Ask HN: Why are people in real life so different?

If they were conversations, then he must have been contributing to the emotion and nonsense, otherwise he could have just ignored it.

I don't know who your engineer is, but in some professional forums, I have seen prima donnas leave in a huff because they just couldn't stand to be challenged and couldn't refrain from going off-topic by discussing the personality of the other person(s).

Long discussion goes here, but human language is a socially-contextual performance art which has roots in the creation and teaching of the construction of tools. Vagueness, non-verbal messaging, social signaling, and all of the other aspects of language are built in order to transfer that tool knowledge with the minimum amount of effort. To be even further reductionist, you don't have to make that spear out of the exact same rock I used as long as you get a point on the end of a sufficiently long stick. Language's inability to be precise and have millions of shades of meaning based on other things besides words is a feature, not a bug. It's an evolutionary survival trait, probably needed by any sentient creatures.

Contrast that to what we're doing now on HN: typing messages back and forth. That is not the use of human language, at least not as we understand it today. Printed text is not language. Symbolic representation of sounds has a singular, yet fundamentally different goal: the unambiguous transfer of knowledge. The closer that knowledge that we want to transfer is to the human experience, the worse printed text works for that purpose. This is why fiction can be a 12-part novel while a chemistry formula might take up one page.

So when we see text messages flying back-and-forth, it engages a different part of our brain. Continuing my simplification, when we view and interact with text, we're really looking to play some advanced video game where the correct text and replies "proves" an exact version of the world that others might not share. This is why so many online arguments end up end semantic wordplay games. It's not that people are petty, it's that we're trying to take that hominid brain system and bolt it into a logical, mathematical framework. Tech folks commonly say something like "If a implies b, and b implies c, then a implies c" Unless you use a set theory definition of a,b, and c, this can be shown to fail rather easily. [1]

tl;dr, when I type the word "dog", think of a dog, and have a conversation with my grandmother about her dog, although we want to think of the word as being the exact same thing in all three contexts, it is not. It just appears that way. That's why you think people are acting so differently. They're not. It's just different things are going on in different social/physical contexts without our realizing it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism#Syllogistic_fallacie...

For bravery and boldness:

Online, you can dip out of a conversation any time you want, so you can make bold claims and back out of defending them when you start losing. You can also sneak away, quickly look things up, refine your argument and return with everyone else having no idea that you started off talking complete bullshit. In real life, to do that you have to actually call an Uber. Whatever conversational mess you got unto, you have to sit in.

For aggression:

I think people are generally nicer online (although our perceptions of that are skewed by very stupid twitter replypersons), when they are posting in a community they want to continue to post on (and are reasonably bright.) In real life they are also nice when speaking to strangers or mild acquaintances. In both cases it is because all people know of you is what you're saying, so you don't want to scare them off. For friends and loved ones, however, you can argue abstractions much more aggressively because they know that you love them and that the subject is irrelevant to that.

So online people are bolder because they have escape hatches, but less aggressive because they want to impress. Offline people are more timid because they have to stand by what they say, but more aggressive with people they have real relationships with because they can rely on those to put that aggression into context.

At parties with people who aren't close, you get the worst of both worlds. People afraid to be bold and people afraid to offend. [edit: that's what alcohol is for, though.]

This is the precisely the kind of crap I'm talking about that brings HN down, where commenters just assert facts with no information whatsoever.

In person, it's hard to arrange, say, a local amateur astronomer group and have meetings once a week or once a month with telescopes someplace dark. Online, you can talk about astronomy with others who are interested and share links, tips, trade anecdotes, etc. any time of the day or night.

It's a completely different social environment and this significantly impacts how people interact, thus it impacts individual behavior either in real terms or perceived terms.