them feel. There is a lot of truth in that. Once you tell someone they're wrong, they feel bad and are much less likely to accept truth from you - even if it's obvious. A mountain of evidence will be seen as a personal attack and your message won't get through.
I went back and rewrote that paragraph after realizing that I basically said "you're approach is wrong". So instead I tried to frame it as a problem with the listener and their emotional response. There is truth in both way to present it, but isn't one more likely to get you to change your approach?
I don't know. I think you can tell someone you disagree outright and still be nice about it. I've been in situations where people act like how you're suggesting (i.e., frame the issue as being with them, instead of with me) and it comes off as a little passive aggressive. I know that might sound odd, but in the end it makes me feel like they're hiding something from me or not willing to tell me what they really think.
I feel the same, but I think we must admit we are weird. Most people do not want to hear what other people really think, and you most certainly should not assume that people usually have such desire.
I think the best way to get into the habit of doing this is to actually believe it. Respect the people around you enough that you consider your own misunderstanding as likely a reason for disagreement as theirs. Constructive communication then comes completely naturally, instead of feeling forced.
Thank you for pointing this one out in particular. I've noticed myself falling into this trap at times, which is sad because it's something I know is frustrating when I hear it from others.
The pattern in the examples you mentioned is the desire, conscious or not, to twist the knife a little and squeeze out a "sorry" from the other person. The desire for someone else to realize an error they've made turns into a desire for guilt, a general "think better next time" that is just specific enough to hurt but vague enough to not actually be helpful. It's like training an animal with a blunt instrument and expecting that to get results anytime fast.
My rule is, don't mention the other person at all in HN comments. Address only the subject. I don't always succeed, but the comments I've made that folks like are always of this sort where I expand on the topic, instead of contradicting. The worst sin is trying to rephrase what was said before e.g. "You said blah blah". That is always unnecessary, and often folks take offence.
"How to Talk so Kids Will Listen, and Listen so Kids Will Talk" made a bigger difference to my interactions with colleagues than it did with my kids. It should be on every management reading list.
> But some people tend to be elitist and frown upon them. :)
That may be due to the fact that the little smile at the end of a sentence can look really self-satisfied or fake.
Especially if you were to dismiss any complainers by calling them elitists, and afterward tack a smile on the end of the sentence. Here, I'm being nice too! :) :) :)
It makes me look stupid, so it can only be a sincere smile. Or maybe I'm just stupid... Well to be fair, we're discussing the psychology of smileys.
I have a theory about ":)", that people use it when there's a discrepancy between what they say and what they think, through the same mechanism of humor (which is also about discrepancies). And so in general, I don't trust people who use it strangely. But now, they're all going to use :3... We're doomed.
The effectiveness of emoticons has been greatly diminished by interfaces that rewrite them as emoji. While I can cope with someone adding an accent to their writing with an emoitcon, when it turns into an emoji I completely discount the writing. Something about the yellow pacman face in various poses ruins a conversation for me.
Oh, and it blows to copy-and-paste code into one of those blasted chat programs... hateful things.
Totally agree, if I'm using a smiley and not an actual emoji.
It's really weird, but in Hipchat, it always throws me off a little bit when I include an emoticon, but the resulting graphic conveys a slightly different connotation than I was expecting.
It's a generational thing tho. 😁 Try and find a college aged girl that doesn't use emojis. Only ones that don't are "conscientious objectors", and to most people in that age group and younger emoji are as ambient as air.
>Trouble is, tone doesn't come through text very well
PG's a great example of this. In almost every interview I've seen with him, he comes across as warm and sincere. In almost every online comment I've read of his, he comes across as cold and terse to the point of dismissiveness. Clearly these aren't different people, but the medium shapes the message in more ways than many of us grok. Something that sounds matter-of-fact in my head when I write it will often sound dickish to those who read it.
I'm really glad that he worded that so well; it's really easy to disguise "being a jerk" as "just being right," and I often see it justified as such (at times by myself).
Being right and being kind aren't mutually exclusive.
> It's perfectly OK to disagree with someone; but please consider doing so in a respectful and thoughtful tone.
The problem I've found is I literally get ignored and end up repeatedly dealing with the same mess until I stop being "kind" about it.
I generally have to do literally 10x as much work to be "kind" than when I'm less generous about it. The problem with kindness is its frequently taken [in IT, in places I've worked] as it not being a serious problem that actually needs to be addressed except as a favor to you. It eventually, frequently, gets to the point where serious problems are repeatedly introduced and you end up having to clean it up.
Because from their point of view, if it really was a problem, you would have stopped being nice after the first or second time.
Miss Manners wrote about her newspaper subscription not arriving. She called repeatedly and was nice. Finally she got somebody in charge who told her "We don't do anything unless the customer is angry". She asked nicely if he would put her down as having been irate. He kindly did.
This is confusing "kind" with "nice". If your audience can handle some directness, be direct. It's okay to say, "This is a horrible idea, and I can't believe we're considering this." That can be kind when you care about the person you're talking to.
What's unkind is saying, "You're an idiot, and that's a ridiculous idea." Attacking people is not kind, but directness _can_ be kind.
On the other hand, you deserve to be shown some kindness too. If your coworkers don't listen to you, maybe it's time to start looking for a new job.
> What's unkind is saying, "You're an idiot, and that's a ridiculous idea." Attacking people is not kind, but directness _can_ be kind.
I don't call people idiots at work but I can behave in a way some people view as "adversarial".
> On the other hand, you deserve to be shown some kindness too. If your coworkers don't listen to you, maybe it's time to start looking for a new job.
Oh, they listen they just don't agree. That is the problem with the general "kindness" bit. People simply assume if you are being kind about it that it isn't a big deal.
Many, many people operate on the "If you are not upset, this is not a serious issue". After all, if it only impacts them rarely...it isn't important to them personally.
He's getting downvotes because no one actually says "you're an idiot" in real life and that comparison has fuck all to do with the actual point anyone in this thread is coming close to.
It depends. Saying "horrible idea" and "can't believe we're considering this" will be pointlessly hostile in many situations. Why not just be specific about the problem?
> The problem I've found is I literally get ignored and end up repeatedly dealing with the same mess until I stop being "kind" about it.
I am currently in a situation like that, and have been in similar situations over the years. There seems to be this gift that many people have where they can lie on a near compulsive basis, and no one will do anything about it. Disagreeing with them in a reasoned and polite manner is beyond ineffective, somehow "you're wrong" on their part wins every argument, regardless of the evidence. Only when you eventually get so fed up and cause a scene pointing out blatant problems, errors, and incompetence, only then does something finally happen, but of course then the response is "hey man, why didn't you just say something?" And despite there being a long paper trail of doing exactly that with no success, this tactic once again wins the day, and the reputation of the one who freaks out is the one that is tarnished in the eyes of management. And then of course, the cycle begins all over again.
I don't ask why you have to put a gun to some people's heads to get them to do the job they are paid (handsomely) for, that I can understand, but why is it so common that no one is willing to stand up for what is right, and for management to allow this behavior? I have seen it on different projects in different cities, and across various industries. It really makes me wonder if somehow the problem is with me and I try to reason through that, but as hard as I try I just can't make that case.
Two of my favorite quotes about being 'nice' come from the musical, Into The Woods.
The first is Red Riding Hood's quip, "Nice is is different than good", which is then fleshed out later by the witch: "You're so nice. You're not good, you're not bad, you're just nice. I'm not good, I'm not nice, I'm just right."
I think "kind" and "good" are reasonable synonyms here, and Boz and Sondheim express very similar sentiments.
Exactly this. IMHO, the first paragraph quoted above is especially important to understand.
This post reads like someone discovering the line between aggressive and assertive. Aggressive is most definitely unkind. Assertive is often confused with unkind, but it isn't really that: it's about demonstrating respect both for yourself and for those around you.
> Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you.
Totally agree, especially in regard to when people share their projects on HN. The HN community moderation always seemed to be based on a very superficial rules - don't swear, don't mention banned keywords X Y or Z. Never have they seemed to seriously consider the impact that words have on other people, instead of just the words themselves.
Agreed. I will never share anything I make with HN for this reason.
We all know the last 20% (polish) takes 80% of the work, and isn't the fun stuff. Yet that's generally what gets criticized when someone shares a link.
For any of my hobby projects, it's about making a POC or rickety MVP. I want to build things and learn quickly, not doing the last 20% schlub work that eats at my time to learn something else. Because of that, and what I've seen of the reception to other hobby projects, I have determined that HN is not an appropriate forum for me to share projects with.
Ignore 80% of the feedback (about the lack of polish) and pay attention to the 20% of 'useful' feedback. :)
I'm 100% guilty of criticizing the lack of polish on some things that get posted. Often times because I am not familiar enough to criticize more important details that may not be apparent to the average observer.
For example - I might have to comb through an entire project in a programming language I'm not familiar with to perhaps give feedback on a better algorithm they could have used for X to improve performance... Or I could criticize that their search feature is entirely broken and always results in an empty results page.
The latter is easier to find and a casual user might run into it, although it might be a pain for the programmer to fix on the front end. The former will likely have less notice for the casual user, but is more beneficial for the programmer.
This is my take on why you see a lot of criticism about the lack of polish compared to other aspects or details.
> The HN community moderation always seemed to be based on a very superficial rules - don't swear, don't mention banned keywords X Y or Z. Never have they seemed to seriously consider the impact that words have on other people
Of course there's no rule against swearing.
This whole description is so remote from everything we try to do that I'm at a loss to know what else to say.
Certain very strong community norms have formed here, whether you realize it, or whether it was intentional or not. Sorry, I meant "rule" just as something that is somehow enforced, empirically. Probably "rule" is completely the wrong word, as empirical actions can often be the opposite of the written rules.
I'm talking relative, you're showing absolute. Oh, I see I edited that out of my previous comment.
Previously, I said to try an experiment using multiple accounts where you post comments with a swear word and slightly censored swearing, versus just posting uncensored swearing and nothing else different. You'll quickly see the relative difference in the community's reaction.
I fucking swear all the time here and don't give a shit how often I do it.
You'll only get voted down for it when the swearing makes it harder to read your comment, or conveys an emotional urgency unwarranted by the thread. For instance: "Fuck you" is unlikely to be well-received in any thread.
This is very evident in the styles people do interviews. For example, Bill O'Reilly is loud, calls names etc when his guests disagree with him - to the point that some of his conversations end up being loud shouting matches and the only thing left to do (as a viewer) is to turn it off. Jon Stewart on the other hand - he disagrees with his guests in a kind, calm and funny manner - it is interesting to watch him and his guests go back and forth on ideas. I'm guessing that attitude probably spills into other areas of their lives too
Unfortunately some claim [1] that if Jon Stewart really disagrees with you, he has no qualms against using editing tricks and false pretenses to make you look foolish and stupid.
That's very interesting (and I will never go on the daily show now if I disagree with them), but I am not sure that it applies here. The parent was discussing the interviews that Jon Stewart performs himself in the interview part of the show. Often when there is a serious ideological difference there they publish a long-form interview(20 minutes) which is clearly the whole interview.
The piece you link to seems to be more about the field pieces which are not what was being discussed, and not what the parent was comparing O'Reilly's interviews to.
Isn't O'Riley trying to rile up his target audience by getting his guest worked up though? If he makes the guest look unruly, even by becoming unruly himself, he can blame the guest and make the guest look bad. It's the attraction to the show.
I don't watch O'Riley, but that's my perception from reading about things he's done/said.
Both are propaganda programs and it's all about which audience they're pandering to. Stewart's audience is attracted to pretension and smugness, a "holier and smarter than thou" perspective, and O' Reilly's audience is attracted to people getting what's perceived to be their comeuppance. Both programs exist for the same purpose -- to reinforce the political beliefs of the people that run them. It's much less profitable to be moderate and fair.
Of course it costs nothing to address people in a way that they feel comfortable with, so you should do it. But, in a Postel's law sort of way, in terms of critiquing argument I don't think it's worth dwelling on the tone. Two plus two is four no matter how many times the person arguing it uses the word "fuck", to put it crudely. And often, addressing tone is a way of eliding real argumentation.
> Of course it costs nothing to address people in a way that they feel comfortable with, so you should do it.
It doesn't cost nothing, it's costs a lot of time and attention to find out what they're comfortable with and much attention to filter yourself to to fit that, so no you shouldn't just do it without a good reason.
Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but you assume it's a choice and that's a mistake. You presume it's easy to know how people want to be treated, but there are a great many conditions that make reading other people difficult for entire classes of people. They aren't necessarily being miserly, they may be doing the best they can and that's all they've got. Those with Aspergers for example have to do with intellect what most people do instinctively socially speaking, and that's exhausting for them; they simply aren't wired to be social.
Yes, totally this. Moreover, I'd like to add anonymously down-voting / reporting someone's opinion just because it's not yours is just as mean-spirited as calling someone names.
Every internet message board has its own culture with its own take on what's "right" and what's "wrong", and on HN (and reddit) the institutionally accepted way of being mean is misusing the downvoting / flagkilling system to attempt to bleep out someone else's opinion because you disagree with it and labeled it as "toxic" from your perspective.
I mean, it's one thing to downvote someone because of spam or noise (e.g. one line posts of "lolwtf" or "this is dumb"), but every time I scroll through the comments and see discussion chains of folks arguing some valid points (about say referrals and paywalls or the ever controversial issue of sexism) under a flagkilled or completely invisible down-voted-to-hell post, I think to myself "this shouldn't be how our community operates."
I basically stopped commenting (well, except now -- doh) here on HN because of how frequently I saw toxic responses and punishment down-voting. There are a noisy subset of users here who either (a) can't understand or respect generalizations, especially based on older/real-life experience, or (b) demand "proof" for any claim, or (c) will punish any kind of not-narrowly-PC statement. And then the blatantly rude. Folks who say something in a comment they'd never dare to say to your face.
Therefore I've given up on caring and now much prefer Reddit's community. Less pinheads there, greater topic variety, greater sense of fun, can collapse threads, can delete comments much later (if you discover one that attracts a hate mob). I still enjoy reading HN, mostly the off-site articles linked to. But not so much the comment threads here. Not anymore.
I don't think the upvote/downvote system here provides enough feedback to the person being voted. There just isn't the information there.
For the longest time I was confused at seeing down-voted comments because I mentally assumed that downvotes mean "this is a troll comment / this is some kind of abusive comment". Not so.
Also (and I've said this before so apologies for repeating myself!), if downvotes do mean 'disagreement', could we get rid of the graying out of down-voted comments, or maybe just make it an account preference? I'm interested in reading viewpoints that I might not agree with and graying out the comment makes it really hard to do so. It also seems to fit better with the model of "downvote = this comment shouldn't be in the conversation".
