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"No Feigning Surprise"
31–40 of 80 posts
Re: "No Feigning Surprise"
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Either way, that’s not feigning surprise. Odd to call it that. What they are saying is when you are surprised somebody didn’t know something, don’t let it show. So “feign unsurprise.”
The reason we call it "feigning surprise", is that the surprise is pretty rarely genuine. It's an interaction people have more-or-less-unthinkingly practiced throughout their lives to keep the out-group separated from the in-group
This is a sharply negative interpretation of behavior of people who may be acting genuinely, if without social grace. I think few people shocked that you don't know bash are displaying that surprise as a way to keep you in the out-group - I think they are surprised.
I would argue that the real in-group/out-group behavior is excluding people who aren't naturally adept at being social.
Re: "No Feigning Surprise"
#33This is a reference to one the Recurse Center's social rules: https://www.recurse.com/social-rules I was really impressed with how successful RC is at maintaining an environment where people can learn and grow. Part of that is certainly selection effects- the point of center is self directed growth around programming, and there's an interview process that I assume filters especially hostile people. But I think the so…
I always found this particular Recurse Center rule strange. I understand how not feigning surprise can be a good rule, as in you should not pretend to be surprised when you genuinely aren't. (e.g. a web front-end dev saying "I don't know how to recompile the kernel" - "What, you don't know ?!?" - when it's clear that there's no actual expectation of knowing, it's just an attempt to self-aggrandize or put the other pe…
Indeed. That's directly addressed in their definition of the rule:
> No feigning surprise isn’t a great name. When someone acts surprised when you don’t know something, it doesn’t matter whether they’re pretending to be surprised or actually surprised. The effect is the same: the next time you have a question, you’re more likely to keep your mouth shut. An accurate name for this rule would be no acting surprised when someone doesn’t know something, but it’s a mouthful, and at this point, the current name has stuck.
Re: "No Feigning Surprise"
#34I don't think people are upvoting this for the fact at the top of "say something surprising" [1], but it indeed surprised me:
> I can write 500MB/s to a hard drive? that's so much!
Turns out a Seagate 2X18 can write at 528 MiB/s according to its spec sheet. [2] My rule of thumb was that HDDs could do like 100MB/s (aka 800 Mbps) but I guess between density improvements and this new "dual-actuator" class, it's gotten a lot faster. HDD seek time has basically been stuck for 30+ years and probably will remain so but capacity has increased a lot, and the throughput for sequential access probably should scale with capacity [edit: times rpm, thanks Retr0id]. For a while I think it wasn't increasing, but I guess they decided to fix that?
SSDs of course can do way more than 500 MB/s, and you can do better by compressing as you write (depending on your data), and you can stripe across multiple HDDs, but it turns out none of those are necessary.
[1] as I write this, the title "no feigning surprise" suggests https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/> but the link points to "say something surprising" https://wizardzines.com/comics/surprise/>.
[2] https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/exos-2x1...
Re: "No Feigning Surprise"
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always found this particular Recurse Center rule strange. I understand how not feigning surprise can be a good rule, as in you should not pretend to be surprised when you genuinely aren't. (e.g. a web front-end dev saying "I don't know how to recompile the kernel" - "What, you don't know ?!?" - when it's clear that there's no actual expectation of knowing, it's just an attempt to self-aggrandize or put the other pe…
It is not always best to communicate openly. Honesty without kindness is cruelty. It does a learner no good to hear that you are shocked by a skill deficit. If you're planning to be around people who are in a learning space, you should not be surprised if they don't know something. And even if you are surprised, it is kinder to not show it. I don't think this rule is universal. If you're in a professional environment…
> I don't think this rule is universal.
Counterpoint: Most workplaces would be best served by a team of developers who help up level each other without causing morale issues when knowledge gaps, which everyone has, inevitably show up.
This type of environment is the best for software development organizations specifically because most software development shops that have more than one person working on a codebase or system or set of systems have already reached the point where no single person can keep the whole thing in their head at once.
Maybe that person really worked in an environment where they didn't have to think about pointer arithmetic. Reframing closing knowledge gaps as a beneficial and necessary part of a healthy development system makes it so when somebody doesn't know something and needs help they are willing to get it quickly. And that they will talk about knowledge gaps openly so they can be filled with the collective pool of the organization .
Shutting that down even by just "narc-ing" on the person just makes it that much harder when others need to know something they don't to get a job done, slowing down the system over time.
Re: "No Feigning Surprise"
#36@mods: the title or the URL are wrong. They either meant to post https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/ or https://wizardzines.com/comics/surprise/ with a title that has any relation with it.
Send it to hn@ycombinator.com.[1]
Re: "No Feigning Surprise"
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason we call it "feigning surprise", is that the surprise is pretty rarely genuine. It's an interaction people have more-or-less-unthinkingly practiced throughout their lives to keep the out-group separated from the in-group
This is a sharply negative interpretation of behavior of people who may be acting genuinely, if without social grace. I think few people shocked that you don't know bash are displaying that surprise as a way to keep you in the out-group - I think they are surprised. I would argue that the real in-group/out-group behavior is excluding people who aren't naturally adept at being social.
The whole point of making it a rule is so those people can learn it and avoid accidentally putting other people down.
Re: "No Feigning Surprise"
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Either way, that’s not feigning surprise. Odd to call it that. What they are saying is when you are surprised somebody didn’t know something, don’t let it show. So “feign unsurprise.”
The reason we call it "feigning surprise", is that the surprise is pretty rarely genuine. It's an interaction people have more-or-less-unthinkingly practiced throughout their lives to keep the out-group separated from the in-group
People doing that are doing it intentionally, and they aren't going to follow your rule.
People who are open to listening are not pretending to be surprised in order to put somebody down. They are actually surprised and (perhaps) unintentionally hurting somebody. If that somebody is hurt, they need to ask themselves which hurts more, having somebody surprised you didn't know something (aka they think you are smart), or being unsurprised you are ignorant of something (aka they think you don't know stuff).
Re: "No Feigning Surprise"
#39This is a reference to one the Recurse Center's social rules: https://www.recurse.com/social-rules I was really impressed with how successful RC is at maintaining an environment where people can learn and grow. Part of that is certainly selection effects- the point of center is self directed growth around programming, and there's an interview process that I assume filters especially hostile people. But I think the so…
I always found this particular Recurse Center rule strange. I understand how not feigning surprise can be a good rule, as in you should not pretend to be surprised when you genuinely aren't. (e.g. a web front-end dev saying "I don't know how to recompile the kernel" - "What, you don't know ?!?" - when it's clear that there's no actual expectation of knowing, it's just an attempt to self-aggrandize or put the other pe…
It still sucks to be on the receiving end of genuine surprise.
I found the most helpful reframing is to replace the words and emotions with ones that encourage learning and question-asking. For example you can try being excited instead of surprised, or say something like, "that's a great question, let's figure it out together."
Going through the Fermi estimation in the xkcd comic Ten Thousand also helped me to be a lot less genuinely surprised when someone didn't know something: https://xkcd.com/1053/
Re: "No Feigning Surprise"
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a sharply negative interpretation of behavior of people who may be acting genuinely, if without social grace. I think few people shocked that you don't know bash are displaying that surprise as a way to keep you in the out-group - I think they are surprised. I would argue that the real in-group/out-group behavior is excluding people who aren't naturally adept at being social.
The whole point of making it a rule is so those people can learn it and avoid accidentally putting other people down.
Is being surprised somebody doesn't know something putting them down, or is being unsurprised they are ignorant putting them down?