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Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Crocker's rules are a request for people to act a certain way with respect to you , not wrt anyone else.
Should every incident report be written twice, once for normal people and once for the developmentally challenged then?
On my team we all trust each other to be fairly direct. On the flip side, “softening” a remark can signal to the recipient that you’re open minded to other solutions. “We should do X.” and “how would you feel about doing X?” accomplish the same thing but the second one fosters more psychologically safe discussion in my opinion.
People learn that lesson then don't stir the pot without reason. Rather than saying "I don't get offended" it is generally better to prove it and push people for feedback from time to time.
There is also a subtle point here in things like "if the design is wrong, say it is wrong" - how is someone supposed to know if the design is "wrong"? Philosophically it isn't possible for a design to be wrong, the idea is nonsense. Designs have trade-offs and people might or might not like the trade offs. But a design can't be wrong because that implies there was already a right solution that people could deploy. If someone is going to be direct that is also a problem they run in to constantly - they're going to be directly saying things that are harsh and garbled. A lot of humans aren't comfortable being that person, there is a more comfortable style of being clear about observations, guarded about making value judgements from them and associating with like-minded people from the get-go rather than pushing to resolve differences. And spending a lot of time playing social games to work out how to organise all that.
Everyone says that they value directness, and from what I can tell the vast majority of people actually don't. For example, I had a job interview a couple years ago where the interviewer showed up fifteen minutes late for a thirty minute interview. Eventually he did show up, and the interview proceeds more or less fine, and near the end he asks if I have any questions. I said "is it common to show up fifteen minutes…
Mm they didn't really mean /any/ question, and weren't inviting directness. Just like "hi how are you" from a stranger isn't an invitation to respond that your cat just died and your transmission needs replacing Of course they didn't want to move forward. That's what you had decided/wanted though right? I can't imagine you hoping for any other outcome with that kind of question and follow up?
The job paid really well so a small part of me still wanted to move forward, but I will admit I was pretty annoyed.
I should provide a bit of context; the recruiter that the company “valued directness” on their copypasted job description.
Regardless, if you show up late halfway through an interview that you scheduled, you shouldn’t be surprised when people are irritated with you.
This is pretty autistic. I kind of agree, being somewhat on the spectrum myself. But I think the world would be a considerably worse place if everyone abided by such rules.
> The person invoking Crocker's Rules is saying, in effect, "your feelings about how I might receive this are your problem to manage, not mine, just give me the information." Isn't it quite the opposite? The person invoking Crocker's Rules is saying, in effect, " my feelings about the information and how I might receive it are my problem to manage, not yours , just give me the information."
Yes, but it's also both. Everyone should manage their own feelings and exchange information both efficiently and respectfully.
If we accept that any one person can take responsibility for their feelings then it follows that everyone is responsible for their own mind. Otherwise what exactly are we saying? And emotions are complex, especially offence, it is practically impossible to say that something will reliably offend a specific person without trying it and seeing how they react. Even for the reactee. Someone can easily say "whatever happe…
Incidentally, this reply.
This is pretty autistic. I kind of agree, being somewhat on the spectrum myself. But I think the world would be a considerably worse place if everyone abided by such rules.
>considerably worse place if everyone abided by such rules Those rules are not meant for everyone.
> When you spend the first third of your message establishing that you are a nice person who means well, you are not being considerate but you are making the recipient wade through noise to get to signal. You are training them to skim your messages, which means that when you actually need them to read carefully, they might not. You are demonstrating that you do not trust the relationship enough to just say the thing and you are signaling a level of insecurity that undermines the technical credibility you are trying to establish. Nobody reads "hope you had a great weekend" and thinks better of the person who wrote it, they probably just being trained to take you less seriously in the future, or at worse, if they're evil loving of Crocker's [sic?] like myself, they just think about the couple of seconds of their life they will never get back.
This very much sounds like the author believes that everyone who doesn't abide by these rules - not just him, not just people who've agreed to them, everyone - is deficient in some way. And it's not just a slip - this attitude is pervasive throughout the post.