{"id":545,"date":"2008-07-31T07:28:29","date_gmt":"2008-07-31T11:28:29","guid":{"rendered":"\/blog\/?p=545"},"modified":"2014-10-03T01:45:39","modified_gmt":"2014-10-03T06:45:39","slug":"etiquette-telling-people-theyre-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=545","title":{"rendered":"Etiquette: Telling People They’re Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

People don’t like to be wrong. I <\/strong>don’t like to be wrong — on the one hand I’m doing all this extra schooling so I can be Mr.<\/del> Dr.<\/strong> Smarty-pants and be wrong less often, but on the other hand I’m a scientist and science is all about being told you’re wrong and learning from that. Occasionally the social situation crops up where a friend is doing something that I think might be, you know, not perfect<\/em>, and I really don’t seem to handle telling them that very well. I nearly lost a good friend over something like this “Dude, guess what, I’m doing X<\/i>.” “Man, it’s your life, do what you want… but I think that’s not going to work out the way you think it will. Seriously, rethink X<\/i>.” “You’re a rotten friend, I’m not talking to you for a year.” “…but I was right…”<\/p>\n

While I can be a bit of a loner, Dottie, a rebel, I do have enough of a clue to just bite my tongue when there’s nothing that can be done even if I am right. For example, I currently think this is a fairly terrible time to go off and buy a house, in a financial sense, yet a few friends and acquaintances have done it anyway, and I didn’t find out sometimes until the housewarming party. By that point there’s obviously nothing to be done. Now I just found out another set of friends is out there looking for a house, and I don’t know what to say, how much caution to give them. So far, I’ve just said “oh, you might want to look into maybe waiting or at least offering below asking — the days of bidding wars seem to be over…” The decision to get a house in particular can be a very emotional one, doubly so if you’ve just spawned and need more space for the rapidly growing F1<\/a>. I really don’t want to be seen as the one shattering “the dream” with my damned Vulcan logic. Simply keeping my mouth shut to avoid an awkward situation isn’t really an option for me — they’re my friends<\/strong>. And isn’t putting your foot in your mouth in the best-intentioned way what friendship is all about? So how do you go about telling people they’re wrong? <\/p>\n

…in person, that is. Of course here in the blogosphere you can just call people to the mat<\/a>, pull out charts and references, and just generally make an arrogant intellectual ass of yourself :)<\/p>\n

[Admin aside: I’ve stepped up my posting schedule the last few days as you may have noticed, and now I’m going to take the long weekend off. Rest those eyes!]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People don’t like to be wrong. I don’t like to be wrong — on the one hand I’m doing all this extra schooling so I can be Mr. Dr. Smarty-pants and be wrong less often, but on the other hand I’m a scientist and science is all about being told you’re wrong and learning from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}