I'm a bit sad about how eager everyone is jumping on the idea that "candid advice" will always be construed as possibly sexist. I'm from Germany and we are famously blunt, so maybe there is a cultural aspect to this, but to me candor != risk of sexism. If your advice is candid, it also shouldn't leave any ambiguity..."I'm unsure about you doing the pitch because the last N times you froze up and you seem nervous again" makes your reasoning clear without beating around the bush. How can you twist this into something sexist?
A lot of Americans of any gender would be put off by a lot of very routine and candid professional communications that happen in Germany. I find American English in general to be tending toward the near universal avoidance of direct speech and statements, independent of speaker/listener identity.
Importantly the speaker and listener are not consciously aware of this happening. The net result is that you can say literal/plain thing A and the listener can hear literal/plain thing B.
Speaking to Americans requires a significantly accurate modeling of the listener's mind and expectations to be able to be clearly understood, much much moreso than any other language I have studied or even heard of.
Basically, it is very easy to be totally misunderstood when using plain, literal speech (such as is common in Germany or in Slavic countries).
Very interesting to read. I wonder if some of this is due to neutral statements in English tending to carry a negative connotation. If I say "I want to come over tomorrow but I'm not sure if I can make it" - that actually means "I do not want to come over tomorrow".
You /can't/ communicate without euphemisms, and trying to will always fail and make you seem like a dick even though you're just being straightforward. That is likely where the difficulty you've experienced comes from.
(For context, your exact situation occurred this weekend. I was invited to an event and said yes, but both me and my friend knew that I would not attend)
But Brits certainly do use the same kind of highly indirect non-literal phrasing. We're famous for it.
This reminded me of this infamous bit from Yes, Minister, and although it's not actually entirely an example of this, it's too good not to share now i've found it:
Sir Frederick: There are four words to be included in a proposal if you want it thrown out.
Sir Humphrey: Complicated. Lengthy. Expensive. Controversial. And if you want to be really sure that the Minister doesn't accept it, you must say the decision is "courageous".
Bernard: And that's worse than "controversial"?
Sir Humphrey: Oh, yes! "Controversial" only means "this will lose you votes". "Courageous" means "this will lose you the election"!
We’re lost the formal flowery language of the English which was designed to communicate things like this more precisely - “I regret that I will be unable to attend but I appreciate the invitation and cherish our relationship” or similar.
I think you misunderstood? If the message being conveyed is understood by everyone involved it’s not a lie. Your post can claim the words are a lie I guess, but not in this culture.
I used to work for a company that has the standard "Meet Expectations" / "Exceeds Expectations" performance review every 6 month. Some European coworker felt the need to make a ppt titled 'euro-perf' to teach Europeans how to write performance feedback. Apparently words like "Good", "OK", "decent" etc meant slightly below median, and words like "Amazing" meant slightly above median for Americans. An European coworker also told me that he used to think a solid track record of Meet Expectations is very good and worthy of a promotion.
Yeah I find American exaggeration (over-positivity) quite tiring. Good things become "amazing" and "literally the best ever". Even "great" is just around median in actual meaning. Everyone is "excited" to meet you and "thrilled" about whatever you say, wide smiles etc. Complaining about anything is a huge no-no, your life narrative must always be carefully crafted and anything slightly negative rephrased as a positive challenge and learning opportunity. Everyone is a hero sitting on a great exponential upward curve ahead of them. You are considered negative and a downer for just not buzzing all the time. Seems like people care even more about "saving face" than in East Asia.
As an American concerned about the direction our language (and our culture) is headed in, realizing that there are places in the west that aren't like this is incredibly relieving.
People can make up whatever motivation they want if they feel slighted. All it takes is for the female founder to ascribe sexism to the VC when he suggests swapping CEOs, and you've got the entire media circus on your neck. And then people stop being rational actors when mob mentality kicks in.
Well if that was the case where are all the horror stories? With the acceptance rates of startups at VC pitches etc., shouldn't we be expecting a lot of VCs being hounded with allegations of sexism and the media circus going amok? How is YC still in business given their acceptance rates?
> Well if that was the case where are all the horror stories?
Pre-empted by the abundance of caution described in the article? It's not a very deep game, so I assume the strategy in question is readily apparent to almost any man in such a position.
Isn't that circular logic? Everyone is afraid of something bad happens, so everyone censors themselves way too much...but it's somehow still so well known that it would happen?
