I found that an endearing document to read. A lot of clear self-reflection communicated explicitly, describing both endorsed and unendorsed self-properties, in an effort to help others communicate and interface.
The document is interesting, but how well does it describe Nate’s actual behavior? Can you find the parts that correspond to this:
He didn’t exactly yell at me and my fellow ops coworker, according to my imaginary decibelmeter, but he was indisputably hostile and aggressive, and obviously uninterested in 2-way communication.
I saw Nate in the office kitchen later that day (a Saturday) and thought it was an appropriate time to bring up again that I was having trouble with our available pump. I didn’t know how to–“Learn!” he snapped and then stormed out of the room.
He got really angry at me when the rest of the office outvoted him on the choice of lunch catering.
Nate’s comms doc doesn’t really track my (limited) experience of what it feels like to talk with Nate, and so (IMO) doesn’t make great sense as a baseline of “what happened?”.
The 12 section headings under “Failure modes” are: Confidence, Frustration, Lashing out, Condescension, Nonrespect, Dismissal, Disdain, Disbelieving you, Harshness, Tunnel vision, Retaliation, and Stoneface. The elements in your quoted section appear to me to come up here (e.g. Lashing out, Tunnel vision, Dismissal, etc).
I don’t say it’s a successful document. My first guess is that a more successful version of the doc (edit: or at least a doc that successfully conveys what to expect when interacting with the author) would be shorter and focus on giving a more grounded sense of “here are concrete instances of the peak good and bad interactions I’ve had with people, and some sense of the modal interaction type”. It might include content like “I’ve talked to N people who’ve said they’ve had life-changingly positive interactions with me, and M people who’ve said as a result they were really substantively hurt by interacting with me and wish to indefinitely avoid me, here’s some properties of the interactions they described, also here’s a survey on general properties of how people find me to be in conversation, split out between friends and colleagues”.
However I think that the sort of doc I’m describing is ~unheard of in any setting and way more effort than ~anyone I’m aware of has put into this sort of widespread expectation setting with lots of colleagues and collaborators (I’d say the same for the linked doc that Nate drafted), and people typically do not have much obligation to let people know about bad interactions. Heck, in many countries people can get criminal records expunged so that they don’t have to inform their future employers about them, which is worlds apart from handing someone a doc listing times when people they’ve talked to have felt burned by the interaction, which reads to me like a standard being demanded elsethread.
For convenience: Nate-culture communication handbook
I found that an endearing document to read. A lot of clear self-reflection communicated explicitly, describing both endorsed and unendorsed self-properties, in an effort to help others communicate and interface.
The document is interesting, but how well does it describe Nate’s actual behavior? Can you find the parts that correspond to this:
As I wrote elsewhere:
The 12 section headings under “Failure modes” are: Confidence, Frustration, Lashing out, Condescension, Nonrespect, Dismissal, Disdain, Disbelieving you, Harshness, Tunnel vision, Retaliation, and Stoneface. The elements in your quoted section appear to me to come up here (e.g. Lashing out, Tunnel vision, Dismissal, etc).
I don’t say it’s a successful document. My first guess is that a more successful version of the doc (edit: or at least a doc that successfully conveys what to expect when interacting with the author) would be shorter and focus on giving a more grounded sense of “here are concrete instances of the peak good and bad interactions I’ve had with people, and some sense of the modal interaction type”. It might include content like “I’ve talked to N people who’ve said they’ve had life-changingly positive interactions with me, and M people who’ve said as a result they were really substantively hurt by interacting with me and wish to indefinitely avoid me, here’s some properties of the interactions they described, also here’s a survey on general properties of how people find me to be in conversation, split out between friends and colleagues”.
However I think that the sort of doc I’m describing is ~unheard of in any setting and way more effort than ~anyone I’m aware of has put into this sort of widespread expectation setting with lots of colleagues and collaborators (I’d say the same for the linked doc that Nate drafted), and people typically do not have much obligation to let people know about bad interactions. Heck, in many countries people can get criminal records expunged so that they don’t have to inform their future employers about them, which is worlds apart from handing someone a doc listing times when people they’ve talked to have felt burned by the interaction, which reads to me like a standard being demanded elsethread.