[HN Gopher] Tact Filters (1996)
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Tact Filters (1996)
Author : sturza
Score : 107 points
Date : 2021-07-12 06:48 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mit.edu)
| klodolph wrote:
| I don't think that nerds have an inbound tact filter. I don't
| think this is a good explanation of going on.
|
| If you spent twenty years being called a "smart kid" and then
| went to a job where all the smart kids end up, then you may have
| a rock-solid self-image. That gives you a certain amount of
| immunity to tactless comments. It also gives you the confidence
| to make tactless comments.
|
| On the other hand, not all the people you want to work with grew
| up that way or have that kind of self-image. In order to avoid
| hurting people around you, you should learn to speak tactfully.
|
| I think what happened is just that nerds care about speaking
| directly. There are also a number of types of neurodiversity
| over-represented in nerds, such as autism, ADHD, and social
| anxiety disorders.
|
| Speaking tactfully naturally takes extra time. An autistic person
| would not pick up on the necessary social cues in order to speak
| tactfully. Someone with ADHD may be irritated by the interruption
| and want to get back to work. Someone with social anxiety may
| just want to leave the interaction.
|
| Yet, in spite of this, there are plenty of nerds who care about
| tact, and make an effort to consider other people's feelings when
| they talk. The effort is appreciated.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I don 't think that nerds have an inbound tact filter. I
| don't think this is a good explanation of going on._
|
| Are you a nerd? I ask because it's extremely risky to speculate
| about how the minds of people of a type that you're not, work.
| That's precisely the problem we nerds have trying to understand
| non-nerds: their minds work differently and we don't understand
| how, at least not instinctively; we have to laboriously build
| up such understanding by hand, and we get reminded constantly
| of how limited our understanding is even after we've spent
| years building it up.
|
| _> If you spent twenty years being called a "smart kid" and
| then went to a job where all the smart kids end up, then you
| may have a rock-solid self-image. That gives you a certain
| amount of immunity to tactless comments. It also gives you the
| confidence to make tactless comments._
|
| If you qualify all three of these sentences with "around other
| nerds", then they are true. But, at least in my own personal
| experience, they're not true without the qualifier.
|
| Food for thought: remember the studies that showed that kids
| who were told they were smart did _less_ well on subsequent
| tests than kids who were told they had made a great effort?
| That 's because "smart", at least the way we instinctively
| parse that word, is something _not under our control_. When
| someone tells me I 'm "smart", I don't feel more confident,
| because "smart" is something I don't control; I can't command
| myself to be smart, the way I can command myself to make a
| concerted effort. So being told all the time that you're a
| smart kid doesn't actually improve your self-image.
|
| What _does_ improve your self-image if you 're a nerd is being
| told that some problem solution you came up with is right--
| provided it comes from someone whose opinion you expect to be
| right, such as another nerd or a teacher. Having that happen
| often as you're growing up does give you a lot of confidence
| when you're trying to solve the next problem. But that only
| works in an environment where correct solutions are the measure
| of value, i.e., around other nerds.
|
| _> I think what happened is just that nerds care about
| speaking directly._
|
| That's true, but it's really just a side effect of the fact
| that nerds care about _actually solving problems_. Which
| implies that the best way to get a nerd to learn how to be
| tactful is to point out that doing so can help them to solve a
| problem: namely, how to cooperate effectively with non-nerds to
| get something useful accomplished.
|
| The inbound tact filter, in fact, is just the same sort of
| thing, but applied to interacting with other nerds. Nerds know
| that other nerds don't apply tact in the outbound direction,
| because they're too concerned with communicating accurate
| information to muddy it up with tact filters. But we nerds also
| know from experience that nobody, including us, likes to be
| told they're wrong, or that something they've worked hard on
| isn't done yet and needs more work. So we apply the inbound
| tact filter as a hack around our own emotions as much as
| anything else--to get us past the initial emotional reaction
| and on to actually solving the problem. At least, that's my
| experience.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| _If you spent twenty years being called a "smart kid" and then
| went to a job where all the smart kids end up, then you may
| have a rock-solid self-image._
|
| Growing up as a smart kid interested in computers from
| 1976-1996 was a very different experience than the same from
| 2001-2021.
