Bluntness and honesty vs. politeness and white lies

Post Reply New Topic

There hair thing is a matter of opinion, so while I don't quite understand asking for someone's opinion without actually wanting it, it's not like it's an absolute that a haircut I don't like is ugly. Someone else may love it.

What about facts? Lots of people will get pissed if you correct an outright fact that they got wrong. What's up with that? I mean, do they WANT to run around for the rest of their life saying something that's not true?? If I were saying something that didn't make sense, using a word that wasn't applicable at all in something, or generally giving incorrect information, I'd want someone to SAY something.. not just giggle inside that I said something wrong and let me keep doing it! The only reason I wouldn't tell someone something like that is if I thought they were too stupid or ignorant to care, or maybe if I really didn't like them and wanted to laugh about it later. But they'd have to meet that first part for the second to apply, anyways.

When I was a kid, one of my teachers said that I lacked tact. So whenever I said something "wrong" my mom would say. "Meg. tact." It was profoundly unhelpful...

An example of when I would probably not voice my honest opinion:

"I don't like you.

Actually, I cannot stand your presence because you need a serious overall overhaul and because you always say the wrong things and are loud and going on my and everybody's nerves. I do not want to associate with a person who is continuously embarrassing themselves and others and can't be normal. Also, your attire, I hate your attire because it's old-fashioned and reflects your strangeness and makes you even. I think it's no wonder nobody likes you, really. It's your own fault.

I also hate how you talk. Your voice is high-pitched and hurts my ears and what you say is usually a total bore. You successfully destroy every happy atmosphere and conversation as soon as you participate in it. And rather than keeping shut up, you are so egoistical to never let two people converse with each other quietly because you always need to listen on them and annoy them by trying to join in.

You also gossip. A lot. You think it's funny to spread dirty secrets about people and then see how they are hurt by it. I will hereby stop associating with you forever. I gave you a chance but you just kept being lazy instead of trying to change and be nicer to other people. That shows your total incompetence and egoism and hate for the world and I do not want to be in contact with such a rude, hurtful person as you."


Personally if I thought that or similar of somebody, I would keep my mouth shut and just signal the other by non-verbal cues that I dislike them and rather not meet them again ever. And I and them lived happily after! - or something

I mean, I think that above example is as polite as can be if you truly dislike somebody. But for whatever reasons, these words alone make people cry horribly and despair even if you tell them neutrally and honestly. And then they hate you back and want to destroy you though you just don't want them in your life.

I think that Kajjie and Sophist have provided very good examples of this. I have nothing more to add at this time.

I must be SuperWoman, because friends have told me versions of "I don't want to come to the market with your whole family because I'd feel not in the right context for an outing with you" and they didn't destroy me, didn't cause me to redden in the face and lose the respect of all around us inside the telephone line, and on the contrary, enlightened me about our relationship and gave me the feeling of being respected enough to be given the truth rather than a miserable faking of illness and the humiliation of having me offer help with their sickness and call later to ask how they were feeling.

No wonder, with so much phoniness between them, most people end up having social relations rather than friends. And feeling lonely amidst a crowd of so-called friends. So-called politeness is the number 1 cause of human isolation and alienation nowadays. Heck, I was even accused by someone of being rude and politically incorrect for mentioning that "cute, very, very thin girl at your birthday party".

I was sure of that

In the example given, I would have awarded an extra point, and seen the smile as friendly, correcting a new teacher out of their field, to a class that could lose points on other tests if the error was not mentioned, he was doing what was best for his class.

In a way it was a test question, and he gave the correct answer.

Seeing it as lacking respect for position, the teacher is always right, well, if you go into business, you will find that most are not right, even though senior, and and the smart ones see the people they hire as support, who are supposed to use their education to bring up things that are mis stated.

What is wrong with this business/marketing presentation, is a common teaching method here.

It sounds like a native English speaker being hired to teach in English, and it was not English that was corrected. The students were to learn business English, and to perform for companies marketing goods.

As it was not their native language, they were right to question and clarify.

The differance culturally, in England and America the teacher is boss in the classroom, but in Austria, they are an employee, of the servant class.

One should not only learn the material, but of the history and culture, for the American view is considered rude and low class by most, and taking a superior attitude is unbecoming in a servant.

This is part of the autistic situation, not understanding the unspoken rules, and we often do better in another culture, where one, we are not expected to know, and two, people will point things out, tell what is expected.

