5 ms·
"No Feigning Surprise"
- akerl_ 4mo agoDid you mean to link to https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/ https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/
- jtbayly 4mo agoEither way, that’s not feigning surprise. Odd to call it that. What they are saying is when you are surprised somebody didn’t know something, don’t let it show. So “feign unsurprise.”
- akerl_ 4mo ago> What they are saying is when you are surprised somebody didn’t know something, don’t let it show. Thats about 50% of what they’re saying. The name comes from the other half.
- swiftcoder 4mo agoThe reason we call it "feigning surprise", is that the surprise is pretty rarely genuine. It's an interaction people have more-or-less-unthinkingly practiced throughout their lives to keep the out-group separated from the in-group
- johnfn 4mo agoThis is a sharply negative interpretation of behavior of people who may be acting genuinely, if without social grace. I think few people shocked that you don't know bash are displaying that surprise as a way to keep you in the out-group - I think they are surprised. I would argue that the real in-group/out-group behavior is excluding people who aren't naturally adept at being social.
- akerl_ 4mo agoThe whole point of making it a rule is so those people can learn it and avoid accidentally putting other people down.
- jtbayly 4mo agoIs being surprised somebody doesn't know something putting them down, or is being unsurprised they are ignorant putting them down?
- akerl_ 4mo ago> Is being surprised somebody doesn't know something putting them down Yes. > is being unsurprised they are ignorant putting them down Again, the whole reason to just declare this as a rule is so that you’re not put in a position to try to decide if somebody is ignorant or not. You set a social guideline, and if people break it, you point it out, and it doesn’t matter why they did it.
- jtbayly 4mo agoBy demonstrating an assumption that everybody knows nothing? I fail to see how that is beneficial. It is rude to everybody.
- akerl_ 4mo agoYou're the one who's extrapolated that the rule asks you to assume ignorance. The post, and the Recurse Center guidelines it's built on top of, don't make that claim. If I say it's a social guideline to not tell somebody about something wrong with their outfit unless they can fix it in under 5 minutes, I'm not suggesting you go around assuming that everybody knows they have a stain on their shirt. I'm telling you it's net-negative to point it out to them.
- JohnMakin 4mo agoWow, you didn't know this kind of behavior is insulting? Crazy!
- jtbayly 4mo agoPeople doing that are doing it intentionally, and they aren't going to follow your rule. People who are open to listening are not pretending to be surprised in order to put somebody down. They are actually surprised and (perhaps) unintentionally hurting somebody. If that somebody is hurt, they need to ask themselves which hurts more, having somebody surprised you didn't know something (aka they think you are smart), or being unsurprised you are ignorant of something (aka they think you don't know stuff).
- akerl_ 4mo agoIf somebody says something rude to me, why would my reaction be to try to decide if I’m glad they were rude unintentionally?
- jtbayly 4mo agoReread what I wrote. The point is it is more rude to assume somebody is ignorant than it is to assume they are knowledgeable. This is telling people to assume people are ignorant or at least pretend you think they are ignorant.
- akerl_ 4mo agoIt's not telling people to assume anything at all.
- danaris 4mo agoAs akerl_ says, it's not telling you to assume anything. It's talking about behavior, not thoughts. You can be thinking they're the most ignorant fool on the planet, or you can be thinking that a minute ago you believed them to be so smart, and now that image of them is shattered and you're disappointed...but all this is asking you to do is not to perform that surprise to them, regardless of whether or how much you feel it.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- 4mo ago
- Qwuke 4mo agoI think so. Maybe dang or tomhow could switch the link :) The social rules work so well that I wish tech cos would just adopt these as baseline. They make interacting with other technical folks much more enjoyable.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo agoI think there's an xkcd, with the same thing. I really enjoy sharing a planet with Ms. Evans. She seems to be a genuinely decent person, and we could always use more of those.
- rhplus 4mo agoXKCD: 10,000 people learn something “everyone knows” every day: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- cryptopian 4mo agoI really enjoyed her talk "Making Difficult Things Easy"[1]. She's got a real talent for taking complex technical subjects, recognising the difficulties in understanding them, and explaining them back in a friendly way that doesn't mystify them. Almost the opposite of the modern IT industry. [1] https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/10/06/new-talk--making-hard-things-easy/ https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/10/06/new-talk--making-hard-things...
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo agoHmm... the reactions to this post are rather revealing about the HN community. One quite positive, and sharing an excellent link (thanks). One neutral, and sharing the xkcd link I referenced (thanks). A couple of anonymous downvotes. I assume because it says something positive about someone, and we'll have none of that, here, thank you very much.
- akerl_ 4mo agoThe concept of not feigning surprise may be related to the linked xkcd comic, but I don’t see any indication that it’s the “original”, and I downvoted several comments that seemed keen to steal thunder from the post by trying to frame it as just a rehash of a popular comic.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo agoI sincerely wasn't trying to "steal her thunder," as my preface to the comment makes clear. Lots of people reference xkcd, myself, included[0]. It doesn't cheapen her post, one, tiny bit. I did change it, so it doesn't say "original." Good point. It's entirely possible that people can be decent to each other. I know, I know, that's crazy talk, but I'm kind of relentlessly positive. I have had plenty of negative fuel, but I guess I'm just a Pollyanna. [0] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qQDAuhGvBvBlZVH2zn_VjLsW5IrYSOv3fWj9R5QEhWg/ https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qQDAuhGvBvBlZVH2zn_V...
- goodmythical 4mo agorelated: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ edit:rhplus beat me to it
- evakhoury 4mo agoOops, yes! Thank you!
