The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions
papers.ssrn.com
The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions
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Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions
#2The author misses the point. People are avoiding sensitive questions not because it impacts opinion on average, but because of the rare outliers that ruin it for everybody.
It takes just a single asshole reporting you to HR to ruin your life.
Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions
#3Hmm, in my head, I model conversation as a game of who can get the mine the most "intimacy", if you will, while revealing the least about oneself. So risque topics are, as the adjective suggests, high risk, but also high reward. Correspondingly, small talk is a lot of low risk, low reward back-and-forth. You don't have to be intimate with a stranger, but you need to stick your neck out if you want to progress beyond pleasantries.
Here's a longer piece about the whole topic of conversations that I wrote a while back: https://zrkrlc.wordpress.com/2018/11/27/a-long-guide-to-conv...
Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions
#4The author misses the point. People are avoiding sensitive questions not because it impacts opinion on average, but because of the rare outliers that ruin it for everybody. It takes just a single asshole reporting you to HR to ruin your life.
I only read the abstract and the first few pages, so my opinion is uninformed. However my first thought was similar to yours. Asking sensitive questions may be moderately positive on average, but occasionally extremely negative.
Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions
#5Hmm, in my head, I model conversation as a game of who can get the mine the most "intimacy", if you will, while revealing the least about oneself. So risque topics are, as the adjective suggests, high risk, but also high reward. Correspondingly, small talk is a lot of low risk, low reward back-and-forth. You don't have to be intimate with a stranger, but you need to stick your neck out if you want to progress beyond…
Trying to get the most out of another while giving little or nothing seems like a strange and rather mercenary way to approach interpersonal interactions. Could you explain how you arrive at this mode of communication?
Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions
#6Hmm, in my head, I model conversation as a game of who can get the mine the most "intimacy", if you will, while revealing the least about oneself. So risque topics are, as the adjective suggests, high risk, but also high reward. Correspondingly, small talk is a lot of low risk, low reward back-and-forth. You don't have to be intimate with a stranger, but you need to stick your neck out if you want to progress beyond…
If your goal is to get others to share intimately without sharing intimately yourself, you will tend to seem insincere and manipulative.
Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions
#7Hmm, in my head, I model conversation as a game of who can get the mine the most "intimacy", if you will, while revealing the least about oneself. So risque topics are, as the adjective suggests, high risk, but also high reward. Correspondingly, small talk is a lot of low risk, low reward back-and-forth. You don't have to be intimate with a stranger, but you need to stick your neck out if you want to progress beyond…
This is part of why I try to just speak my mind. The great advantage of that is if people are nice they'll correct you when you say something really disturbing and maybe you'll notice bad things about yourself that you otherwise might have missed.
Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions
#8What is a sensitive question? Not the examples provided. Here’s an alternative.
Former Secretary of Defense for two presidents Donald Rumsfeld once framed (brilliantly actually) the possible things we know.
... there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know [1]
A while after someone (which I can’t trace back) made an interesting (and equally brilliant) observation - there is a fourth option - unknown knowns - that is, things we don’t know we know. In most cases, that person pointed out, the category contains, things we actually know, but prefer to pretend that we don’t.
So, what is a sensitive question?
A sensitive question is one for which the answer is an unknown known.
The cost of asking such a question in American society (and, obviously in SV) is dear. Avoiding them is free.
Ask carefully.
Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions
#9Hmm, in my head, I model conversation as a game of who can get the mine the most "intimacy", if you will, while revealing the least about oneself. So risque topics are, as the adjective suggests, high risk, but also high reward. Correspondingly, small talk is a lot of low risk, low reward back-and-forth. You don't have to be intimate with a stranger, but you need to stick your neck out if you want to progress beyond…
That is a trait I've seen in a lot of my autistic patients. Are you on the spectrum/have you been tested?
Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions
#10Hmm, in my head, I model conversation as a game of who can get the mine the most "intimacy", if you will, while revealing the least about oneself. So risque topics are, as the adjective suggests, high risk, but also high reward. Correspondingly, small talk is a lot of low risk, low reward back-and-forth. You don't have to be intimate with a stranger, but you need to stick your neck out if you want to progress beyond…
If your goal is to get others to share intimately without sharing intimately yourself, you will tend to seem insincere and manipulative.
That’s not just seeming insincere and manipulative.