We are not hopeless, only we come unprogramed, but we can adapt. What we cannot do is play a meaningless game of posers, all playing for position in an imaginary game. I find we are more adaptable to other cultures, not being strongly imprinted by our own, in mine the classic, Ugly American.

Sora's point of view is much like Asia, we may hate some people, but we just act in a way that they leave and don't come back. It is a sorting system, no one is friends with everyone, it is not expected, but they are rejected politely. They expect it, and telling them what a worthless waste of air they are can hurt greatly.

As my grandmother put it, "You may have to kill someone, but you never have to be rude."

No, we come unformatted.

Without form topic

I am imagining an unformatted floppy disk. I have had a great deal of difficulty with these disks, and thankfully now we have USB mass storage devices, which seem to be just right for auties and aspies.

I sing, and I draw. I love doing both, and I will continue to do both for as long as I live, but I would like to know something: Am I good?

Many of the people who tell me I'm good at either would do so because they think it would hurt my feelings if they thought I sucked and told me so. I have also had people tell me I suck at singing, but those are people who feel the need to insult me, whether jokingly or to try to injure me emotionally.

As a result, I don't know what I need to improve on in these areas. I don't know what I'm good at, what I'm not, etc.

The only way to improve one's self is through honesty. If opinions of others are necessary to do so, then those opinions should be given honestly.

As for me? I prefer brutal, detailed honesty. I know that this is something most people don't like, however, so when asked, I will provide an opinion, but when I shoot the "arrow of truth," I will "dip its point in honey" to the best of my abilities.

Unfortunately, I'm not very good at polite honesty.

Edit: By the way, I take white lies to be insults. It is if they are insinuating that I am emotionally unstable and unable to handle honesty.

I was tired. It was late afternoon and I'd just come in from running errands in the heat, dashing around town with the baby carriage, as my wife was at an all-day seminar. I had to rest for a short time before going out and teaching.

I have an example from my 6th grade class. We were around 12 years old. In those days, I knew everything that a kid could know about whales and dolphins. I read all the books I could get my hands on. I had seen whales in Maine. Et cetera.

A girl in my class gave a presentation on dolphins. There she was at the front of the room with her picture of a dolphin. She read her paper. I don't know where she got her information, but it was all wrong. I started keeping a list of everything she said that was wrong. The only one I remember so many years later is that she said that killer whales ate people. I knew from my book, Mind in the Waters, by Joan McIntire, that there were no actual cases of killer whales eating people. Et cetera.

So at the end of her presentation, I read the list of everything she had said that was wrong. It took a little while. And when I finished, I looked up and saw tears streaming down her face.

I immediately wished I had kept my mouth shut. I don't think it was going to make or break anyone in the room if they had an incorrect idea about killer whales. Who cares? Her parents were divorcing and she was under a lot of stress and I shouldn't have said anything. You may have another opinion.

Inventor wrote: "In the example given, I would have awarded an extra point, and seen the smile as friendly, correcting a new teacher out of their field, to a class that could lose points on other tests if the error was not mentioned, he was doing what was best for his class." I think you're right about that. But are you always at your best? Do you always react to people in the best possible way? Greentea might be Superwoman, but I'm definitely not Superman, just an ordinary mortal working in education.

I don't think you're right about Austrian students feeling that their teachers are of the servant class. I've taught here since 2001 and I've never either felt that or heard anyone say it. So at least, it doesn't sound right to me. You may have had other personal experiences with it.

This discussion reminds me of stories by my friend Abdón Ubidia, an Ecuadorian writer. Abdón's stories are full of people lying to each other to various degrees in order to get along. He's fascinated by the phenomenon. Here are a few paragraphs from one of his stories. The narrator is an older man married to a mysterious younger woman who asks him not to ask any questions when she leaves town for a week.

