I was really impressed with how successful RC is at maintaining an environment where people can learn and grow. Part of that is certainly selection effects- the point of center is self directed growth around programming, and there's an interview process that I assume filters especially hostile people.
But I think the social rules do a lot too, and have been trying to pay attention to the effects on others when someone breaks them at work. No Feigned Surprise is a particularly important one around people who are trying to learn and already a little insecure. It's great when they've learned a new thing, and you want to celebrate that, not meet it with denigration!
I always found this particular Recurse Center rule strange. I understand how not feigning surprise can be a good rule, as in you should not pretend to be surprised when you genuinely aren't. (e.g. a web front-end dev saying "I don't know how to recompile the kernel" - "What, you don't know ?!?" - when it's clear that there's no actual expectation of knowing, it's just an attempt to self-aggrandize or put the other person down). But if it's a true, genuine surprise, then there is no feigning! If a web front-end dev says "I've never heard of CSS", it's genuinely surprising, and I think it's ok to express that. It's also useful to the recipient to hear this genuine surprise, because it's a strong signal that they're missing something important, a much stronger signal than if someone just said in a calm voice "you know, CSS is one of the most important things to learn for web front-end development". But that's not how Recurse Center means it - when they say "no feigning surprise" they actually mean "not showing surprise, no matter how genuine". I think it's generally best to be open in communicating with others, and neither feign something that isn't there nor hide something that actually is there.
The Recurse Center, and Julia Evans, have correctly identified that it's a net negative social practice for people to on-the-fly decide that somebody needs to be mocked for not knowing something, regardless of how much you think they ought to know it.
Even your "calm" version probably doesn't need to exist. If there's something they want to do and they're asking you about how to do it, by all means, it may be relevant to tell them that learning a new thing would potentially help them.
Otherwise maybe worry less about what other people should or shouldn't know.
Indeed. There's nothing lost by rephrasing that to "Aha, good to know that you have not heard of CSS before! That means I will explain you some basics first, otherwise x and y will be incomprehensible to you."
I agree that the phrasing is not semantically perfect for covering all scenarios. Someone might be showing true surprise.
However, the rule is really about not doing something that makes others feel bad about not knowing something or asking questions, like you said. The “No feigning surprise” phase has been a perfect hook to get people to read and understand what it means.
In some environments, feigning or exaggerating surprise really is abused as a social status and hierarchy establishment trick. Those who use the trick are trying to turn a question or gap on someone’s knowledge into an opening to elevate their own status, often in front of others. If you haven’t seen this trick used (abused) then you’re lucky. In my academic and early career I was in some environments where not knowing something was an invitation for the vultures to circle and try to turn the situation into a show of their superiority on some imagined social hierarchy. It sucks. I suspect the Recurse Center introduced this rule after having a person or batch of participants who started doing this, because it’s really toxic when it is normalized.
It is not always best to communicate openly. Honesty without kindness is cruelty.
It does a learner no good to hear that you are shocked by a skill deficit. If you're planning to be around people who are in a learning space, you should not be surprised if they don't know something. And even if you are surprised, it is kinder to not show it.
I don't think this rule is universal. If you're in a professional environment where, say, you're coding C++, and a new collegue with five years of purported experience claims to have never used a pointer, it would be okay to show surprise. And then maybe speak to your shared leadership chain. Learning environments are special that way.
Counterpoint: Most workplaces would be best served by a team of developers who help up level each other without causing morale issues when knowledge gaps, which everyone has, inevitably show up.
This type of environment is the best for software development organizations specifically because most software development shops that have more than one person working on a codebase or system or set of systems have already reached the point where no single person can keep the whole thing in their head at once.
Maybe that person really worked in an environment where they didn't have to think about pointer arithmetic. Reframing closing knowledge gaps as a beneficial and necessary part of a healthy development system makes it so when somebody doesn't know something and needs help they are willing to get it quickly. And that they will talk about knowledge gaps openly so they can be filled with the collective pool of the organization .