| majormajor wrote:
| I don't know what growing up in the 2000s was like, but my
| experience in your referenced time frame is like the person
| you replied to: it's not gonna make you popular, it's not
| gonna make you friends with the cheerleaders, it might be
| part of an overall miserable experience - but being
| interested in computers certainly wasn't going to make anyone
| stop telling you you're smart.
| erdos4d wrote:
| As someone who is closer to the 76-96 timeframe, could you
| give some insights into how you feel this has changed? I
| actually would like to know how the younger generation of
| nerds is faring these days, but I don't know any to ask.
| anonfornoreason wrote:
| From what I can see, it's much more acceptable to be nerdy.
| I have some younger cousins and nieces/nephews who have
| recently graduated high school or are currently about to
| start. It seems much easier to find a niche and not get
| bullied for being good in school or with technology.
|
| In other words, revenge of the nerds. Every toy out there
| is now STEM in some way (either in actuality or in
| branding), and everyone realizes that tech is more likely
| to make money.
| klodolph wrote:
| Like everything else, it's contextual.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> If you spent twenty years being called a "smart kid" [...]
| you may have a rock-solid self-image._
|
| This is, of course, why we programmers are famous for the
| delight we take in coding on a whiteboard in front of a large
| audience; the comfortable ease with which we talk to beautiful
| members of the opposite sex; and the fact none of us have ever
| been described as shy :)
| majormajor wrote:
| Look at it this way: we're all convinced _the problem is the
| whiteboard interview itself_ , it couldn't possibly be that
| we're not as smart as we think we are.
|
| That's some pretty strong self-image of the "I'm a smart kid"
| sort.
| user1980 wrote:
| The problem is interruptions, not my ability to focus.
|
| The problem is Product demanding estimates, not my ability
| to estimate in the midst of uncertainty and ask questions
| to reduce it.
|
| The problem is Java, C, or whatever "legacy" technology is
| being used. Despite the fact that the whole world runs on
| it.
| klodolph wrote:
| Like everything else, it's contextual.
| saxonww wrote:
| Postel's Law, but for people.
| [deleted]
| udev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| False. Although there are differences between military and
| civilian communication styles, tactlessness ain't it.
| udev wrote:
| I tactlessly order you to elaborate.
| afarrell wrote:
| If 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.
| afarrell wrote:
| It is also possible to apply a heavy tact filter both to what you
| hear and to what you say. This can however provoke impatience in
| others as you spend time doing extra cognitive/emotional
| processing.
| jklm wrote:
| Great write-up.
|
| As a natural nerd, took me 5+ years of unintentionally offending
| people at work to figure out the same lesson. Turns out nerds are
| somewhat overrepresented in early startups, but the trend doesn't
| hold as companies grow!
|
| Another general takeaway from this is "tailor your communication
| to your audience". If they're in marketing, you could talk about
| a project in terms of the potential conversion lift. If they're
| engineers, maybe emphasizing how the same project improves dev
| speed is more valuable.
| nullc wrote:
| This would predict that being tactless and accepting tactlessness
| from others are strongly correlated.
|
| I don't think they're that strongly correlated, and the
| correlation that exists may just come from the fact that people
| with both no-tact filter and high intolerance of tactlessness are
| so undesirable to work with that you won't find them in many
| populations due to selection.
|
| People of reasonable emotional intelligence can work with
| tactless people and they can work with fragile people, but being
| asked to work with a tactless fragile person is asking for quite
| a bit more. :)
| hzhou321 wrote:
| > This would predict that being tactless and accepting
| tactlessness from others are strongly correlated.
|
| This is because most of us will try to understand other people
| from their own perspectives. This is the case even when one
| tries to put themselves in other's shoes -- it often fall short
| because one simply doesn't have other's shoes.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I'd say there are basically too ways in which "inconsiderate"
| statements appear. One way is in people who genuinely are not
| that good at anticipating how others will view a given
| statement. The other way is in people who by reflex assert
| dominance and so don't care what effect their statements are
| going to have. A given boss lashes out at subordinates both
| because they can and to continue to show them "who's boss". An
| emotionally incompetent employee may lash out at a boss and get
| fired because they don't aren't being emotionally aware.
|
| Even more, you can get a person who's always asserting
| dominance and they either rise to the very top or fall to the
| very bottom. Which is to say, there's a certain porousness
| between emotionally incompetent and "just being dick".
|
| " _but being asked to work with a tactless fragile person is
| asking for quite a bit more. :)_ "
|
| No one can work _with_ a tactless, fragile person. But plenty
| of people _for_ tactless, fragile people.
