Lesson 1: Don't talk about sex, politics, or religion. Source: Very, very old stuff, I got from Mom. I wish I'd always followed it. Lesson 2: Don't tell t

Lesson 1: Don't talk about sex, politics, or religion. Source: Very, very old stuff, I got from Mom. I wish I'd always followed it. Lesson 2: Don't tell them ANYTHING! Source: From an astoundingly, intensely socially cautious person, my mother in law. Some of the most intense brain activity I ever saw was by her anywhere in public. So, e.g., the woman I married found E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life easy reading and obvious! In part the mother's intensity came from some delicate, highly stressful circumstances of her mother in the Great Depression where in their small community just a single wrong word could wipe out the finances of the family, literally. Lesson 3: "... keep to two subjects: the weather and everybody's health." Source: My Fair Lady, advice to Professor Higgins who was socially crude! Lesson 4: He who always calls a spade a spade is fit only to use one. Source: Common from some parts of the English upper class. I was very slow to follow this advice. So, I had to learn the hard way, pay "full tuition", from experience -- "Experience is the great teacher, and some will learn from no other." So, Professor Higgins had to learn these lessons the hard way. Much of the theme of the movie Patton was that Patton also had to learn the hard way. IMHO, basically the advice is good. I've been astounded at how eager some people, how many people, are eager to attack strongly against any violation of those lessons. My current working guess is, TOO MANY people are just wildly oversensitive to even small violations of those lessons. So, the simple solution is, when in doubt, which means nearly all the time, follow the lessons. Yes, there is a downside: As in E. Fromm, The Art of Loving, four of the keys to intimacy (between the ears if not between the legs) are knowledge, caring, respect, and responsiveness. Here, for "knowledge" he meant, roughly from memory, "giving knowledge of one's self to the other." So, the lessons above conflict with this part of Fromm's version of intimacy. So, if have a really good relationship with your spouse and work at a place where some wound up clique is running the place and has their war paint on and are on the war path, then express your true feelings -- blow your stack, blow off steam -- in private, at home, with your spouse. For more examples, apparently in WWII, both the German army and the Japanese navy were very intense organizations. Victorious? No. Intense? Yes! So, can remember the movie Tora, Tora, Tora where in the WWII Japanese navy apparently a subordinate needed an explicit "you may speak freely" to say much. And in the TV series Winds of War apparently a German officer was encouraged to voice whatever concerns he had until the superior issued a direct order at which time the subordinate would stop the concerns and just say "Immediately". Once around DC I was in a part-time job working myself and my wife through our Ph.D. degrees. At one point the US Navy had a request: Evaluate the survivability of the US SSBN (missile firing submarines) fleet under a special scenario of global nuclear war limited to sea. They wanted the results in two weeks. Gads. Well, I found a continuous time, discrete state space Markov process and delivered something in two weeks, and apparently they liked it. Then a few days later, some guy I'd never seen before was in the offices. He wandered back to my office and started making small talk. He did this for 1-2 hours a day, for about 2 weeks. Gee, it was no longer small talk! He got the conversation going to current political topics of US national security and defense. I answered like a well informed voting citizen with some reasonably solid, not very unusual, opinions. Dumb de dumb dumb, dumb. Looking back it was a high end security interview for some high position, and I missed out on it. Should have followed Mom's advice: Don't talk about politics. Certainly don't talk about national security politics in an office doing classified work for the US Navy. Another related lesson: Limit all communications with co-workers to objective aspects of the work, and do not permit more than trivial instances of small talk. Such small talk can be the seeds of destructive office gossip, deliberate efforts to distract from the work, etc. Sure, the small talk should avoid sex, politics, and religion, but should avoid essentially everything else, too. So, limit small talk to, say, very short, obvious, trivial, innocuous remarks on the weather -- of course, NEVER mention "global warming" or "climate change"!