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"No Feigning Surprise"

wizardzines.com

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Re: "No Feigning Surprise"

#41

Post by Retr0id »

scottlamb wrote: post #34

I 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…

Don't forget that server-grade drives are often 15K RPM, giving you ~2x over a typical 7200RPM drive.

Re: "No Feigning Surprise"

#42

Post by akerl_ »

jtbayly wrote: post #40
akerl_ wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Is being surprised somebody doesn't know something putting them down

Yes.

> is being unsurprised they are ignorant putting them down

Again, the whole reason to just declare this as a rule is so that you’re not put in a position to try to decide if somebody is ignorant or not. You set a social guideline, and if people break it, you point it out, and it doesn’t matter why they did it.

Re: "No Feigning Surprise"

#43

Post by akerl_ »

jtbayly wrote: post #38
swiftcoder wrote: post #15

Earlier 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

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),…

If somebody says something rude to me, why would my reaction be to try to decide if I’m glad they were rude unintentionally?

Re: "No Feigning Surprise"

#44

Post by Aurornis »

Chaosvex wrote: post #27
Aurornis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the phrasing is not semantically perfect for covering all scenarios. Someone might be showing true surprise. However, the rule is really about not doing something that makes others feel bad about not knowing something or asking questions, like you said. The “No feigning surprise” phase has been a perfect hook to get people to read and understand what it means. In some environments, feigning or exaggerati…

"has been a perfect hook to get people to read and understand what it means" "Joke's on you. I worded it poorly intentionally!"

I don't think they did. I doubt they intended this to blow up at all.

As I said in my post, I suspect they were addressing a situation they were seeing in their cohorts and it happened to resonate with more people and in broader contexts than they expected.

Re: "No Feigning Surprise"

#45

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #12
akerl_ wrote: post #2

Did you mean to link to https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/

I think there's an xkcd, with the same thing. I really enjoy sharing a planet with Ms. Evans. She seems to be a genuinely decent person, and we could always use more of those.

Hmm... the reactions to this post are rather revealing about the HN community.

One quite positive, and sharing an excellent link (thanks).

One neutral, and sharing the xkcd link I referenced (thanks).

A couple of anonymous downvotes. I assume because it says something positive about someone, and we'll have none of that, here, thank you very much.

Re: "No Feigning Surprise"

#46

Post by JohnMakin »

johnfn wrote: post #32
swiftcoder wrote: post #15

Earlier 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.

Wow, you didn't know this kind of behavior is insulting? Crazy!

Re: "No Feigning Surprise"

#47

Post by [deleted] »

jtbayly wrote: post #38
swiftcoder wrote: post #15

Earlier 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

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),…

[deleted]

Re: "No Feigning Surprise"

#48

Post by akerl_ »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #45
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's an xkcd, with the same thing. I really enjoy sharing a planet with Ms. Evans. She seems to be a genuinely decent person, and we could always use more of those.

Hmm... the reactions to this post are rather revealing about the HN community. One quite positive, and sharing an excellent link (thanks). One neutral, and sharing the xkcd link I referenced (thanks). A couple of anonymous downvotes. I assume because it says something positive about someone, and we'll have none of that, here, thank you very much.

The concept of not feigning surprise may be related to the linked xkcd comic, but I don’t see any indication that it’s the “original”, and I downvoted several comments that seemed keen to steal thunder from the post by trying to frame it as just a rehash of a popular comic.

Re: "No Feigning Surprise"

#49

Post by dasil003 »

wdrw wrote: post #16
TaylorPhebillo wrote: post #5

This 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…

I don't really understand what you're nitpicking, the rule is "don't feign surprise". It seems perfectly well-stated to capture the spirit of the intent, and it explicitly allows for genuine surprise as you suggest.

Now, human interaction is squishy, so yeah, they are also trying to cover the all-too-common-in-tech case where someone is just being an asshole. Let's call it the Comic Book Guy case. In this case, it actually doesn't matter whether surprise is feigned or not, because what's actually happening is this person is listening and waiting for someone to express a blind spot so they can prove their intelligence by correcting them. You can't really write down an explicit deterministic rule for this, because it's all cognitive behavior social stuff that people are generally unaware of moment to moment. However the recurse center rules plus live feedback when it happens is as good of a solution as I can imagine.

Re: "No Feigning Surprise"

#50

Post by Aurornis »

isoprophlex wrote: post #28
akerl_ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Recurse Center, and Julia Evans, have correctly identified that it's a net negative social practice for people to on-the-fly decide that somebody needs to be mocked for not knowing something, regardless of how much you think they ought to know it. Even your "calm" version probably doesn't need to exist. If there's something they want to do and they're asking you about how to do it, by all means, it may be relevan…

Indeed. There's nothing lost by rephrasing that to "Aha, good to know that you have not heard of CSS before! That means I will explain you some basics first, otherwise x and y will be incomprehensible to you."

Honestly I wouldn't even say that much. The point of the rule is that there's no need to call it out or even discuss the fact that you know it but they don't.

Just go straight to explaining it helpfully. Don't make the knowledge gap itself a point of discussion at all.

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