A lot of the time the modern world tells us that feelings are more important than objective reality. It's bullshit.

It seems people forget that it's not a binary scenario, you can absolutely respect someone else's time while also being honest with them.

Which is what the modern world is actually getting at, since historically we've ignored feelings far too much for the sake of submission to the status quo.

For example, I remember reading "For people to change, first they have to feel accepted as they are".

This is some "objective reality" people should keep in mind when disclosing "objective reality".

"But my spouse/friend/child/coworker is <doing this stupid/misguided/unhealthy thing>!"

And feelings are not opposed to objective reality, for that matter.

It's entirely possible to be clear, explicit, truthful, and kind.

That depends on the person. I’ve known people who take any criticism at any time for any reason as an offense. There is no kind way (from their perspective) to convince such a person that their behavior is anything negative. Neutral at worst or it’s, “What do you have against me?”

In addition, you can keep kindness as a guiding principle and still recognize the people who will take advantage of that kindness, and adjust yourself accordingly. You do not need to live to appease people who are never going to be appeased.

Instead, I recognize that some people cannot be kindly (again, from their perspective) criticized. There is no, “That was disrespectful,” which is taken at face value. When this person hears such a phrase being directed at them, they hear someone being unkind to them.

If you can communicate the truth with kindness and be heard, great. If not, move on.

In my experience, unkindness isn't any more effective than kindness in effecting change; it usually prompts defensiveness.

One of the human types may be called “emotional extremist”. They push borders until someone explodes in their face, and this is the feedback they use. Not reality or arguments. Cold controlled unkindness that presses them against the wall is much better in this case because otherwise someone will be driven crazy by them.

Instead of saying "that was disrespectful" or "you are being disrespectful", you can say "I feel very disrespected by what you just said and it really hurt." This changes the statement from an accusation to a factual statement about your feelings. The other person can legitimately disagree about whether the statement was fundamentally disrespectful, but the other person cannot reasonably disagree about how you feel. It is then up to the other person to decide how to respond, whether to discount your feelings or adjust their words and behavior to be less disrespectful.

Tell me more about how everyone else in the “modern world” is the problem…

I've lived long enough to have learned to present feedback to others diplomatically and inasmuch as possible kindly.

But when it comes to me, dear Lorde, just get to a constructive point quickly and directly. Takes me a while to coach my mentors :) but life is easier for all once they believe me.

The point being, there's all sorts, including those who genuinely want "hard truths" without looking to only correct others.

But instead you spat out someone else's ad hominem bullshit.

So here's the truth from my perspective: I do not give a fuck about your or anyone else's many and invariant inadequacies.

I will look and see and be honest - and not give a shit either way regarding how my input is received.

And I will be harder yet in self reflection.

Because the point of the statement is in the consequences that result, not the emotional response elicited?

Here's an example, I once worked with an absolutely useless tester, the only tester on my team.

Hadn't picked up by month four on the sort of basic shit he should've had on day one.

And he never did.

I'd been implementing some rather complex features for the technical lead of one of the other teams, and the changes were almost ready to be built.

We had a meeting, with the team lead, my manager, the tester, and I told the team lead that he'd need to test the changes once they were in place.

"[The tester] will do that."

"No he won't, he's not good enough."

Full test coverage mattered more to me than some dude's feelings.

If full test coverage mattered to you so much, I'd expect at least a part of this anecdote to include some discussion of how it would be handled in light of prior concerns about test coverage up to that point. If I’d been in a leadership role in this scenario I’d probably postpone whatever next thing was on my daily agenda to sit down with you and convey that waiting months to raise known problems is exactly what I expect you not to do. I would indicate that it’s actively harmful to the success of whatever everyone is working on and to everyone working on it, and since you seem to appreciate bluntness I’d add that I expect it not to happen again.

And there was no constructive way to address the situation where someone simply is not smart enough to learn their required tasks.

