"not offending others by asking sensitive questions/Avoiding awkward" is the polite thing to do.
But a core part of being polite, is not hruting others through your actions directly or undirectly. ( or at least trying)
In cases where not asking the question puts the other party in a disadvantage or at the risk thereof, I feel one shouldn't be allowed to claim that one was being polite or "doing the right thing".
You were being either too shy, cowardly or selfish. This doesn't mean that you must ask such questions/ venture in those topics. But it certainly does mean, that those that don't, shouldn't be allowed to claim active virtues ( to others or to themselves).
* Also, if one chooses to not inform the other party of the problem, I feel that one shouldn't make them suffer for that choice. Which means at the very least, not trashtalking them behind their backs for it.
The first part is about being good, the second part is about not being actively evil.
> But a core part of being polite, is not hruting others through your actions directly or undirectly. ( or at least trying)
The problem is that in some cultures it's perfectly fine to talk about things that in other cultures it's not. The solution to that is to give people a benefit of a doubt and not assume they are trying to be hurtful, even if your first response is to be hurt. We don't seem to be great at that when dealing with people from other cultures, and we're really not great about it with people of the same culture (but the same thing can apply, since people interpret culture differently).
With the addition that we're currently in a zeitgeist of being very sensitive as a society about how people feel about what has happened to them (I would argue to the point that we're ignoring intention far more than makes sense), and it can be very hard to have sensitive conversations without someone being hurt and/or repercussions resulting, even if the intention was good.
Not to mention the thousands of little subcultures that exist. I've seen people offended by others leaving notes that seemed polite to me - "please refill coffee pot if it's empty" as passive-aggressive, etc.
OK... - "This is exasperating and I'll just accept it"
OK... - "His response was childish; moving on..."
OK? - "What you've just said appears to have no bearing on the question I asked nor the conversation at hand. Please explain how it's relevant or get on-topic."
OK? - "Did you understand? Please provide a response indicating whether you need additional information."
OK! - "I acknowledge your request and am capable and willing to fulfill it. I'm on it. I'll get it done. You can count on me."
In person, you can provide vocal inflection and facial expression to communicate which of these you intend. Over text, you're at the mercy of how the reader is feeling in the moment. Personally, I'll spend time either putting more punctuation around the "OK" to help clarify. Or I'll just go with the sentences that attempt to preclude ambiguity. Apparently (anecdotally), most people don't bother.
OK = Acknowledged or agreed.
OK? = Request for acknowledgement or agreement.
Anything else is reading too much into it. If I send someone an email explaining something and I get an, "OK" back, then I assume they've read it (or will read it) and I'll hear more from them if they have more to share.
When speaking in person, the "OK" itself almost completely superfluous as it's merely a vehicle for inflection and other social cues which carry the real meaning, as you noted.
> I'll just go with the sentences that attempt to preclude ambiguity.
And that's what I'd do 99% of the time, but I was specifically pointing to discussion around "OK"
Well, it depends on how you define "easily". And any culture that agrees a thing is offensive will probably not feel the offense is taken too easily, because by definition it's the norm.
I mean, I was chastised for taking a picture with a Buddha even while I did my best to be polite (I knew taking photos was OK but you had to make sure you weren't standing higher than the Buddha, etc.) - to me it seems kind of arbitrary, but I don't think the people offended ("annoyed with another dumb tourist" might be more apt) were being unreasonable.
In my case it was just a move to a different country and the social norms about what was acceptable, etc. are slightly different.
I've always advocated for a "refill the coffee if you find an empty pot" rather than "refill it if you empty it" approach since the latter means you _could_ be wasting a pot of coffee if you happened to be the last to want coffee that day, but I get that people have different views.
Is refill the pot of coffee if you empty it another casualty of technology? I don't think I've worked anywhere in more than a decade that did not have big automate coffee maker that allowed you to choose between a dozen passable options.
In that situation you never refill the pot if you empty it, you empty the grinds or pour in more beans if the the machine asks.
