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Rudeness and arrogance are fascinatingly context-dependent. Sometimes you’ll get called rude and arrogant for plainly speaking the truth. (Of course, then you get belligerent assholes who use “I’m just telling the truth” as an excuse for being dicks. There’s layers to this stuff) https://t.co/EeqnKZhYoE
@visakanv Fun to take that idea and analyze it in the context of how language changes the way people relate to each other. Was reading this a few days ago:https://t.co/LbPM9WUHFD
@visakanv "The only exception was for investors who shared a cultural background with the firm’s managers. These investors were better able to interpret the nuances in cultural tone and adjust their response to the calls accordingly."
Politeness often involves introducing implicit social fictions. Eg, Larry might’ve seemed rude if he said plainly, “I don’t need your money”. To be polite, he might’ve had to say something like “I appreciate the offer”. That might actually be a lie, though. And lies do cost you
Most of us live in an ordinary social reality where the cost of maintaining little fictions are dramatically outweighed by the benefit of warm relations to others. I’m not so sure “person building Google” lives in that reality. Maybe they need to be honest to a radical degree
And maybe Larry thought he was being honest and kind by “being rude”! This seems likely, given my interactions with the kind of people who I know who might do something like “let’s build something to index the world’s information” before anybody properly realized it would make $$
Each person might think the other person was being rude when they were really trying to be polite https://t.co/Ij9BoBVQPi
cool followup thread https://t.co/q0Wk6BVaWl
I read the book "Assholes: A Theory" recently, and I thought it was OK. One of those books that could have made a great paper but where expanding it to book length revealed the weaknesses of the author's conception of the world and the theory as applied to it.