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The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

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Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#91

Post by hanniabu »

artsyca wrote: post #29
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #23

I'm a regular reader of Ask a Manager ( https://www.askamanager.org/ ), and one thing that comes up over and over is how both managers and employees will avoid awkward topics ranging from trivial ("your breath smells") to consequential ("you need to step up or you'll be fired!"), to the point of going to extremes like quitting the job, just to avoid having a genuine conversation with somebody. And I'm guilty of this…

I had a manager like that dude he was house poor and had only one ratty Hilfiger sweater There's no way to relate to people like that and confrontation being avoided is the only way out

I knew a guy like that and he had a very different attitude than most in this situation. The guy I knew was 100% aware of what he was doing. He said he's not poor at all, but chose to live poor to save his money and invest it instead. He said he was on track to retire at 30. The man had laser vision with his eye on the target, can't hate on him for that. He'll be the last one laughing with that "fuck you" money.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#92

Post by closeparen »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #23

I'm a regular reader of Ask a Manager ( https://www.askamanager.org/ ), and one thing that comes up over and over is how both managers and employees will avoid awkward topics ranging from trivial ("your breath smells") to consequential ("you need to step up or you'll be fired!"), to the point of going to extremes like quitting the job, just to avoid having a genuine conversation with somebody. And I'm guilty of this…

After being on the disgusted end of one of these situations, I’ve learned to be more attuned to lighthearted teasing and other offhand remarks about my own behavior.

People who care about you may be trying to help you understand that you’re violating norms, but feeling limited in how they can communicate it.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#93

Post by hanniabu »

arvinsim wrote: post #86
georgewsinger wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep -- a classic "Expected Value is not the only thing that matters, but also one's Risk of Ruin" situation. The counter-argument is this: do we still overestimate our true risk of ruin when it comes to asking sensitive questions? Are we actually going to get fired (or whatever horrendous thing) for not asking that question? I bet the answer is that we still overrate our true probability of ruin when it comes to thes…

> Are we actually going to get fired (or whatever horrendous thing) for not asking that question? What's worse than being fired is to be stuck on a job where the environment/culture has gone bad. Not everyone has the economic and social mobility to change jobs on the fly.

Or where you're effectively in a dead end job because that incident with HR causes you to get passed up for any promotions or lateral shifts.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#94

Post by crimsonalucard »

sandoooo wrote: post #2

The 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 don't think it's that simple. You pose the issue as if it's a rational decision.

There is no rational decision in your brains choice to make you fear public speaking or fear heights. I think avoiding sensitive questions is largely the same thing.

Many people have an irrational fear and their excuse (while semi legitimate) is to try to rationalize the whole thing as you have.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#95

Post by thaumasiotes »

StandardFuture wrote: post #90
wildmusings wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But a core part of being polite, is not hurting others through your actions directly or indirectly. ( or at least trying) The problem is wanting the notion of politeness to do too much work. Being polite, being nice , is just a moment to moment strategy for avoiding conflict. Unfortunately, niceness has become the most important virtue in American culture. Being good is much more profound, and niceness is just one…

This hits at a fundamental point that has puzzled me about American culture for the longest time. A country that is so heavily steeped in protestant/purtanical Christian roots and yet does not even realize that one of the main components of that creed is NOT taking offense to things. In fact, taking offense to things is as sinful as actually offending someone. It's basically a philosophical method of being a little l…

> It is one of my favorite principles from a religion that most who practice said religion almost entirely ignore. Puzzling.

There's nothing puzzling about this. Most people who practice any religion with written principles almost entirely ignore almost all of those principles. The official principles of a religion don't really have anything to do with why people affiliate to one or another.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#96

Post by kbenson »

Yessing wrote: post #44
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #23

I'm a regular reader of Ask a Manager ( https://www.askamanager.org/ ), and one thing that comes up over and over is how both managers and employees will avoid awkward topics ranging from trivial ("your breath smells") to consequential ("you need to step up or you'll be fired!"), to the point of going to extremes like quitting the job, just to avoid having a genuine conversation with somebody. And I'm guilty of this…

"not offending others by asking sensitive questions/Avoiding awkward" is the polite thing to do. But a core part of being polite, is not hruting others through your actions directly or undirectly. ( or at least trying) In cases where not asking the question puts the other party in a disadvantage or at the risk thereof, I feel one shouldn't be allowed to claim that one was being polite or "doing the right thing". You…

> But a core part of being polite, is not hruting others through your actions directly or undirectly. ( or at least trying)

The problem is that in some cultures it's perfectly fine to talk about things that in other cultures it's not. The solution to that is to give people a benefit of a doubt and not assume they are trying to be hurtful, even if your first response is to be hurt. We don't seem to be great at that when dealing with people from other cultures, and we're really not great about it with people of the same culture (but the same thing can apply, since people interpret culture differently).

With the addition that we're currently in a zeitgeist of being very sensitive as a society about how people feel about what has happened to them (I would argue to the point that we're ignoring intention far more than makes sense), and it can be very hard to have sensitive conversations without someone being hurt and/or repercussions resulting, even if the intention was good.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#97

Post by gsich »

musicale wrote: post #74
rcurry wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst one for me was the guy who didn’t wash his hands after using the restroom. One day, one of my team members told me about this, and I didn’t believe him, ha ha, so a few days later I’m in the restroom and this guy comes out of a stall and just walks out the door. So about a week later my guy who’d complained about it had some problem with one of our other systems, and who do they send over to help him out? Y…

You got it backwards - toilet seats are cleaner than computer keyboards. https://www.center4research.org/bacteria-computer-keyboards-...

Toilets get cleaned regularly (at most places). Keyboards not really.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#98

Post by Consultant32452 »

Anyone interested in this topic might find a search for the phrase 'preference falsification' interesting. For a great resource in book form, I highly recommend "Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification" by Timur Kuran. He was recently in The Portal podcast for an even shorter intro.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#99

Post by taneq »

perl4ever wrote: post #36
krustyburger wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right, of course. But I wonder if the parent is aware other people can detect this sort of thing.

If you can't detect it in some cases, how would you know?

Obviously you can't, and the end result is that this dramatically amplifies the effect of catching someone out in an insincerity. The stronger your belief that someone is truthful, the larger a portion of their actions you need to re-examine once catching them out in a significant lie, and the longer it will take for you to re-build your original belief that they were generally truthful.

(Statistics isn't my strong suit but I believe this is perfectly in line with modeling a person's trustworthiness as a Bayesian process?)

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#100

Post by StandardFuture »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #95
StandardFuture wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hits at a fundamental point that has puzzled me about American culture for the longest time. A country that is so heavily steeped in protestant/purtanical Christian roots and yet does not even realize that one of the main components of that creed is NOT taking offense to things. In fact, taking offense to things is as sinful as actually offending someone. It's basically a philosophical method of being a little l…

> It is one of my favorite principles from a religion that most who practice said religion almost entirely ignore. Puzzling. There's nothing puzzling about this. Most people who practice any religion with written principles almost entirely ignore almost all of those principles. The official principles of a religion don't really have anything to do with why people affiliate to one or another.

But, particularly in American culture it is the imbalance in "enforcement" of principles that is the problem.

It is perfectly fine to be super-nice as often as possible. But, the culture is "do not offend" dominate and almost void of "do not take offense".

This imbalance of cultural enforcement is likely a driving factor behind the younger generations view on enforcing standards of political correctness, social justice, etc. If you are offended then you are in the right, always, and without question.

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