Comment by Indy_Dh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Indy_Dh | Hacker News Reader

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> "Being yourself", authenticity, and direct/brutal honesty are roughly orthogonal; you can (or not be) one without affecting the others.

While I agree with the general sentiment of your post, I find quote does not actually work out in practice.

I have been in many situations (ie around family, coworkers, etc) where the group has a strong opinion about something and I feel the opposite. I would usually not chime in and let the conversation move on, but when people ask your opinion, there is a decision. As far as I can see, the options are basically:

1) Lie: not authentic or direct honesty 2) Avoid/Deflect: maintain authenticity, not direct honesty 3) Fein disinterest: lacking authenticity, not direct honesty 4) Express your dissent: authentic, direct honesty

The only options for maintaining authenticity are to be directly honest, or to not answer, and there is a limit to the extent you can avoid answering direct questions and still maintain freedom and conserve your energy and focus.

So while I agree that you don't have to be brutally honest to be authentic, I would say they are far from orthogonal. Sometimes choices have to be made, especially around people who have a tendency to pry or ask your opinion a lot.

You can also take the socratic approach and just ask good questions instead of making statements.

Sometimes you don't even have to ask, just mirror your counterpart (repeat his last statement as a question) and make good use of silence. Wu wei all the way.

One the quotes that matters most to me and that I apply in my daily life is:

Judge a man by his questions rather than this answers.

Even if you've asked the right question, and lost, you're better off than not having asked the question at all.

Yes! I am by nature non-confrontational, but this is how I dissent in a discussion without getting into a heated argument (when the possibility of changing minds goes out the window anyway).

This is still difficult, but better than staying quiet or lying, a path to self-contempt.

The problem comes to a head when you get the tech equivalent of "Does this make me look fat?". The vast majority of the time, people asking things like that don't want to hear the truth. They want a partner for their mental trip to fantasy land.

Does this JavaScript framework make my website look fat :-)

Yes, I measured the kibibytes - it really does. :-) And if you really want to go by looks (as you worded your question): I tested it with a proxy that slows down the connection - one can see the time the website builds itself up and how it looks as long as not all the data of your fatty JS framework arrived. :-)

> The problem comes to a head when you get the tech equivalent of "Does this make me look fat?". The vast majority of the time, people asking things like that don't want to hear the truth.

If a majority of society would answer such questions with brutal honesty, the stupid idea of asking questions where they don't want to hear the truth would disappear. This sounds like a better world. So I have to conclude the "politeness" is what prevents improvement in this section.

Yes. Truly, nothing improves a society like the constant exercise of interpersonal brutality.

Lol. Clearly!

"An armed society is a polite society"

(pointing out a parallel, not expressing an opinion)

I'm not sure that is a parallel; having known several who espouse that position, I've never gotten the impression that the weapons with which such a society is armed are intended frequently to be used.

If you think people are actually interested in the lie when they ask questions like that, you've missed the subtext. They aren't interested in the answer. They know the answer. They want you to make an effort to make them feel good.

You should be flattered when somebody asks you a question like that. It means they want you to care about them. That you would resort to the brutal response might hurt them but it gives them good advice: steer clear of you.

Doesn't the reason for asking that question depend heavily on context? If your wife asks you that as she's getting dressed in the morning, she may well be asking for honest(-ish) feedback to avoid looking fat all day at work. It deserves a very different sort of consideration than if she's asking you that on your dinner date.

Or have I been getting this wrong for the last decade?

Doesn't the reason for asking that question depend heavily on context?

Yes, it does. Maybe you and your wife are so close you can be brutally honest with each other and it doesn't hurt your relationship. The same advice might not apply to Sally from accounting, however.

> They want you to make an effort to make them feel good.

There are much better ways to make people feel good than lying to them when answering such stupid questions.

I found things to be easier if I first contemplate why people ask the question in the first place and then reply to the reason of the question, not the question itself. People ask questions they don't require the answer to(for instance, there might not be an answer) for all kinds of reasons; trolling, 'just making conversation' etc. Depending on the reason and if you have time / want to indulge you can go after the real intent. If someone trolls you can have good shouting matches (which I enjoy now and then), if just making conversation and the question might be laden, you can change the subject that wasn't the goal of the conversation anyway.

another tack is to harmonize. In this situation for example, you'd take a few elements of the group's consensus and fold in your own thoughts - synthesizing a new position that expresses your own ideas but with some 'bridges' that help the group relate to what you are expressing. Maybe even changing your own position marginally in the process.

Yes! I totally do this - you show that you've listened to the other person, that their opinion is important, and then go into reasoning about why you have a differing opinion.

This is of course, if the other person actually wants to have a conversation. If I feel they simply want to vent their frustration, then I usually just let them say what they have to say, and not bother responding.

Sometimes it's better just to keep quiet and say nothing.

If people are venting, and I'm asked directly however, I usually confront the underlying topic - that people are venting for example. Sometimes questions are asked as a type of manipulation, or have a different intention other than receiving an answer to the question.

I frequently find myself asking people if they want to vent, or solve. I'm game for either, but like many of you, pretty sure "solve" is our default state and "vent" is theirs and the mismatch? Not so great.

Yea, my wives is pretty 93% in "solve" mode and I'm 84% in "solve" mode so we try to explicitly say "can I just vent (or talk something out loud) to you?"

It is sad how often people aren't willing to 'agree to disagree'.

It is much sadder to see how often are people willing to abandon the ancient ideal of truth-seeking and prefer conflict avoidance.

This presumes a level of objective truth that is almost never available within the confines of casual conversation. I find the failure mode of a stubborn "truth-seeker" far more obnoxious in most settings than the failure mode of someone saying "huh, that's interesting, I'll have to look into that more" even when they're pretty sure they're right.

"Huh, I'll have to look into that more" (and presumably get back to you) is not agreeing to disagree, though. I suspect 'mordae was making a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem

It's not hard to tell if someone is actually seeking dialectic and wants to pursue the truth. The vast majority of people are making smalltalk and may as well be discussing professional basketball.

> ancient ideal > truth-seeking

Surely you realize how much of an oxymoron that is.

Follow an unrealistic and impractical standard, just as your forefathers have. Why? Because it is righteous and good.

There's no point in finding the truth. Perhaps if your knowledge seeking gives you positive neurochemical feedback, more power to you, but to denigrate all of society for not conforming to your ideals is a very ugly personality trait.

They go together: if I know that you and I can have a discussion and agree to disagree, rather than having it escalate it to an emotionally charged argument that affects our relationship, then I'm more likely to express my thoughts thruthfully.

That's a bullshit term. Reasonable people can simply disagree.

The tack I've come to lately is to say "I don't think we currently have sufficient information available to adequately resolve this issue" - it works like a charm, and people seem to like you more when you say that, compared with "let's agree to disagree"

Being yourself doesn't mean not lieing.

If you are a very honest kind of person, it does.

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