- xandrius 4mo agoFeels like the smushed down version of xkcd's lucky 10.000: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- iterateoften 4mo agoAlmost not related at all expect “learn something new”. Not everything needs xkcd
- CommieBobDole 4mo agoYou're right for the link as provided, but the (apparently) correct link provided upthread is https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/ https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/, which is pretty similar to the XKCD.
- phendrenad2 4mo agoThat seems like a more general idea, and I like it more. For the last 5 or so decades we've been transitioning from a world where everyone watches the same 4 TV channels to a world where everyone is in their own niche, and the tendency to be surprised that someone doesn't know about some cultural phenomenon is directly proportional to age. The way boomers gape and stutter when I said I don't know much about The Beatles...
- cryptopian 4mo agoIn software too, it feels like there's been a shift to a more individualistic "learn-on-the-job" attitude in companies. If you're not the kind of person who knows how to structure learning a new field, it's easy to end up with big gaps when you don't know what you're looking for.
- TaylorPhebillo 4mo agoThis is a reference to one the Recurse Center's social rules: https://www.recurse.com/social-rules https://www.recurse.com/social-rules I was really impressed with how successful RC is at maintaining an environment where people can learn and grow. Part of that is certainly selection effects- the point of center is self directed growth around programming, and there's an interview process that I assume filters especially hostile people. But I think the social rules do a lot too, and have been trying to pay attention to the effects on others when someone breaks them at work. No Feigned Surprise is a particularly important one around people who are trying to learn and already a little insecure. It's great when they've learned a new thing, and you want to celebrate that, not meet it with denigration!
- wdrw 4mo agoI always found this particular Recurse Center rule strange. I understand how not feigning surprise can be a good rule, as in you should not pretend to be surprised when you genuinely aren't. (e.g. a web front-end dev saying "I don't know how to recompile the kernel" - "What, you don't know ?!?" - when it's clear that there's no actual expectation of knowing, it's just an attempt to self-aggrandize or put the other person down). But if it's a true, genuine surprise, then there is no feigning! If a web front-end dev says "I've never heard of CSS", it's genuinely surprising, and I think it's ok to express that. It's also useful to the recipient to hear this genuine surprise, because it's a strong signal that they're missing something important, a much stronger signal than if someone just said in a calm voice "you know, CSS is one of the most important things to learn for web front-end development". But that's not how Recurse Center means it - when they say "no feigning surprise" they actually mean "not showing surprise, no matter how genuine". I think it's generally best to be open in communicating with others, and neither feign something that isn't there nor hide something that actually is there.
- nemomarx 4mo agoI don't think most recipients would be able to tell the difference between a put down or self aggrandizing feigned surprise and genuine surprise reliably, so the effect in terms of discouraging them is probably at least similar. It's at least a very subtle difference in social cues even if it's genuine.
- quxbar 4mo agoLove this, it's like Randall Munroe x Lynda Barry
- hbrav 4mo agoI think I'd appreciate a compilation of such surprising facts, if anyone has a list. I feel like the "falsehoods programmers believe about [thing]" is a little similar, but about correctness and never about performance.
- polynomial 4mo agoYou don't know that No Feigning Surprise is actually from an xkcd comic, before it was a wizardzines post? U+1F632
- uberex 4mo agoOh did you just start an HN emoji standard.
- thror8494jr 4mo agoMaybe it sounds like major redflag? It sounds a bit manipulative. People use it to lie and to get out of out of their obligations? Typical "feighning suprise" is with pet attack. "It does not bite". What a big suprise when it does bite, it "never did it before, did you provoke it"? Later you find that thing send 5 people to hospital, and entire street has delivery services suspended.
- bmacho 4mo ago@mods: the title or the URL are wrong. They either meant to post https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/ https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/ or https://wizardzines.com/comics/surprise/ https://wizardzines.com/comics/surprise/ with a title that has any relation with it.
- pseudalopex 4mo agoSend it to hn@ycombinator.com.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- scottlamb 4mo agoI don't think people are upvoting this for the fact at the top of "say something surprising" [1], but it indeed surprised me: > I can write 500MB/s to a hard drive? that's so much! Turns out a Seagate 2X18 can write at 528 MiB/s according to its spec sheet. [2] My rule of thumb was that HDDs could do like 100MB/s (aka 800 Mbps) but I guess between density improvements and this new "dual-actuator" class, it's gotten a lot faster. HDD seek time has basically been stuck for 30+ years and probably will remain so but capacity has increased a lot, and the throughput for sequential access probably should scale with capacity [edit: times rpm, thanks Retr0id]. For a while I think it wasn't increasing, but I guess they decided to fix that? SSDs of course can do way more than 500 MB/s, and you can do better by compressing as you write (depending on your data), and you can stripe across multiple HDDs, but it turns out none of those are necessary. [1] as I write this, the title "no feigning surprise" suggests <https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/ https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/> but the link points to "say something surprising" <https://wizardzines.com/comics/surprise/ https://wizardzines.com/comics/surprise/>. [2] https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/exos-2x18-DS2093-1-2202US-en_US.pdf https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/exos-2x1...
- Retr0id 4mo agoDon't forget that server-grade drives are often 15K RPM, giving you ~2x over a typical 7200RPM drive.
- redsocksfan45 4mo ago[dead]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- sublinear 4mo agoThe kind of person who "feigns surprise" has an insufferable personality that will leak out no matter what. You can't fix it "one weird trick" at a time.
- stavros 4mo agoAfter that one xkcd, I learned to follow up on "you don't know X?!" with "lucky you, you get to learn a cool thing today". It goes much better than before.