Shutting that down even by just "narc-ing" on the person just makes it that much harder when others need to know something they don't to get a job done, slowing down the system over time.
Indeed. That's directly addressed in their definition of the rule:
> No feigning surprise isn’t a great name. When someone acts surprised when you don’t know something, it doesn’t matter whether they’re pretending to be surprised or actually surprised. The effect is the same: the next time you have a question, you’re more likely to keep your mouth shut. An accurate name for this rule would be no acting surprised when someone doesn’t know something, but it’s a mouthful, and at this point, the current name has stuck.
The comic explains it better: Don’t act surprised if sombody doesn’t know something - even if you are genuinely surprised.
> I think it's generally best to be open in communicating with others
I’m pretty sure you wouldnt blurt out “you sure got fat” in a buisiness meeting, even if it genuinely was the first thought which popped into your head. Not every thought or feeling need to be communicated.
EDIT: Removed my comment, as I was referencing the HN article's link. It seems to incorrectly link to a separate comic that is coincidentally also about "surprise".
I agree with bazoom42 in the context of the correct comic:
I don't think most recipients would be able to tell the difference between a put down or self aggrandizing feigned surprise and genuine surprise reliably, so the effect in terms of discouraging them is probably at least similar. It's at least a very subtle difference in social cues even if it's genuine.
It still sucks to be on the receiving end of genuine surprise.
I found the most helpful reframing is to replace the words and emotions with ones that encourage learning and question-asking. For example you can try being excited instead of surprised, or say something like, "that's a great question, let's figure it out together."
Going through the Fermi estimation in the xkcd comic Ten Thousand also helped me to be a lot less genuinely surprised when someone didn't know something: https://xkcd.com/1053/
Either way, that’s not feigning surprise. Odd to call it that. What they are saying is when you are surprised somebody didn’t know something, don’t let it show.
The reason we call it "feigning surprise", is that the surprise is pretty rarely genuine. It's an interaction people have more-or-less-unthinkingly practiced throughout their lives to keep the out-group separated from the in-group
This is a sharply negative interpretation of behavior of people who may be acting genuinely, if without social grace. I think few people shocked that you don't know bash are displaying that surprise as a way to keep you in the out-group - I think they are surprised.
I would argue that the real in-group/out-group behavior is excluding people who aren't naturally adept at being social.
People doing that are doing it intentionally, and they aren't going to follow your rule.
People who are open to listening are not pretending to be surprised in order to put somebody down. They are actually surprised and (perhaps) unintentionally hurting somebody. If that somebody is hurt, they need to ask themselves which hurts more, having somebody surprised you didn't know something (aka they think you are smart), or being unsurprised you are ignorant of something (aka they think you don't know stuff).
I think so. Maybe dang or tomhow could switch the link :)
The social rules work so well that I wish tech cos would just adopt these as baseline. They make interacting with other technical folks much more enjoyable.
I really enjoyed her talk "Making Difficult Things Easy"[1]. She's got a real talent for taking complex technical subjects, recognising the difficulties in understanding them, and explaining them back in a friendly way that doesn't mystify them. Almost the opposite of the modern IT industry.
I don't think people are upvoting this for the fact at the top of "say something surprising" [1], but it indeed surprised me:
> I can write 500MB/s to a hard drive? that's so much!
Turns out a Seagate 2X18 can write at 528 MiB/s according to its spec sheet. [2] My rule of thumb was that HDDs could do like 100MB/s (aka 800 Mbps) but I guess between density improvements and this new "dual-actuator" class, it's gotten a lot faster. HDD seek time has basically been stuck for 20+ years and probably will remain so but capacity has increased a lot, and the throughput for sequential access probably should scale with capacity. For a while I think it wasn't increasing, but I guess they decided to fix that?
SSDs of course can do way more than 500 MB/s, and you can do better by compressing as you write (depending on your data), and you can stripe across multiple HDDs, but it turns out none of those are necessary.