I strongly prefer a good old coffee pot to some ridiculous espresso making contraption. Most of the machines you refer to (so far as I'm aware) won't do "big ol' cuppa joe" but you can get about 3 watered down "large" espressos if you want (I don't recommend it).
evidently I asked a sensitive question here, as I got downvoted a couple. Sorry I just thought they had gone the way of the tape cassette, phonogram, typewriters etc.
Most people still work at small to medium size businesses, and depending on business type and density, it doesn't make sense to have a machine like that. Those big machines aren't inherently better, they've just faster at serving lots of people, but at the expense of cost to run and service, and that cost can be a lot (especially the up-front cost to buy).
As for downvoting, I guess people thought you were being dismissive of smaller workplaces? I dunno, I'm just guessing there, since I didn't feel the need to downvote you.
maybe it's different where I'm at. I do work at a lot of big places, but right now the company I'm at is small to medium sized (they recently bought another company in another city so while it is probably a medium sized company now it still feels small) and it has a machine.
Also at the big companies I've worked at often you have a small room with a self contained team and each of these teams has one of these machines.
That's a good point, but at the same time, at least in a work setting, there needs to be some sort of common ground.
It seems to me that a reasonable compromise would be to expect people to notify a coworker of things that their boss would judge the coworker for; even if it is contrary to the culture of the person doing the notification.
Sure! There are many reasonable compromises. I'm just making the point is that people sometimes have very localized view of what's reasonable, and what's reasonable or not from a bird's eye view may not seem so to those in the situation.
We should be able to interact in the best manner of the business and out coworkers. Sometimes doing that may be perceived by others around you as having crossed a line. Sometimes, there isn't a great answer.
What if bringing an office problem forth exposes that the person causing the problem has personal reasons for doing so (a disability they don't want to advertise, for example). The end situation may just be the status quo (neither the company nor the staff really want to impede the person with the disability once it becomes known), but with two people now uncomfortable either with each other, with coworkers, or both. I would say that's often a case that can be helped by being able to talk about sensitive things, but also a case where people may have good reasons for wanting their privacy (people do not always act rationally). The "right" answer is often contextual, and in some cases it may not exist.
This isn't to say that we should just forget it all. It's just that it's hard, and we should be careful before assuming even somewhat obvious statements such as yours (which I agree with) are enough.
>But a core part of being polite, is not hurting others through your actions directly or indirectly. ( or at least trying)
The problem is wanting the notion of politeness to do too much work. Being polite, being nice, is just a moment to moment strategy for avoiding conflict. Unfortunately, niceness has become the most important virtue in American culture.
Being good is much more profound, and niceness is just one of the many tools you can use to achieve it. Sometimes being good entails being harsh. Sometimes it means doing things that will upset others.
I think you are definitely correct. However, the other side of the coin is that:
In my experience, people who say that they are being harsh for someone's own good are generally just being jerks. On the other hand, people who are actually able to be harsh for someone's own good are generally people who try very hard to be nice.
It's sort of like the saying that luck favors those who don't expect luck.
To be clear: I don't mean to say that I think you are a jerk. I realize that you are just explaining the principle that good and nice are not necessarily the same thing; not saying how you would or wouldn't act in a given situation.
This hits at a fundamental point that has puzzled me about American culture for the longest time. A country that is so heavily steeped in protestant/purtanical Christian roots and yet does not even realize that one of the main components of that creed is NOT taking offense to things. In fact, taking offense to things is as sinful as actually offending someone.
It's basically a philosophical method of being a little less self-centered. It also suggests that while objective offensiveness is possible (calling someone a harsh name, etc.), most of the time offense is taken rather than given.
It is one of my favorite principles from a religion that most who practice said religion almost entirely ignore. Puzzling.
> It is one of my favorite principles from a religion that most who practice said religion almost entirely ignore. Puzzling.
There's nothing puzzling about this. Most people who practice any religion with written principles almost entirely ignore almost all of those principles. The official principles of a religion don't really have anything to do with why people affiliate to one or another.
But, particularly in American culture it is the imbalance in "enforcement" of principles that is the problem.