I agree with you.IMHO, graying out text is a way to convey censorship. Allowing each individual to configure his HN experience sounds positive to me. I like reading controversial opinions just like you. For me, it's both a way to challenge my worldview and a way to understand a particular community better.
This has been discussed before (well, the general configuration for users). The main argument against it was that not having a common experience in the core elements makes it very hard for the community to stay coherent (which is given as desirable) and have good discussions.
Eg when I don't know how you perceive the comments in the vicinity of the discussion, it is harder for me to understand your comment's intentions and finer points.
Of course this doesn't apply to peripherical features such as the colour of the header bar.
From what I understand, upvotes signify "this adds to the conversation" and downvotes signify "this subtracts from the conversation" -- it's a stronger sentiment than disagreement, but weaker than trolling or abuse (which is what flags are for.)
If a comment is disagreeable but worthwhile, my preference is to give a substantive response. If a comment is value-subtracting, even if I agree with the sentiment, I'll downvote it (and may take the time to explain the downvote if I think my explanation will be helpful.)
The main attributes I consider to make a comment value-subtracting are:
- substantial factual errors (not just a nitpick, but core to the point)
- gratuitous negativity or unnecessary incivility
- waste of space ("me too", memes or jokes except if they're edw519 caliber, excessive references to irrelevant topics such as mentioning someone else's religion several times in a thread that has nothing to do with that)
- extremely poor reasoning or communication, to the degree that trying to engage substantively becomes difficult
Well then, it seems to me that you have a very healthy approach to votes and flags.
It should be common sense but I suspect not everyone with the ability to downvote has such considerations and the HN guidelines¹ offer very little comment on that.
I'm guessing that mods think that once you've risen above the downvote reputation threshold you must be qualified and should have a good criteria on how to use this newly given privilege.
I'm not trying to tell anyone how to do their job, but maybe it would be useful to add some guidelines for that too (Voting, specifically), I think I like your guidelines.
>> I'd be less annoyed by a downvote from pg, because I probably deserved it, than a downvote from someone completely random, who I might not care about.
I admire PGs work too, but don't you think this criteria would introduce to the community a herd-like mindset of following perceived moral leaders instead of evaluating ideas for their own standing?
Sorry, I don't understand the relationship you're trying to make between votes and mindset.
If someone important likes what I said, I'm going to think that I made a good comment. If they dislike it, then I'm going to reconsider what I said a bit more deeply. Neither of these would change my mindset from a simple up/down vote. I'd want a comment or discussion to take place first.
I find many things troubling in your statement, I'll explain myself as constructively as possible without sacrificing pragmatism (I hope all the following doesn't come as condescending, I'm just trying to help here).
1st of all. This is not facebook. Upvotes and downvotes are not likes/dislikes.
That said, here's another way to explain what I meant:
Commenting is not about pleasing readers (is also not about displeasing, so be kind, like the post recommends). If "someone important" likes or dislikes what you said, should not have such an impact that would make you consider changing your mind, your mind should be changed by feedback in the form of comprehensive information, that kind of feedback is much more meaningful than someone else's emotion (or even disagreement by itself without feedback provided).
There can be many reason/motives to upvote/downvote, but emotion is not reason, acting on emotion alone is just compulsive.
I don't think PG would ever downvote you if he dislikes what you said, I'd like to think he's more sophisticated than that; he would either have an interest (motive) on muting the info you introduce to the conversation (but that's sketchy), or even better he would provide feedback (reason) on why he disagrees with you. (But I have absolutely no idea on how would PG make decisions, I'm just being rhetorical here and using PG as an example of "someone important")
So my point is:
You should not make comments expecting PGs approval (or any other figure you consider "someone important", which is what I stated as a "perceived moral leader"), because that's the very definition of a "herd-like mindset of following perceived moral leaders", if HN introduces tools that allow that mindset, the community's value will suffer. Being inspired by leaders is cool, but allowing them to make your mind just by liking or disliking what you said is very dangerous (and immature).
You should participate in a conversation with confidence, and to obtain confidence you need to be well informed and prepared to test your ideas.
EDIT: Rephrased a few things, but didn't change substance I hope.
The previous is suggesting opinion on threads would bias around popular personalities on the site. pg is popular here, others are too, but not all are universally "important" to the world. Publicizing to a greater extent these personalities' thoughts on subjects will drive out other viewpoints, as commenters self-edit in hopes of those up-votes.
In the case of your example, if someone important likes what you said and you feel rewarded for that, you're more likely to say that (or something similar) again, regardless of the objective merit of the statement.
Say your comment was "Java is stupid". it only gets 3 upvotes, but XYZ likes it. You feel validated, so next time the subject comes up you say it again. Commentary was then shaped by a personality rather than the merit of the commentary.
Seeing who downvoted you sounds like a good idea. Spending karma to downvote however - I see your point, but trolls or noise still needs to be punished, not sure people would still do that enough.
I don't agree with your "argument from authority" though - even pg can be wrong sometimes...
I'm against trigger-happy flagging/downvoters too. On the other hand, I actually like the fact that Reddit's and HN's communities are different in that way.
I go to Reddit when I'm hungry for lots of information and want to have a good time, also to get in touch with a broader internet community. I come to HN when I want to know what's making an impact, and that means -among MANY other things- surviving criticism.
So I would not complain because HN needs criticism. I'd rather suggest a technical solution through UX design, for the false alarm flagging mostly.
A subset of your (a) that I see here a lot is when I write a 500 word essay arguing some point, and the first reply comes in and says something to the effect of: "On word 348, you said 'all'. Here's a counter-example that proves that you should have said 'some' instead! I found the word that is wrong in your statement! See? Your entire argument is invalid!"
Nit-picking and pedantry is toxic in real life and on message boards, however it seems to be ever-present in communication with fellow software engineers. In software engineering, if you miss an = sign or misplace a { or use a single wrong keyword in a 100K line program, the program can fail spectacularly. Debugging a broken program often involves nit-picking syntax--it's an essential tool in a software engineer's arsenal.
This is not universally true for written argument or rhetoric. Being clear is good. Using correct grammar is good. The details count. But attacking a clear, articulate argument by nit-picking grammar or word usage is pointless and does not substantially add to the conversation. Despite this, this behavior seems to exist as a cancer everywhere on the Internet where you encounter written argument or persuasion, including here.
Great nuance and insight! That feels like part of it.
When I'm wearing the Software Engineer hat, yes, the entire world can fail if a single nit is imperfect. But when we wear the Human Conversing or Persuading hat I expect and indeed enjoy seeing and using a more fuzzy logic. I expect more buffer and assume-I'm-not-an-idiot-kid-please-get-off-my-lawn-been-there-done-that-have-the-tee-shirt-thanks.
Compilers and CPUs are the world's most productive utter idiots. The best engineers adjust their thoughts to see them and emulate them, but sometimes this backfires when they forget to exit that mode.
Unfortunately, I don't think "aha!-you're-not-exactly-right" kind of people are going away anytime soon, they've been around on the net since I first laid mouse on it (the 90s, I'm not that old) and they've conquered the technical forums for a reason. Some people simply have that sort of mindset, one just needs to wear the "deal with it" hat and get over it.
In fact, those people are very useful and most of them have helped me from time to time, so I'm grateful for them.
Side note:
>> assume-I'm-not-an-idiot-kid-please-get-off-my-lawn-been-there-done-that-have-the-tee-shirt-thanks
Thank you for that, I'll use it sometime, not sure why or when, but it's so funny I must! :D
maybe turn it into a C poem and wear as a T-shirt?
I once had the following printed on a T-shirt and wore to a Meetup.com event here in Colorado, and out of the crowd an early Bell Labs alumnus (C/UNIX era) emerged and tried to recruit me:
consider me forewarned. if in twenty years I'm retired living on a golden yacht sailing the icy seas of Europa I hope a non-trivial portion of my income is coming from the royalties on the sales of that T-shirt.
and/or from the earnings on my book series The Dread Space Pirate Richard. (srsly)
or... savings from my day job. a good strategy has several fallbacks. :-P
you have been both very kind and very constructive. email me at groglogic@gmail.com and I'll ensure you always have free copies of all the books and audio episodes. (I did not see your email in your profile otherwise I would have sent this privately.)
I've found that the most healthy way to deal with people that dismiss your entire argument/point/opinion by nit-picking your grammar (or similar) is to dismiss them back, kindly.
The kindly part is so important; their attitude shows that they don't have an open mind at the moment; dismissing kindly leaves a moral door open so that in the infrequent (but not rare) event that they'll have an open mind later in the day (or later in a lifetime), they may remember your reasoning and revisit the logic in their minds and agree with you, sometimes they acknowledge you merit for it and sometimes they don't, but when they do, bingo, you just made an intellectual ally, but that works only if you were kind and treated them with respect.
Pick your battles; If you insist on proving yourself right and antagonize people (remember even trolls are people) you make gratuitous enemies and waste resources in general; time, energy, focus, etc.
Trust me, I've turned foes into allies several times in my short lifetime. And more importantly, I've saved myself from wasting time and headaches. Kindness works miracles and saves time.
Be kind, rewind (your mind?).
And don't forget to read the welcomming page and the guidelines:
Those are all great points and I try to follow them myself when interacting online. I was actually looking for some kind of way to stop it from an algorithmic standpoint or some other fashion. Mainly because I don't like reading and wasting time on some minor nitpicks.
Not sure if I understood you correctly but as far as I know HN uses algorithms already for this sort of taks.
That's cool but I'd like to have better control, so I'm designing a custom HN curator myself. And I've noticed some other people have done the very same thing themselves.
Understand that we're generalising here, but a counter-example on your main argument would have, in fact, refuted your whole thesis. There's a massive gap between a short (in length) invalidation of an argument and useless nitpicking. There's also increased conflation of the two in online discussion channels.
"Yes, totally this. Moreover, I'd like to add anonymously down-voting / reporting someone's opinion just because it's not yours is just as mean-spirited as calling someone names."
I've stopped up/down voting all together for similar reasons.
I'd always assumed the intent was to vote when you feel something contributes to the discussion, or is particularly relevant.
For example, upvoting when a subject matter expert gives some context, or the person offers a comment that you found interesting. Conversely downvoting when there is a "me too"/contentless comment.
Personally I most commonly find myself downvoting what I would describe as either rhetoric or offensive.
"I'd always assumed the intent was to vote when you feel something contributes to the discussion, or is particularly relevant."
It is. I've decided to just leave the comments (reactions) as they are and signal upvote by commenting. If the post/comment is of no interest, no comment. Voting in some ways has distorted the real intent of the site: "talking about things hackers like".
Imagine of the rating system did away with votes and instead measured the quality of the discourse on something interesting.
It's not much, but when I see posts that are downvoted for no discernable reason (assuming good faith on the poster), I'll usually throw them an upvote to bring them a bit out of grey.
It's not much, but if I'm having a crap day and something I say it getting downvoted, I feel a little better when it ticks up a notch, knowing at least one person isn't trying to just bomb my post. It's basically the tiniest little gift I like to give to people, heh.
I also think that, if enough people put that upvote in, the community could shift how it reacts to things.
> It's not much, but if I'm having a crap day and something I say it getting downvoted, I feel a little better when it ticks up a notch, knowing at least one person isn't trying to just bomb my post. It's basically the tiniest little gift I like to give to people, heh.
I think you're too concerned about what strangers think and do around the internet. Most people will "bomb" your subjective side of the argument (the snarky, mean, remarks), and not the underlying idea. I've found out that conveying your arguments while avoiding personal, subjective, attacks is a much better way of getting your point across, since people are more receptive if they don't get the impression they need to be defensive.
Yeah. Part of "good faith" for me is that the person isn't being discernibly or overtly aggressive, mean, or sarcastic.
Basically, if you're being an asshole, I don't feel a need to save you from yourself.
There aren't many (if any) formal guidelines for comment voting on HN, so this is me driving at what I want out of the community. I don't speak for everyone. For my part, I want civility, and to encourage people to contribute their opinions, popular or not.
The polite responses to misinformed ideas are often some of the most educational, at least for me, and so I'd like an environment where anxiety about the chance of being wrong is low for everyone.
I also don't want any of this to sound like an indictment of hacker news. I keep coming back here because I think the community is really top notch, and the signal to noise ratio is high. Commenting systems and forums have had these problems for ages, and they're hard problems. I just wanted to add my voice to the crowd.
I do it too sometimes, trying not to lose perspective of the true purpose of the conversation taking place of course; a single upvote in a bombarded comment won't cause detriment to the conversation but it will provide some motivation for the participant to keep trying to participate (assuming good faith on the poster, as well).
For example in StackOverflow, if I notice a -1 post but the post has some value, I'll upvote it even if it wasn't particularly useful for my issue, in order to give it a chance to be reevaluated without a negative bias of that -1
I find it a bit funny/curios on why we do such things. I've always known I'm not the only one doing that, it's one of those unsaid things that happen on the net, part of its culture.
You might be right. Even when in many cases you can immediately tell downvotes were necessary, deserved and the commenter should've seen it coming.
I've also encountered many cases that confused me a bit and at the time didn't quite understand why those people/commenters were being downvoted.
So I've spent a long time just reading HN without commenting, trying to first understand the culture, the news are just as important as the people curating them IMHO.
After sometime I've begun to understand the different mindsets and dynamics; there are many discernible reasons to be downvoted by the community, there's for example, being perceived as a shill or a strawman, and etc. And correct me if I'm wrong but there's also the secret/magic algorithms making the mod's jobs easier, I don't think those algorithms are perfect and may make mistakes sometimes, that's understandable.
But there are still enough cases that I suspect ended up being downvoted just because disagreement motive or maybe even for irrational emotion (very rarely do strong emotions come with reason) motive. And there's also the case of Trigger-happy-downvoting individuals, all these latter cases generate such damage that I have * sometimes * even found myself a bit suspicious of the worth of the HN community as a whole.
But I stressed "sometimes" for a reason...
...One has to understand that communities change, that's a fact, and as YC has had success and obtained more and more media attention (and therefore HN as well), different kind of audiences have joined the flock (me included, since a few years ago).
My guess is that HN's community is still adapting to the new audience, must be tough since there must be thousands of real people along with hundreds of fake accounts (some with nefarious purposes) and bots.
In the end, you'll find it more useful to acquire a thick skin and a "deal with it" attitude towards gratuitous negativity (down-voters included), but not an impermeable shell because sometimes there's some useful criticism behind rude negativity, just don't take it personal and master the art of spinning the conversation towards a constructive direction.