Maybe it sounds like major redflag? It sounds a bit manipulative. People use it to lie and to get out of out of their obligations?
Typical "feighning suprise" is with pet attack. "It does not bite". What a big suprise when it does bite, it "never did it before, did you provoke it"? Later you find that thing send 5 people to hospital, and entire street has delivery services suspended.
That seems like a more general idea, and I like it more.
For the last 5 or so decades we've been transitioning from a world where everyone watches the same 4 TV channels to a world where everyone is in their own niche, and the tendency to be surprised that someone doesn't know about some cultural phenomenon is directly proportional to age. The way boomers gape and stutter when I said I don't know much about The Beatles...
In software too, it feels like there's been a shift to a more individualistic "learn-on-the-job" attitude in companies. If you're not the kind of person who knows how to structure learning a new field, it's easy to end up with big gaps when you don't know what you're looking for.
This is a reference to one the Recurse Center's social rules: https://www.recurse.com/social-rules
I was really impressed with how successful RC is at maintaining an environment where people can learn and grow. Part of that is certainly selection effects- the point of center is self directed growth around programming, and there's an interview process that I assume filters especially hostile people.
But I think the social rules do a lot too, and have been trying to pay attention to the effects on others when someone breaks them at work. No Feigned Surprise is a particularly important one around people who are trying to learn and already a little insecure. It's great when they've learned a new thing, and you want to celebrate that, not meet it with denigration!
I always found this particular Recurse Center rule strange. I understand how not feigning surprise can be a good rule, as in you should not pretend to be surprised when you genuinely aren't. (e.g. a web front-end dev saying "I don't know how to recompile the kernel" - "What, you don't know ?!?" - when it's clear that there's no actual expectation of knowing, it's just an attempt to self-aggrandize or put the other person down). But if it's a true, genuine surprise, then there is no feigning! If a web front-end dev says "I've never heard of CSS", it's genuinely surprising, and I think it's ok to express that. It's also useful to the recipient to hear this genuine surprise, because it's a strong signal that they're missing something important, a much stronger signal than if someone just said in a calm voice "you know, CSS is one of the most important things to learn for web front-end development". But that's not how Recurse Center means it - when they say "no feigning surprise" they actually mean "not showing surprise, no matter how genuine". I think it's generally best to be open in communicating with others, and neither feign something that isn't there nor hide something that actually is there.
The Recurse Center, and Julia Evans, have correctly identified that it's a net negative social practice for people to on-the-fly decide that somebody needs to be mocked for not knowing something, regardless of how much you think they ought to know it.
Even your "calm" version probably doesn't need to exist. If there's something they want to do and they're asking you about how to do it, by all means, it may be relevant to tell them that learning a new thing would potentially help them.
Otherwise maybe worry less about what other people should or shouldn't know.
Indeed. There's nothing lost by rephrasing that to "Aha, good to know that you have not heard of CSS before! That means I will explain you some basics first, otherwise x and y will be incomprehensible to you."
I agree that the phrasing is not semantically perfect for covering all scenarios. Someone might be showing true surprise.
However, the rule is really about not doing something that makes others feel bad about not knowing something or asking questions, like you said. The “No feigning surprise” phase has been a perfect hook to get people to read and understand what it means.
In some environments, feigning or exaggerating surprise really is abused as a social status and hierarchy establishment trick. Those who use the trick are trying to turn a question or gap on someone’s knowledge into an opening to elevate their own status, often in front of others. If you haven’t seen this trick used (abused) then you’re lucky. In my academic and early career I was in some environments where not knowing something was an invitation for the vultures to circle and try to turn the situation into a show of their superiority on some imagined social hierarchy. It sucks. I suspect the Recurse Center introduced this rule after having a person or batch of participants who started doing this, because it’s really toxic when it is normalized.
"has been a perfect hook to get people to read and understand what it means"
"Joke's on you. I worded it poorly intentionally!"
