> if there are never any negative indicators that you are the problem, rather than everyone else… there is a mathematically insignificant chance you will ever realize something might be wrong

A lot of my self-improvement has come not because of explicit negative feedback, but through paying attention to people and reflecting on who I want to be in the world. That's not to say that any approach is generally superior. People have all sorts of ways of dealing with the world.

And, for some reason, people become seemingly completely unwilling to learn-by-example any new-to-them soft skills, once they reach adulthood.

Or perhaps "lifelong learning of soft skills" is itself a soft skill that people aren't being taught.

-----

Anecdote: I was diagnosed/treated for ADHD as an adult, whereupon the "social soft skills" part of my brain suddenly started working like it never did through my childhood.

I went from thinking I was on the autistic spectrum, to noticing all sorts of new patterns while observing social interactions. I quickly realized that my capacity for social-skill learning had never been missing; but rather, the learning itself had just sort of been "paused", for lack of "voltage" in the right brain areas.

I did / am still doing a lot of delayed soft-skill learning as an adult. And it's really starkly obvious how much other people with me in the same situations, aren't deriving the same learning I do from those situations — even when those people are sorely lacking in the relevant social skill, but aren't otherwise socially unskilled. It seems like they just aren't bothering to look at the situation under the right "lens" to see the pattern, even though it's a "lens" they clearly possess.

Canadians are very nice, but their famous agreeableness (and passive-agressiveness) often prevents me from realizing when I've committed a transgression, and makes it so much harder to integrate into the culture.

Negative feedback is very useful and I would be grateful to get it instead of receiving a veiled response.

people give feedback online.

I'm not sure what you're talking about--I wonder if this is just your extremely subjective experience of the internet? Because I thought that the internet lately has been nothing but disagreement.

Personally, I try to limit the amount of time I spend on such websites, and HN is really the only place I read the comments (in moderation). Consuming everyone else's anxiety is unproductive, because it skews how I view the world (and the people in it), and raises my blood pressure. :)

I think fucking social butterfly Arianna Huffington [1]'s website Huffington Post is the one that started the trend of headlines like "X {destroys,obliterates} Y" to report on 140 Twitter outbursts. Thanks, lady, for your contribution in destroying the media landscape.

https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1994/11/ariannas-virt...

It is about people being more active in pushing when they disagree.

Perhaps it's disagreement across tribes, but mandatory agreement within each tribe?

There's seems to be a decent market for contrarian opinions within each tribe though. Such as "Conservatives against Trump" [0] and "Liberals against Cancel Culture" [1]

[0] e.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-24/disaffect...

[1] e.g. https://medium.com/arc-digital/the-whispered-left-wing-disse...

Unless by “...against cancel culture” you mean “...who deny thr existence of ‘cancel culture’ as a significant new or especially liberal/left phenomenon”, but then, those arent dissenters at all.

I don't think anti-Trump conservatives are particularly unwelcome in mainstream American conservatism though. Take someone like the Orthodox Christian journalist Rod Dreher, who says very negative things about Trump ("Donald Trump is flat-out lying to manipulate the political process", [0]), but who has also written a book (Live Not By Lies) claiming that American progressivism is evolving into Soviet-style totalitarianism. Getting invited on to Tucker Carlson's show is a pretty clear sign of being welcome by mainstream American conservatism, and Carlson has invited Dreher (in September last year) on to promote his book, and I'm sure the Fox News audience loved it. Carlson just avoided asking Dreher about his opinions on Trump, he knows what his audience likes and he didn't get where he is by upsetting them.

[0] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/donald-trump-...

Right, there's no market for dissent, only for the tribal-conformist views.

Actually I do wonder whether centre-left media outlets have the same freedom that Carlson has, to platform dissenters to talk about matters unrelated to their dissent.

Also, yes, mentally ill people. I'm sure of it...

The statement seems a priori false, since people cant both be disagreeing with you, and also be against people disagreeing.

Then again, depending on the psychological issues it doesn't matter how many negative indicators there are that you are the problem. Some people just seem unable to accept they have issues, or unable to correctly process that people's reaction to them is in fact negative.

There's just such a wide range of things here.

I’m not sure I follow. Do you see a culture where no one disagrees with each other? From my perspective it would appear that the opposite is true. Particularly in social media which is jam packed full of people who disagree with each other very very often.

Where are you seeing a culture where people aren’t constantly disagreeing with each other?

Imagine taking the youtube comments on a video to heart. shudder