Side note:
>> anonymously down-voting / reporting someone's opinion just because it's not yours is just as mean-spirited as calling someone names.
Amazingly well phrased, I had to point that one out :)
> In the end, you'll find it more useful to acquire a thick skin and a "deal with it" attitude towards gratuitous negativity (down-voters included), but not an impermeable shell because sometimes there's some useful criticism behind rude negativity, just don't take it personal and master the art of spinning the conversation towards a constructive direction.
This is the most important lesson I was never formally taught about discourse. If you can mange to be Kind & Thick-skinned you will be capable of communicating with a far wider group of people than those who are missing one component of that pair.
Well, there's some high value on learning lessons by yourself, it may have taken some time from your life, but you ended up understanding better the in and outs. So good for you my friend.
Well so he says, but is it useful? When downvoting means two different things, it is hard to discern what is meant. I usually vote with 'helpful'/'I learnt something new' and 'not helpful'/'wasted my time in a mean manner'. I also don't see how one could only want comments one agrees with at the top - you learn less, and there might be less of a discussion. (Maybe I misunderstood pg's intention here?)
One could argue for another voting just for agreement/disagreement that wouldn't impact the positioning and colour of the comments, because seeing HN's opinions is also interesting. It would however add another layer of complexity.
As long as people upvote "I learnt something I agree with," and not "I learnt something I disagree with," the effect is the same, the amplification is just tuned a bit. Having a different standard for upvotes and downvotes doesn't do much. If you get less upvotes, it is effectively as if you got more downvotes.
I found it curious that something is never mentioned in that post. That is, not voting at all.
So yeah, I generally agree with PG in that
> it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement
But he never said to do it in a trigger-happy manner. There can be many other reasons to vote, but when the reasoning is 'agreement/disagreement', voting IMHO should be done when you strongly agree or strongly disagree; this way you allow some "space" in between for freedom of expression.
So my current take on this whole vote up/down to convey agreement/dissagreement discussion would be not voting at all unless you find it pertinent.
Also IMHO, in other types of reasoning one should be a bit faster to downvote, for example 'rudeness', or worse, 'hate messages', for those ones I downvote immediately, or flag and sometimes even educate (if the person seems to be just confused, and I make one attempt only, if the person is not interested in changing their mind, I skip).
Other types of reasoning deserve a different approach, for example; Interesting comments I upvote even if I don't agree. Well redacted but uninteresting comments I leave untouched (I don't vote up nor down).
And there are many other considerations for different scenarios and different types of reasoning, I mostly prefer not to waste time, but I liked this post about kindness and find the topic of community very engaging and relevant to me. Maybe because I'm starting to build a community myself.
I admit that I'm a bit faster to upvote, for anything that deserves positive feedback; attention, approval, agreement, endorsement, celebration, applause, kudos, kindness, etc. And I'm OK with that.
It's a bit like when you have a survey and you have 5 or 6 options ranging from 'hate it' and 'love it'.
The difference is often very small and just adds not really necessary options which makes making a choice harder.
How about checking if a user downvoted more than e.g. average number of comments on some post, resulting in his downvotes carrying very little weight if it is true. Unless it's being done already.
Don't you think that would break the minimalist design? I don't think it would benefit, not to mention it would be a little too opinionated.
I suspect HN's up/down system follows the pattern of simplicity by design and for good reason; the reason being the flexibility to welcome a cognitive diverse audience.
Apparently HN's decline in audience quality over time was expected from the start¹; quality and popularity seem to be inversely correlated, but the voting privilege threshold is a good way to maintain culture values to some degree.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but given the fact this community was conceived as "an experiment"¹ to explore and empower the hacker community, I suspect one of the points has always been that the "best" ideas float to the top. In this case, the "best" ideas are always relative to the values of the community as a whole; the sum of criteria of the engaged participants, a very diverse audience.
That diverse audience can have multiple motives to vote up or down, according to each individual mindset; it can be agree/disagree, constructive/non-constructive, as you proposed, yes, but it also can be interesting/uninteresting, like/dislike, kind/unkind. Or many other criteria that are not necessarily antonyms; amazing/disgusting, enlightening/TLDR, etc.
So this singular up/down "un-opinionated" system's simplicity allows a cognition diversity one-size-fits-all dynamic, any change in UX would have to be planned for a justifiable purpose and very carefully executed.
I visit HN not to argue about the right or wrong, but to get more informed and educated. The more you know, the more you'll be humble and kind to those who you disagree with.
The notion that there is not absolute correctness even for a most trivial problem may be hard for engineers to understand, but I've learned it the hard way. I've learned a lot and working better with others since I started reading more on non-technical books and articles. It's a lot easier to being kind socially than to being kind on technical discussion and decision times. I think every engineering major should take courses in philosophy and psychology or read some related books.
Because if there's one place everyone can go to be better informed about climate change, it's definitely not NASA.
This is why people like you get dismissed in the first place. I can choose to spend time worrying about why you would think that, or I can go on with my life.
I choose to go on with my life. It is not true that all opinions are created equal.
I don't agree with mreiland. I didn't dismiss you donizx, your first comment was a smart POV.
mreiland is just being rude, he probably had a bad day or was recently frustrated with some discussion gone eerie with a climate change denier and he's taking it out on you.
And he's worried about climate change, that's understandable, cut him some slack.
If you don't want to waste your time with climate change deniers, just skip and don't address them, that's cool, life is short no doubt about that.
If you find yourself in a situation where somehow you DID address them (maybe because you care about the world, and you DO sound like someone reasonable that cares about important matters), that means you already decided to use some time on them climate change deniers, so make the most of it, remember they're human beings and treat them with respect and you might end up inspiring them to actually listen to you to understand instead of listening to retort (like most people do when they're on defensive mode), be kind and you might even end up incepting some sense into their minds.
That's a strawman. I specifically quoted someone talking about being open-minded, I specifically used the verbiage 'open-minded' in my response, and you start talking about taking the time to "address an issue".
What if you had taken the time to be more fair to my post than that?
If someone has to wonder wether they are kind; I have found they are just Not kind. They don't change unless they have a nervous breakdown, major health scare(like a TBI), or become poor(really poor).
Capitalism seems to cater to selfish individuals? A lot of selfish individuals get far financially in life. Think about some of the "successful" people, some of us, idolize here on HN. Think about that person before they became rich and famous. I can usually bring up a list of retched things they did to become financially successful.
That's the rub. They become comfortable in life and are in complete denial over how they carved their way to the top of their version of success.
That's all I have--I have a headache, but kind people know they are kind. They don't need to advertise it. They don't need an audience in order to give to the suffering (human, animals, environment). They are just kind!
Now, the Fakers--well that's what makes me unkind. Oh there are so many Fakers.
(I have a sister who stepped on family members in order to become financially successful, and her journey was ugly. I might be a little over sensitive when it comes to people and kindness.)
People seem to underestimate this but I've learned this lesson myself the hard way. Your absolute most important skill is not to make a dick of yourself next to your co-workers. Even if it means doing things wrong for a while, it is essential you don't hurt feelings while slowly pushing for things to change.
"Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and considerate of the way your presence affects them."
I think this advice is so apt and so needed. There's a perception that to be effective or powerful, one must also be harsh, stern, a little bit mean. That stems from a misunderstanding of what kindness is. Hopefully people will heed his advice!
It used to be pretty easy to get random little .com domain names before they got real cheap and every single word, short string and misspelling got bought.
eg I own a three letter .net that I don't even use.
The author is self aware and empathetic. But even if he wasn't or his natural inclination was not to become more kind, it's a really good thing to fake (and will hopefully become natural over time). Being kind is the right thing to do even if you're selfish/looking out only for yourself. A lot of really smart jerks are held back because other people don't want to work with them. Even if they're promoted for their individual contributions, they will always be limited by how much they individually can achieve vs. as a team.
I empathize with you. But be careful, the trouble is that those people fill their time at work with political games. They are dangerous to someone who wants to be head down doing great work.
If you read the article, the author is talking about his relationship with coworkers, so I'm going to assume we are talking about one's relationship with coworkers. That being the case, I certainly hope you don't think any of your coworkers are "useless."
You don't have to be kind; you don't have to be anything. On the other hand, if you want to be a good engineer, with goodness defined as how much one contributes to the team/company, then you probably should be kind. If you feel like your teammate is unmotivated then it seems like if you want to be a good engineer you would do your best to motivate that person.
Having an uncaring attitude towards your coworkers could well lower their motivation which would mean your net contribution to the team is lessened as well.
Have you considered the possibility that some of your people are unmotivated because you act like a jerk to them, and you're perpetuating the problem?
If you'll forgive me quoting my own post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9117035): A couple of jobs back, I met with a supervisor to proudly tell him that a gigantic, exhausting project I'd been working on for the last nine months was finally ready to deploy. His response, almost verbatim, was "Cool. Here's what I need you to do next..." I found it nearly impossible to care about what he wanted for the rest of my time there. 60 seconds' worth of interest and congratulations would have gotten dozens of hours of extra productivity out of me.
Yes you are right, you don't have to be kind, but kind people are advancing in their carrier faster. If you want to play this purely based on logic, and you want to advance in your carrier than you have to be kind. :)
The best manager I ever had (and continues to be my inspiration today) was also one of the kindest, genuine, and empowering people I've ever met. Not necessarily nice, but kind.
The worst manager I ever had once told me "you're too kind to your team". He wore his ability to bring fear to a room like a badge of honor.
I never worked harder and more passionately than under the first and I never felt more apathetic and unmotivated from work than under the second. A single data point, but something I'll never forget.
Surprisingly, the kindest manager I had (and still have) at the same time wears his ability to bring fear to a room in an impressively efficient way. I have never experienced a room transitioning from theoretical daydreaming to practical results so fast, just because someone enters it. Amazing skill if you use it appropriately and if it emanates from knowledge rather than being mean.
He doesn't sound so unkind letting an apathetic unmotivated lead keep his or her job. It doesn't seem like we're getting the whole story here. That second manager might have been an ass, but it seems like he got the job done.
No, the second manager didn't fire me - my apathy and lack of motivation didn't keep the team from shipping or themselves being demotivated. A key thing the first manager taught me was that a good leader is able to keep their team motivated and moving forward in spite of problems above - shielding the team, etc.
And the second wasn't an ass - he just used fear as a management technique. As opposed to the first manager that used empowerment and encouragement.
I do see a fair share of managers that use fear/authority/power as a technique to get results, but for me (and I see for many other peers) it is counter productive in the long run.
Respect earned from fear/position is short-lived. Respect earned from trust and empowerment will stay with people their entire careers and pay dividends.
Not disagreeing with you, but there are also leaders like Jobs, Gates, Ellison etc. How come they are able to get amazing results, while being really nasty to their people?
Sheer charisma? Also, different people respond better to different kinds of leadership and motivation. This gets talked about a lot in the context of coaches of professional sports teams.
When you're running a business, you can probably afford to be a jerk as long as the small group of people closest to you can tolerate it.
The problem is with the people that try to emulate leaders like that - they try to play Steve Jobs in meetings and end up causing all of the damage without any of the greatness.
Can you explain why you say that? It seems you're suggesting that there is in fact a correlation between genius, or at least effective management, and unkindness. Is that what you meant? If so, why?
I can see how high high achievers could tend to be extremely focused and driven, which in some cases would present in this way. I wouldn't expect it to be the norm though; do you believe otherwise? How do you know?
I guess the parent is saying that there are lots of people with nasty behavior who are successful - may be not bill gates level successful, but successful nevertheless. Just a guess though
There is a Bill Gates quote (I read it on the "Becoming Steve Jobs" biography that was recently published) : "Lots of people want to be like Steve. They have got the asshole part down pat. All they are missing is the genius part.".
We'll probably never know the truth of the management styles of Jobs, Gates, et al. Only those that worked for them directly will know, and even then the memory will be colored by later events. Something to keep in mind.
Positions of power have a lot of leeway. If you're the big boss, people can't do much to remove you. It's different if you're trying to climb the corporate ladder; there are a lot of people ready and able to stomp on your fingers and knock you down a few rungs at the slightest offense.
It's so unfortunate that being nasty works for those guys. I've seen so many people who effectively equate Apple's success to "the leader of Apple being an arsehole" and decide they too want to be Steve Jobs.
I am of the (entirely uneducated) opinion that Jobs wasn't successful because he was an arsehole, but that he could only get away with being an arsehole because he was so successful.
This guy wants to be super cool and cover just everything. Be kind, be super programmer, have tattoo, write blog ... Thinking about the post, I quite understand why people don't want to work with such superheroes. Kind will not make it if it is one other thing you want to be good at. Don't show off too much will do.
That's kinda...uncalled for. Seems like you have personal issues with him? What does having a tattoo have to do with anything, or am I missing something?
I agree with the idea, maybe, but not the phrasing. You're quick to judge people you don't know, and shame them when they have the courage of sharing. At the end of the day, his post is on the front page, and it's doing good.
This hits so close to home for me personally. I recently got some feedback that seemed very similar (it seemed much more useful and constructive than what boz got) and I recently had a similar realization about my friends putting up with me.
Thanks for writing and publishing this. It's very good.
Author's 'before' picture is me very often. I'm nearly ego-less in pursuit of the truth--more than ready to be shown wrong myself--but that doesn't mean that coworkers and loved ones end up feeling good about the conversation.
I hope he will write a "how to" follow up, because I would like to change, but I don't see how to do it in a way that doesn't sound impossibly exhausting.
I'm hopeful that it actually is possible, though, because for 30+ years I had never been able to keep any space well-ordered for more than a few weeks, nor had any reason to think I ever would be able to. I read "the life changing magic of tidying up" and it turns out I can do it--I just needed to be taught how. This may not seem relevant, but it's been life-changing not so much to have a tidy office, but to learn that what I assumed was a fixed personal trait was changeable after all.
It's "How to Win Friends and Influence People", and it's one of Paul Graham's recommended books (see http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfaq.html ), along with the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
There's also "7 Habits of Highly Effective People", which is often recommended in the same breath.
I did a lightning talk a while back called "7 Habits of Highly Effective DevOps", adapting the habits and the organization of them to doing DevOps well.
Thanks. Maybe I'll try it again. I've read it once, and my memory of what I read is a major contributor to the entire enterprise seeming beyond exhausting.
I got the same feeling from reading the book as the original recommender ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7762266 ): reading the book made me feel instantly better at being able to communicate when having difficult or tense conversations. I can't recommend it enough.
Several well-known people in tech are notorious jerks. So I don't think being kind is a necessary condition for career success (though it can't hurt). But I suspect it's necessary to have a happy life.