Beyond that, just because I can recognise that testing is inadequate, does not mean that I can guide how to do it.

(Just because I can point when a builder puts a hammer through the glass, does not mean that I can fix the window myself.)

Okay, I’ll grant that my first impression might’ve been wrong.

> And there was no constructive way to address the situation where someone simply is not smart enough to learn their required tasks.

I think maybe there’s something constructive in just separating your assessment of someone’s present skills from your assessment of their person. Have you never found yourself in a position where you didn’t know enough to be proficient and faced a longer and harder climb to meet expectations (your own or external)? How much would it help you improve if you were designated not smart enough, full stop, no path forward?

> Beyond that, just because I can recognise that testing is inadequate, does not mean that I can guide how to do it.

> (Just because I can point when a builder puts a hammer through the glass, does not mean that I can fix the window myself.)

I’m sorry but here I have to call bullshit. You have more informed criteria as a dev about testing than a layperson about construction. You probably have enough familiarity with the system under test to do an adequate job testing it even if you’re not well versed in the broader role of dedicated testing. I’m not saying you were in a position to mentor the tester, or that it was your job to do so. But you were definitely in a position to make more constructive recommendations than blurting out that a person is inadequate.

If I might be more constructive myself, it sounds like you might benefit from becoming more familiar with the testing role you’re evaluating individual competency for. If nothing else it’ll make you a better dev. Maybe you and everyone else will be lucky and you’ll be a little more able to help your teammates succeed, and know how to fill in gaps so you can succeed too.

I've never been in a position where I lacked the ability to develop the skills that I needed to be proficient.

If I were ever that inadequate on a team project, I would leave of my own volition.

And you're using this incident as an example of why social skills don't matter....

Of course there is man. Nobody is smart or dumb, they are just curious or incurious. You could have pointed out what was lacking in their knowledge base, pointed to documentation, pointed to inadequacies in the process etc. Just shouting at someone's face that they are good enough was the worst way to tell this truth.

If you decide this dude isn't gunnuh make it and start cutting him off projects rather than getting him more support, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. And it's pretty messed up to trash him that way.

If I'm being perfectly frank, this doesn't so much sound like a case where brutal honesty saved a project than a case where you lacked the tact and emotional intelligence to navigate a delicate situation, and so you just took a sledge hammer to it.

That's such a brutal way to treat a colleague, it must have been devastating for their moral. Like, what was your relationship to this person like after that? Did they stay on? Were your team lead and manager really okay with how you handled that?

He would ask about something that I expected him to be able to figure out, I would answer. Then he ask the same question with different parameters.

Day after day, week after week, month after month.

So yeah, the truth fell out of my mouth. It's always harshest when it's actually true.

In this example you’re basically just dodging the question, because talking to someone is different than talking about them to someone else. I can’t tell if you genuinely don’t understand this.

I see so much of that behavior everywhere I look nowadays. It does make me wonder how much of that is a projection but I doubt it’s only a projection.

I can understand being bothered by things that are overly saccharine, I just don't understand the value proposition in providing a "counterpoint" or trying to check this in some way.

Or maybe I'm just a cunt.

I don't know how reflective the examples you gave are of things you actually say to people, but if you think you know that someone is objectively beautiful or smart and that you telling them that is some kind of bandaid to rip off for them - that is something to reflect on, these are textbook examples of socially constructed ideas. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. You're smart or beautiful when your community regards you that way, it's the consensus of tastemakers. It's nature as consensus can make it feel "real" or objective, but these are vague squishy concepts that change across time and across cultures. Even within a culture there's a huge diversity of preferences.

So some communities might prefer technical skills and call people smart when they're great programmers, some might value media criticism, it's not set in stone. Same goes for beauty, but I'd wager there's even less consensus there.

With that in mind, telling someone you don't find them beautiful is just placing a burden on them. It's telling them about how they fail to measure up to some measure in your mind, but the only outcome here is that either don't care or it bums them out. If you don't find them beautiful - that's a property of your eyes, not them, and you're entitled to feel that way but it's something to keep to yourself.