It is not always best to communicate openly. Honesty without kindness is cruelty.
It does a learner no good to hear that you are shocked by a skill deficit. If you're planning to be around people who are in a learning space, you should not be surprised if they don't know something. And even if you are surprised, it is kinder to not show it.
I don't think this rule is universal. If you're in a professional environment where, say, you're coding C++, and a new collegue with five years of purported experience claims to have never used a pointer, it would be okay to show surprise. And then maybe speak to your shared leadership chain. Learning environments are special that way.
> I don't think this rule is universal.
Counterpoint: Most workplaces would be best served by a team of developers who help up level each other without causing morale issues when knowledge gaps, which everyone has, inevitably show up.
This type of environment is the best for software development organizations specifically because most software development shops that have more than one person working on a codebase or system or set of systems have already reached the point where no single person can keep the whole thing in their head at once.
Maybe that person really worked in an environment where they didn't have to think about pointer arithmetic. Reframing closing knowledge gaps as a beneficial and necessary part of a healthy development system makes it so when somebody doesn't know something and needs help they are willing to get it quickly. And that they will talk about knowledge gaps openly so they can be filled with the collective pool of the organization .
Shutting that down even by just "narc-ing" on the person just makes it that much harder when others need to know something they don't to get a job done, slowing down the system over time.
Indeed. That's directly addressed in their definition of the rule:
> No feigning surprise isn’t a great name. When someone acts surprised when you don’t know something, it doesn’t matter whether they’re pretending to be surprised or actually surprised. The effect is the same: the next time you have a question, you’re more likely to keep your mouth shut. An accurate name for this rule would be no acting surprised when someone doesn’t know something, but it’s a mouthful, and at this point, the current name has stuck.
The comic explains it better: Don’t act surprised if sombody doesn’t know something - even if you are genuinely surprised.
> I think it's generally best to be open in communicating with others
I’m pretty sure you wouldnt blurt out “you sure got fat” in a buisiness meeting, even if it genuinely was the first thought which popped into your head. Not every thought or feeling need to be communicated.
EDIT: Removed my comment, as I was referencing the HN article's link. It seems to incorrectly link to a separate comic that is coincidentally also about "surprise".
I agree with bazoom42 in the context of the correct comic:
https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/
I don't think most recipients would be able to tell the difference between a put down or self aggrandizing feigned surprise and genuine surprise reliably, so the effect in terms of discouraging them is probably at least similar. It's at least a very subtle difference in social cues even if it's genuine.
It still sucks to be on the receiving end of genuine surprise.
I found the most helpful reframing is to replace the words and emotions with ones that encourage learning and question-asking. For example you can try being excited instead of surprised, or say something like, "that's a great question, let's figure it out together."
Going through the Fermi estimation in the xkcd comic Ten Thousand also helped me to be a lot less genuinely surprised when someone didn't know something: https://xkcd.com/1053/
@mods: the title or the URL are wrong.
They either meant to post https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/ or https://wizardzines.com/comics/surprise/ with a title that has any relation with it.
Send it to hn@ycombinator.com.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Did you mean to link to https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/
Either way, that’s not feigning surprise. Odd to call it that. What they are saying is when you are surprised somebody didn’t know something, don’t let it show.
So “feign unsurprise.”
The reason we call it "feigning surprise", is that the surprise is pretty rarely genuine. It's an interaction people have more-or-less-unthinkingly practiced throughout their lives to keep the out-group separated from the in-group
This is a sharply negative interpretation of behavior of people who may be acting genuinely, if without social grace. I think few people shocked that you don't know bash are displaying that surprise as a way to keep you in the out-group - I think they are surprised.
I would argue that the real in-group/out-group behavior is excluding people who aren't naturally adept at being social.
The whole point of making it a rule is so those people can learn it and avoid accidentally putting other people down.
Is being surprised somebody doesn't know something putting them down, or is being unsurprised they are ignorant putting them down?