Many of such said 'jerks' are often the ones at the top, however: i.e. nobody above them to be put off their ability to communicate or display typical good teamwork.
Being well-known also means your worst moments get more attention than might be deserved. Even kind people have bad days, but a bad day for a Fortune 10 CEO can follow them for life. Maybe unfair, but it's one of the (more reasonable) reasons for the inflated paycheck.
I don't know Boz, but having known others like him, I would say that many didn't actually violate the golden rule; people who are efficient and brash often not only don't mind, but expect others to act the same way.
The Golden Rule (treating others as you want to be treated) isn't actually very good. I prefer the Platinum Rule (treat others as THEY want to be treated)
Yes, the Golden Rule is good, because it assumes that you are the same as the other person (generally most people want to be treated with kindness and respect), rather than assuming that they are somehow different from you.
Agree with the Platinum rule. If you meet a big variety of people you'll learn fast that they want to be treated differently. There's a lot of room for social or cultural differences in humanity.
Just as an obvious example, the golden rule is why a lot of guys send dick pics.
How is the Platinum rule good? When would treating someone how they want to be treated go wrong?
Your converse golden rule suffers the same problems as the golden rule - everyone should be treated individually, treating others the same as you expect people to treat you will not always work out as intended.
Totally agree with the premise of this article. Being kind involves being empathetic and putting yourself in the other person's shoes. Most times, this involves taking a step back and not reacting in the moment (to the best of one's ability). Passion can be a good thing, but not without restraint and self-awareness.
Good for you Boz! Some people go their whole lives without learning that lesson. One of my favorite pieces of advice I ever received was "be direct, be specific, and be non-punishing." At the time, I thought it was trite advice, but its one of the more useful tidbits I've heard.
This is a fantastic article from Boz. I have to be blunt in my criticism, however, as I imagine Boz would expect and appreciate. I had a few run-ins with him in the early 2010s and I don't see much evidence that he learned from these experiences or changed his basic working pattern. Or maybe he was even more raw before I met him. :) I learned very early on not to have anything Boz wanted nor to cross him. It's hard to judge the impact of what people don't say, once they get into the habit of not saying certain things around you.
Yup, this post is about the start of a journey that is still ongoing for me. It still takes work and I still lose focus and do poorly and tried to call that out at the end.
To your specific point, I probably was even worse in 2008 than what you experienced in 2010. That's probably true at every point since. I'm getting better, but I am sure you can find people even in the last year who would say this post doesn't reflect the Boz they met. I believe those people are getting fewer and their experiences less bad, but I am definitely not great at this yet so the post should be taken as a belief I hold and a behavior I aspire to.
Thanks for the honesty and careful articulation! I find myself to be a bit of bulldog myself, and it's hard to change ingrained habits. Thanks for the reminder!
> Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you.
> the start of a journey that is still ongoing
Then you still have a long way to go on that journey, because you apparently have no idea the damage you've done to the world with Facebook. You have help lead people into undermining their own privacy, straight into the hands of a surveillance state.
So keep on that journey. Maybe in a few decades, when it is far too late, you'll realize how much you have hurt humanity. For the time being, I expect you'll just dismiss this entire post.
/sigh/ I don't have many regrets in life, but you, "Boz", are one of them. I wish I never ran those 4-H programming projects, and never worked to get you interested in computers. It probably wouldn't have changed much, but maybe the problem we call "Facebook" would be just a little bit easier to fight.
I assume you already know this but it's not an easy journey and it will take time.
I am on the same journey as you and my conclusion is that I am essentially a creature driven by emotions. My emotions get the better of me and I revert back to my old state where I will bluntly tell someone how I feel about them and their work.
Just last week I had to bring appology chocolates to work. Self improvement was never easy.
Really, the main change I see now is that I almost immediately regret my words or actions, but I still have to work on the immediate apology that should follow that regret.
Don't beat yourself up too much. Diversity means having an honest full-spectrum cohort of people to grow with, not a curated one. If I removed people like you [us] (typically genius+passionate+outspoken+intellectually-arrogant) I would miss you. People might avoid you because they are weak, but you probably help tow the bottom line at fb more than you know.
I've struggled with similar in my career (eng@uber) to a lesser degree and these are some of my findings:
- in terms of long-term survival; friendship, connection and investing in humans brings much more satisfaction than any technical part of my work and will outlast the business every time.
- when I'm arguing a solution or iteration that I've designed, the harder I hold onto that solution the tougher it is to sell.
- every time I instruct an engineer rather than let them figure something out on their own it seems to not go in my favor.
- the best designs and implementations [at scale] in engineering [sadly, for my ego] always seem to require multi-faceted perspectives (a team) to simulate adequately and vet impact (business+social+tech).
- promotion and progression in an organization is a subjective mess, all biased, and largely driven by non-technical markers namely social proof, liking and perception.
I've heard so many horror stories about Boz and the extremely toxic work environment that he apparently cultivated. Good to see that at the very least, he's self aware.
It's not in your interests to be manipulative. People know when they are being manipulated, or they figure it out later and relationship rapidly goes out the window. You don't need to be manipulative with people to get what you want.
A realist here, I'm manipulative only with my foes. My friends and love interests I value them tremendously and I don't resort to such measures when dealing with them.
Don't they also call this empathy. I think it's critically important to resist the temptation to fire back at someone the moment you think you disagree. Take a few seconds, repeat in your head what the other person has said, then repeat that back to the person, then formulate a response. Remember, the hardest thing to do is to control your emotions, especially during times where most people can't help but get defensive.
I had a completely different interpretation of the incident at Facebook.
He had developed some key features that were now important. Instead of mentoring him to work better with others, his boss demoted him.
The boss was giving someone else a favor, making them the lead of this now-important project, some up-and-coming hotshot. He made up an excuse about "bad attitude", while just using it as cover for backstabbing him.
The OP probably had big $$$ in unvested options, so he had to play along and play nice, instead of quitting on the spot.
I'm going to write a follow up about how I wasn't mad about the feedback as much as I was mad nobody had told me sooner. We were a young company and didn't really have a management or mentorship skillset yet. We would all develop that together in the ensuing years and this was a major part of my motivation for pushing for it.
Sounds like there weren't any grownups around, honestly. I'm also getting the feeling that it's a fire-happy kind of place, maybe I'm wrong but that could explain the note-passing childishness. Maybe they were afraid of getting canned if they talked back to you.
I don't know if this is a lesson about being nice or a lesson about dealing with different personality types, I guess it depends on how much of an asshole you actually were. Personally I'd prefer an environment where you call my work "shit" and I say you have your head up your ass, it saves time and it's better than passive-aggressive weirdness and underhandedness but not everybody is like that.
Any place where people are arbitrarily fired is going to be toxic though, the reaction from the CTO and a few other things I've heard about Facebook kind of makes me think that's what's going on.
> The boss was giving someone else a favor, making them the lead of this now-important project, some up-and-coming hotshot. He made up an excuse about "bad attitude", while just using it as cover for backstabbing him.
so, basically someone who was competent and agreeable was favored by his boss to get a promotion, and the person who acted like a know-it-all dickhead 24/7 got sent to the basement.
You're confused about how the dickhead non-dickhead spectrum works.
From the viewpoint of a dickhead, an honest and intelligent person is a dickhead. The honest and intelligent person has the potential to expose the dickhead as a dickhead, so the dickhead will do everything he can to convince everyone else that the honest and intelligent person is a dickhead.
A dickhead would see an honest and intelligent person as a dickhead, and be able to lie convincingly enough to establish it as fact in the eyes of others.
In fact, a highly skilled dickhead can convince an honest person that "standing up for yourself" is a dickhead behavior.
I have no way of telling if the OP is a dickhead or not, because I haven't met him. My guess is "not a dickhead, he was just convinced by dickheads the he actually was the dickhead".
So, he learned to act in a manner least likely to offend dickheads. I don't want to work with dickheads, so I don't bother with that skill.
seeing as how there are, in this very thead, people that consider OP to have been a dickhead, i think i'm going to go with the primary source on this one.
Considering how the OP is the mythical 10x-100x programmer, I'd lean towards him not being a dickhead. He singlehandedly implemented several key features for FaceBook.
If FaceBook had an average employee instead of the OP, they might not have been as successful.
It's possible to be highly skilled in one area and very weak in another, and the median is almost always more important to the long-term success of a business. Look at it from the perspective of a CEO: is a hot-shot programmer nobody wants to work with more or less likely to be productive than a well-integrated team with a dozen people? Would you want to bet your company on that one person staying healthy, employed by you, never making a mistake, etc. or do you want to bet on a long-term model more sustainable than “Make sure this person never leaves”?
This is why the 10x mythologizing is so annoying. There are a few people who are 10x in specific areas or who might have periods of intense productivity but it's never true across the board for significant periods of time, and it's used to excuse a lot of bad behaviour by 1.2x programmers — not to mention the larger mistake of assuming that the limiting factor on projects is rarely absolute programming ability. In most cases, you see far better results from someone who might be maligned as a .8x programmer who communicates well with the team & users and relies on solid tools and practice rather than assuming sheer skill will save the day.
On the one hand, I've been in situations where dickheads would undermine me behind my back to management, tell me other people were undermining me, act like I was I a dickhead if I responded to a direct question from management directly instead of clearing it through them.
On the other hand, the dickhead always thinks he's a non-dickhead.
If everyone you meet is a dickhead, you're the dickhead.
So be kind to everybody, dickhead or non-dickhead.
Indeed. We should be under no illusion -- employment is a popularity contest. In non-startups, the only thing that matters is how much the people around you, especially the high-ranking people, like you. Other things matter only in the most extreme circumstances -- every normal value can be hand-waved away if the boss likes you enough.
If you want to be a successful employee, view yourself as a politician and run a successful campaign: minimize anything that will be viewed negatively, blatantly exploit peoples' biases to emphasize a positive image. Don't talk about divisive subjects, regardless of their relevance to your job. Anyone smart enough to see what's going on but naive enough to call you out will immediately be viewed badly, the only real threat to your power is someone who is smart enough to see the manipulation and experienced enough to respond to it through his own counter-manipulations.
Welcome to Life 101. It's all about sales + skill. Skill is one part of the equation, necessary but not sufficient. Sales is the other part - unfortunately a great salesman can go very far without hard skills (to be fair, a great salesman has unique skills).
This is a hard fact about life and something a lot of talented people realize way too late. Now you know. Focus on your pitch - ABC - always be closing. Every interaction in life is a transaction of some sort - your sales strategy will determine if you get a good deal or a raw deal.
"Every interaction in life is a transaction of some sort."
What about when a mother kisses her baby's head? What about when a friend offers a hug to someone who has just lost a loved one? What about when a kid gives a friendly smile to the kid who always gets bullied?
Are those transactions? Did those people get "good deals"?
Now I'm just some hyperbole-prone kid who isn't qualified to give advice to a Life Veteran like yourself, but I find myself wondering what you might learn if you stopped keeping score for awhile. In my experience, treating every interaction as a little game to maximize profit is a great way to scare away anyone who is interested in anything more worthwhile than profiting off of you.
Of course those are all transactions. The helping hand, the caring kiss from the depths of motherly love, etc - they are win-win transactions. The baby gets comfort and love and the mother gets a dose of oxytocin to encourage further bonding. The friend offering a hug provides comfort and gets the good feelings of helping/offering comfort. Win-wins, but still a transaction, an exchange of value. Time, attention, love, care - these are all benefits that can be given and received.
Same with business - win-win transactions are best. When you provide something that others find valuable and you receive something valuable in return (loyalty, money, hype, etc) it's a good thing.
Surely you would agree that the amount of oxytocin the mother gets is not determined by the quality of her "sales strategy."
Thank you for clarifying that you were not advocating the rather shallow, exploitative, and depressing approach to life that I misinterpreted from your previous comment.
> What about when a mother kisses her baby's head? What about when a friend offers a hug to someone who has just lost a loved one? What about when a kid gives a friendly smile to the kid who always gets bullied?
Well, there are the obvious ones: evolutionarily beneficial responses. Still transactions, unconsciously working for the benefit of the species.
The others are more selfish. Obviously not angry or malicious, but they convey certain clear benefits for little to no effort. Definitely transactional.
Just because they are transactions, however, doesn't mean you have to weigh them in terms of some sort of emotional "profit", or they're in any way unwanted. It's just a way of talking about them, even modelling them for study.
Nobody is good enough to warrant being a torvalds-esque dickhead.
"get away with" is entirely different.
I think the world would be a better place if Torvalds took a couple martial arts classes and 1) got his ass handed to him a couple of times and 2) felt physically self confident enough that he no longer felt the need to verbally beat every body else up before they got a chance to do it to him.
There are a lot of successful sales people who'd agree with you. Choosing a non-sales field makes it so you don't have to focus on this as much since much of your work is non-social and you have a good excuse to be in a corner staring at the screen, but the social element is still the most important part of maintaining and improving your employment status. Your social status is much more important than the quality of your actual work product.
An old and dear friend, who started out as a brilliant civil engineer but moved to marketing where she has spent most of her professional life, would completely ratify your second sentence.
Unfortunately, I find it harder and harder to refute her assertion that in the end, it all comes down to marketing.
I'm currently re-reading the classic "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, and one of the principles he outlines to win people over to your way of thinking is to "show respect for the other person's opinion. Never say 'you're wrong'." He tells a story from Ben Franklin's autobiography outlining how insolent and opinionated he used to be, to the point that nobody could stand being around him. One day, someone wiser and older pointed this out to him and from that moment, Franklin made it a point to never directly contradict people or positively assert his own opinions. Instead, he'd say things like "I may be wrong. Let's examine the facts." This warmed people up instead of immediately putting them on the defensive and completely changed the success he had in dealing with people. A little tact and diplomacy goes a long way towards persuading others towards your way of thinking. And you never have to say "you're wrong."
I wonder how much of this inability to be nice to others/empathize is due to tech selection bias and how much is due to lack of socialization as children? Before computer games, etc., kids spent a lot more time playing outside with their friends in person.
400 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadI'd like to think that it was through mindful practice that I've managed to tame my aggression. Perhaps it is, partly. But the real reason that I'm a lot easier to get along with now probably has to do with aging out of the testosterone-flooded decade of my 20s.
Mindfulness is tough though. I've actually had to work pretty hard on being aware of my reactions and the intentions behind them. If I find myself getting upset, my face getting hot or my fingers tingling, then I ask myself what it is I want out of the situation I'm in. Usually the best way to get that is to take a deep breath and try to understand _why_ the other person doesn't understand my point of view.
