@davidbauer Ugh. These commenters stress me out. In fact, there's potentially an argument that filtering out such personalities actually helps cultivate a good/healthy environment for you personally.
To my eyes the comments read like pattern matches on low-level grammar and lexical choice. RFCs are even more egregious users of imperative language, but I don't see many people getting their jimmies ruffled about that, so I wonder what kind of social background and circumstances could make simple grammar features feel like a strong signal of character to people.
As a point of contrast, if discussion brought up things like the following, I would instead feel eminent warmness and inclusiveness:
- There is not a social norm encouraging people to write "Me Manuals", so what factors might bring such an idea to salience?
- Cultivating such a document and sharing with people exposes a lot of vulnerability. What does this act itself communicate? (Cooperative intent? Perfectionist tendencies? Bravery? Narcissism?)
- How would a document like this parse out under various different cultural and corporate norms?
- What are the failure modes of trying to communicate nuances of human cooperation through low-bandwidth channels of explicit delineation?
- Engaging witch such a document also engages our Kahneman System 1 cognition strongly. What can we glean about our individual biases by the snap-judgements and intuitions we feel reading the article?
- Are there historical or anthropological analogies we can draw to a "Me Manual" practice that could shed light on how such it may operate?
Et cetera. Personally, the author's article pushes my priors about him/her in the direction of earnest, open, optimistic, defaulting to cooperation vs competition, and perhaps having perfectionist tendencies. My base-rate estimate for this personality is semi-low, but the article feels like a pretty strong signal, so overall, I would feel cautiously hopeful about working with the author.