Toxic Experts (2017)

A problem that is encountered frequently among people with exceptionally low social intelligence is the inability to separate agreeability from social intelligence. Those concepts are completely unrelated.

Agreeability is the need to please others and to a lesser extent seek reciprocity for kindness. Kindness lives here. This is completely and utterly unrelated to social intelligence and when signals are confused acts in opposition to social intelligence.

Social intelligence is a perceptual skill. It is the ability to both introspect and perceive the motivations of others. You can have exceptionally high social intelligence and still be a cold asshole.

For people with exceptionally low social intelligence they lack the perceptual skills required to both introspect and discern the emotional communication of others. So... they may confuse that with something else, like kindness, where they strive to fill an unfillable gap.

It is fun talking about this with my wife. I am a software developer and software is staffed with males with low social intelligence at a much higher rate than the population at large. My wife works in education and its the same thing there for females.

There are two points in a connection, and one way to sever it is to follow author's advice to "ignore them". Or you could try to learn and maybe even engage.

(also, the "non-coward" way would be to actually link to the comment so that we could try to understand how toxic / irrelevant expert peons are)

When someone rags on me or my work in a way I interpret as aggressive or dismissive, I make a point to go look at what they're up to. More often than not: nothing, or, something that screams "oh, your problem with me is despite you knowing things I don't, I also know things that you don't."

I agree with the general sentiment here, but it helps to mentally filter the passive aggression and condescension from the point they're making. More often than not they're correct, you just have to cut through the weeds to get to it. I'd say that's an occupational hazard as a programmer.

Good? No. But a reality (on the personality level) you have to deal with in this business. It sucks, but it is what it is.

Maybe someone was having a bad day. Maybe this is an argument they had with a peer and it triggered a peeve. Whatever.

Tangential, but if I had to rank toxicity, someone going overboard at being a pedant in the easily censored comments under a blog post ranks far below overreacting and clutching pearls to try to pillorize and rile a torch mob, hoping to put them on blast and make them pay for their transgression. The latter is significantly more toxic, and it is what absolutely destroys communities.

Who cares? We have a clear term for this and it is called "point scoring".

Just give the rest of the group further reading material if they want to study it in their own time and to not talk over minute details.

So just dismiss them with a "Great point" remark and tell everyone else to read the reading list later.

Job done.

on the one hand it's a nasty thing to say he should be "ashamed" for not mentioning it. on the other, it is a little strange he hadn't come across the "amortized O(whatever)" concept before. esp if doing a talk about it..

neither of them come across well here.

That is always what happens when you get rid of the experts. Ruthless mediocrity takes over!

It reads like a character assassination piece superficially presented as nuanced philosophy, and we don't even have the actual exchange, only this person's account of it, which we are meant to trust in terms of both wording and demonstrated intent.

"If you have nothing kind to say" as the quote goes ...