Yes, but I know too much about saving face, and I don't like how it's growing in the west.
About costs for being wrong, last time I quoted a RFC about a topic I know well and said to someone that their information was outdated, I ended up downvoted as usual - even more in the reply, while providing a link to the RFC and even apologizing for insisting that the right information should be spread because how important it is - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21430096
In the end, I decided to stop caring. Now I stick to being factual. If I hurt someone sentiments and do not allow them to save face, so be it. Let the objective truth decide, social consequences (like karma) be damned.
I am the person whom ‘1996’ corrected. I was glad to be corrected, and I upvoted the correcting comment. Even though I was of course bothered by having been proven wrong, and the phrasing was a mite adversarial, I disagree with those who may have downvoted the correcting comment.
And FYI, I didn't feel you were being negative or anything, and I don't think you have the ability downvote to -3!
I took the time to answer to tell you about deprecation because I thought it was worth sharing given your message, and that you may find that funny (double deprecation, bringing it back from the dead!) as I did when I learned that.
However, our exchange was judged negatively by other people. In the end, I still give up. I can't please them. I don't understand their culture or how it is adversarial even after going though the discussion here (especially about the "funny" part).
I don't want to watch what I say or talk in fear on ow I will be misunderstood. This is not a dictatorship. But "inclusive" language start to feels this way to me.
> In the end, I still give up. I can't please them. I don't understand
I would hate to lose you. But you’ve got to keep up with the times. It used to be, for example, acceptable to call any theoretical person “him” if it was a person in a stereotypically male role. Now it’s not acceptable, and we all have had to adjust. When I was a kid, it used to be accepted and normal to make jokes about racial stereotypes, and most people only thought it was funny and didn’t assume racism of either the person making the joke or of anyone laughing. Now it’s different, and we cringe at the terrible things which we then accepted uncritically.
It’s a bit like that when cultures change.
> This is not a dictatorship. But "inclusive" language start to feels this way to me.
There are two different things going on, one mostly good – i.e. the societal move to less adversarial language – and one bad, the social media incentives which creates an outrage driven attention culture, which drives people to, like Cardinal Richelieu, scrutinize every tweet and find something in those words to cancel them.
You shouldn’t be afraid of the latter to a degree that you reject the former.
While I recognize that the language used here would normally be read as aggressive, I don't really understand why.
When someone speaks to me this way, especially in written form, I make it a point to assume noble intent. They are trying to communicate efficiently. I think it's an especially common style among programmers who are accustomed to "talking" to computers all day.
Still, I try not to use this kind of language myself. Sometimes you need to be inefficient in order to communicate efficiently. Leadership of many organizations has to fly across the world to have conversations face to face to accomplish efficient communication sometimes. It's pretty paradoxical!
I have seen far worse passive-aggressiveness here (most often it's a variation of "why anyone would think X is beyond me" or "You do X ? I do Y because of reasons and I would certainly never do X but do it if you want.").
It might be a globish issue but I don't see any hostilities in OP's comments. [0]
> > This is factually wrong. Your information is deprecated.
How would you phrase that ?
[0] but I also believe that HN has members from many different cultures and lot of what is being discussed suffer from too much variety in communication style.
Historically, yes 465 has been deprecated several years ago. But as many ISP and the largest email services kept using it, the IANA had to change its tune and 'resurrected' port 465 in this RFC.
It is funny: the RFC itself describes that as a wart, but reality is a harsh mistress.
Section 3-3 of RFC 8314 from 2018 has the details.
Well, "Interestingly" (what?) and "It is funny but" sound patronizing to my ears. I'd use that language if I wanted to rub someone's nose into it and subtly hint they are stupid to other participants, especially at that point of the conversation.
Doesn’t that mean that you set out to interpret messages in that way?
I guess this is the reverse of nonviolent communication. If you always speak and are used to communicating agressively, then people that are being nice suddenly sound condescending.
> Doesn’t that mean that you set out to interpret messages in that way?
Yes, it does. But then it's still up to me to try to overcome my first reaction. I don't always succeed.
> I guess this is the reverse of nonviolent communication. If you always speak and are used to communicating agressively, then people that are being nice suddenly sound condescending.
"Always" ? Interesting choice of word when talking about non violent communication :).
Snark aside, I don't see myself as communicating aggressively. I may be wrong. I certainly don't put myself in the camp of "people who tell it like it is" though.
> Snark aside, I don't see myself as communicating aggressively. I may be wrong. I certainly don't put myself in the camp of "people who tell it like it is" though.
Ah. I didn’t mean you in particular, and not necessarily aggressive, just the opposite of nonviolent.
I just never considered this from the point of view of the other side before.
Maybe "I am not entirely sure I feel convinced that nobody would disagree with this description providing sufficient convergence with what might be argued is a valid way to interpret reality". Or maybe "that's being disingenuous", another classic of sophisticated kindness.
I agree, I was being sarcastic. I find this overly flowery and passive language more dishonest than polite, because it means the same thing, but with added plausible deniability/indirection, and more useless work for the reader.
"This is wrong" always implies "IMO/to my knowledge" anyway, and is functionally equivalent to "I feel / it could be argued that this might be wrong" and all that, except that the writer has the courtesy to speak up when they are ready to actually express an opinion, not just to allude to the possibility of someone, possibly them, expressing an opinion or making an argument.
> "This is wrong" always implies "IMO/to my knowledge" anyway, and is functionally equivalent to "I feel / it could be argued that this might be wrong" and all that, except that the writer has the courtesy to speak up when they are ready to actually express an opinion, not just to allude to the possibility of someone, possibly them, expressing an opinion or making an argument.
They are not "functionally equivalent" if they effect the reader in two different ways.
I would infer an aggressive attitude on the part of the speaker which makes the meat of the message more difficult to parse. Should I, for my part, try to get better at parsing messages delivered in such a format? Sure. But the question of whether or not you want to be heard still leaves some onus on the speaker to consider their audience.
But it's complicated, right? There seem to be quite a few people in this thread that strongly prefer one over the other.
It sounds like you believe that you're simply delivering the unvarnished, objective truth, but this method is just a different (and less-persuasive) type of varnish.
Even if there's some "protocol overhead", a more effective communication/persuasion style benefits both parties. Plus, it's more fun!
About costs for being wrong, last time I quoted a RFC about a topic I know well and said to someone that their information was outdated, I ended up downvoted as usual - even more in the reply, while providing a link to the RFC and even apologizing for insisting that the right information should be spread because how important it is - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21430096
In the end, I decided to stop caring. Now I stick to being factual. If I hurt someone sentiments and do not allow them to save face, so be it. Let the objective truth decide, social consequences (like karma) be damned.