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Comment by iamacynic | Hacker News Reader

the trick is to finely calibrate your bullshit meter through life experiences.

what people tend to respect innately is a genuinely nice person who can instantly turn into a no-holds-barred asshole if bad intentions are detected.

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IMO, the trick is to have control over the level of accommodation you present to different people and different situations. The key quote from the article:

>I gave to them for years, at the expense of those who had a far better claim upon my generosity.

There's a life skill getting pointed at here. Specifically, comparing the demand to the level of obligation you want to fulfill, and reacting appropriately. There's another higher-level skill of figuring out what the results of different obligation levels are and strategically choosing them.

Basically, saying "yes" implies saying "no" to the alternatives, and sometimes those alternatives are far better.

> the trick is to have control over the level of accommodation you present to different people and different situations

Exactly.

For many people, it's not about detecting someone with bad intentions. It's about not liking conflict so much that they don't know how not to accommodate by default. Over accommodation of a good person you're close with can be just as detrimental as over accommodation of a shitty person.

I'll second this. If you're over accommodating with your partner, it's just as detrimental to your own mental health and the health of your relationship as it is with a shitty person. The danger here is that we tend to be more accommodating with people we like than those we don't and so we don't even realize we're doing it until it's too late.

People really respect power. An accommodating person has none because they say yes to everything.

Yeah. If two people ask for things that are mutually exclusive, there's a huge problem if you can't say no to one of them. If there's no concept of "no", then "yes" becomes much less meaningful.

In social dance contexts, I'm usually happy when people decline to dance with me. It's dead obvious when someone isn't enthusiastic about the dance, and much less fun than getting shot down. Similarly in business contexts - an unreliable "yes" is worse than a "no", because you can get burned relying on the "yes" you did get rather than trying elsewhere after the "no".

the trick is to finely calibrate your bullshit meter

Not really, the "trick" is actually contained within the wisdom of the last paragraph of the piece.

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