The thing you said in another comment about people being invariable reminded me of a comment I made recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35318596

> Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say.

Genuine beauty exists is a strong indicator of health and fertility, extremes of human state (such as the anorexic or obese forms) are not only not beautiful but are profoundly unhealthy.

(Intelligence is a social construct, says a member of the only species intelligent enough to hold that notion.)

Plenty of people find extremely skinny people attractive - it's one of the reasons anorexia can be a problem, people feel compelled to go without food because they're trying to attain a body shape that isn't achievable while staying healthy in order to conform to a beauty standard. Plenty of people find larger people attractive, and at other times in history this was the dominant attitude.

This is just smuggling your preferences into a frame of objectivity with some spurious comparisons. You're ignoring the is-ought problem [1]. You can tell me a long stream of "is" claims ("this person is obese, this person is anorexic") but you can't actually come to a conclusion about beauty without making or implying an "ought" claim ("you ought to look a certain way"). The rhetorical game here is that, if you leave it implied as if it were obvious and required no justification, then you can pretend that it is an "is" claim instead of an "ought" claim in a trenchcoat. And if you pretend that you've made your argument using only "is" claims we can all agree on, then you can pass it off as objective. But it's mere sophistry, and once you understand how it works, it stops being convincing.

Even if we accepted your framing here, very few people are anorexic or obese or in another extreme state at a given time. So by your logic, surely the vast majority of people are beautiful, and we still don't need to go around policing who gets to feel beautiful.

> (Intelligence is a social construct, says a member of the only species intelligent enough to hold that notion.)

This is does not contradict any claim I made. I'm guessing you've conflated "socal construct" with "fictional," but that's not so. Voting and being elected are both social constructs, that doesn't mean Joe Biden isn't the president of the US. Being smart is real, as a concept, but reasonable people may disagree about the definition or about who is smart, and it's possible for none of them to be wrong.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

I think you forget that everyone’s stats are on a bell curve, and I may be a very beautiful boy for my mom, but her column is of height 0.02% and columns 20..100% don’t think so. You can’t start going to A if you think you’re at A and you can’t become a version of yourself you want to be if you believe you’re already perfect-ish. Being nice is one thing, another thing is gaslighting someone into unrealistic expectations. Who’s [not] wrong doesn’t matter if you have hard time finding a match or a job.

The mechanism is not that everyone has a stat block floating over their head that they can't see and you're lying to them about what that stat block says. It is not a gesture of "being cruel to be kind" to tell someone they aren't smart or beautiful, because you don't actually have that power to see into their destiny.

What I'm telling you is that people are not video game characters

I never said they are. Unless you reject the fact that people have traits, characteristics, etc just tell how you’d like to call them. These concepts weren’t invented in RPGs, they are from natural language.

The people who truly knew what they were doing? Usually extremely kind. They don't need to prove their worth by being rude. They were always considerate of feelings, even when they had to tell you that you were really really bad (ask me how i know :)

None of them had to resort to "objective reality" justifications.

So, just based on that experience, I think we can all afford some kindness. It's not going to make us worse off.

Objectively, if you’re hoping to persuade your audience by being an absolutely correct jerk, you’ll succeed. But only by eliminating your audience and having no one to persuade but yourself.

You don’t have to coddle people to treat them respectfully. And if you think you do, I invite you to consider that maybe you have more to learn on the topic.

Screw this everyone should feel good about everything crap but please be kind. Say the things that need to be said, but remember not everything needs to be said. Being blunt is better than evading.

But kindness is not weakness. If the person you're talking to works well with brutal honesty, have at. You'll probably have a lot of fun. :)

The point is caring about the other person rather than treating them like a punching bag.

Sometimes you need to know/ understand that kind of to do the right thing… well.

— The Dude