It is perfectly fine to be super-nice as often as possible. But, the culture is "do not offend" dominate and almost void of "do not take offense".
This imbalance of cultural enforcement is likely a driving factor behind the younger generations view on enforcing standards of political correctness, social justice, etc. If you are offended then you are in the right, always, and without question.
>But, the culture is "do not offend" dominate and almost void of "do not take offense".
Events where people get offended end up being reported online or in the media. Events where no one gets offended get no coverage, though that mind set is also very common. Additionally, extreme examples of "offensive behavior" are used by poth sides for political propaganda.
Very, very important point. I'm not sure it's possible to overstate the effect of confirmation and selection biases in any kind of "people these days" generalization.
Take that with a grain of salt, there's plenty of stuff in the Bible that suggests overlooking offenses (things like Proverbs 19:11) and obviously forgiveness is part of it. But I'm not sure "take no offense" is quite the main component of that creed.
One explanation that I read recently (https://aeon.co/essays/what-duelling-can-teach-us-about-taki...) is that taking offense may often be not so much the magnitude of the slight itself as it is about establishing that you are an equal and therefore have the right to take offense.
For example suppose that a trans person takes offense at someone refusing to use their preferred pronoun. The issue may not actually be about the importance of the pronoun so much as it is about whether they have the social right to define the pronoun that is associated with them.
I think that the failure to understand this dynamic could be one of the causes of polarization in America. For example:
- Conservatives often criticize "political correctness" by mocking what they perceive to be overreactions to minor slights. However, that may be missing the point if the issue is not the magnitude of the slight but whether someone has the right to take offense at all.
- Anger over removing the Confederate flag may not be about the flag itself so much as it is about asserting that Southerners have a right to be treated with respect.
> may not be about the flag itself so much as it is about asserting that Southerners have a right to be treated with respect
This seems extremely generous, and doesn’t match my impression of supporters of the confederate flag I have seen or heard about, many of whom live outside the former confederate states and have nothing to do with the South culturally.
There is a demand to be heard/respected involved, but the demand as far as I can tell is for recognition of white racial superiority and white social hegemony as a legitimate political ideology (which goes hand-in-hand with an implicit threat to non-whites), rather than anything about geography per se.
There’s also a strong element of defiance of what is seen as a subversive culture of pluralism and mutual respect, along the lines of: “I know this symbol is offensive to you, but I declare my right to wave it in your face because you can’t stop me.” This kind of militant offensiveness is attractive to the same sorts of people who “roll coal” to stick it to environmentalists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
Being polite and nice is the lubricant in the gears of society. You're correct in that it's not the same thing as being good (and, as you said, sometimes to be good we have to be impolite or even harsh) but being nice is an important part of getting along with other humans, especially the ones you don't know.
I’ve heard people talk about the “compassionate” thing to do and I’ve asked, “What exactly is compassionate about prolonging suffering?” Either they get it or they think I’m a brutish social nub.
-that generics don't play well with primitives and arrays?
I understand that jep218 aims to fix the first one. But it's been quite a few years now and why was this not done the right way from the start?
> equals() and ==
I think these should've been switched.
A general principle in languages (not only in programming languages) is that things that are used often should be short.
Plus
- get() and charAt(), instead of [].
just why?
- verbose naming conventions:
Excessive redundancy does not increase safety or improve maintainability. Having one blinking red light is useful, having a thousand lights of different importance will just make you filter it out. People will simply gloss over and skip long identifiers.
we are humans and we can't operate at full attention the whole time. if something has low information content, we simply go on autopilot.
Easy things should be short, so that the hard things popout in the code.
- Obsession with software engineering and OOP Principles?
Instead of thinking about the data structures needed and the alogirthms chosen, time is spent just making a millefeuille of abstractions.
Java not having operator overloads as a design choice explains the majority of your complaints.
Generics are built around type erasure and as such generics treat the type as Object at runtime. Primitives cannot be treated this way. The reason its not a simple fix is because the language designers are not willing to break compatibility to make this happen.
The style complaints are an artifact of Java being a popular corporate language but there's no reason you need to write Java this way.