Of course, being aggressive is a very useful trait at times. Learning when to use that trait is the tricky part.
Don't assume that just because someone is crotchety, indignant, or combative that he/she is intelligent.
If an engineer is outstanding, their actions can speak for themselves, and they won't have to put on airs; if an engineer is mediocre, their only option to hide it will be arrogance.
It's perfectly OK to disagree with someone; but please consider doing so in a respectful and thoughtful tone. Remember that others often shut-down when they read criticism, even when well warranted. The way you phrase and present yourself defines whether you're giving criticism or critique.
I think being selectively kind makes a lot more sense. I'm kind to children and animals and my loved ones. People at work, retail staff, etc should be prepared to not have their emotions constantly validated and deal with disagreement and other things that are unpleasant.
I'm not one of those "grow a thick skin, jerk" types, but there's this cheap sentiment I see about how everyone needs to be more kind and compassionate, and when its not phoned in, it usually ends up as a way to take advantage of others. Its easy for celebrity millionaire Kurt Vonnegut to write about compassion and be quoted by tumblerinas and its totally another thing for some kid no one gives a shit about trying to make his way in the world try to live it.
I find high-concept philosophies are often the playthings of the well-off and comfortable. If you're fighting for your living, its not a luxury most of us can have. Sadly, this often justifies hostility, but I think there's a sane middle-ground here, but curt statements like "be kind" just seems so classist and off-putting to me. Like a soccer mom telling me how wonderful the Maharishi is or how relaxing doing 4 hours of Yoga is (no, she doesnt work, her husband does) and after I got off a long shift and dealt with a lot of shit and a crappy commute.
Cheap sentiment just doesn't resolve the fundamental issue facing humanity today and probably until our final extinction event: we are all competing for the very same resources and competition can sometimes be ugly. It doesn't need to be truly awful and we shouldn't be encouraged to be overly negative and vindictive, but conflict and disagreement happens on a certain level and pretending we can kindly make it go away is just being unrealistic about our fundamental economic beings. Kindness is often taken advantage of as one party feels obligated to engage in it moreso than the other. This is a fairly large problem in gender politics where we raise women to be kind and then they find themselves at a disadvantage to men in the workplace who don't have these values.
Considering everyone here is visiting a hard-nosed libertarian-leaning entrepreneur forum about becoming wealthy quickly, but the second something pseudo-spiritual gets posted suddenly we're all Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree. We're not. If anything, the personality types here are very, very far from any sort of selfless ideal. Patting ourselves on the back because our six-figure salaries let us rise above the struggle doesn't mean the struggle doesn't exist and that struggle means acting in a rational, usually unkind way. High class pseudo-spirituality is such a hilariously hypocritical thing its a running gag on HBO's Silicon Valley, yet here we are Gavin Belson'ing it up. At least I'm honest with myself to say that, no, I'm not "kind" by these standards and that I will argue and fight with you when I feel its appropriate and more importantly -- I will not feel bad about it afterwards.
Sadly, most of the replies to my comment are fairly unkind responses telling me how much of a horrible person I am, especially to retail staff even though I gave no concrete examples of how I act. How ironic. If anyone is truly interested, I meditate daily and follow Buddhist ideals. I just refuse to go to the yogi-like extremes of insincere self-love in an attempt to con my way out of the struggle of Samsara. Accepting the reality of who I am is real mindfulness and liberating, and that person is not this uber-kind enlightened being who is 'above it all' and I doubt anyone here reading this is either. If anything, if ...
I've consistently found that (in particular when treated with kindness and respect) poorer people respond with kindness in much greater measure than wealthy people. Like the author said, kindness isn't the same as niceness.
The addition of "retail staff" here surprised me.
I'm a techie who took a break from tech and startups the past few months to help out my S.O., who owns a retail store. I worked the front counter, ran inventory, etc. for the past 3 months.
I had never worked retail before. I got into tech at an early age and skipped most of the "menial" jobs that typical American teenagers have. So working retail was eye-opening for me.
Retail workers get paid shit wages to deal with your crap. Yes, you. Whatever crap you've been dealing with, we have to take it with a smile and help you out. I've stood behind a counter and listened to a homeless guy ramble about anything and everything for 12 minutes (I had a small clock within view.)
Your attitude in this post indicates to me that you could probably use a bit of this type of work yourself. If you think it's beneath you, doubly so.
If you're curious what it's like for a techie/introvert/successful entrepreneur to work retail, I've been blogging about it. (Blog link in my profile) To be honest, the 3 months I spent there made me a far better person than any given 3 months I spent in the tech industry (I've run tech companies for 14 years now.) It humbled me, and gave me far more respect for my fellow human beings. And I learned there's nothing like the priceless joy in someone's eyes when you do something for them and can see pure joy radiate from them. I hope you, too, can experience this.
You're chastising him for his "attitude"; what attitude? He's correct and he didn't display any attitude other than simple honesty.
The reason people say it's exhausting to "be nice" constantly is specifically because of people like you. You've made up your mind on something that's completely outlandish and unfair, but you're going to attack him for being "unkind" because he doesn't agree with you.
Stop acting like that and maybe more of these "blunt" people would stop being so damned blunt to you.
There is so much projection here I'm not even sure where to start.
Lets say I'm working with retail worker who has been trained to be as difficult as possible to stop my RMA attempt for something I bought that was broken. I can see things from her point of view and understand her paycheck comes from her financial masters who want her to deny my RMA, but that infringes on my return rights. Now I express this as clearly as I can. Guess what, now I'm an "asshole" because $big_co wants to be able to casually rip people off.
I pretty much got into a yelling match about a serious engine fault on my wife's warrantied car a few years ago. Its only after I was particularly nasty did they relent and do the work. Why does the guy making $12 an hour behind the counter want to deny me my entitled service? Because Jeep told him to limit this kind of very expensive work.
This is so much more complex than you make it. Niceness and kindness do not resolve the fundamental conflict we are having. If anything, it allows the kind person to be taken advantage of. If I wasn't at the dealer with my wife they would have steamrolled her the same way other mechanics have steamrolled her.
The world is a nasty place and how we handle it is situation dependent. Want me to be nice to you? Treat me with some goddamn respect and don't try to rip me off. Because if you don't, you'll deal with a lot of "assholes." "Assholes" who are just working schmucks trying to get through the day without being ripped off.
I think the "kind" people of HN need to stop calling everyone who disagrees with them or have different motivators "assholes." Disagreement, argument, and negotiation are fundamentals in life. Retail staff need to learn to handle that. Its a huge entitlement to be this snotty retail person who hates all his customers. The lady who wants to return the broken food processor isn't a "bitch" because she got you off your freemium game for a minute and she's not a "mindless breeder" because she fed her crying baby on your counter. Or "stuck up" because she had to answer the pediatricians call on her iphone while you were processing the return.
Think of communication as having two layers, an emotional one and a factual one. In your car example, the factual layer remains the same, "You are going to fix my car." But you can either combine that with an emotional layer of "And I am fucking pissed off with you right now because you fucking don't do your job, you useless twit", or you could layer it with "I understand that your job is difficult and you're doing the best you can, I don't want to make things difficult for you, but the contract clearly says that the car is under warranty, the car is clearly broken, and I'm not leaving until it's fixed."
And it's definitely possible to disagree, even sharply, in a considerate manner - eg focus on the point of disagreement, not on the person disagreeing; avoid name-calling; point out that the issue you disagree with may be valid in other cases; etc.
I agree that it's not worth constantly worrying about what other people think of you, but it turns out that's not usually what other people are expecting anyways. Rather, it's just that when you make a mistake, apologize, try not to make it again, and move on. Everybody makes mistakes - I've seen some folks I consider very socially adept make pretty embarrassing gaffes. But usually the folks who're viewed as socially skilled just brush it off and update their mental model of how not to offend people, while the ones that people get mad at are those who are either completely oblivious or react with defensiveness.
What's with the potshots at younger people that I keep seeing on HN? Things like undermining their experiences, their abilities, or their viewpoints. "Pff, I used to think like you, but now I know better"; "I did the same thing, but then I realized that I was being a moron"; "Let me guess, you haven't <experienced/got X> yet? Then your opinion is useless"; "Young people without kids will stupidly work themselves to death for their employee because they have nothing better to do with their time".
I can't say that I've experienced that older people (talking only adults here) are more socially apt, or compassionate, than younger people. And that sentence was completely optional to the rest of the paragraph.
Just because you're good at office politics doesn't mean you're a kind person. It just means you're good at working people over emotionally and catering to them for your own personal gain.
However, when you open with, "this is also incredibly exhausting", it indicates to me that either a) you find yourself surrounded with an unhealthy amount of hyper-sensitive people, or b) there might be more to the "be kind" methodology that you have yet to internalize. I carried around this attitude for most of my life, and just recently am I coming to understand that truly internalizing kindness, the way the OP describes, is not "exhausting" in any way, shape, or form (unless you have kids. Children break this rule in half).
Another thing that sticks out is "if you're fighting for your living". I agree that, if you're truly fighting for your living, kindness and compassion should take a backseat to climbing Maslow's hierarchy to the point of comfortable reflection. Given that your english seems to be good and you're posting highly articulate opinions on an Internet forum, I'd be very surprised if your line of work forced you to reject kindness as part of your job, and I urge you to consider a new line of work if at all possible.
I'm a lot better at this today than I used to be, mostly because I don't take work so personally today. I still want to do well, but if I screw up, I don't take it as an indictment of myself as a person. This makes it a lot easier to, say, admit something is my fault QUICKLY -- if it is -- which allows us to focus on the solution instead of whose fault it is.
There are (IMO very rare) occasions where a soft word won't do the trick, and that is what the big stick is for. But almost everyone, even very obnoxious people, usually respond very well to a little bit of niceness, and it costs basically nothing to give it a try.
A soccer mom is a very valuable person who also does work, work that kids appreciate a lot, don't be so belittling. If you are jealous of her, try to find a partner with a good career that allows you to be a soccer dad.
"Reaction I do not understand" is not the same thing as "reaction that is arbitrary."
Frequently a decision that appears to make no sense starts to do so when you put yourself in the shoes of the person who made it. Their experiences in life have been different than yours (guaranteed!), so there will be no shortage of cases where you look at something and think "A" while that other person looks at the same thing and thinks "B." But that doesn't make either of you arbitrary; you both have reasons for your interpretation, they're just different.
> People at work, retail staff, etc should be prepared to not have their emotions constantly validated and deal with disagreement and other things that are unpleasant
But that was the whole point of the article: it's possible to disagree with others in a way that is still respectful. Keeping that bit of respect in what you say is really all it takes. You don't have to agree with everything they say or spend all day pumping sunshine up their skirts; you just have to have enough respect for them to hold back from turning objection into insult. It's stopping at "I disagree with you" and not taking the extra step to "and therefore you are a bad person."
> Its easy for celebrity millionaire Kurt Vonnegut to write about compassion and be quoted by tumblerinas
Let's say I read your comment and, instead of taking the time to try and address your points directly and individually, I just fired back something along the lines of "you're quite a sperglord."
Would you be comfortable with that response? Would it feel pleasant, or even neutral? Or would it feel like a personal attack -- something that would make you feel an impulse to lash out back at me?
It would feel like an attack, of course. Why? Because I'm not dealing with you as an individual. I'm just picking you up and stuffing you into a bucket with a label on it. It would be dismissive, and people don't like being dismissed.
Now ask yourself: having said all that, can you imagine someone else feeling the same way -- and reacting the same way, as if you had attacked them -- when you dismiss them as a "tumblerina"?
Just as I don't care about your feelings, I also don't care that you thing I am a sperglord. It's your opinion and you're entitled to it.
I agree that we must be nice (smiling, saying "thank you", being polite, etc). I see it as a social convention, a sort of rule like driving in the right side of the road and following the traffic signs. It makes society work smoothly and we, as social beings, are hardwired to react positively to it. Now being kind... That just assumes an emotial investement in the other person, which I simply don't have with 90% of the people I interact daily.
To conclude, I'll respond to the OP's article. It's not the author's fault. His co-workers don't want to work with him because he wasn't nice, besides him being more than capable for the job. IMO it shows how unprofessional they are.
This a million times. For lack of a better term, I find a lot of managers refuse to work with anyone but a "Uncle Tom" geek who will just say yes to everything and smile politely and never, ever correct bad ideas or wrongful assumptions. This leads to bad implementations, impossible requirements, unrealistic deadlines, bullshitting, and other issues people have to deal with.
If you can't work with the guy who occasionally says, "Whoa this is a bad practice for reasons x, y, and z," then that says a lot about how broken that culture is and not a lot about that person.
But dealing with an unkind person is also exhausting. And many people will, at some point, choose to not interact with that person unless absolutely necessary. That might be worth considering as well.
Does that mean you have to constantly agree with others? Not at all. But there are different ways of disagreement. One choice is "Well, you're wrong, and stupid, and here's my way". Another one is saying "I hear what you said, and I acknowledge you feel that way. But I'd like to point out there are things you might have missed". Sometimes, pointing out those missed items is the kindness.
Fake kindness - "I love everybody so much, and we all should just relax more" - is something you rightfully abhor. And I think you are right that it is a plaything of the privileged.
But concern for another person's wellbeing? I've experienced it from a wide gamut of people of all ages and classes. From a 3-year old sharing their cake, to a middle-aged manager taking hours to help me understand my career, to a 80-year old woman living on a meagre income, concerned people living next to her would feel welcome in the neighborhood.
If I could ask a favor of you, consider that kindness. Not the reshared Vonnegut quotes, but simply living with an awareness of others emotions. Not in deference to those emotions, but with respect for them.
But you still don't seem to have a point beyond that it isn't good to ignore real conflict while faking nice and it's annoying when affluent people assume all people can adopt their lifestyle.
I'd suggest you go back to basics and figure out what it could mean to be kind to others while still getting what you need and not being a doormat. Because at this rate you'll soon start accidentally quoting Mean Girls and treating it as a coherent life philosophy.
What part is exhausting? Emotional fallout can be expensive in terms of time and mental energy.
I don't know you, so this isn't a critique of you directly, but if being kind takes special effort you're doing something wrong. It shouldn't take much work at all. You don't need to be a mind reader and try to predict peoples reactions to things, most of the time it's just being mindful of how you act in certain situations and if that behavior really makes sense (for instance: if someone comes to you with a novice question, do you make them feel welcome, or do you make them feel stupid? Either way takes the same amount of effort, but one has a much better long term payoff.)
I think if this comes naturally to you then you're perhaps more gifted in that area than you may want to give yourself credit for. In my experience most people have a hard time being mindful and it's definitely exhausting at first. I certainly have trouble with it and it takes work to remember.
