>It sounds like you want the conclusion to be true, or you already believe it to be true, that EMFs are harmful, and

Wouldn't it be more accurate to hypothesize for a start, that man-made EMFs are likely to be harmful than safe. We co-existed with nature for eons and our bodies will be tuned to deal with the 'natural' EMFs, magnetic fields etc. Anything that is not 'natural' has to be viewed with more suspicion than something natural. Note that I'm not claiming that everything natural is good and everything 'artificial' is bad. Also the distinction between natural/artificial can be blurred.

Perhaps naive, but he sounds like an optimist to me. Because govt/social stuff can often negate technological advancements as it already has.

I spent the last minute observing in silence, in memory of this remarkable creature. HN sheep, I command thee all, to do the same.

I did. Also, I think i needed this bit of news today.

>That's my argument in favor of quotas (e.g. for women):

Just saying - my observation: statistically the most competent will be white old males. Same goes for humility.

> Just saying - my observation: statistically

Sounds weird to me. Is it a "just saying - my observation" kind of take, or is it statistics? It cannot be both, can it?

Obviously we don't have any statistics about that, first because we don't have any measure that can say who the "most competent" is when it comes to "being in a position of power". The only measure we have is that the person in power was competent enough to get in power, which doesn't mean they are not toxic (very often, they are).

>Sounds weird to me. Is it a "just saying - my observation" kind of take, or is it statistics? It cannot be both, can it?

No, this is not any official statistics. It's personal observation. Just like I can conclude that statistically most men are taller than women based on personal observation. ( you can remove the word statistic if I sound confusing)

( At this point I generally like to ask the person who I am conversing with - what is your real world experience with complex technical projects? Or alternatively do you exchange notes with people who manage complex technical projects.)

You say that "white old males" are "statistically the most competent" (without statistics, just "because you see it"), and also "most humble".

And you seem to genuinely believe it. Well I don't, at all.

> what is your real world experience with complex technical projects?

My real world experience with complex technical projects shows completely different "gut feeling statistics". My real world experience with complex technical projects is that those white males who are particularly good at getting in positions of power are generally incompetent at doing anything other than getting in positions of power. More: they are often counter-productive, at least regularly toxic, sometimes downright dangerous. And they systematically believe that they are good people and that everybody loves them, even though my experience being part of "the people" is that it's usually very, very wrong.

So that makes at least one point where they are statistically (from what I see, no actual statistics) incompetent: they don't realise that what they see reflects their position of power (people act as if they respected them) and not reality (people act completely differently when they are safe to do so, e.g. when drinking beers in a safe environment).

>If you see a system in which so many fail, then the problem is the system.

Nope, it's start off with individuals, often way up above. Calling a system problematic is, essentially saying no one is responsible.

> Calling a system problematic is, essentially saying no one is responsible.

That's a great and essential point.

I think if we deal with reality, the correlation between system and human behavior is inescapable. And of course leaders and managers have a strong influence on the people they lead/manage (and vice versa to a lesser degree), and peers have a strong influence on each other. Otherwise, leaders might as well not exist. We are social creatures.

At the same time, each of us is fully responsible for what we individually do.

It can be a hard circle to square, and there it becomes a vivd issue at times: If the general orders something immoral or illegal, the colonel passes the order to the captain, and the seargent takes a squad to do it and the private carries it out, who is responsible and how much?

All of them are responsible, of course. But how much? Do we hold the 18 year old private as responsible as their officer, the captain? Do we hold the young officer as responsible as an senior one?

My point is, that for the private, we do offload some responsibility to the system. For the general, much less so. (Or we should; often the general and others use their influence to get out of it and the captain or private is blamed.)

>My point is, that for the private, we do offload some responsibility to the system

Fair enough.

> there is an awful lot of legacy thinking and "way things are done" taking lives.

I think one of the legacy thinking is to treat it like an infection rather than a systemic disease.

>it seems like the treatment is almost worse than the disease.

You seem to be indeed factually correct in most cases, judging by views of physicians who have gone against the orthodoxy.

>I used a simple “tell me what you had for breakfast” line to filter out people who don’t read.

Seems like a good screening. Atleast it's better than - "what are your accomplishments.?"

>considerably worse place if everyone abided by such rules

Those rules are not meant for everyone.

That's the theory, but there's absolutely normative statements in this piece. For example:

> When you spend the first third of your message establishing that you are a nice person who means well, you are not being considerate but you are making the recipient wade through noise to get to signal. You are training them to skim your messages, which means that when you actually need them to read carefully, they might not. You are demonstrating that you do not trust the relationship enough to just say the thing and you are signaling a level of insecurity that undermines the technical credibility you are trying to establish. Nobody reads "hope you had a great weekend" and thinks better of the person who wrote it, they probably just being trained to take you less seriously in the future, or at worse, if they're evil loving of Crocker's [sic?] like myself, they just think about the couple of seconds of their life they will never get back.

This very much sounds like the author believes that everyone who doesn't abide by these rules - not just him, not just people who've agreed to them, everyone - is deficient in some way. And it's not just a slip - this attitude is pervasive throughout the post.

Yes, exactly.

I strongly prefer directness in technical communication at work.

But the way the article author phrases his preferences as absolute truth rubs me the wrong way.

Also if I worked with that person then after reading the article I would have perhaps the opposite reaction to the author's intentions.

You still have to walk on eggshells to not offend him by including any bit of information that he might consider not relevant enough.

I love this point as much as I hate it in practice. We all have different preferences and it is more helpful to be clear about ours rather than declare them "correct". The way we expect these differences to be navigated can become oppressive.

The blog post is an open letter: the author wants everyone reading to follow the those rules.

No. Crocker's rules are a request for people to act a certain way with respect to you, not wrt anyone else.

Crocker's rules themselves might be, but the essay is plainly contemptuous of people who aren't naturally disposed to follow them.

… I don't know what your incident reports look like, but if there's anywhere it's normal to optimise for communicative clarity rather than social wheel-greasing, it's an incident report!

How do you figure that the author is “developmentally challenged”? It sounds to me like they are able to handle their insecurities in a more mature and emotionally balanced way than most others.

They wrote an entire article about how they hate when someone says they hope they had a nice weekend...

If that is what you took from the article I think you might have some language development issues yourself, friend.

Be more direct with me. Don't say things like "If that is what you took" or "I think", you're just wasting my time.

>whats incredible to me are how many useful idiots out there STILL fall for it.

That's about 99% of the population.

But none of us here, right?

We are special of course. Edit: Actually just me, I'm special