| permo-w wrote:
| I feel like this article is using tact by referring to people on
| the autistic spectrum as "nerds"
| nullc wrote:
| Because autism spectrum disorders are created by how parents
| frame the world for their children? :)
| meej wrote:
| I think there was less awareness around ASD at the time and
| people didn't really talk about it the way they do now. That
| said, it links to the classic "Fanspeak" at the bottom, which
| does mention Aspergers.
| golergka wrote:
| Isn't that just robusntess principle[0] applied to human
| interaction?
|
| > Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept
| from others.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
| loa_in_ wrote:
| First thing that came to mind: This device may not cause
| harmful interference, and * This device must accept any
| interference received
| _def wrote:
| This seems like a pretty bad explanation to me.
|
| How people form their messages and how they interpret incoming
| ones is way more complex.
| spoonjim wrote:
| "Tact" isn't something you really need to study for years to get
| good at. Basically, you _need_ to have a difficult conversation
| in about 0.1% of the interactions you'll ever have. So, avoid
| anything tough in the other 99.9%.
| rgoulter wrote:
| I liked the model in this blogpost.
| https://status451.com/2016/01/06/splain-it-to-me/ It discusses
| making corrections. Some people interpret a correction as
| demonstrating superiority. Others interpret it as providing
| information.
|
| Compared to OP: For those who prefer tactful statements: using
| 'tact' and avoiding speaking directly avoids 'demonstrating
| superiority'; but tact-less statements would appear to be
| 'demonstrating superiority'. But for those who prefer
| information, adding tact just dilutes and slows things down.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| IMHO tact is more about how than what. You can make a
| correction as a statement which cannot be disputed and not
| supported (by facts, arguments) or you can make a correction
| and be ready to explain why you think so and be open to being
| mistaken.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I think this is saying the same thing. It would be more
| efficient to say it bluntly, then if necessary ask for
| additional info, rather than front-loading all the extra that
| just slow things down. I know I get frustrated when people
| take so long to get to their point.
| jozvolskyef wrote:
| Brilliant article. Explains why I find myself frustrated with
| people who take my well-intentioned feedback and try to
| retaliate against it as if it were some kind of a game.
| jvvw wrote:
| This reminds me of Deborah Tannen's book You Just Don't
| Understand. She's a professor of linguistics and the book talks
| a great deal about using language to demonstrate superiority vs
| using language to connect.
| [deleted]
| eklavya wrote:
| So basically emotional intelligence and social skills needed by
| /lacking in any person.
| ben_w wrote:
| No, two different and mutually incompatible solutions to the
| same problem.
|
| If it was an outright lack of emotional intelligence or social
| skills, either nerds wouldn't get on with each other, or only
| nerds would, depending on which group you think is lacking.
| tinktank wrote:
| Agreed, but OP is not saying nerds lack EI/SS outright, just
| that they're lacking.
| papandada wrote:
| This thread is amusingly self-referential regarding tact.
| mcguire wrote:
| This presumes a difference between "normal people" and "nerds"
| that is not necessarily relevant anymore, if it ever was.
| jarfil wrote:
| It used to be that people using the Internet would realize, or
| were made to realize, that text communication lacks many of the
| non-verbal cues, so one should always try to avoid offending
| others, while when in doubt pick the least offending
| interpretation of what someone else has written.
|
| Unfortunately, decades of eternal September seem to have washed
| many of those lessons away. With the rise of professional trolls,
| and the inherent instinct to make a scene of some, now we have
| people trying to offend on one side, and people trying to get
| offended on the other... while they're both trying to be the
| loudest and drown out everyone else.
| [deleted]
| PaulAJ wrote:
| I think its more a matter of spending all your school years being
| "remedial" for inter-personal skills (IPS).
|
| Think of IPS like it was a school subject. If you are learning
| maths slower than everyone else then when it is time to move on
| to multiplication you are still trying to get the hang of
| carrying the tens in addition. To catch up you have to go faster
| than everyone else, but that isn't possible. Now you have to
| leave addition and start doing multiplication, and you still
| haven't got the hang of addition, without which multiplication
| doesn't make sense. Pretty soon you are floundering in a mess of
| abstractions built on other abstractions that you don't
| understand, and it all goes downhill from there.