I reference the perennially over-quoted Kenyon commencement speech by David Foster Wallace only because he put it - where "it" is the trouble most people have with mindfulness - much better than I ever could:
> If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
> The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
> Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
> Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
Maybe we can read comments more kindly, and give terse words the benefit of the doubt?
Being kind can be more concise. Here is an example that my fiance recently pointed out...
I think the single biggest mistake people make in communication is reminding the other person they are incorrect when that does not change the content.
"As I told you Monday, the reason is X."
"I have not heard from you when I asked for feedback, so I am following up."
"We could have done it the other way, but since you already set it up, let's use this."
It is amazingly tempting, almost everyone does it, and your communication becomes an order of magnitude more benevolent when you edit those clauses out.
For more ideas on how to be concise and kind, I highly recommend the parenting book, _How to Talk so Kids Will Listen, and Listen so Kids Will Talk_. It is not just for parents. What works with 13 year old kids also works with 30 year old kids.
And in the case where your only relationship with these people is online in the first place? (As in this community, but also in quite a few FOSS projects or remote-only companies.)
It never hurts to be aware of the issue. Beyond that, try to stay within community norms. Every approach will have failure modes. Know and accept which ones are likely with what you are doing, and deal with them when they come.
In some communities this will mean that you are very straightforward and technical. Don't say anything emotional. Always work from facts. If you are misunderstood, note it, apologize for the misunderstanding, and move on.
In other communities it might mean that you actively solicit input from decision makers, and carefully avoid controversial topics.
A variety of approaches will work. But following strategy X in a community that is set up for strategy Y is a recipe for disaster.
In general, when I want to correct someone's understanding I frame it as a failure of my own understanding. Like, hey, I'm the asshole here, would you do me a favor by going over this one more time for me? This is great because it allows the other person to graciously concede your point, and to feel like they're the one helping you. It's also great because when it turns out you're wrong, you don't have to backtrack.
Additionally I find it useful as an exercise in suspending belief. Sure, I think I'm right, but let's set that belief aside for a moment and explore our understanding. Nothing misleads people more than the conviction that they're right.
It is not economically or socially beneficial for me to be as blunt as I am - but my personal morality triumphs over both of those. If someone is wrong, they are wrong and I will let them know they are wrong.
It won't win me any friends and it isn't beneficial for me to be as blunt as I am - but I don't treat life like an economist, trying to maximize use out of people and my relationships with them.
Now at 41 I'm probably indistinguishable in action from the group you've categorized as having a "deep seated need to win friends" not because I do actually have such a need, but because I realized my need to be vocally, publicly "right" was mostly a manifestation of a core lack of confidence, something which has since been mostly alleviated. Also, in retrospect, I was actually wrong about a lot of things I was sure I was right about because I was intelligent but not wise and the two are often divergent.
All that said, there's a difference between being honest and blunt, and being needlessly honest and cruel.
As mentioned in this thread, in text, tone is most certainly an issue. The photographer Howard Schatz did an interesting series, where he takes photographs of actors "In Character", among others Ricky Gervais[1], and he says at one point: "The other thing about it is: Comedy comes from a good or a bad place. And I think that the funniest people always comes from a good place. Two people can say the same thing, and one person can be so nasty and vitriolic -- and therefore not funny. And the other can be, you know, a celebration. You know, you can be in on the joke." --Ricky Gervais
[1] http://www.howardschatz.com/film.php?ID=3814
I see telling people they're wrong as selfish. It's almost never necessary, and in a probabilistic sense is not the most efficient way to make them correct, because instead of just changing their mind, they have to tamp down their ego, avoid getting ticked at you, and then change their mind. Bam: you've just made their lives harder, for the satisfaction of being explicit that you're more correct than they are.
But if they do take that time and say something, then it's not unreasonable to consider the goal. Is it to demonstrate superiority and massage ego? Unkindness works well. If it's to help someone correct a mistake, do better next time or bring their conversational partners thinking closer to theirs on a subject, then kindness is likely to work better.
Personally, I prefer to work with someone who's right and delivers the message in a way they think I and my other colleagues will respond well to, than someone who's right and delivers the message thoughtlessly, or in a way designed to maximise their own pleasure.
I especially like that you validate their question and then convincingly explore the nuance to the situation, framing your response around their question. Then you make your ultimate position subjective ("Personally, I prefer...") instead of trying to make it some objective truth ("it's better to be kind."), which allows that the others person's position is also subjective - merely a personal preference - and thus changeable.
A+, effective communication.
I personally prefer (there it is!) to work in an environment where being incorrect isn't such a big deal everyone thinks you have to walk around eggshells in order to point it out.
I responded to another poster in this thread and told them they may just be in the wrong place. Or to put it another way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4hqFvXm57M&t=01m23s
What you read as effective communication I read as the guy whose mindset is so far off of what's effective it isn't even worth engaging him.
I also think there are degrees to how much one can avoid contradicting others. I also want to be able to take contrary positions in meetings without hedging and without people getting upset or other nonsense. I don't think that has to be avoided by "walking around on eggshells". If it had that effect in my life I would never have adopted it.
Additionally none of my comments are really about cultural proclivities: I am opposed to trying to rigidly enforce communication standards within a group. "Sorry MReiland, you didn't state your position about why we shouldn't be using the braid data structure with enough sensitivity." The thing you're taking a position against sounds terrible but isn't really the thing we're talking about.
> I see telling people they're wrong as selfish. It's almost never necessary, and in a probabilistic sense is not the most efficient way to make them correct, because instead of just changing their mind, they have to tamp down their ego, avoid getting ticked at you, and then change their mind. Bam: you've just made their lives harder, for the satisfaction of being explicit that you're more correct than they are.
That's the context of this conversation (a statement made by YOU).
If I can't approach someone about improving/fixing/changing something being worked on then I have no interest in working with them, and I have enough control over my own life that I don't have to.
If someone is really going to insist that I need to spend my time trying to work with them, they're going to get dismissed and I'm going to go on with my life.
I have enough control over my own life that I don't have to deal with those sorts of issues. Perhaps if you're working in a job where you feel forced to have to deal with other people's bullshit than you suddenly feel as if it's important to start worrying about this sort of thing, but I'm not there.
And no amount of communication is going to put me there.
I think maybe we're misunderstanding each other. I'm not saying don't approach someone to improve/fix/change something. I'm making a statement about manner of approach. Being unable to approach people when they're wrong is intolerable. Being an asshole about it will make you intolerable. The statement I made is about finding a middle way.
I've lived much of my life like that - but what's my goal here - to be right? Or to be happy? To me being happy means working towards harmonious relationships. I'm not going to pretend someone is right when they're not, but I might be a bit more diplomatic in my communication.
I'm not sure I get the morality angle. Is it immoral to chose not to contradict someone? Not in my moral code.
I find misinformation and ignorance to be a detriment to humankind in its entirety. It drags us down and hides the truth behind the world and how it works.
People believe things that are wrong - myself included. When I am wrong, I hope for others to correct me.
Spreading wrong and misinformed beliefs, to me, is morally wrong. What good comes from spreading wrong information?
So, your personal morality requires you to not only offend people, but to reduce the odds of them hearing what you're saying because you choose to deliver it in an unkind manner. This is absurdly self-serving of you, and really only goes to show that you're not actually interested in "[letting] them know they are wrong", but rather in demonstrating that you are right to the detriment of personal relationships.
In that case, they will probably not understand that they are wrong. There's a saying that people will not remember what you said, but will remember how you made them feel. There is a lot of truth in that. Once you tell someone they're wrong, they feel bad and are much less likely to accept truth from you - even if it's obvious. A mountain of evidence will be seen as a personal attack and your message won't get through.
I went back and rewrote that paragraph after realizing that I basically said "you're approach is wrong". So instead I tried to frame it as a problem with the listener and their emotional response. There is truth in both way to present it, but isn't one more likely to get you to change your approach?
I think the best way to get into the habit of doing this is to actually believe it. Respect the people around you enough that you consider your own misunderstanding as likely a reason for disagreement as theirs. Constructive communication then comes completely naturally, instead of feeling forced.
The pattern in the examples you mentioned is the desire, conscious or not, to twist the knife a little and squeeze out a "sorry" from the other person. The desire for someone else to realize an error they've made turns into a desire for guilt, a general "think better next time" that is just specific enough to hurt but vague enough to not actually be helpful. It's like training an animal with a blunt instrument and expecting that to get results anytime fast.
:-)
That may be due to the fact that the little smile at the end of a sentence can look really self-satisfied or fake.
Especially if you were to dismiss any complainers by calling them elitists, and afterward tack a smile on the end of the sentence. Here, I'm being nice too! :) :) :)
:?|
It makes me look stupid, so it can only be a sincere smile. Or maybe I'm just stupid... Well to be fair, we're discussing the psychology of smileys.
I have a theory about ":)", that people use it when there's a discrepancy between what they say and what they think, through the same mechanism of humor (which is also about discrepancies). And so in general, I don't trust people who use it strangely. But now, they're all going to use :3... We're doomed.
Wait, I mean :D
:P
Oh, and it blows to copy-and-paste code into one of those blasted chat programs... hateful things.
It's really weird, but in Hipchat, it always throws me off a little bit when I include an emoticon, but the resulting graphic conveys a slightly different connotation than I was expecting.
It's a generational thing tho. 😁 Try and find a college aged girl that doesn't use emojis. Only ones that don't are "conscientious objectors", and to most people in that age group and younger emoji are as ambient as air.
PG's a great example of this. In almost every interview I've seen with him, he comes across as warm and sincere. In almost every online comment I've read of his, he comes across as cold and terse to the point of dismissiveness. Clearly these aren't different people, but the medium shapes the message in more ways than many of us grok. Something that sounds matter-of-fact in my head when I write it will often sound dickish to those who read it.
Being right and being kind aren't mutually exclusive.
The problem I've found is I literally get ignored and end up repeatedly dealing with the same mess until I stop being "kind" about it.
I generally have to do literally 10x as much work to be "kind" than when I'm less generous about it. The problem with kindness is its frequently taken [in IT, in places I've worked] as it not being a serious problem that actually needs to be addressed except as a favor to you. It eventually, frequently, gets to the point where serious problems are repeatedly introduced and you end up having to clean it up.
Because from their point of view, if it really was a problem, you would have stopped being nice after the first or second time.
What's unkind is saying, "You're an idiot, and that's a ridiculous idea." Attacking people is not kind, but directness _can_ be kind.
On the other hand, you deserve to be shown some kindness too. If your coworkers don't listen to you, maybe it's time to start looking for a new job.
I don't call people idiots at work but I can behave in a way some people view as "adversarial".
> On the other hand, you deserve to be shown some kindness too. If your coworkers don't listen to you, maybe it's time to start looking for a new job.
Oh, they listen they just don't agree. That is the problem with the general "kindness" bit. People simply assume if you are being kind about it that it isn't a big deal.
Many, many people operate on the "If you are not upset, this is not a serious issue". After all, if it only impacts them rarely...it isn't important to them personally.
I am currently in a situation like that, and have been in similar situations over the years. There seems to be this gift that many people have where they can lie on a near compulsive basis, and no one will do anything about it. Disagreeing with them in a reasoned and polite manner is beyond ineffective, somehow "you're wrong" on their part wins every argument, regardless of the evidence. Only when you eventually get so fed up and cause a scene pointing out blatant problems, errors, and incompetence, only then does something finally happen, but of course then the response is "hey man, why didn't you just say something?" And despite there being a long paper trail of doing exactly that with no success, this tactic once again wins the day, and the reputation of the one who freaks out is the one that is tarnished in the eyes of management. And then of course, the cycle begins all over again.
I don't ask why you have to put a gun to some people's heads to get them to do the job they are paid (handsomely) for, that I can understand, but why is it so common that no one is willing to stand up for what is right, and for management to allow this behavior? I have seen it on different projects in different cities, and across various industries. It really makes me wonder if somehow the problem is with me and I try to reason through that, but as hard as I try I just can't make that case.
The first is Red Riding Hood's quip, "Nice is is different than good", which is then fleshed out later by the witch: "You're so nice. You're not good, you're not bad, you're just nice. I'm not good, I'm not nice, I'm just right."
I think "kind" and "good" are reasonable synonyms here, and Boz and Sondheim express very similar sentiments.
This post reads like someone discovering the line between aggressive and assertive. Aggressive is most definitely unkind. Assertive is often confused with unkind, but it isn't really that: it's about demonstrating respect both for yourself and for those around you.
Totally agree, especially in regard to when people share their projects on HN. The HN community moderation always seemed to be based on a very superficial rules - don't swear, don't mention banned keywords X Y or Z. Never have they seemed to seriously consider the impact that words have on other people, instead of just the words themselves.
We all know the last 20% (polish) takes 80% of the work, and isn't the fun stuff. Yet that's generally what gets criticized when someone shares a link.
For any of my hobby projects, it's about making a POC or rickety MVP. I want to build things and learn quickly, not doing the last 20% schlub work that eats at my time to learn something else. Because of that, and what I've seen of the reception to other hobby projects, I have determined that HN is not an appropriate forum for me to share projects with.
I'm 100% guilty of criticizing the lack of polish on some things that get posted. Often times because I am not familiar enough to criticize more important details that may not be apparent to the average observer.
For example - I might have to comb through an entire project in a programming language I'm not familiar with to perhaps give feedback on a better algorithm they could have used for X to improve performance... Or I could criticize that their search feature is entirely broken and always results in an empty results page.
The latter is easier to find and a casual user might run into it, although it might be a pain for the programmer to fix on the front end. The former will likely have less notice for the casual user, but is more beneficial for the programmer.
This is my take on why you see a lot of criticism about the lack of polish compared to other aspects or details.
Of course there's no rule against swearing.
This whole description is so remote from everything we try to do that I'm at a loss to know what else to say.
Previously, I said to try an experiment using multiple accounts where you post comments with a swear word and slightly censored swearing, versus just posting uncensored swearing and nothing else different. You'll quickly see the relative difference in the community's reaction.
You'll only get voted down for it when the swearing makes it harder to read your comment, or conveys an emotional urgency unwarranted by the thread. For instance: "Fuck you" is unlikely to be well-received in any thread.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URHPD6AJ5Fg&t=2m (Bill ends up calling his guest a fascist)
[1] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-23/don-t-ever-...
The piece you link to seems to be more about the field pieces which are not what was being discussed, and not what the parent was comparing O'Reilly's interviews to.
I don't watch O'Riley, but that's my perception from reading about things he's done/said.
