Do environments widely recognized for excellence and intellectual progress generally have cultures of harsh and blunt criticism
To the best of my ability to detect, the answer is clearly and obviously “no” — there’s an important property of people not-bullshitting and not doing the LinkedIn thing, but you can actually do clear and honest and constructively critical communication without assholery (and it seems to me that the people who lump the two together have a skill issue and some sort of color-blindness; because they don’t know how to get the good parts of candor and criticism while not unduly hurting feelings, they assume that it can’t be done).
To the best of my ability to detect, the answer is clearly and obviously “no” — there’s an important property of people not-bullshitting and not doing the LinkedIn thing, but you can actually do clear and honest and constructively critical communication without assholery (and it seems to me that the people who lump the two together have a skill issue and some sort of color-blindness; because they don’t know how to get the good parts of candor and criticism while not unduly hurting feelings, they assume that it can’t be done).