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I don't take issue with what you've said about remote work despite very much having the opposite opinion to you because you phrased it as your own personal opin
by saghm 11mo ago
I don't take issue with what you've said about remote work despite very much having the opposite opinion to you because you phrased it as your own personal opinion.
This blog post does pretty much the opposite though; its analysis of remote work is pretty much entirely just generalizations of their own experience, but phrased as if they're objective truth. It was an especially weird editorial choice to make use of the "general" second person given how much outside of that one paragraph was written in the first person. In an article that's ostensibly trying to be humble and vulnerable like you mention, it just comes across as patronizing. I can't say I'm surprised that the author might have been judged for expressing this opinion because it's not about their personal preference, but a judgement of its own.
I think a lot of people genuinely struggle with the idea that sometimes how something is said can matter just as much as what's being said. Being correct and being respectful are orthogonal concepts even when talking about objective truth rather than opinions; if someone asks what 7 times 9 is, there's a difference between telling them "63" and "Well, obviously it's fucking 63, duh!". For a subjective topic like remote work that some people's lives have been quite significantly affected by, it's even more important to put some effort into understanding how one's words will come across, because if the phrasing is poor, people aren't necessarily going to feel the need to go out of their way to try to give it the benefit of the doubt. I can't know what exactly the author was thinking when writing that paragraph, but I also can't distinguish between whether they have the same viewpoint as you but communicated it poorly or if they genuinely think that there's some sort of objective truth than I'm worse at my job working remotely than I would be working in person. Given the amount of care I've put into addressing many of the exact issues they've raised due to needing to work remotely because of a medical condition of an immediate family member, it was quite hard for me not to have an immediate strong angry reaction to how flippant they seem to be with what's at best their phrasing of their opinions. My point is that it's a lot more work to actually care about how one's point comes across than it is to claim that people are overreacting after the fact, and it's worth considering how much of the reaction the author mentions having gotten in the past is reflective of this.
- ryaniscool 11mo agoIt feels like you're blaming the author for the lazy thinking of someone who might read his opinion and take it as objective fact. The 7 times 9 analogy doesn't track it all. 7x9 = 63 is an objective fact by definition. His thoughts on remote work are an opinion by definition. If other people decide that what he says is dogmatic, blame it on their own lack of critical thinking skills. The meta-point of the article is that we should express are thoughts without qualifiers and embellishments to manipulate other people's perceptions of us.
- j-bos 11mo ago> The meta-point of the article is that we should express are thoughts without qualifiers and embellishments to manipulate other people's perceptions of us. In my experience this is a common failure point among tech/analytical folks (myself included) which leads to their words and actions being genrally misconstrued and effectively misunderstood by the larger segement of the population which is rarely able or disposed to handling communications without embellishments.
- Ar-Curunir 11mo ago“Technical” people are also people, and that doesn’t exclude them from communicating like reasonable adults. Blaming the rest of the world for an inability to communicate effectively is not orienting the blame correctly.
- ryaniscool 11mo agoYou're wrong (IMO) The onus should not be on the communicator to qualify every statement of opinion. This is tedious and unreasonable. Not prefacing what clearly is an opinion with "IMO" is not a jedi mind trick that makes others believe it as fact. You're also demonstrating some hypocrisy by presenting your own point of view in the same manner. No qualifiers. You're simply stating something as truth
- didibus 11mo ago
- sbarre 11mo ago> pretty much entirely just generalizations of their own experience, but phrased as if they're objective truth I mean you're describing 90% of blog and forum posts on the Internet here. This (IMO - so it's not ironic) is the biggest leap most people need to make to become more self-aware and to better parse the world around them: recognizing there is rarely an objective truth in most matters, and the idea that "my truth is not your truth, both can be different yet equally valid" (again in most cases, not all cases).
- saghm 11mo agoI think my issue is that the blog post comes across to me as in essence an argument that the person communicating shouldn't be dissuaded by potential reactions to what they say, but it fails to account for the difference between good-faith and bad-faith reactions. There's a huge difference between a bad-faith misinterpretation and a good-faith misunderstanding in my opinion, as the latter seems to come just as often from a failure on the part of the communicator to be clear as from any fault on the listener. It's hard for me not to get the impression that the author either can't or doesn't seen the value in differentiating between those cases based on the fact there's such significant room for improvement in clarifying their views in their paragraph about remote work, which is why I called it out.
- sbarre 11mo agoTotally fair, I agree with your take on the blog post for sure.