I don't think so... you can predict things won't go well without necessarily having observed exactly the same thing in the exact same context.
E.g. I'm sure tourist issues when travelling to North Korea are vanishingly rare, and yet I bet I'm pretty good at guessing what not to do. You can glean that kind of thing from the totality of your experiences and knowledge without necessarily testing it.
That's not to say I wouldn't be over-cautious or that I'd be a perfect predictor, but that's just about the looming cost of a false negative. I don't think it's rationally faulty or circular to just act in a self-preserving and overcautious way.
But in this thread people have repeatedly explained to me that no matter what you say, people can and will accuse you...so why do we not hear more about rejected female, black etc. entrepeneurs calling down the PC mob on VCs that rejected them? Or at least attempting to?
No, there's no circular logic. What does it mean "but it's somehow still so well known that it would happen?". All one needs is a non-negligible probability that it would, since the payoff from criticising isn't usually stellar.
If you talk about this (either as a personal thing or something you've seen happen to someone else) you will get crucified, basically anywhere. It doesn't take a whole lot of extrapolating to see why there are no horror stories.
American media culture is probably more relevant than general American culture.
A lot of politicians or executives will only say carefully scripted sound bites to the press because they can't count on a reasonable portrayal. They give them a sentence or two that's difficult to twist into something offensive.
Here it's similar. They're afraid reasonable behavior will be portrayed as outrageous in some blog post.
> "candid advice" will always be construed as possibly sexist.
But this isn't the idea at all, right? Rather, everyone seems to agree it's relatively rare, but that it's such a massively negative experience when it does happen that it tanks the expected value anyway.
Thanks for pointing that out, good point. I'll actually need to think about this aspect a bit more. It still seems like the fear is more clamming than the thing being feared
In American logic the listener need only question your motivations to demonize you. Eg. "would you have said this if I wasn't {Black,female,Olympic badminton athlete}?" If you find this incredulous I assure you that although it is rare, a minority will accuse you and their accusations will be taken seriously by many.
I chuckled when I read this. It made me curious to try working in Germany.
In the US, there are some men who will say that to a woman who wouldn't say the same thing to a man giving the same performance. Most women have experienced this at least once (watch someone criticize u fairly). So, some women will assume criticism that is happening in a sexist way when it isnt.
I've observed both many times - sexist criticism by a man (which would infuriate me if I were the woman), and a woman assuming that criticism was sexist when it was fair.
We also have a generally less blunt culture in the US.
“Yet another man who thinks all women are hysteric. What next, are you going to ask me if it’s my ‘period’?”
Once one moves from a position of effective prejudice (“he will criticise me because I’m a woman”), any critical statement can be read from that perspective. It’s a bit like with conspiracy theories, where every debunking attempt can be turned into “of course THEY would say that!”.
You are inventing a hypothetical straw-man. Until you can point to conversation where someone said something fact based like I gave as an example and people accept your twisting and start a twitter mob of any impact, this remains a hypothetical victimization.
I could transcribe entire conversations here and you would still accuse me of making them up. What I wrote I heard almost precisely word for word; but in the end, exchanging anecdata until the end of time will do precisely nothing to persuade anyone that such mindset really exists (and indeed prospers), apart from making me a candidate for cancellation.
The main point is that, unless you’re talking physics (maybe), nothing is so “fact-based” that it cannot be perceived in the “wrong” way by someone sufficiently determined to do that.
1. An observation that you are arguing from a position of assuming malice from the other side. "They" are trying to twist everything, therefore evidence is not required since "they" won't listen anyway
2. You can point at any public twitter mob where the real conversation was made public afterwards or where you know the inside scoop and with the caveat of anecdata it could strengthen your point
3. You seem to be dangerously close to resting on a "what even is 'fact based'?" argument repeating that "they" are determined to misunderstand statements in malicious ways
You said “if I say something like this, there is no room for attack/misinterpretation”. I showed you how such a statement can be easily attacked/misinterpreted - and I can do that because I’ve been in enough conversations like those to know that this mindset is relatively popular.
You are free to not believe me and continue to live your life as you were, I honestly don’t care. Take my statements as anecdata and move on. Just don’t come crying to me when you’re cancelled because of some “fact-based” statement.
