At this point I am reminded of
an old post from 2013 talking about how to offer advice or guidance, and how some people seem to think their only two options are:
A: Give bad advice.
or
B: Be a dick.
When I originally wrote that post, I thought this was just the result of someone who hadn’t yet learned how to offer encouraging advice. I thought that, if given enough information, these types of people could self-correct. Five years later, I’m suspecting that this problem goes deeper. There seems to be this entire… I dunno…
genre of people who really have no idea how to correct others, and it seems to cut right to the heart of their personality. As far as I can tell most of these folks wind up in the various engineering disciplines, but you can find them all over.
The thinking seems to be that as long as you’re saying things that are true then you’re doing a good job at communicating, and the burden of understanding and acceptance is entirely on the listener. If someone is being stupid, then you need to be really rude so they realize how stupid they’re being.
I see this as deeply misguided. Backwards, actually. The more divergent your opinions are, the more care and tact you’ll need to get them to listen to your viewpoint with an open mind. Wrong people don’t know they’re wrong, so from their point of view,
you’re completely wrong. If you’re rude, then they won’t question their own position, they’ll just assume you’re both wrong
and rude. Thinking you need to be rude because the other person is obviously wrong is like thinking that the more serious a programming bug is, the more important it is to type with YOUR FISTS.