"...Up until that point I had been able to maintain great faith in my intimate, autobiographical discoveries, which I thought of as the wisdom I had gathered in my life: we humans are comprised of profundities; it’s necessary to respect each person’s place of shadow; it’s necessary to keep for ourselves a secret enclosure within us that no one can violate, where everything from perverse desires to vile hatreds can fit; it’s necessary not to say everything to anyone, because the whole truth has only momentary value, and its revelation is almost always nothing but the result of a test of strength. At forty-something years of age, these were my firm convictions.
"Like everyone at that point in life I had fallen in and out of love a number of times. I retain blurry memories of those bygone madnesses. To tell the truth, most of what I remember about them is how they ended. On at least two occasions, I was the one at fault. In the case of one girl, I was driven by an insatiable curiosity mixed with jealousy and insecurity. I submitted her to such interrogations that I ended up emptying her out, learning about even the most hidden details of her soul; which proved to be, in the end, a way of killing her in myself and dying in her heart. With another woman, I went just as far in the opposite direction. At one point I poured myself out in front of her, telling her everything I thought about the two of us, in a pointless, compulsive confession, which wasn’t even accurate, and which precipitated a painful breakup that could have easily been avoided.
"Because of these sad experiences, I loved Maria differently. For example, I never told her anything about the abrupt, unconscious urges that sometimes assaulted me like invaders from forgotten distances, and which superimposed on any part of her body the image of part of another body I had loved before. Nor did I mention to her those renegade yearnings that always attack us—the desire for an unknown body that passes near us and then goes away. I believed that these restrictions, combined with the sincere will not to invade her silences with uncomfortable questions, would be enough.
"I was wrong."

(The whole story, in Spanish and English, is here http://www.ubidia.editorialelconejo.com/libros.html under Descarga libros gratis / De la genética y sus logros)

Greentea, how do you reconcile this statement with "I think you should post a thread with this text, it's invaluable NT feedback", which you wrote to me in an email? It seems like you liked what I said, and then disliked it. Please explain.

This is a university class that students are paying a lot of money for, and you want to give them incorrect information and not be corrected, just to save yourself a bit of a bruised ego? And when someone explained the information to you, you got pissed? I wouldn't want to take a class with a teacher like that. Would you rather have a reputation for not being a very good teacher, and never have anyone say anything? Or maybe one day, years later, find out that students told each other not to waste their time and money taking classes with you?

I don't get this NT attitude of not caring if you're any good at something, so long as nobody is "rude" enough to tell you. Anyone who knew the difference and didn't say anything would just be laughing at you. To me this is the same as the issue with therapists not wanting to be told when they're completely off-base with something. You're being paid to do something, and don't care if you're doing it badly??

Why do you want to know that? Do you want to do them professionally?



The people you ask--are they artists and musicians? If not, then they are not qualified to give you the kind of feedback you need. If they are, you should be paying them for that information, possibly as their student, because the skill that they have is developed over years of hard work, and doesn't come free.



Nobody owes anyone an opinion, honest or not, unless the two have made some kind of arrangement.

The only way to be an artist of any kind is to stubbornly, honestly, cleanly, lovingly, critically, joyfully do the art. IMHO.

I think it's a false dichotomy - it is possible, though often very difficult, to tell the truth in a relatively tactful way. By tactful, I don't mean hinting the truth, but telling it in such a way as to cause as little offense/pain as possible. Making matters more complicated. different people require different degrees/types of tact. Being tactful without lying is difficult, what I often do is simply say nothing. For example, a female friend of mine dyed her hair partially red, I didn't like it at all, fortunately wasn't asked my opinion, so I said nothing. She decided to change back, and then I told her I thought she looked better with her hair undyed ('looks better' as opposed 'the other one really sucked').
Of course, it's one thing of others to expect you'll try and tell them the truth as tactfully as possible, and quite another to demand that you not just lie, but do so very convincingly, in response to a direct question that is not, in fact, a question at all (like the classic 'Does this make me look fat?')

I think it's about 340 euros a semester for their Bachelor's program.

I don't have strong opinions on therapists, and don't want to be lumped with them. The experiences you have had with therapists are not my concern.

I take pride in my work. I'm not perfect. Are you? I gave them good value for their money. My evaluations were fine from that class. "That teacher was pretty good, and worked hard for us, and creatively, and answered our questions, and we were satisfied with the experience." None of them complained that I didn't demonstrate a professional level of knowledge of their field of study on the first day of class. Go figure.

I have learned when people say "Do you want an honest answer?" or "Do you want me to be honest?" they are going to say something really hurtful than putting it in nicer way. You don't need to be mean to be honest, you use different words. I think people ask those questions first before they say something hurtful because they are finding an excuse to do it so they are basically asking for your permission for them to be mean to you.



But when my close online friends say if they can be honest with me, I let them because I know they are not going to say something hurtful. They are still being honest like the time my online friend asked me if he can be honest about what he thought about my last relationship and I told him "sure" and he said he didn't think it was going to work out because of my ex's attitude towards adult babies.

Last edited by Spokane_Girl on 15 Jun 2009, 4:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.