Either way, that’s not feigning surprise. Odd to call it that. What they are saying is when you are surprised somebody didn’t know something, don’t let it show.
The reason we call it "feigning surprise", is that the surprise is pretty rarely genuine. It's an interaction people have more-or-less-unthinkingly practiced throughout their lives to keep the out-group separated from the in-group
This is a sharply negative interpretation of behavior of people who may be acting genuinely, if without social grace. I think few people shocked that you don't know bash are displaying that surprise as a way to keep you in the out-group - I think they are surprised.
I would argue that the real in-group/out-group behavior is excluding people who aren't naturally adept at being social.
I know it was tongue in cheek, but to respond directly, intent doesn’t matter when the result is universally harmful. The recipient shouldn’t have to ignore the harm just because you didn’t mean anything by it. I can have the best possible intent when telling someone they are fat out of concern, but it doesn’t mean the result isn’t harmful.
FYI i’m slightly on the spectrum and it took me a very long time and destroyed a lot of relationships before I understood this. I used to believe similar, and even assumed good intentions most of the time. The problem is many people do not have good intentions a large percent of the time, and there were situations where I went years without realizing people were being extraordinarily mean to me who I thought were friends. either side of it, I just don’t think it’s a great philosophy.
The first time I ran into this was working at Meta, where that was one of the core values (it's since been replaced by "Be direct and respect your colleagues"). It was one of those slogans that sounded fine on paper, but in practice, it was almost exclusively weaponised by powerful folks to excuse their transgressions.
Think someone is sexually harassing you? You are clearly not assuming good intentions on their part. Think they are being racist towards you? Same thing. Think someone is sandbagging your promo for personal reasons? Ditto...
> Is being surprised somebody doesn't know something putting them down
Yes.
> is being unsurprised they are ignorant putting them down
Again, the whole reason to just declare this as a rule is so that you’re not put in a position to try to decide if somebody is ignorant or not. You set a social guideline, and if people break it, you point it out, and it doesn’t matter why they did it.
People doing that are doing it intentionally, and they aren't going to follow your rule.
People who are open to listening are not pretending to be surprised in order to put somebody down. They are actually surprised and (perhaps) unintentionally hurting somebody. If that somebody is hurt, they need to ask themselves which hurts more, having somebody surprised you didn't know something (aka they think you are smart), or being unsurprised you are ignorant of something (aka they think you don't know stuff).
Not usually, no. They haven't (for the most part) adopted gatekeeping behaviour just to be dicks, they've adopted it as a method of signalling to other members of the in-group that they too belong to the in-group.
From their perspective, the effect on the person in the out-group is merely collateral damage.
As akerl_ says, it's not telling you to assume anything. It's talking about behavior, not thoughts.
You can be thinking they're the most ignorant fool on the planet, or you can be thinking that a minute ago you believed them to be so smart, and now that image of them is shattered and you're disappointed...but all this is asking you to do is not to perform that surprise to them, regardless of whether or how much you feel it.
I think so. Maybe dang or tomhow could switch the link :)
The social rules work so well that I wish tech cos would just adopt these as baseline. They make interacting with other technical folks much more enjoyable.
I really enjoyed her talk "Making Difficult Things Easy"[1]. She's got a real talent for taking complex technical subjects, recognising the difficulties in understanding them, and explaining them back in a friendly way that doesn't mystify them. Almost the opposite of the modern IT industry.
I know she seems to be popular enough on HN, and I’ll admit I don’t know her in any capacity other than what posts I occasionally see here, which are innocent enough.
That said, her bluesky or mastodon profile leads with “I have DMs muted from people I don’t follow”, which just rubs me in such a wrong way. The vibe is “don’t be confused: communication is for me to give and you to receive, and NOT the other way around”.
I’m sure she has her reasons (presumably weird/angry onliners), but this - and in particular its digital real estate indicating it’s one of two facts you need to know about her - feels like the digital equivalent to checking out at the grocery store with headphones on: “I don’t know you and I don’t want to know you.”
Just makes me feel sad seeing things like that, and I don’t know that I resonate with being happy to share a planet with people with such world views. They certainly don’t seem happy to share it with me.
This is something that a lot of celebrities have to do (I have actually known a number, over the years).
One thing about living a life, where you share a lot of personal information, is that people tend to create close relationships that are entirely one-way.
In many ways, this benefits the celebrity, because they get rich/famous from it, but it can also lead to some fairly serious consequences. I was just reading yesterday, about some young lady that had to get a really toothy restraining order against a nutter that keeps trying to break into her house.
Many of these folks are really "people people," and the need to restrict access truly bothers them, but it's basically a requirement for their life.
On the other hand we can't even have DMs on Hacker News because the feature is considered hostile and disruptive and many people don't even bother to put contact information in their profile. Her rules for discussion seem no more limiting than HN's own guidelines, which are extremely tone policed.
I can't hold it against her - it isn't the 1990s anymore, the entire web has become an aggressively toxic space and one has to curate everything nowadays.
The concept of not feigning surprise may be related to the linked xkcd comic, but I don’t see any indication that it’s the “original”, and I downvoted several comments that seemed keen to steal thunder from the post by trying to frame it as just a rehash of a popular comic.
I sincerely wasn't trying to "steal her thunder," as my preface to the comment makes clear. Lots of people reference xkcd, myself, included[0]. It doesn't cheapen her post, one, tiny bit. I did change it, so it doesn't say "original." Good point.
It's entirely possible that people can be decent to each other. I know, I know, that's crazy talk, but I'm kind of relentlessly positive. I have had plenty of negative fuel, but I guess I'm just a Pollyanna.
> It's entirely possible that people can be decent to each other. I know, I know, that's crazy talk
This is nearly comical phrasing given the topic of the page.
I provided enough context about the specific kind of comment I found to be in bad faith that I don’t understand why you felt concerned that I took offense to any mentions of xkcd.
It was meant to be comical, and, judging from some of the comment threads in the posting, I think a lot of folks are really, really uncomfortable, being positive, or seeing other folks trying to be positive.
I tend to hang with a fairly ... unkempt ... crowd, IRL. Many of them have been through serious personal trauma, and have great difficulty seeing anything good in life, or in others.
They are a minority, in society, in general, but some communities tend to gather them in greater numbers (like the one in which I participate, which is about people trying to heal from trauma, amongst other things).
It's not unusual to encounter folks that sincerely believe that expressing optimism, open-mindedness, or kindness is an expression of weakness, to be treated with contempt. They sincerely believe that these expressions of positive energy are fake -often for good reason, as they have seen plenty of fake good faith.
I have learned not to allow myself to be drawn into their world, which often means that I am treated with contempt.
I shrug it off, and continue to be positive, anyway. I enjoy Julia Evans, because she remains relentlessly positive, in a community that is often ... unreceptive ... to that kind of energy.
So “feign unsurprise.”