zlacker

>>tagoll+(OP)
I think the problem is that people, even smart people, lack critical thinking skills or don't apply them. It's not the scale that makes the nuanced communication not work, it's the scale that makes you notice it. You could have the same communications with smaller groups and you'd have the same results, you just wouldn't be as likely to get negative feedback indicating it.

It's also ironic to me that someone would try nuanced communication on Twitter, a platform whose very design discourages it. You can't do nuanced communication in 280 characters, but you can do vitriol just fine. So they do the tweet storm which turns off anyone who isn't incredibly interested in what you're saying.

>>mattma+Jp
> I think the problem is that people, even smart people, lack critical thinking skills or don't apply them.

I agree, but I think it's more nuanced than this: smart people can regularly be observed being unable to think critically during conversations (particularly on certain topics), yet the same people can think critically writing code. Assuming this is true (it's certainly quite true), it seems to me that differences between these two contexts causes the mind to behave differently.

>>mister+jE
Also there is a certain lack of training in clear thinking with words and ideas that are not emphasized in STEM curriculum but are emphasized in the humanities. I took a fair amount of history and literature in college, and while they lack the clarifying reality of equations and axiom systems, the practitioners of such fields are quite good at dissecting statements and pulling out the subtleties of human language based communication. A group of upper level literature students would I think pick up on more nuance than a group of CompSci students. They are also exposed to a lot more nuance in their regular reading and work.

>>lansti+Lc1
> Also there is a certain lack of training in clear thinking with words and ideas that are not emphasized in STEM curriculum but are emphasized in the humanities. I took a fair amount of history and literature in college....

Or the most potent disciplines: epistemology and logic. I believe epistemology and logic when combined with decomposition (something programmers usually have excellent capabilities in) make it fairly easy to determine where the weakest links in any given argument lie. A big problem though (in addition to the fact that we don't teach this sort of thinking): the human mind seems to have evolved to have an extremely strong aversion to exercising these skills on certain topics (something barely taught at all in western curriculum of any kind, the closest being psychology, which doesn't get a lot of respect from most people).