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I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me

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Re: I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me

#331

Post by mapontosevenths »

lproven wrote: post #329
mapontosevenths wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think I object to excessive verbiage because I struggle through it? That was the heart of my question, yes. The only way I could fathom it was to think that maybe some people just found reading generally difficult. The hypothesis being that those few extra words hurt, because reading in general was high effort. It seems I was very far off the mark, at least in your case. For what it's worth, I've enjoyed sev…

> Now I wonder if it is sometimes the opposite problem: A skilled writer losing patience when someone less skilled is at the wheel. Others in his thread explored that theory, and it seems they may be onto something. Could be. The KISS principle applies in communication as in the rest of life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

Of course, but it takes skill and intelligence to speak plainly. Meanwhile, half the people you meet every day are of below average intelligence.

It's best not to expect more from people than they have to give.

Re: I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me

#332

Post by kixiQu »

allreduce wrote: post #135
kixiQu wrote: post #23

> If the payment service went down because a config value was wrong, the incident report should say: the payment service went down because config value X was set to Y when it needed to be set to Z. The number of junior engineers I have had to coach out of this way of thinking to get the smallest fragment of value out of a postmortem process... dear Lord. I wonder if this person is similarly new to professional collab…

What's the mistake here? Shouldn't an incident report start with this and then continue with an analysis of the process, without too much "internal perspective"? In my mind, the internal perspective might be useful to jot down when doing the analysis, but is too noisy to be useful to disseminate.

So I know it's a little bananas to answer this with a link to material the length of a novel, but my feeling is that the real spirit of a postmortem is best carried across by:

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/stamping-on-eventstream/

He goes through the process, which he describes:

> The constant zooming-out is key here: it’s not enough to find out why things broke, but find out why “why things broke”. In theory you’re supposed to keep doing it: if someone skips a step because of managerial pressure, you ask why the manager was pressuring them in the first place. If the manager was worried about production quotas, find out how the quotas were decided. You just keep going and going and going.

There are different procedures folks can use to capture bits of this to different degrees, but I think this write-up illustrates well both how exhausting it is to do this right and what the value can be. Even if your goal is to get to Action Items, this kind of understanding of your event is what should generate them.

If a person doesn't understand the value, I would imagine they would write something very close to TFA's

> when something goes wrong [...] they explain why they made the decision, and then explain the contextual factors that influenced that, and then explain why those contextual factors existed, and then explain why it would have been unreasonable to expect them to anticipate the downstream effect of those factors, and by the end you have some fat five paragraphs that contains maybe one sentence worth of information and reads like a legal defense brief written by someone who knows they are guilty.

Re: I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me

#334

Post by groby_b »

IanCal wrote: post #275
groby_b wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but an interruption can be a lot less disruptive compared to getting nerd sniped. Theoretically yes. Practically, folks who avoid small talk deliberately usually have enough awareness to not interrupt unless they need your time. But yes, directness without judgment is bad. Ironically, the author fails to apply that judgment themselves and wastes a ton of words on unnecessary and/or bad examples. And, more important…

> Practically, folks who avoid small talk deliberately usually have enough awareness to not interrupt unless they need your time. It’s not whether you need my time it’s where it falls in my priorities which you do not know. By essentially not asking they will get it wrong more, in both directions.

Sure. And so it depends on how many people you need to talk to on a daily basis, and how often the interruption is worth your time.

It's recall vs. precision in an org-shaped trenchcoat.

Re: I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me

#335

Post by jerbearito »

comboy wrote: post #321
tasuki wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It perfectly is. From https://www.lesswrong.com/w/crockers-rules : > Note that Crocker's Rules does not mean one is authorized to insult people; it means that other people don't have to worry about whether they are insulting you. Crocker's Rules are a discipline, not a privilege. Furthermore, taking advantage of Crocker's Rules does not imply reciprocity. How could it? Crocker's Rules are something you do for yoursel…

Alright, my original comment was wrong (as was the parent). I still stand by my opinion that it is not practical though.

Seeing this a bit late. I take your point and yes, that's my worldview. Crocker does not say it's both. Sorry I'm so late to reply.
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