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There is a much stronger argument for tactless communication. In tactless mode there is little space for manipulation, misrepresentation, and other kinds of bu
by udev 5y ago
There is a much stronger argument for tactless communication.
In tactless mode there is little space for manipulation, misrepresentation, and other kinds of bullshit.
In tactless mode coercion cannot be sugarcoated, becomes overt, imposing a much higher social cost on the one attempting it.
All in all, tactless communication is much more efficient and clear, this is why it is used, e.g., in the military.
- mcguire 5y agoFalse. Although there are differences between military and civilian communication styles, tactlessness ain't it.
- udev 5y agoI tactlessly order you to elaborate.
- afarrell 5y agoIf you want to encourage people to be less tactful with you, there is a wrong way to do so and there is a right way to do so. The wrong way is to get impatient with their attempts at tact and act as if they would given additional time and patience, be more manipulative. This assumes that manipulation requires more space & time because it is highly intentional. In my experience, most manipulative speech is a fast emotional (perhaps system 1) reaction to a situation where a fearful speaker is desperately trying to establish control of the outcome of an interaction. It often strives to protect the speaker’s own ego. Tact is exerting the mental effort to be clear about what one is not trying to say about someone else's ego while being clear about what one is trying to say about the facts of a situation. If you try to get others to be tactless by impatience, their fact-clarity will drop alongside their ego-preservation. So if you wish another to speak with less tact, the right way to do that is to set them at ease by saying things that indicate you have a low ego attachment to the topic and that you are willing to re-think your own beliefs. Then, they can redirect their mental RAM to creating increased fact-clarity. In short: Send signals that you are in "scout mindset" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MYEtQ5Zdn8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MYEtQ5Zdn8.
- kmill 5y agoThere's also a fallacy people fall into where they believe something doesn't affect them because they're not paying attention to it. People can be very unintentionally manipulative when they think they're just not being tactful -- they can forget that they're not respecting the finite resources of the other party. Many so-called "purely technical" discussions are actually (accidentally) veiled attempts at getting someone else to do the work. Designing APIs is a political act: ignore this at your peril! :-) I'm fine dealing with respectful tactlessness, but what can grind my gears is when others demand more information or work from you without showing they know what they're asking of you, or at least that they're willing to provide anything in return. For example, sometimes people simply ask "why didn't you do it such-and-such way?" which takes very little effort on their part -- it seems to me it should be their job to compare their idea to the proposed/existing design rather than mine, unless they offer well-thought-out reasons, or otherwise have a good track record of being insightful. Something related to this fallacy is something I saw on HN years ago, about how in the feminist movement flat hierarchies ended up having a hidden power structure, which in many ways is worse than when the power structure is formalized. I guess there's some value in "RTFM," so long as whoever says this knows it's in the FM (unfortunately many times it's not).
- afarrell 5y agohttps://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm Is probably the article you are thinking of.