Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by citricsquid 4720 days ago 

    Had someone from the MailChimp design or development team reached 
    out and asked me to take the resource down, I totally would have understood. 
    I greatly admire their work and respect their talents immensely.
It's like they teach this in asshole 101. You can tell someone is being unreasonable every time this argument arises, "I'm not upset about the bigger picture, I'm upset about meaningless-detail x!".
1 comments
rhizome 4720 days ago
It's a tone argument, which is toward the bottom of PG's hierarchy of disagreement, not to mention many other places (e.g. random google hit http://lucereta.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/tone-argument-as-lo...).
link
jerrya 4720 days ago
It's not a tone argument.

An argument from a legal department is a threat. And if it's not actually a threat, it's certainly a very significant perceived threat.

And lawyers and society definitely understand that.

The letter itself wasn't terrible, but it definitely contained a threat, and claiming it is a tone argument denies that.

Also, do you have a reference to PG's "hierarchy of disagreement"? Sounds interesting.

link
Karunamon 4720 days ago
First off, this isn't a debate. Secondly, this completely ignores the use of tone in communication.

People get defensive when it appears they're being attacked. The "if you'd have asked nicely" response is, in my experience, the best response to give to a random being an asshole. Either they'll double down (confirming your suspicions), or they'll realize they came across wrong and rephrase.

link