People doing that are doing it intentionally, and they aren't going to follow your rule.
People who are open to listening are not pretending to be surprised in order to put somebody down. They are actually surprised and (perhaps) unintentionally hurting somebody. If that somebody is hurt, they need to ask themselves which hurts more, having somebody surprised you didn't know something (aka they think you are smart), or being unsurprised you are ignorant of something (aka they think you don't know stuff).
> What they are saying is when you are surprised somebody didn’t know something, don’t let it show.
Thats about 50% of what they’re saying. The name comes from the other half.
I think so. Maybe dang or tomhow could switch the link :)
The social rules work so well that I wish tech cos would just adopt these as baseline. They make interacting with other technical folks much more enjoyable.
related: https://xkcd.com/1053/
edit:rhplus beat me to it
I think there's an xkcd, with the same thing.
I really enjoy sharing a planet with Ms. Evans. She seems to be a genuinely decent person, and we could always use more of those.
I really enjoyed her talk "Making Difficult Things Easy"[1]. She's got a real talent for taking complex technical subjects, recognising the difficulties in understanding them, and explaining them back in a friendly way that doesn't mystify them. Almost the opposite of the modern IT industry.
[1] https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/10/06/new-talk--making-hard-things...
XKCD: 10,000 people learn something “everyone knows” every day:
https://xkcd.com/1053/
I don't think people are upvoting this for the fact at the top of "say something surprising" [1], but it indeed surprised me:
> I can write 500MB/s to a hard drive? that's so much!
Turns out a Seagate 2X18 can write at 528 MiB/s according to its spec sheet. [2] My rule of thumb was that HDDs could do like 100MB/s (aka 800 Mbps) but I guess between density improvements and this new "dual-actuator" class, it's gotten a lot faster. HDD seek time has basically been stuck for 20+ years and probably will remain so but capacity has increased a lot, and the throughput for sequential access probably should scale with capacity. For a while I think it wasn't increasing, but I guess they decided to fix that?
SSDs of course can do way more than 500 MB/s, and you can do better by compressing as you write (depending on your data), and you can stripe across multiple HDDs, but it turns out none of those are necessary.
[1] as I write this, the title "no feigning surprise" suggests <https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/> but the link points to "say something surprising" <https://wizardzines.com/comics/surprise/>.
[2] https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/exos-2x1...
Don't forget that server-grade drives are often 15K RPM, giving you ~2x over a typical 7200RPM drive.
I think I'd appreciate a compilation of such surprising facts, if anyone has a list.
I feel like the "falsehoods programmers believe about [thing]" is a little similar, but about correctness and never about performance.
Maybe it sounds like major redflag? It sounds a bit manipulative. People use it to lie and to get out of out of their obligations?
Typical "feighning suprise" is with pet attack. "It does not bite". What a big suprise when it does bite, it "never did it before, did you provoke it"? Later you find that thing send 5 people to hospital, and entire street has delivery services suspended.
Love this, it's like Randall Munroe x Lynda Barry
Feels like the smushed down version of xkcd's lucky 10.000: https://xkcd.com/1053/
That seems like a more general idea, and I like it more.
For the last 5 or so decades we've been transitioning from a world where everyone watches the same 4 TV channels to a world where everyone is in their own niche, and the tendency to be surprised that someone doesn't know about some cultural phenomenon is directly proportional to age. The way boomers gape and stutter when I said I don't know much about The Beatles...
In software too, it feels like there's been a shift to a more individualistic "learn-on-the-job" attitude in companies. If you're not the kind of person who knows how to structure learning a new field, it's easy to end up with big gaps when you don't know what you're looking for.
Almost not related at all expect “learn something new”. Not everything needs xkcd
You're right for the link as provided, but the (apparently) correct link provided upthread is https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/, which is pretty similar to the XKCD.
You don't know that No Feigning Surprise is actually from an xkcd comic, before it was a wizardzines post? U+1F632