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0 pointsshadowgovt5y ago0 comments

> The tone is not more important than the facts. It never is.

This is an error software engineers sometimes make.

When working with human beings, tone matters. Tone always matters. "Nature cannot be fooled," but presenting facts with the wrong tone can lead to them being discarded, harming the project and/or people involved. You get better outcomes recognizing that people make better decisions when they aren't emotionally tilted.

The successful projects operated by people who don't know how to interact with other people are significant outliers (and in some cases, their creators and maintainers have recanted their past approach as counter-productive, ref. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...).

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tialaramex5y ago· 1 in thread

The thing about Mother Nature is her dependability, not only can she not be fooled, she's the firmest conceivable foundation upon which to build. When you're depending upon tone that's never more than a subtle shift of tone from disaster. "Four legs good, Two legs bad" becomes "Four legs good, Two legs better" so easily.

I agree with you that tone matters, but I think that's a bad thing, a weakness or vulnerability. We should take "tone matters" into consideration the same way we'd take "OCSP without stapling results in a query to the CA for each leaf certificate examined, thereby harming privacy" into consideration. Can we prevent it? Can we mitigate the resulting harms? We definitely shouldn't celebrate it.

shadowgovtOP5y ago

> not only can she not be fooled, she's the firmest conceivable foundation upon which to build

I agree.

What do we do with that observation when we then observe that human beings care so deeply about how they're being interacted with by other human beings? We are products of nature, after all.

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