But if you don’t endorse this reaction—then deal with it yourself.
I agree with the above two comments (Vaniver’s and yours) except for a certain connotation of this point. Rejection of own defensiveness does not imply endorsement of insensitivity to tone. I’ve been making this error in modeling others until recently, and I currently cringe at many of my “combative” comments and forum policy suggestions from before 2014 or so. In most cases defensiveness is flat wrong, but so is not optimizing towards keeping the conversation comfortable. It’s tempting to shirk that responsibility in the name of avoiding the danger of compromising the signal with polite distortions. But there is a lot of room for safe optimization in that direction, and making sure people are aware of this is important. “Deal with it yourself” suggests excluding this pressure. Ten years ago, I would have benefitted from it.
To be clear I agree with the benefits of politeness, and also think people probably *underweight* the benefits of politeness because they’re less easy to see. (And, further, there’s a selection effect that people who are ‘rude’ are disproportionately likely to be ones who find politeness unusually costly or difficult to understand, and have less experience with its benefits.)
This is one of the reasons I like an injunction that’s closer to “show the other person how to be polite to you” than “deal with it yourself”; often the person who ‘didn’t see how to word it any other way’ will look at your script and go “oh, I could have written that,” and sometimes you’ll notice that you’re asking them to thread a very narrow needle or are objecting to the core of their message instead of their tone.
I agree with the above two comments (Vaniver’s and yours) except for a certain connotation of this point. Rejection of own defensiveness does not imply endorsement of insensitivity to tone. I’ve been making this error in modeling others until recently, and I currently cringe at many of my “combative” comments and forum policy suggestions from before 2014 or so. In most cases defensiveness is flat wrong, but so is not optimizing towards keeping the conversation comfortable. It’s tempting to shirk that responsibility in the name of avoiding the danger of compromising the signal with polite distortions. But there is a lot of room for safe optimization in that direction, and making sure people are aware of this is important. “Deal with it yourself” suggests excluding this pressure. Ten years ago, I would have benefitted from it.
To be clear I agree with the benefits of politeness, and also think people probably *underweight* the benefits of politeness because they’re less easy to see. (And, further, there’s a selection effect that people who are ‘rude’ are disproportionately likely to be ones who find politeness unusually costly or difficult to understand, and have less experience with its benefits.)
This is one of the reasons I like an injunction that’s closer to “show the other person how to be polite to you” than “deal with it yourself”; often the person who ‘didn’t see how to word it any other way’ will look at your script and go “oh, I could have written that,” and sometimes you’ll notice that you’re asking them to thread a very narrow needle or are objecting to the core of their message instead of their tone.