Essay: Too much 'niceness' is bad for critical thinking

It is unfortunate that the editor could not have taught Mr. Enright to make paragraphs of more than two sentences. Does that show the weakness of the approach? The editor might also have taught Mr. Enright to spell "Hardwick" correctly. That might have been more useful than giving him grief for going to lunch.

The problem with citing Edmund Wilson is that Wilson a) did not think his job done when he came up with the title, but rather made a cogent case in the essay, and b) did not focus on Agatha Christie, but wrote about what he saw lacking in mystery novels generally. Reducing this to the headline is the sort of thing that leads young programmers to remember Dijkstra for his zingers, and think of him as an insult comic. Wilson could be caustic enough, but he gave reasons for his criticisms.

Half of this essay is spent memorializing a toxic editor with examples of behavior that were completely counterproductive. Yelling at an editor because they went to lunch is bold criticism, it's being a jerk for no reason or benefit to anyone.

Beyond that, there's nothing of substance here to persuade me that caring about people's feelings is an actual problem. The author takes a commonly understood, generally accepted, uncontroversial point -- that being nice is not an excuse to be wrong or to tolerate bad behavior -- and then makes a vague case that something is wrong with present-day emphasis on empathy in communication.

Then they go on to conflate a lot of criticisms together that doesn't really relate in any way. We jump from talking about how criticism should be pointed, to talking about how "nice" is applied too generally as an adjective, back to criticism of reviewer standards. It's all over the place, I suspect because there is no focused point to make. It's just a vague rant that people aren't allowed to be rude any more.

And to that point, holy heck is this author living in a bubble if they think that people are too focused on being nice today. Our political discourse is more tribalized and militarized than ever before. Has the author looked at Twitter recently? Where is this wonderful, fictitious society I can join where everyone dulls their criticism out of concern over what its effects might be?

This is an unfocused, pointless criticism of a problem that doesn't exist, supported by nothing more than poorly written, vague anecdotes, smothered in good old-fashioned 'in my day it was better' irritability, and I have no idea how it managed to make the front page of HN.

Aside from those complaints, it's very nice.

This is just some guy’s opinion, and it reeks of having started from the rather common conservative everything-used-to-be-better narrative. The exact genealogy is unclear, but it could be a close relative of Aristotle’s famous kids-were-better-when-we-still-hit-them speech.

In my experience, people quickly adapt to any leader’s style. If they tend to start with ad hominem (I. e. Torvalds) it uses any power except to make people hate working for you.

Conversely, a silent voice can be the loudest. Alan Greenspan comes to mind, although it’s a somewhat different context.

I feel that people who feedback in a harsh way are often at blame. Harsh feedback is caused by something or someone not living up to your expectations, and lashing out is often caused by not having communicated those expectations upfront.

They also constitute terrible leadership where the only way to get by is tolerating being berated at random. Needless to say it’s widespread in industries such as investment banking and theatre, where fear trumps appreciation in schooling people on their way up.

I'm having a hard time identifying the author's primary motivation in this vague cloud of worries and demands. If it's the fear that incisive criticism is dying in contemporary commentary, he does at least provide supporting evidence by getting this piece published at all.

"Nice" is not essential, and can often get in the way of effecting real positive change.

"Respect", however, is absolutely critical. I would not have tolerated working for the editor mentioned in the article -- not because he wasn't nice, but because he wasn't respectful.

There's a type of personality (who I have basically never been able to get along with) that can only give criticism in this flippant manner. I think maybe they missed some emotional development or something. It's like they're afraid of being sincere.

I got straight A grades on high school essays. It turns out my teachers were just being nice. My first college essay came back with more words in red ink than there were words in the essay, all well justified. Niceness lowered the slope of the learning curve and I left high school incompetent and unprepared. Sometimes you've got to be cruel to be kind in the right measure. It's a very good sign.

The price of interpersonal conflict has gone up dramatically over the past ~10+ years. I don't know if that's good or bad, and while I certainly learned a great deal from some very "mean" folks, the more important part was learning how I myself needed to take criticism and avoid reacting to perceived "meanness".

Learning how to get along with "mean" people is more about learning how to not take things personally....although by the same token, you also need to learn how to stand up for yourself when you're right and they're wrong. One persons "mean" comment is another persons normal feedback, just like being nice can come off as condescending or patronizing in certain circumstances.

In the end most workplaces are a mixture of all types of communicators, and being able to handle those different types of people is far more useful than worrying about people being too nice or too mean.

I’ve told this story before on these forums:

I had a junior engineer once, a few years back, who could not take criticism.

He would get flustered, angry, sarcastic. His work wasn’t good. I did my best to help him — and even though I was polite, he always seemed to take a kind of deep, personal offense at whatever criticism I had for him.

There were many problems I had with his work — he wasn’t great at testing his code (at a surface level, sure, but rarely thought deeply about the implications of his changes. E.g., once he got a ticket to clean up some code throwing lots of warnings, and solved it by making the code not work at all. He tested that it wasn’t throwing warnings, but didn’t realize that it had an early escape condition that was being triggered inappropriately every time.)

He surprised me with his lack of basic knowledge that I would’ve expected from a CS graduate who’d also made an app or two outside of school. He didn’t know what a database index was, for example, among other issues.

He was also not great at communicating. When talking about his work, he’d use technical jargon incorrectly. His emails to outside vendors were meandering and difficult to parse. I coached him on these points extensively.

In the end, after 6 months or so of trying to help him, I asked our CEO to fire him. We gave him a month’s severance.

A couple months later, his lawyer got in touch with his, alleging racial discrimination. The allegation was that we fired him because of his accent. He interpreted my problems with his communication as being a problem with his (slight, barely noticeable) accent.

Our CEO told me to work on how I levy criticism of others. I mean, he’s right I’m sure. I thought I was being precise and polite, but perhaps I did give the wrong idea.

Or, maybe this hire just wasn’t used to criticism. He didn’t understand how to take advice. He didn’t know how to internalize it and act on those suggestions. When fired, he blamed an immutable quality about himself rather than something he could change.