#1 is kind of clever pointing out a spelling error.
You know the thing that horrified me? When I realized that my “wizened” snark was my most upvoted contribution to this site. All I did was point out the intersection of a typo and an amusing mental image!
You’re totally right, though, that I should have found a politer way to do it- focus on the mental image instead of status-seeking sarcasm. Indeed, that’s probably the heart of politeness- wording things in ways that they don’t threaten the other person’s status.
Personally, I think I would have taken more offense at the suggested substitution
Hey Sebastian, I wanted to give you a heads up. I saw your recent post, but you spelled “wisen” as “wizen”—easy spelling error to make, since they’re uncommonly used words, but I thought you should know. “Wizen” means for things to dry up and lose water. Cheers and best wishes.”
As someone with a fairly extensive vocabulary and good spelling, I wouldn’t mind having someone poke fun at an accidental misspelling or wrong usage, but I would be inclined to feel patronized if I thought that the person didn’t think I would recognize on reexamination that what I had written was a mistake.
Even with a well thought out set of social heuristics, if you don’t know the people you’re dealing with very well, you run the risk of inadvertently giving offense. This is where it comes in handy to be a good guesser rather than an asker.
Personally, I think I would have taken more offense at the suggested substitution
Is that because the wording changed, or because the location changed? Split the two apart- compare the thing I wrote PMed to you vs. posted as a comment and the thing he wrote PMed vs. posted as a comment. My guess is the optimal combination for you is the thing I wrote PMed.
How much of the dance to do is not clear unless you know the person in question, but where to dance seems pretty clear.
That depends on the nature of the group I was in, I think. If I cared particularly about the regard of the other members of the group, and did not feel like I had a secure position of status in it, then I would probably prefer receiving the message by PM. If I felt secure in my social position, I would probably prefer that the message be posted openly, so that other people could appreciate it.
People are complicated. I’ve put a lot of effort into working out how to deal effectively with others in social situations (working my way up from a very low starting point I’m afraid,) and one of the lessons that has served me best is to not to suppose that even my best tried and tested heuristics will apply to everyone, and to be prepared to discard them when necessary.
FWIW, I thought your “wizened” remark was a witty way of making the correction, and doing the “great article but I just wanted to say just a teeny tiny correction that I happened to notice and I’m sure it was just a typo but” dance would have been merely tedious, and no more polite.
See, that’s the thing- the dance isn’t the important part. I already did the dance with “I don’t think that’s the word you want to use.” lionhearted’s absolutely correct point is doing the correction in public is the “look at me” option and correcting him in private would have been the polite option, regardless of how much dancing went on in either. Unless people are thick-skinned by intention or ignorance, they notice when you take the impolite option.
It’s pretty common, though. You wanted the other people reading to think of you as clever, and considered that to be “worth” making the author feel a bit bad. This is what the proxy-value of karma, as implemented by the Reddit-codebase discussion engine of this site, reflects: the author can only downvote once (and even then they are discouraged from doing so, unlike with, say, a Whuffie system), but the audience can upvote numerous times.
Thinking back, I’ve had many discussions on the Internet that devolved into arguments, where, although my interlocutor was trying to convince me of something, I had given up on convincing them of anything in particular, and was instead trying to convince any third-parties reading the post that the other person was not to be trusted, and that their advice was dangerous—at the expense of making myself seem like even less trustworthy to the person I was nominally supposed to be convincing. This is what public fora do.
Thank You For Smoking has a wonderful moment along these lines (and is a thoroughly enjoyable film for other reasons).
This describes what I do on the other forum I frequent; I treat anyone politely for about 3 posts, and then if they’re still an idiot I just start tearing them apart for the amusement of myself and others. But I was surprised that I did it here (I wasn’t planning to), and even more surprised that it was so well received.
Apparently this community really values the combination of wit, brevity & correctness, which are all good things.
Unfortunately, since your brief witty correct remark was about something irrelevant, that means we are rewarding entertainment that wins status/appreciation without contributing to meaningful discussion, relative to deep and/or thoughtful insights. Quite understandable, but I can see why you were horrified—one expects better of LWers.
I interpret this as evidence against the correctness of the elitism strain in LW culture. We are all monkeys, the great thing about LW is that we know it and want to change it—not that we have.
When I realized that my “wizened” snark was my most upvoted contribution to this site. All I did was point out the intersection of a typo and an amusing mental image!
When one’s opinion is expressed as a flat yes/abstain/no, a natural consequence is that an item that elicits wide, mild approval but little or no disapproval will be more successful than an item that elicits narrow, ecstatic approval with significant disapproval. This applies as much to blog commenting as it does to democratic politics.