Facts can't win if emotions are involved. Facts only work when everyone is rational, but, to quote former FBI hostage negotiator, Chris Voss, from his excellent book on negotiation (Never Split the Difference): humans are inherently irrational. A large chunk of his book is how you rarely succeed in arguments or negotiations based on facts, because humans are irrational emotional creatures. I highly highly recommend reading the book (because its great, not because it says this particular thing).
No, but you also can’t rely on just one. You need both. I highly recommend reading he book, he explains it a lot better than I ever could.
The problem is many people think that just by presenting facts they will get through to people, but that doesn’t work. You have to understand the other persons emotional state too.
There's nothing hypothetical or straw-man about his comment. If you surf around english-language forums where the new breed of feminist hangs out, you'll see dozens of posts pretty much exactly like that, all highly liked/upvoted and with huge numbers of responses agreeing and amplifying. Any posts with the message of "hold on, maybe it's not just sexism and he actually has a point" will be downvoted and attract hateful responses: "you sound like just another one of those sexists!".
I mostly try to avoid places with a lot of that, though it still feels like it seeps through anyways sometimes. /u/fastball's link is a gold mine of that stuff though.
Most recent example outside of Reddit subs catering to neo-feminists that I can recall is this one:
Not the literal exact quote, but a fine example of a story about, somebody treated the new hire intern disrespectfully, where the comments go in that direction. Oh wait, it was a woman? Well it definitely must be sexism! Downvote anyone who expresses doubt. It's not like men ever get disrespected and told to sit down and shut up in roles like new hire intern.
Erm...so maybe Germany is actually more sexist than the US, but I could totally see this happpen to women in germany, less so men. Because, especially in engineering, older workers do sometimes still assume a women in a dress must be a secretary or something. And is your point "well it definitely wasn't sexist?" Because....just because men also get disrespected doesn't mean that this happens a lot more to women? Or are we just abandoning statistics to make feminists evil now?
I was kind of expecting something more...respectful? Like, that's not at all "candid advice misunderstood". That's a person disrespected in a way that happens more to women than men, and people drawing conclusions.
Remember that you are on an American website with a heavy, American audience. You have to learn to dissociate European (in your case German) discussions and experiences from American ones. Don't "import" their problems, ideologies, opinions, etc.
It seems like many non-Americans simply do not make the context switch and once they leave the Ameri-sphere (e.g talk to fellow non-Americans), they talk about American topics as if they were happening locally - and is if they were directly impacted with a major stake in the issue.
Remember where you are, who you're talking to, and the context. Since non-Americans seem so eager to copy Americans however, it can be prudent to be aware of what's going on across the pond without being heavily invested. The USA is now acting like a looking glass into the future of what successes and mistakes are going to be imported wholesale by other countries and their citizens.
Last I ran the numbers, HN readers were about half in the U.S., but of course many of those are immigrants, expats, and so on.
Please let's not make this about a specific group. That way lies flamewar, and I can assure you that cross-cultural misinterpretation is a huge problem here in all directions.
Good points, thank you. It just seems like in this case, whenever the topic is discussed everyone points to "it is known" style twitter mobs, and the actual examples of twitter mobs that do show up tend to not be as unreasonable in general.
E.g. the cancelling and uncancelling of RMS seemed to me mainly...reasonable? Like, he says some weird stuff and defended ~~Eppstein~~ Minsky (sorry, memory got messed up, thanks
skissane) in a tone-deaf manner (I have had the joy of exchanging emails with RMS and interacting with him at talks he gave at my alma mater, and he always seemed like a thoughtful and kind person whom I respect and admire, but I feel like "tone-deaf" is a fair description), maybe that's not a good thing to do if your job is to be a public figure? And very little twisting was needed to make his discussion of what really is rape reasonable? So if this is an example of what people are afraid of, it seems a very...specific fear
He didn't defend Minsky in a tone deaf manner at all though, what he said was completely taken out of context. In the post where the lady "outted" him, she literally quoted what he said and then paraphrased it to mean something completely different.
RMS literally said that its possible that Minsky did not know that she wasn't willing because she was being coerced by Epstein to appear like she was. What is tone deaf about that? It seems pretty obvious that Epstein coerced his victims into acting a certain way.
The post took this and rephrased it as "RMS said she was entirely willing", which wasn't even close to what he said.
> And very little twisting was needed to make his discussion of what really is rape reasonable?
