Hacker School has a set of “social rules
[...] designed to curtail specific
behavior we’ve found to be destructive
to a supportive, productive, and fun
learning environment.” One of them is
“no feigning
surprise”:
The first rule means you shouldn’t act
surprised when people say they don’t
know something. This applies to both
technical things (“What?! I can’t
believe you don’t know what the stack
is!”) and non-technical things (“You
don’t know who RMS is?!”). Feigning
surprise has absolutely no social or
educational benefit: When people feign
surprise, it’s usually to make them
feel better about themselves and
others feel worse. And even when
that’s not the intention, it’s almost
always the effect. As you’ve probably
already guessed, this rule is tightly
coupled to our belief in the
importance of people feeling
comfortable saying “I don’t know” and
“I don’t understand.”
I think this is a good rule and when I
find out someone doesn’t know something
that I think they “should” already know, I
instead try to react as in xkcd
1053
(or by chalking it up to a momentary
maladaptive brain activity
change
on their part,
or by admitting that it’s probably not
that important that they know this
thing).
But I think “feigning surprise” is a bad
name, because when I’m in this
situation, I’m never pretending to be
surprised in order to demonstrate how
smart I am, I am always genuinely
surprised.
(Surprise means my model of the world is
about to get better. Yay!)
Hacker School has a set of “social rules [...] designed to curtail specific behavior we’ve found to be destructive to a supportive, productive, and fun learning environment.” One of them is “no feigning surprise”:
I think this is a good rule and when I find out someone doesn’t know something that I think they “should” already know, I instead try to react as in xkcd 1053 (or by chalking it up to a momentary maladaptive brain activity change on their part, or by admitting that it’s probably not that important that they know this thing). But I think “feigning surprise” is a bad name, because when I’m in this situation, I’m never pretending to be surprised in order to demonstrate how smart I am, I am always genuinely surprised. (Surprise means my model of the world is about to get better. Yay!)
I don’t think that sort of surprise is necessarily feigned. However, I do think it’s usually better if that surprise isn’t mentioned.