It doesn't cost nothing, it's costs a lot of time and attention to find out what they're comfortable with and much attention to filter yourself to to fit that, so no you shouldn't just do it without a good reason.
Every internet message board has its own culture with its own take on what's "right" and what's "wrong", and on HN (and reddit) the institutionally accepted way of being mean is misusing the downvoting / flagkilling system to attempt to bleep out someone else's opinion because you disagree with it and labeled it as "toxic" from your perspective.
I mean, it's one thing to downvote someone because of spam or noise (e.g. one line posts of "lolwtf" or "this is dumb"), but every time I scroll through the comments and see discussion chains of folks arguing some valid points (about say referrals and paywalls or the ever controversial issue of sexism) under a flagkilled or completely invisible down-voted-to-hell post, I think to myself "this shouldn't be how our community operates."
I basically stopped commenting (well, except now -- doh) here on HN because of how frequently I saw toxic responses and punishment down-voting. There are a noisy subset of users here who either (a) can't understand or respect generalizations, especially based on older/real-life experience, or (b) demand "proof" for any claim, or (c) will punish any kind of not-narrowly-PC statement. And then the blatantly rude. Folks who say something in a comment they'd never dare to say to your face.
Therefore I've given up on caring and now much prefer Reddit's community. Less pinheads there, greater topic variety, greater sense of fun, can collapse threads, can delete comments much later (if you discover one that attracts a hate mob). I still enjoy reading HN, mostly the off-site articles linked to. But not so much the comment threads here. Not anymore.
I'd be less annoyed by a downvote from pg, because I probably deserved it, than a downvote from someone completely random, who I might not care about.
In some ways, I also wish downvoting cost you a point like it does on stackoverflow.
For the longest time I was confused at seeing down-voted comments because I mentally assumed that downvotes mean "this is a troll comment / this is some kind of abusive comment". Not so.
Also (and I've said this before so apologies for repeating myself!), if downvotes do mean 'disagreement', could we get rid of the graying out of down-voted comments, or maybe just make it an account preference? I'm interested in reading viewpoints that I might not agree with and graying out the comment makes it really hard to do so. It also seems to fit better with the model of "downvote = this comment shouldn't be in the conversation".
Eg when I don't know how you perceive the comments in the vicinity of the discussion, it is harder for me to understand your comment's intentions and finer points.
Of course this doesn't apply to peripherical features such as the colour of the header bar.
If a comment is disagreeable but worthwhile, my preference is to give a substantive response. If a comment is value-subtracting, even if I agree with the sentiment, I'll downvote it (and may take the time to explain the downvote if I think my explanation will be helpful.)
The main attributes I consider to make a comment value-subtracting are:
- substantial factual errors (not just a nitpick, but core to the point)
- gratuitous negativity or unnecessary incivility
- waste of space ("me too", memes or jokes except if they're edw519 caliber, excessive references to irrelevant topics such as mentioning someone else's religion several times in a thread that has nothing to do with that)
- extremely poor reasoning or communication, to the degree that trying to engage substantively becomes difficult
It should be common sense but I suspect not everyone with the ability to downvote has such considerations and the HN guidelines¹ offer very little comment on that.
I'm guessing that mods think that once you've risen above the downvote reputation threshold you must be qualified and should have a good criteria on how to use this newly given privilege.
I'm not trying to tell anyone how to do their job, but maybe it would be useful to add some guidelines for that too (Voting, specifically), I think I like your guidelines.
¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I admire PGs work too, but don't you think this criteria would introduce to the community a herd-like mindset of following perceived moral leaders instead of evaluating ideas for their own standing?
If someone important likes what I said, I'm going to think that I made a good comment. If they dislike it, then I'm going to reconsider what I said a bit more deeply. Neither of these would change my mindset from a simple up/down vote. I'd want a comment or discussion to take place first.
1st of all. This is not facebook. Upvotes and downvotes are not likes/dislikes.
That said, here's another way to explain what I meant: Commenting is not about pleasing readers (is also not about displeasing, so be kind, like the post recommends). If "someone important" likes or dislikes what you said, should not have such an impact that would make you consider changing your mind, your mind should be changed by feedback in the form of comprehensive information, that kind of feedback is much more meaningful than someone else's emotion (or even disagreement by itself without feedback provided).
There can be many reason/motives to upvote/downvote, but emotion is not reason, acting on emotion alone is just compulsive.
I don't think PG would ever downvote you if he dislikes what you said, I'd like to think he's more sophisticated than that; he would either have an interest (motive) on muting the info you introduce to the conversation (but that's sketchy), or even better he would provide feedback (reason) on why he disagrees with you. (But I have absolutely no idea on how would PG make decisions, I'm just being rhetorical here and using PG as an example of "someone important")
So my point is:
You should not make comments expecting PGs approval (or any other figure you consider "someone important", which is what I stated as a "perceived moral leader"), because that's the very definition of a "herd-like mindset of following perceived moral leaders", if HN introduces tools that allow that mindset, the community's value will suffer. Being inspired by leaders is cool, but allowing them to make your mind just by liking or disliking what you said is very dangerous (and immature).
You should participate in a conversation with confidence, and to obtain confidence you need to be well informed and prepared to test your ideas.
EDIT: Rephrased a few things, but didn't change substance I hope.
In the case of your example, if someone important likes what you said and you feel rewarded for that, you're more likely to say that (or something similar) again, regardless of the objective merit of the statement.
Say your comment was "Java is stupid". it only gets 3 upvotes, but XYZ likes it. You feel validated, so next time the subject comes up you say it again. Commentary was then shaped by a personality rather than the merit of the commentary.
I don't agree with your "argument from authority" though - even pg can be wrong sometimes...
So I would not complain because HN needs criticism. I'd rather suggest a technical solution through UX design, for the false alarm flagging mostly.
Nit-picking and pedantry is toxic in real life and on message boards, however it seems to be ever-present in communication with fellow software engineers. In software engineering, if you miss an = sign or misplace a { or use a single wrong keyword in a 100K line program, the program can fail spectacularly. Debugging a broken program often involves nit-picking syntax--it's an essential tool in a software engineer's arsenal.
This is not universally true for written argument or rhetoric. Being clear is good. Using correct grammar is good. The details count. But attacking a clear, articulate argument by nit-picking grammar or word usage is pointless and does not substantially add to the conversation. Despite this, this behavior seems to exist as a cancer everywhere on the Internet where you encounter written argument or persuasion, including here.
When I'm wearing the Software Engineer hat, yes, the entire world can fail if a single nit is imperfect. But when we wear the Human Conversing or Persuading hat I expect and indeed enjoy seeing and using a more fuzzy logic. I expect more buffer and assume-I'm-not-an-idiot-kid-please-get-off-my-lawn-been-there-done-that-have-the-tee-shirt-thanks.
Compilers and CPUs are the world's most productive utter idiots. The best engineers adjust their thoughts to see them and emulate them, but sometimes this backfires when they forget to exit that mode.
In fact, those people are very useful and most of them have helped me from time to time, so I'm grateful for them.
Side note: >> assume-I'm-not-an-idiot-kid-please-get-off-my-lawn-been-there-done-that-have-the-tee-shirt-thanks
Thank you for that, I'll use it sometime, not sure why or when, but it's so funny I must! :D
maybe turn it into a C poem and wear as a T-shirt?
I once had the following printed on a T-shirt and wore to a Meetup.com event here in Colorado, and out of the crowd an early Bell Labs alumnus (C/UNIX era) emerged and tried to recruit me:
perhaps:And I should warn you! I WILL make a T-shirt and give you credit.
and/or from the earnings on my book series The Dread Space Pirate Richard. (srsly)
or... savings from my day job. a good strategy has several fallbacks. :-P
I've just promoted your book up in the long to-read list.
The kindly part is so important; their attitude shows that they don't have an open mind at the moment; dismissing kindly leaves a moral door open so that in the infrequent (but not rare) event that they'll have an open mind later in the day (or later in a lifetime), they may remember your reasoning and revisit the logic in their minds and agree with you, sometimes they acknowledge you merit for it and sometimes they don't, but when they do, bingo, you just made an intellectual ally, but that works only if you were kind and treated them with respect.
Pick your battles; If you insist on proving yourself right and antagonize people (remember even trolls are people) you make gratuitous enemies and waste resources in general; time, energy, focus, etc.
Trust me, I've turned foes into allies several times in my short lifetime. And more importantly, I've saved myself from wasting time and headaches. Kindness works miracles and saves time.
Be kind, rewind (your mind?).
And don't forget to read the welcomming page and the guidelines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's cool but I'd like to have better control, so I'm designing a custom HN curator myself. And I've noticed some other people have done the very same thing themselves.
I've stopped up/down voting all together for similar reasons.
For example, upvoting when a subject matter expert gives some context, or the person offers a comment that you found interesting. Conversely downvoting when there is a "me too"/contentless comment.
Personally I most commonly find myself downvoting what I would describe as either rhetoric or offensive.
It is. I've decided to just leave the comments (reactions) as they are and signal upvote by commenting. If the post/comment is of no interest, no comment. Voting in some ways has distorted the real intent of the site: "talking about things hackers like".
Imagine of the rating system did away with votes and instead measured the quality of the discourse on something interesting.
It's not much, but if I'm having a crap day and something I say it getting downvoted, I feel a little better when it ticks up a notch, knowing at least one person isn't trying to just bomb my post. It's basically the tiniest little gift I like to give to people, heh.
I also think that, if enough people put that upvote in, the community could shift how it reacts to things.
Just my two cents
I think you're too concerned about what strangers think and do around the internet. Most people will "bomb" your subjective side of the argument (the snarky, mean, remarks), and not the underlying idea. I've found out that conveying your arguments while avoiding personal, subjective, attacks is a much better way of getting your point across, since people are more receptive if they don't get the impression they need to be defensive.
Basically, if you're being an asshole, I don't feel a need to save you from yourself.
There aren't many (if any) formal guidelines for comment voting on HN, so this is me driving at what I want out of the community. I don't speak for everyone. For my part, I want civility, and to encourage people to contribute their opinions, popular or not.
The polite responses to misinformed ideas are often some of the most educational, at least for me, and so I'd like an environment where anxiety about the chance of being wrong is low for everyone.
I also don't want any of this to sound like an indictment of hacker news. I keep coming back here because I think the community is really top notch, and the signal to noise ratio is high. Commenting systems and forums have had these problems for ages, and they're hard problems. I just wanted to add my voice to the crowd.
haha I get it. And that's also very kind of you.
I do it too sometimes, trying not to lose perspective of the true purpose of the conversation taking place of course; a single upvote in a bombarded comment won't cause detriment to the conversation but it will provide some motivation for the participant to keep trying to participate (assuming good faith on the poster, as well).
For example in StackOverflow, if I notice a -1 post but the post has some value, I'll upvote it even if it wasn't particularly useful for my issue, in order to give it a chance to be reevaluated without a negative bias of that -1
I find it a bit funny/curios on why we do such things. I've always known I'm not the only one doing that, it's one of those unsaid things that happen on the net, part of its culture.
I've also encountered many cases that confused me a bit and at the time didn't quite understand why those people/commenters were being downvoted.
So I've spent a long time just reading HN without commenting, trying to first understand the culture, the news are just as important as the people curating them IMHO. After sometime I've begun to understand the different mindsets and dynamics; there are many discernible reasons to be downvoted by the community, there's for example, being perceived as a shill or a strawman, and etc. And correct me if I'm wrong but there's also the secret/magic algorithms making the mod's jobs easier, I don't think those algorithms are perfect and may make mistakes sometimes, that's understandable.
But there are still enough cases that I suspect ended up being downvoted just because disagreement motive or maybe even for irrational emotion (very rarely do strong emotions come with reason) motive. And there's also the case of Trigger-happy-downvoting individuals, all these latter cases generate such damage that I have * sometimes * even found myself a bit suspicious of the worth of the HN community as a whole.
But I stressed "sometimes" for a reason...
...One has to understand that communities change, that's a fact, and as YC has had success and obtained more and more media attention (and therefore HN as well), different kind of audiences have joined the flock (me included, since a few years ago).
My guess is that HN's community is still adapting to the new audience, must be tough since there must be thousands of real people along with hundreds of fake accounts (some with nefarious purposes) and bots.
In the end, you'll find it more useful to acquire a thick skin and a "deal with it" attitude towards gratuitous negativity (down-voters included), but not an impermeable shell because sometimes there's some useful criticism behind rude negativity, just don't take it personal and master the art of spinning the conversation towards a constructive direction.
Side note: >> anonymously down-voting / reporting someone's opinion just because it's not yours is just as mean-spirited as calling someone names.
Amazingly well phrased, I had to point that one out :)
This is the most important lesson I was never formally taught about discourse. If you can mange to be Kind & Thick-skinned you will be capable of communicating with a far wider group of people than those who are missing one component of that pair.
One could argue for another voting just for agreement/disagreement that wouldn't impact the positioning and colour of the comments, because seeing HN's opinions is also interesting. It would however add another layer of complexity.
As long as people upvote "I learnt something I agree with," and not "I learnt something I disagree with," the effect is the same, the amplification is just tuned a bit. Having a different standard for upvotes and downvotes doesn't do much. If you get less upvotes, it is effectively as if you got more downvotes.
So yeah, I generally agree with PG in that
But he never said to do it in a trigger-happy manner. There can be many other reasons to vote, but when the reasoning is 'agreement/disagreement', voting IMHO should be done when you strongly agree or strongly disagree; this way you allow some "space" in between for freedom of expression.So my current take on this whole vote up/down to convey agreement/dissagreement discussion would be not voting at all unless you find it pertinent.
Also IMHO, in other types of reasoning one should be a bit faster to downvote, for example 'rudeness', or worse, 'hate messages', for those ones I downvote immediately, or flag and sometimes even educate (if the person seems to be just confused, and I make one attempt only, if the person is not interested in changing their mind, I skip).
Other types of reasoning deserve a different approach, for example; Interesting comments I upvote even if I don't agree. Well redacted but uninteresting comments I leave untouched (I don't vote up nor down).
And there are many other considerations for different scenarios and different types of reasoning, I mostly prefer not to waste time, but I liked this post about kindness and find the topic of community very engaging and relevant to me. Maybe because I'm starting to build a community myself.
I admit that I'm a bit faster to upvote, for anything that deserves positive feedback; attention, approval, agreement, endorsement, celebration, applause, kudos, kindness, etc. And I'm OK with that.
The difference is often very small and just adds not really necessary options which makes making a choice harder.
How about checking if a user downvoted more than e.g. average number of comments on some post, resulting in his downvotes carrying very little weight if it is true. Unless it's being done already.
