Sometimes when you work at a large tech-focused company, you’ll be pulled into a required-but-boring all-day HR meeting to discuss some asinine topic like “communication styles”.
If you’ve had the misfortune fun of attending one of those meetings, you might remember that the topic wasn’t about teaching a hypothetically “best” or “optimal” communication style. The goal was to teach employees how to recognize when you’re speaking to someone with a different communication style, and then how to tailor your understanding of what they’re saying with respect to them. For example, some people are more straightforward than others, so a piece of seemingly harsh criticism like “This won’t work for XYZ reason.” doesn’t mean that they disrespect you—they’re just not the type of person who would phrase that feedback as “I think that maybe we’ve neglected to consider the impact of XYZ on the design.”
I have read the many pages of debate on this current disagreement over the past few days. I have followed the many examples of linked posts that were intended to show bad behavior by one side or the other.
I think Zack and gjm have a good job at communicating with each other despite differences in their preferred communication styles, and in particular, I agree strongly with gjm’s analysis:
I think this is the purpose of Duncan’s proposed guideline 5. Don’t engage in that sort of adversarial behaviour where you want to win while the other party loses; aim at truth in a way that, if you are both aiming at truth, will get you both there. And don’t assume that the other party is being adversarial, unless you have to, because if you assume that then you’ll almost certainly start doing the same yourself; starting out with a presumption of good faith will make actual good faith more likely.
And then with Zack’s opinion:
That said, I don’t think there’s a unique solution for what the “right” norms are. Different rules might work better for different personality types, and run different risks of different failure modes (like nonsense aggressive status-fighting vs. nonsense passive-aggressive rules-lawyering). Compared to some people, I suppose I tend to be relatively comfortable with spaces where the rules err more on the side of “Punch, but be prepared to take a punch” rather than “Don’t punch anyone”—but I realize that that’s a fact about me, not a fact about the hidden Bayesian structure of reality. That’s why, in “‘Rationalist Discourse’ Is Like ‘Physicist Motors’”, I made an analogy between discourse norms and motors or martial arts—there are principles governing what can work, but there’s not going to be a unique motor, a one “correct” martial art.
I also agree with Zack when they said:
I’m unhappy with the absence of an audience-focused analogue of TEACH. In the following, I’ll use TEACH to refer to making someone believe X if X is right; whether the learner is the audience or the interlocutor B isn’t relevant to what I’m saying.
I seldom write comments with the intent of teaching a single person. My target audience is whoever is reading the posts, which is overwhelmingly going to be more than one person.
From Duncan, I agree with the following:
It is in fact usually the case that, when two people disagree, each one possesses some scrap of map that the other lacks; it’s relatively rare that one person is just right about everything and thoroughly understands and can conclusively dismiss all of the other person’s confusions or hesitations. If you are trying to see and understand what’s actually true, you should generally be hungry for those scraps of map that other people possess, and interested in seeing, understanding, and copying over those bits which you were missing.
Almost all of my comments tend to focus on a specific disagreement that I have with the broader community. That disagreement is due to some prior that I hold, that is not commonly held here.
And from Said, I agree with this:
Examples?
This community is especially prone to large, overly-wordy armchair philosophy about this-or-that with almost no substantial evidence that can tie the philosophy back down to Earth. Sometimes that philosophy gets camouflaged in a layer of pseudo-math; equations, lemmas, writing as if the post is demonstrating a concrete mathematical proof. To that end, focusing the community on providing examples is a valuable, useful piece of constructive feedback. I strongly disagree that this is an unfair burden on authors.
EDIT: I forgot to write an actual conclusion. Maybe “don’t expect everyone to communicate in the same way, even if we assume that all interested parties care about the truth”?
Sometimes when you work at a large tech-focused company, you’ll be pulled into a required-but-boring all-day HR meeting to discuss some asinine topic like “communication styles”.
If you’ve had the
misfortunefun of attending one of those meetings, you might remember that the topic wasn’t about teaching a hypothetically “best” or “optimal” communication style. The goal was to teach employees how to recognize when you’re speaking to someone with a different communication style, and then how to tailor your understanding of what they’re saying with respect to them. For example, some people are more straightforward than others, so a piece of seemingly harsh criticism like “This won’t work for XYZ reason.” doesn’t mean that they disrespect you—they’re just not the type of person who would phrase that feedback as “I think that maybe we’ve neglected to consider the impact of XYZ on the design.”I have read the many pages of debate on this current disagreement over the past few days. I have followed the many examples of linked posts that were intended to show bad behavior by one side or the other.
I think Zack and gjm have a good job at communicating with each other despite differences in their preferred communication styles, and in particular, I agree strongly with gjm’s analysis:
And then with Zack’s opinion:
I also agree with Zack when they said:
I seldom write comments with the intent of teaching a single person. My target audience is whoever is reading the posts, which is overwhelmingly going to be more than one person.
From Duncan, I agree with the following:
Almost all of my comments tend to focus on a specific disagreement that I have with the broader community. That disagreement is due to some prior that I hold, that is not commonly held here.
And from Said, I agree with this:
This community is especially prone to large, overly-wordy armchair philosophy about this-or-that with almost no substantial evidence that can tie the philosophy back down to Earth. Sometimes that philosophy gets camouflaged in a layer of pseudo-math; equations, lemmas, writing as if the post is demonstrating a concrete mathematical proof. To that end, focusing the community on providing examples is a valuable, useful piece of constructive feedback. I strongly disagree that this is an unfair burden on authors.
EDIT: I forgot to write an actual conclusion. Maybe “don’t expect everyone to communicate in the same way, even if we assume that all interested parties care about the truth”?