|
| Of course there are remedial classes for maths, reading etc. They
| help a lot; sometimes some dedicated tuition can pin down the
| specific issue and deal with it. But there are no remedial
| classes for IPS; the slow learner is left to sink or swim on
| their own.
|
| If you fail to get the hang of IPS when you start school the
| process is very similar to failing elementary arithmetic. You
| can't understand why everyone else is doing the things they are
| doing, or what they mean when they say things. So you get
| excluded by classmates during break, which means that you don't
| learn new IPS. And when you _do_ catch on to something you do it
| wrong, or you don 't realise that it's what everyone was doing
| last year, so now its considered childish. So you stay excluded,
| always wondering what the magic words are that will let you break
| into the social circle. Eventually you reach adulthood, and you
| _still_ don 't know this stuff. You are like someone who managed
| to get through school without learning to read (still happens,
| sadly), and now finds themselves being shouted at by the boss for
| not bothering to read the instructions.
| noodlenotes wrote:
| Additionally, if you're always being excluded from normal
| social circles, you end up only hanging out with people like
| yourself who also don't know how to read. So your group of
| misfits tries to cobble together their approximation of what
| reading looks like and ends up with their own misfit language.
| When they have to communicate with normal people again as
| adults, there's a disconnect.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> But there are no remedial classes for IPS; the slow learner
| is left to sink or swim on their own.
|
| It's called Therapy. Unfortunately they will try to teach it
| covertly because "normal" people can't take direct constructive
| criticism of their behavior.
| majormajor wrote:
| I've gone to a few types of therapy and none have them have
| really been anything like "practice building social skills"
| at all.
|
| I imagine it would be more like a class where every project
| is a group project but you're required to not either slack
| off or do it all yourself, and your grades depend on how much
| the rest of team enjoyed working with you, maybe. That's
| still limited to "work social skills" vs "personal life
| social skills," though.
| nzmsv wrote:
| Someone did actually start a business doing exactly that:
| https://jaunty.org/
| hammock wrote:
| > "practice building social skills"
|
| Child psychologists will do this. (not all, and not all the
| time of course)
| toast0 wrote:
| > But there are no remedial classes for IPS; the slow learner
| is left to sink or swim on their own.
|
| It's often not part of formal school instruction, but there are
| social skills classes available, at least for children.
| Typically through ocupational/behavioral therapists.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I can attest to this, as for various reasons my parents sent
| me to social skills when I was young.
|
| The classes themselves have a lot in common with both anger
| management and conflict resolution pedagogy, in that the
| method was mostly to build skills by practicing explicit,
| step-by-step processes until they converted into intuition.
|
| I have to say, I participated grudgingly when I was younger,
| but with a few decades' hindsight I think the classes have
| given me a long-term advantage over my peers; rather than a
| house of cards built on habit and intuition, my habits and
| intuitions are built onto an explicit framework that I can
| readily integrate new social skills into.
| haskellandchill wrote:
| Yes I had to teach myself these skills in my 20s since I was
| blissfully unaware of how far behind in my 10s. Basically I run
| explicit programs for body language and simulate other's mental
| states, etc. It takes a good chunk of processing power so I try
| to position myself higher in the hierarchy so I can just be
| myself and delegate the social processing to naturals.
|
| I use language transactionally as a command and interrogation
| method, which rubs people the wrong way. If you're the boss
| that's ok. If you're dependent on people that's not going to
| work. It is what it is, I can be obsequious if needed but it's
| gonna make me stupid due to computational resource constraints.
| People would say I'm a sociopath but I'm really nice. My
| empathy is turned up to 1000% so I'm very sensitive to other's
| emotional states oddly, though I have the coarsest ability to
| make others feel better, and it usually backfires.
|
| Anyway if I can figure it out it certainly can be done and
| there's probably a book about how to do it.
| anonfornoreason wrote:
| No idea why you are downvoted here, this is exactly what I
| have to do (though maybe a little less extreme than you), and
| it's a learned skill for some.
|
| I have just always erred on the side of either being my own
| boss through self employment and an in-demand skill, or early
| on by working jobs that require extreme competency or that
| had a fast pace. I definitely understand exactly what you
| mean with transactional language and command/interrogation (I
| ask people to rephrase things alot when I want to confirm
| what they are trying to get across but aren't directly
| stating it).
| dang wrote:
| A few past submissions but only one past comment:
|
| _Tact Filters_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2789364 -
| July 2011 (1 comment)
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