I suspect HN's up/down system follows the pattern of simplicity by design and for good reason; the reason being the flexibility to welcome a cognitive diverse audience.
Apparently HN's decline in audience quality over time was expected from the start¹; quality and popularity seem to be inversely correlated, but the voting privilege threshold is a good way to maintain culture values to some degree.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but given the fact this community was conceived as "an experiment"¹ to explore and empower the hacker community, I suspect one of the points has always been that the "best" ideas float to the top. In this case, the "best" ideas are always relative to the values of the community as a whole; the sum of criteria of the engaged participants, a very diverse audience.
That diverse audience can have multiple motives to vote up or down, according to each individual mindset; it can be agree/disagree, constructive/non-constructive, as you proposed, yes, but it also can be interesting/uninteresting, like/dislike, kind/unkind. Or many other criteria that are not necessarily antonyms; amazing/disgusting, enlightening/TLDR, etc.
So this singular up/down "un-opinionated" system's simplicity allows a cognition diversity one-size-fits-all dynamic, any change in UX would have to be planned for a justifiable purpose and very carefully executed.
¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
I visit HN not to argue about the right or wrong, but to get more informed and educated. The more you know, the more you'll be humble and kind to those who you disagree with.
The notion that there is not absolute correctness even for a most trivial problem may be hard for engineers to understand, but I've learned it the hard way. I've learned a lot and working better with others since I started reading more on non-technical books and articles. It's a lot easier to being kind socially than to being kind on technical discussion and decision times. I think every engineering major should take courses in philosophy and psychology or read some related books.
Should I be more open-minded about climate change deniers when NASA has stated multiple times human activity is affecting it?
I have better things to do with my time.
And you'll know more and save more time for better things.
This is why people like you get dismissed in the first place. I can choose to spend time worrying about why you would think that, or I can go on with my life.
I choose to go on with my life. It is not true that all opinions are created equal.
Sorry, that's just the way it is.
mreiland is just being rude, he probably had a bad day or was recently frustrated with some discussion gone eerie with a climate change denier and he's taking it out on you. And he's worried about climate change, that's understandable, cut him some slack.
If you find yourself in a situation where somehow you DID address them (maybe because you care about the world, and you DO sound like someone reasonable that cares about important matters), that means you already decided to use some time on them climate change deniers, so make the most of it, remember they're human beings and treat them with respect and you might end up inspiring them to actually listen to you to understand instead of listening to retort (like most people do when they're on defensive mode), be kind and you might even end up incepting some sense into their minds.
Trust me, kindness works miracles.
What if you had taken the time to be more fair to my post than that?
Capitalism seems to cater to selfish individuals? A lot of selfish individuals get far financially in life. Think about some of the "successful" people, some of us, idolize here on HN. Think about that person before they became rich and famous. I can usually bring up a list of retched things they did to become financially successful.
That's the rub. They become comfortable in life and are in complete denial over how they carved their way to the top of their version of success.
That's all I have--I have a headache, but kind people know they are kind. They don't need to advertise it. They don't need an audience in order to give to the suffering (human, animals, environment). They are just kind!
Now, the Fakers--well that's what makes me unkind. Oh there are so many Fakers.
(I have a sister who stepped on family members in order to become financially successful, and her journey was ugly. I might be a little over sensitive when it comes to people and kindness.)
http://www.wikihow.com/Be-Kind
I think this advice is so apt and so needed. There's a perception that to be effective or powerful, one must also be harsh, stern, a little bit mean. That stems from a misunderstanding of what kindness is. Hopefully people will heed his advice!
Registered On February 08, 1999
I guess availability was better then, or he made some good cash in the .dot era and bought it outright from someone else?
In 1999 things were much, much different.
It used to be pretty easy to get random little .com domain names before they got real cheap and every single word, short string and misspelling got bought.
eg I own a three letter .net that I don't even use.
I don't feel like I have to be kind to those who aren't motivated to contribute and do thoughtful work.
You don't have to be kind; you don't have to be anything. On the other hand, if you want to be a good engineer, with goodness defined as how much one contributes to the team/company, then you probably should be kind. If you feel like your teammate is unmotivated then it seems like if you want to be a good engineer you would do your best to motivate that person.
Having an uncaring attitude towards your coworkers could well lower their motivation which would mean your net contribution to the team is lessened as well.
The trouble with this is that you could be wrong. They might be "useless" to you but not the rest of the world.
Run it only once, and perma-store the info? Their state could change and you miss out on opportunities.
Run it each time and behave accordingly? That doesn't work, either. People know when they're being used.
Honestly, being kind all the time sounds like a lot less work.
If you'll forgive me quoting my own post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9117035): A couple of jobs back, I met with a supervisor to proudly tell him that a gigantic, exhausting project I'd been working on for the last nine months was finally ready to deploy. His response, almost verbatim, was "Cool. Here's what I need you to do next..." I found it nearly impossible to care about what he wanted for the rest of my time there. 60 seconds' worth of interest and congratulations would have gotten dozens of hours of extra productivity out of me.
The worst manager I ever had once told me "you're too kind to your team". He wore his ability to bring fear to a room like a badge of honor.
I never worked harder and more passionately than under the first and I never felt more apathetic and unmotivated from work than under the second. A single data point, but something I'll never forget.
He doesn't sound so unkind letting an apathetic unmotivated lead keep his or her job. It doesn't seem like we're getting the whole story here. That second manager might have been an ass, but it seems like he got the job done.
And the second wasn't an ass - he just used fear as a management technique. As opposed to the first manager that used empowerment and encouragement.
I do see a fair share of managers that use fear/authority/power as a technique to get results, but for me (and I see for many other peers) it is counter productive in the long run.
Respect earned from fear/position is short-lived. Respect earned from trust and empowerment will stay with people their entire careers and pay dividends.
When you're running a business, you can probably afford to be a jerk as long as the small group of people closest to you can tolerate it.
The problem is with the people that try to emulate leaders like that - they try to play Steve Jobs in meetings and end up causing all of the damage without any of the greatness.
I can see how high high achievers could tend to be extremely focused and driven, which in some cases would present in this way. I wouldn't expect it to be the norm though; do you believe otherwise? How do you know?
Positions of power have a lot of leeway. If you're the big boss, people can't do much to remove you. It's different if you're trying to climb the corporate ladder; there are a lot of people ready and able to stomp on your fingers and knock you down a few rungs at the slightest offense.
I am of the (entirely uneducated) opinion that Jobs wasn't successful because he was an arsehole, but that he could only get away with being an arsehole because he was so successful.
Thanks for writing and publishing this. It's very good.
I hope he will write a "how to" follow up, because I would like to change, but I don't see how to do it in a way that doesn't sound impossibly exhausting.
I'm hopeful that it actually is possible, though, because for 30+ years I had never been able to keep any space well-ordered for more than a few weeks, nor had any reason to think I ever would be able to. I read "the life changing magic of tidying up" and it turns out I can do it--I just needed to be taught how. This may not seem relevant, but it's been life-changing not so much to have a tidy office, but to learn that what I assumed was a fixed personal trait was changeable after all.
Took me years to understand soft skills are as much or more important than technical skills.
(Fixed book's name)
There's also "7 Habits of Highly Effective People", which is often recommended in the same breath.
That search is still open and the text is correct there. Actually, I don't know how I managed this screw up.
I'd also put in a recommendation for a book I stumbled upon when searching through Hacker News called "Difficult Conversations."
http://www.amazon.com/Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-What-M...
I got the same feeling from reading the book as the original recommender ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7762266 ): reading the book made me feel instantly better at being able to communicate when having difficult or tense conversations. I can't recommend it enough.
Just as an obvious example, the golden rule is why a lot of guys send dick pics.
Your converse golden rule suffers the same problems as the golden rule - everyone should be treated individually, treating others the same as you expect people to treat you will not always work out as intended.
To your specific point, I probably was even worse in 2008 than what you experienced in 2010. That's probably true at every point since. I'm getting better, but I am sure you can find people even in the last year who would say this post doesn't reflect the Boz they met. I believe those people are getting fewer and their experiences less bad, but I am definitely not great at this yet so the post should be taken as a belief I hold and a behavior I aspire to.
> the start of a journey that is still ongoing
Then you still have a long way to go on that journey, because you apparently have no idea the damage you've done to the world with Facebook. You have help lead people into undermining their own privacy, straight into the hands of a surveillance state.
So keep on that journey. Maybe in a few decades, when it is far too late, you'll realize how much you have hurt humanity. For the time being, I expect you'll just dismiss this entire post.
/sigh/ I don't have many regrets in life, but you, "Boz", are one of them. I wish I never ran those 4-H programming projects, and never worked to get you interested in computers. It probably wouldn't have changed much, but maybe the problem we call "Facebook" would be just a little bit easier to fight.
Nice, you have some storytelling skills :) I'd bet those will come in handy once you learn to apply them for your human communication skills.
I am on the same journey as you and my conclusion is that I am essentially a creature driven by emotions. My emotions get the better of me and I revert back to my old state where I will bluntly tell someone how I feel about them and their work.
Just last week I had to bring appology chocolates to work. Self improvement was never easy.
Really, the main change I see now is that I almost immediately regret my words or actions, but I still have to work on the immediate apology that should follow that regret.
I've struggled with similar in my career (eng@uber) to a lesser degree and these are some of my findings:
- in terms of long-term survival; friendship, connection and investing in humans brings much more satisfaction than any technical part of my work and will outlast the business every time.
- when I'm arguing a solution or iteration that I've designed, the harder I hold onto that solution the tougher it is to sell.
- every time I instruct an engineer rather than let them figure something out on their own it seems to not go in my favor.
- the best designs and implementations [at scale] in engineering [sadly, for my ego] always seem to require multi-faceted perspectives (a team) to simulate adequately and vet impact (business+social+tech).
- promotion and progression in an organization is a subjective mess, all biased, and largely driven by non-technical markers namely social proof, liking and perception.
He had developed some key features that were now important. Instead of mentoring him to work better with others, his boss demoted him.
The boss was giving someone else a favor, making them the lead of this now-important project, some up-and-coming hotshot. He made up an excuse about "bad attitude", while just using it as cover for backstabbing him.
The OP probably had big $$$ in unvested options, so he had to play along and play nice, instead of quitting on the spot.
I don't know if this is a lesson about being nice or a lesson about dealing with different personality types, I guess it depends on how much of an asshole you actually were. Personally I'd prefer an environment where you call my work "shit" and I say you have your head up your ass, it saves time and it's better than passive-aggressive weirdness and underhandedness but not everybody is like that.
Any place where people are arbitrarily fired is going to be toxic though, the reaction from the CTO and a few other things I've heard about Facebook kind of makes me think that's what's going on.
so, basically someone who was competent and agreeable was favored by his boss to get a promotion, and the person who acted like a know-it-all dickhead 24/7 got sent to the basement.
that's a real shocker.
From the viewpoint of a dickhead, an honest and intelligent person is a dickhead. The honest and intelligent person has the potential to expose the dickhead as a dickhead, so the dickhead will do everything he can to convince everyone else that the honest and intelligent person is a dickhead.
A dickhead would see an honest and intelligent person as a dickhead, and be able to lie convincingly enough to establish it as fact in the eyes of others.
In fact, a highly skilled dickhead can convince an honest person that "standing up for yourself" is a dickhead behavior.
I have no way of telling if the OP is a dickhead or not, because I haven't met him. My guess is "not a dickhead, he was just convinced by dickheads the he actually was the dickhead".
So, he learned to act in a manner least likely to offend dickheads. I don't want to work with dickheads, so I don't bother with that skill.
If FaceBook had an average employee instead of the OP, they might not have been as successful.
This is why the 10x mythologizing is so annoying. There are a few people who are 10x in specific areas or who might have periods of intense productivity but it's never true across the board for significant periods of time, and it's used to excuse a lot of bad behaviour by 1.2x programmers — not to mention the larger mistake of assuming that the limiting factor on projects is rarely absolute programming ability. In most cases, you see far better results from someone who might be maligned as a .8x programmer who communicates well with the team & users and relies on solid tools and practice rather than assuming sheer skill will save the day.
On the other hand, the dickhead always thinks he's a non-dickhead.
If everyone you meet is a dickhead, you're the dickhead.
So be kind to everybody, dickhead or non-dickhead.
If you want to be a successful employee, view yourself as a politician and run a successful campaign: minimize anything that will be viewed negatively, blatantly exploit peoples' biases to emphasize a positive image. Don't talk about divisive subjects, regardless of their relevance to your job. Anyone smart enough to see what's going on but naive enough to call you out will immediately be viewed badly, the only real threat to your power is someone who is smart enough to see the manipulation and experienced enough to respond to it through his own counter-manipulations.
This is a hard fact about life and something a lot of talented people realize way too late. Now you know. Focus on your pitch - ABC - always be closing. Every interaction in life is a transaction of some sort - your sales strategy will determine if you get a good deal or a raw deal.
What about when a mother kisses her baby's head? What about when a friend offers a hug to someone who has just lost a loved one? What about when a kid gives a friendly smile to the kid who always gets bullied?
Are those transactions? Did those people get "good deals"?
Now I'm just some hyperbole-prone kid who isn't qualified to give advice to a Life Veteran like yourself, but I find myself wondering what you might learn if you stopped keeping score for awhile. In my experience, treating every interaction as a little game to maximize profit is a great way to scare away anyone who is interested in anything more worthwhile than profiting off of you.
Same with business - win-win transactions are best. When you provide something that others find valuable and you receive something valuable in return (loyalty, money, hype, etc) it's a good thing.
Thank you for clarifying that you were not advocating the rather shallow, exploitative, and depressing approach to life that I misinterpreted from your previous comment.
Well, there are the obvious ones: evolutionarily beneficial responses. Still transactions, unconsciously working for the benefit of the species.
The others are more selfish. Obviously not angry or malicious, but they convey certain clear benefits for little to no effort. Definitely transactional.
Just because they are transactions, however, doesn't mean you have to weigh them in terms of some sort of emotional "profit", or they're in any way unwanted. It's just a way of talking about them, even modelling them for study.
"get away with" is entirely different.
I think the world would be a better place if Torvalds took a couple martial arts classes and 1) got his ass handed to him a couple of times and 2) felt physically self confident enough that he no longer felt the need to verbally beat every body else up before they got a chance to do it to him.
An old and dear friend, who started out as a brilliant civil engineer but moved to marketing where she has spent most of her professional life, would completely ratify your second sentence.
Unfortunately, I find it harder and harder to refute her assertion that in the end, it all comes down to marketing.