On LW, a partial fix is the “controversial” rating, which ranks a +20/-10 comment higher than a +10/0 one since it’s likely to be a more substantive one, and the “top comments” page which is ranked purely by upmods.
You know the thing that horrified me? When I realized that my “wizened” snark was my most upvoted contribution to this site. All I did was point out the intersection of a typo and an amusing mental image!
You’re totally right, though, that I should have found a politer way to do it- focus on the mental image instead of status-seeking sarcasm. Indeed, that’s probably the heart of politeness- wording things in ways that they don’t threaten the other person’s status.
Personally, I think I would have taken more offense at the suggested substitution
As someone with a fairly extensive vocabulary and good spelling, I wouldn’t mind having someone poke fun at an accidental misspelling or wrong usage, but I would be inclined to feel patronized if I thought that the person didn’t think I would recognize on reexamination that what I had written was a mistake.
Even with a well thought out set of social heuristics, if you don’t know the people you’re dealing with very well, you run the risk of inadvertently giving offense. This is where it comes in handy to be a good guesser rather than an asker.
Is that because the wording changed, or because the location changed? Split the two apart- compare the thing I wrote PMed to you vs. posted as a comment and the thing he wrote PMed vs. posted as a comment. My guess is the optimal combination for you is the thing I wrote PMed.
How much of the dance to do is not clear unless you know the person in question, but where to dance seems pretty clear.
That depends on the nature of the group I was in, I think. If I cared particularly about the regard of the other members of the group, and did not feel like I had a secure position of status in it, then I would probably prefer receiving the message by PM. If I felt secure in my social position, I would probably prefer that the message be posted openly, so that other people could appreciate it.
People are complicated. I’ve put a lot of effort into working out how to deal effectively with others in social situations (working my way up from a very low starting point I’m afraid,) and one of the lessons that has served me best is to not to suppose that even my best tried and tested heuristics will apply to everyone, and to be prepared to discard them when necessary.
FWIW, I thought your “wizened” remark was a witty way of making the correction, and doing the “great article but I just wanted to say just a teeny tiny correction that I happened to notice and I’m sure it was just a typo but” dance would have been merely tedious, and no more polite.
See, that’s the thing- the dance isn’t the important part. I already did the dance with “I don’t think that’s the word you want to use.” lionhearted’s absolutely correct point is doing the correction in public is the “look at me” option and correcting him in private would have been the polite option, regardless of how much dancing went on in either. Unless people are thick-skinned by intention or ignorance, they notice when you take the impolite option.
It’s pretty common, though. You wanted the other people reading to think of you as clever, and considered that to be “worth” making the author feel a bit bad. This is what the proxy-value of karma, as implemented by the Reddit-codebase discussion engine of this site, reflects: the author can only downvote once (and even then they are discouraged from doing so, unlike with, say, a Whuffie system), but the audience can upvote numerous times.
Thinking back, I’ve had many discussions on the Internet that devolved into arguments, where, although my interlocutor was trying to convince me of something, I had given up on convincing them of anything in particular, and was instead trying to convince any third-parties reading the post that the other person was not to be trusted, and that their advice was dangerous—at the expense of making myself seem like even less trustworthy to the person I was nominally supposed to be convincing. This is what public fora do.
Thank You For Smoking has a wonderful moment along these lines (and is a thoroughly enjoyable film for other reasons).
This describes what I do on the other forum I frequent; I treat anyone politely for about 3 posts, and then if they’re still an idiot I just start tearing them apart for the amusement of myself and others. But I was surprised that I did it here (I wasn’t planning to), and even more surprised that it was so well received.
Apparently this community really values the combination of wit, brevity & correctness, which are all good things.
Unfortunately, since your brief witty correct remark was about something irrelevant, that means we are rewarding entertainment that wins status/appreciation without contributing to meaningful discussion, relative to deep and/or thoughtful insights. Quite understandable, but I can see why you were horrified—one expects better of LWers.
I interpret this as evidence against the correctness of the elitism strain in LW culture. We are all monkeys, the great thing about LW is that we know it and want to change it—not that we have.
When one’s opinion is expressed as a flat yes/abstain/no, a natural consequence is that an item that elicits wide, mild approval but little or no disapproval will be more successful than an item that elicits narrow, ecstatic approval with significant disapproval. This applies as much to blog commenting as it does to democratic politics.
On LW, a partial fix is the “controversial” rating, which ranks a +20/-10 comment higher than a +10/0 one since it’s likely to be a more substantive one, and the “top comments” page which is ranked purely by upmods.