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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

#271

Post by smartbit »

pibaker wrote: post #131
smartbit wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO the Dutch are more direct for the same reason they are less sensitive to authority and approach their superiors as equals. Netherlands effectively being a River Delta, there always was the threat of water, a force greater than anyone. IOW if a flood comes, both the king and the peasant start digging. This is completely different from neighboring countries UK and Germany, which both traditionally had strong sense…

> IOW if a flood comes, both the king and the peasant start digging. By the same reasoning, India, Bangladesh and China — all ancient civilizations threatened by great rivers — should have developed similar egalitarian cultures but the reality is the polar opposite. Maybe something as complex as human civilizations can't be the result of just one geographical feature.

India and China are huge countries with very small percentage river deltas. Not comparable by any means. Bangladesh in a very young country that inherited it’s culture from India. I’m not an anthropologist, but sorry, I don’t agree there is any likeness with these countries.

If you have an other theory about the Dutch culture and why it is so different from it’s neighbors, I happy to hear.

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

#272

Post by castillar76 »

jcalvinowens wrote: post #217
castillar76 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point of communication between engineers is usually to establish a mutual understanding... I tried to let this pass in the discussion, I really did, but since it came up in various other replies I felt like I just couldn't. We need to get the hell over ourselves as a profession: the fact that someone is an "engineer" says nothing about their communications styles, needs, or preferences as a person. There is abs…

You read far too much into my word choice. I think you could substitute any technical profession (I would include everything you mentioned explicitly) for "engineer" and what I wrote would be equivalently true. I just happen to have the most direct experience with engineers, and the original article was about engineers. It's true of the technical aspects of art too: professional musicians rehearsing, for example. It'…

That’s fair! There were a couple comments that used similar language; I didn’t mean to call you out. Yours was the first I saw with it, so I hit reply. Thanks for clarifying.

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

#273

Post by smcg »

Something I noticed when working for a company that claimed to "value honesty over fear of offending someone else" is that they are still very selective of what you are allowed to say. Can't make fun of the giant American flag right as you walk in the door, that's unpatriotic. And don't mention any of the misdealings of past or current investors.

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

#275

Post by IanCal »

groby_b wrote: post #43
IanCal wrote: post #9

Some of those examples are genuinely different as they convey different intent and certainty. Also some of the basic small talk level things are also there to gauge someone’s responsiveness right now. To ask directly can mean “I believe my issue is important enough to immediately change what you’re thinking about to my problem without checking first”. You might complain about breaking your flow, which is fine, but an…

> 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.

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

#276

Post by mx7zysuj4xew »

rkomorn wrote: post #109
jiggawatts wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I subscribe to the thesis of Death of the Author , that just because someone came up with something, it doesn't necessarily given them a permanent special privilege in its interpretation. Everybody can understand the work as they prefer, and if anything, the work takes on a life of its own in greater society and evolves together with it. (Hence the limits on the duration of copyright.) This is why many common idioms…

> the subject is the code/system/product/organisation, which has no feelings and hence can't be offended This is like saying that telling someone their artwork sucks is not offensive because "the artwork has no feelings."

[flagged]

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

#277

Post by tmoertel »

mayhemducks wrote: post #201
tombert wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He actually did not! He just proceeded like it was nothing.

Because it was. Was probably this person's 10th interview of the day. They probably only need the simplest of infractions to weed someone out given the absurd volume of applications they receive.

> Because [arriving 15 minutes late to a 30-minute interview] was [nothing].

I'd expect over 95% of both interviewers and interviewees to say that arriving 15 minutes late to a 30-minute interview is very much not nothing; it's a serious breach of what is expected – on both sides of the interview.

If you show up late for an interview, no matter which side of the table you're on, you ought to apologize and, if you're more than a few minutes late, have a good explanation. To do anything less signals that you are an unreliable person. And, when you are representing a company, it makes the company look like it's run by people who don't even understand how to do something as simple as show up on time. It suggests that one of the company's unspoken core values is Dysfunction.

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

#278

Post by simonra »

eucyclos wrote: post #270
plasticchris wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably depends on the measure used to define peak, but the removal of arbitrary limits on honest intellectual inquiry has huge benefits, eg the enlightenment, science, etc.

Did the enlightenment not have a taboo around questioning e.g. the fundamental equality of all human beings?

My impression was that that taboo first got a firm foothold a couple of hundred years later, after the second world war showed what industrialised genocide looks like. How could the fundamental equality of all humans otherwise have been accepted as true and taboo to talk about at the same time as women being denied suffrage until the early 19-hundreds, or eugenics being openly discussed well into the 1930ies?

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

#279

Post by LorenPechtel »

mikkupikku wrote: post #139
rendaw wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard of taboos forbidding discussion in religious contexts, for religious (superstitious) reasons, but what definition of taboo are you using that it doesn't just mean "forbidden"? There's a taboo to marrying your blood sibling, but discussing such marriages is fine. If a culture generally allowed marrying such a sibling I think it'd be past its peak, maybe. But I don't see how discussing it would contribute to…

Try to start up a conversation about the relative merits of marrying your siblings and I bet everybody else in the room will suddenly get very uncomfortable. They'll be thinking "Of all possible things we could talk about, why this??" You're right that taboos also concern actions, not just discussion, but in this case it's probably both.

I see a problem here with your example: "everyone else". If you're going to have a sensitive discussion it should involve the minimum number of people.
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