Of course you can write more performant code with lower-level languages, though there is a reason that almost no web framework/application is written in them - the additional burden of managing memory outweighs the (actually surprisingly little) performance benefit. If you look at examples on the site, in basically every other benchmark Java and sometimes Go rank the best.
I heard the same story when I was a kid but the general that did it was "Tariq ibn ziyad" in Gibraltar (the mountain is named after him). But I can't for the life of me find a enlgish source that confirms it.
It's the origin of the famous phrase "the sea is behind and the enemy is in front of you".
That really depends on the distribution of said numbers. You're probably assuming uniform distribution, but there are power law distributions like wealth where the 26 richest people own as much as the bottom 3.8 billion combined.
it's not easy.
it's not fast to run.
it's not fast to write.
it's not fast to read.
it's not memory efficient.
it's not fun (yeah, subjective but I'm yet to hear someone saying that he had a blast writing java)
>it's not easy. it's not fast to run. it's not fast to write. it's not fast to read. it's not memory efficient. it's not fun
Was 2010 last time you used Java? All these things were addresses in lat 5 releases. I like Java for:
* stability
* fast to run code
* fast to write code
* mature libraries
* good access to many good programmers (bad programmers write bad code which runs slow, is run slow and is read slow)
Try Java13 with modern GC (ZGC or Shenandoah) or GraalVM. It's really fun, fast, modern. 4 years ago I was into Kotlin and Go, this year I'm back on Java.
- If I talk to someone about a problem and he gives me a suggestion. I know that he is trying to help. getting mad at him is unfair because he means well. In fact what's natural is to be happy that someone values me enough that he's spending effort to help me.
- If someone talks to me about a problem that I can't solve. I'll try to help, if I don't know the answer. that's normal. I don't know everything.
- If I try a solution to a problem and It doesn't work, I get frustrated not at the asker, but because It didn't work.
If everybody acts this way, The situation gets easier for everybody, problem are solved if possible and no bad feeling are had,if not.
In fact this behaviour follows directly from already well established moral values: giving others the benefit of the doubt, not being vain ( needing others to validate/compliment you), humility, "I know that I know nothing", Thirst for learning.
I don't understand why autistic people are assumed to be wrong/inferrior in scoial contexts even when their behaviour is the right thing to do.
Another example is trashtalking people behind their back. I always feel compelled to either say a nicething about that person, defend him/play the devil, stop the conversation. People don't like it when I do that, although I'm sure that they, as well as I, would appreciate if someone defends them when they are not there.
> I don't understand why autistic people are assumed to be wrong/inferrior in scoial contexts even when their behaviour is the right thing to do.
The world would be a better place if you ever found an answer to that question.
It's not a fair comparison[0], but I tend to internally categorize people as logical or emotional. It usually helps keep things running more smoothly to treat the two groups how they prefer.
The trick is to not make the distinction a value judgement. I'm usually pretty good at that, but sometimes I slip up.
[0]: Because both groups display traits of the other, and it's not a hard line distinction. Ever seen someone on the spectrum throw a tantrum? It might (might) be logic that started it, but emotions take over nearly immediately.
and it's not because Einstein was a brilliant physicits.
Intelligence refers to how well you can reason abstractly, not to how successful, how competent, how eloquent, or talented you are. for that we have those words.
and Einstein would have still been more intelligent even if he never discorverd anything.
Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving.
But a core part of being polite, is not hruting others through your actions directly or undirectly. ( or at least trying)
In cases where not asking the question puts the other party in a disadvantage or at the risk thereof, I feel one shouldn't be allowed to claim that one was being polite or "doing the right thing".
You were being either too shy, cowardly or selfish. This doesn't mean that you must ask such questions/ venture in those topics. But it certainly does mean, that those that don't, shouldn't be allowed to claim active virtues ( to others or to themselves).
* Also, if one chooses to not inform the other party of the problem, I feel that one shouldn't make them suffer for that choice. Which means at the very least, not trashtalking them behind their backs for it.
The first part is about being good, the second part is about not being actively evil.