> Perhaps you misread me. I'm claiming that saccharine niceness goes WITH vicious back-stabbing. Because people who are vicious back-stabbers are going to be in

> Perhaps you misread me. I'm claiming that saccharine niceness goes WITH vicious back-stabbing. Because people who are vicious back-stabbers are going to be inclined to overcompensate with niceness. I don't think we really disagree. I think that if conflict is avoided through saccharine niceness, eventually it will come out as vicious back-stabbing, and vice versa as you've noted. So the two apparent opposites actually go hand-in-hand, they feed each other. But when I say a middle ground I mean something like firm politeness. I don't believe that brutality paired with honesty is a middle ground; it's just an aggressive solution instead of a passive aggressive one. I think when I say bad at reasoning, I really mean anything that at least partially involves a judgment call. A lot of the scientific process is deciding which experiments to do. Yes, an inability to process emotions is generally going to mean you're suited for working with logic, and as such might excel at proofs, programming, theoretical physics, stuff like that. But the problem I've noticed is that people's careers often get derailed because of emotional issues: it could be because they're passive, they can't handle anger, they get stepped on or taken advantage of, they have grandiose dreams about their research, they become unwilling to admit they were wrong, etc.