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Apology

felleisen.org

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Re: Apology

#101

Post by admash »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #96
admash wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The request for forgiveness is indicative of the desire to restore the relationship, as the other steps can be fulfilled in the absence of that desire. The capacity of such a request to be manipulative is dependent on first, the sincerity of the desire, and second, on the degree to which the injured party feels compelled to forgive. We do a disservice in the extent that we inculcate an expectation that a request for…

Maybe in a private apology between two people, that works. In a public apology, it's typically performative BS that puts the person on the spot and imposes on them to find some socially acceptable response rather than giving them room to sort their feelings and draw their own conclusions. I think it also depends on the severity of the offense. I think if someone murdered someone beloved by the person to whom they are…

"I don't think it is appropriate to demand a gift," -- I agree completely, hence the use of the term "request".

But I would suggest that rather than making the effort to hinder what may be a genuine attempt at the restoration of a relationship, we should instead seek to help people recognize that forgiveness is voluntary, and that they have every right to decline extending forgiveness if harmed.

To use your phrase, we need to make it a socially acceptable response to deny forgiveness.

Better that forgiveness be rare and sincere, than common and meaningless.

Re: Apology

#103

Post by DoreenMichele »

admash wrote: post #101
DoreenMichele wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in a private apology between two people, that works. In a public apology, it's typically performative BS that puts the person on the spot and imposes on them to find some socially acceptable response rather than giving them room to sort their feelings and draw their own conclusions. I think it also depends on the severity of the offense. I think if someone murdered someone beloved by the person to whom they are…

"I don't think it is appropriate to demand a gift," -- I agree completely, hence the use of the term "request". But I would suggest that rather than making the effort to hinder what may be a genuine attempt at the restoration of a relationship, we should instead seek to help people recognize that forgiveness is voluntary, and that they have every right to decline extending forgiveness if harmed. To use your phrase, w…

The problem is that navigating all that in a public setting is compounded by the fact that it is public. When you make it public, for whatever reason, you must navigate not only your side as an individual and their side as an individual but the reactions of a large number of other people.

If they denied forgiveness in the first five minutes because they were hurt, many other people will reinforce their choice and actively make it difficult for them to sincerely change their mind.

At best, we can suggest that it should be socially acceptable to neither accept nor deny the apology and to not comment at all on the matter of forgiveness. But I think a public apology implicitly is a request for forgiveness and can be understood as such without a public request for forgiveness.

That's how I would handle it.

I used to write a lot of very sincere, public apologies on a small email list of a few hundred people because I was very ill and on a lot of medication and in a lot of pain and frequently not sleeping well. I certainly did not mean to offend anyone.

I wrote my apology. I explained what I had been trying to say if I felt it had been misinterpreted. I took responsibility for hurting them. I tried to write in a way that remedied that hurt.

The result was that I became the list scapegoat. If someone actively picked on me and I gave push back, then other people were all "There she goes again!"

I have probably more experience than average writing sincere and heartfelt public apologies. This is an informed opinion and it isn't going to change.

I always hated seeing on list apologies that ended with a request for forgiveness. They were consistently shitty behavior that boiled down to trying to save face and demand that the person they had wronged should make them feel okay about their sense of embarrassment. It was always an awful thing to witness.

Edited because autocorrect borked something.

Re: Apology

#104

Post by LAC-Tech »

threatofrain wrote: post #61
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #3

Context: Why I no longer contribute to Racket . https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27531508

Discussion on Lobsters. https://lobste.rs/s/6rnyn9/why_i_no_longer_contribute_racket

Thanks for this public service announcement to never go on lobsters. Wow.

Re: Apology

#105

Post by dang »

yellow_lead wrote: post #86

I'm curious why this was flagged. If the discussion yesterday didn't break HN rules, I'm not sure why the response would. I suppose both of them technically fall into "off-topic" discussion though.

Possibly some readers are tired of the repetition, and they're not wrong [1] - that's why we downweight follow-up stories [2]. However, we make exceptions when there's significant new information (SNI) [3], which basically amounts to: is there enough of a diff from the previous thread to support a substantially new discussion? Diffs are what's interesting [4].

In this case you could call it either way: the fact that Felleisen apologized is significant new information but on the other hand the thread is...of the second freshness. I've turned off the flags for now.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Re: Apology

#106

Post by gknoy »

wpietri wrote: post #87
neolog wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good answer. Though "ask for forgiveness" seems like a specific cultural/quasireligious thing that not everybody assigns meaning to.

In the sense of asking forgiveness from $DEITY, sure. But in the sense of saying to the person harmed, "Please forgive me," I think it's very broad.

It's considered part of a "four part apology", and is often taught when teaching kids how to apologize.

    I'm sorry.
    What I did was wrong because ____
    Next time, I will ____
    Do you forgive me?
Forgiveness is not required (though encouraged), but you should still ask for it. It's not perfect, but following the pattern is something that helps one demonstrate that you understand both why one's behavior wasn't OK (and how it hurt someone else), it also communicates that you intend to change your behavior.

This blog post seems to pretty solidly convey part one, but the others less so. It's still good to see the "I'm sorry".

Re: Apology

#107

Post by yawaramin »

plorkyeran wrote: post #7
fungiblecog wrote: post #6

Yeah, yeah. We always get the inevitable apology. Actions not words, please.

This is an actual apology that unambiguously admits he was in the wrong, and that's not at all inevitable. An apology is only the first step, but this is a good example of what that first step should look like.

It's really not. What a real apology should have looked like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27545116

Re: Apology

#109

Post by JadeNB »

nyokodo wrote: post #75
aeturnum wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you expect people to do things they don't feel comfortable doing, you will repeatedly be disappointed. If you are depending on coworkers to go outside their comfort zone, you will lose coworkers (and probably feel they are undependable). Even if you are right and this person is "too sensitive" in some way, they were also an important contributor who has left a project where they no longer felt comfortable. No one…

> No one owes it to any of us to "put up" with how we treat them. No, however we do owe it to ourselves to learn better how to push back on difficult people. It’s a form of self defense because difficult people, or people having a bad day and lashing out, are not going away.

> No, however we do owe it to ourselves to learn better how to push back on difficult people. It’s a form of self defense because difficult people, or people having a bad day and lashing out, are not going away.

I think this is a key word, though—we owe it to ourselves. We can say "boy, I did a poor job confronting that bully today." But no-one else owes it to us; we are, I think, unjustified in saying, "boy, Matthew did a poor job confronting that bully today", or at least in passing any judgment if that is our belief.

Re: Apology

#110

Post by ltbarcly3 »

So now we have to issue formal apologies when someone decides to attack us in public for being rude to them years earlier? Are people made of wet tissue paper, unable to move on after someone wasn't nice to them years ago?
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