Recently, I have written a large number of short, ungracious (perhaps snarky is a better term) comments here on LinkedIn.
In general, there has been either
- a question posed in such a way that it leads people away from a solution, or,
- a motivational meme that gives plausible-sounding advice that would be bad to apply broadly.
And, my responses have been unkind, though I think, generally accurate and useful.
In recent days, both online and in-person, people have been, often correctly, pointing out problems in my responses.
In all cases, I have thought that we were broadly in agreement and their correction/addition/comment was just a minor fine point (I never actually said, “nit”).
I would have been happier had they recognized the broad agreement before they went forward to explain their perspective.
It felt ungracious.
Just as ungracious as when I dismiss a question as a dumb framing and immediately explain how & why it is dumb, how to better frame it, and then use the better framing to resolve.
Just as ungracious as when I dismiss an overly broad piece of advice without recognizing where it is applicable.
I’ve just been given a chance to learn graciousness.
I wonder whether I will use it.
Or perhaps I will be a bot to warn me about my ungraciousness or even add graciousness into the posts before I subject the world to them.
In my initial bot experimentation, the bot thought that there was a tradeoff between truth and kindness. While there may be situations where that is the tradeoff (is that a good lead with acknowledgment of the other person’s point, even if they are a chatbot), I don’t think that that is the tradeoff.
I think that the tradeoff, in my case, is generally almost always
Grace vs. Sounding Clever,
though occasionally it has been Grace vs. Wordcount or Grace vs. Laziness.
And that makes me even more motivated to improve.
And, once again, thank you to the chatbots.