Except he never questioned what is or isn't rape. He didn't even question whether the girl in question was a victim, it was pretty clear that he agreed that she was. He only said that, because of coercion by Epstein, Minsky likely was presented with the appearance that everything was ok, even though it wasn't and that this would have affected his judgement.
Of course, Minsky's wife also said that they were on Epstein's island together and that Minsky did not engage in any of the accused activity anyway. But that's neither here nor there.
I see the same thing happening with American colleagues pouring down on us, non-Americans, all sorts of American-society-specific problems and making new workplace rules based on that. I wish neither of what you or I are describing was true.
As a German I think you know the answer but can't see the woods for the trees. It is that most here are from the US and it is worse in the US than in Germany by far. I'm from Denmark and I also see this tendency online with "so and so is true in the US so that's how it is". The Americanization will slowly make this your norm soon too in Germany though, just like everything else.
If I'm sexist then I could choose to make such a remark only if it happens to be a female colleague. If male then sleep(). Sexism achieved.
If you're not from the U.S. you have to understand the background of mendacity that flows through nearly the entire culture. That's a big part of the backdrop for fairly deep levels of distrust, whether it's of a company, one's colleague, the gov't, etc.
For example-- I was watching a political show where the question was something about global warming. One of the guests gave a reply that sounded vaguely reasonable but wasn't clear. The host tried to rephrase the question, and the same respondent again gave a suspiciously confusing reply. This caused the host to drill down on a simpler question-- did the guest believe that global warming was real and that human activity has contributed to this global warming? This time the guest answered a different question, addressing the reality of global warming but ducking the issue of causes. This went on for about 45 seconds before the host finally forced the guest to give a response that revealed the guest was in fact a climate denier. Honestly, it was like watching that scene in Blade Runner with the Voight-Kampff test, except on humans.
Being an American myself, I could immediately tell what the guest's purpose was: to sound like they agreed with the other (sensible) panelists, in order to give more credibility to a climate denial talking point that their job depends on. It's a planned strategy essentially of "denial-in-depth"-- try to sneak FUD into an otherwise good faith discussion, and if that doesn't then reveal your crude talking points for what they are.
In a weird way, the process of figuring out someone's level of earnestness makes me think of the "Sie" to "du" journey in German. Except here in the U.S., it's a slow slog of figuring out exactly how a friend spouts bullshit and under what circumstances, and then figuring out if there's enough earnestness left to become close friends.
> If I'm sexist then I could choose to make such a remark only if it happens to be a female colleague. If male then sleep(). Sexism achieved.
Well, sure, but then you are displaying a clear and verifyable pattern, and my original point of candor that can't be twisted into sexism remains no? You had to add a separate sexist pattern ("treats men and women differently").
Your point of high level of distrust is appreciated and one of the reasons why I'd never move there (no offense intended, most individual americans I know and read about are lovely people, but this culture of hidden BS is too much for me). But then, this is an issue in general no? Why are people only concerned about women/feminists twisting words against them? Why not christians, or veterans as well? Or men for that point, last I checked the protected group list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group does not specify women, and there are conservative mobs on social media just as much as "woke" ones. So I'm just a bit confused
Wow, that's a pretty deep, insightful and harsh analysis of your own culture. You've found exactly the words to express something that I noticed in the states as well, but couldn't quite put my finger on.
Did you figure this from the outside, so to speak, spending time abroad and immersing in a different culture? I've found that most people sort of start noticing cultural blind spots only then.
The US is a diverse place. The culture described by GP fits the wealthy and management classes well. Working class folks tend to be a lot more forthright, often to their detriment in many circumstances, but there are huge swathes of American culture in which folks speak frankly about basically everything.
Yes. If you aspire to "be somebody" then reputation management is important. But if your entire career will be spent working for employers who drug test and ask you if you've been in jail, but don't Google for your name, and you're not important to have the Google results of your name actually be about you anyway, then what is there to worry about?
> did the guest believe that global warming was real and that human activity has contributed to this global warming?
That's not a good yes or no question, because it not only unites two different points together, but also really depends on your definition of global warming, and also ties a lot of other different issues into it. You could for example believe that humanity affects climate to some extent, but still think that it's not bad enough to support environmentalists from economics point of view. You could also believe that this climate change is real, but is not caused by human activity and is just a part of a natural process.
I just don't think that boxing a complex issue into a boolean is a good idea.
