This has been happening to me repeatedly for years, usually in online communities focused around shared hobbies (forums, reddit, discord, etc.) and I just don’t get what the deal is. Typically what happens is this:
Something is being instructed or explained, and the wording is ambiguous or doesn’t match what I observe. For a concrete example let’s say there’s a situation like this when dealing with software: “program X is separate.” But to a layman user like myself seeing that I am required to have program Y to run program X, it does not appear separate. My observation isn’t matching the explanation, so I ask for clarification. I get the same phrase parroted back. I point out where I’m confused because that statement does not match my observation. I get treated like an idiot, and the person explains “program X is separate, that does not mean it’s standalone.” I point out that to a layman like myself “separate” and “standalone” carry the same functional meaning. The person then insults my intelligence. I say that I don’t appreciate being insulted and talked to so condescendingly. Then multiple people in the community, including the moderators, come out to mock me, ridicule me, and tell me that I’m the one being unreasonable and a trouble maker.
So I leave. I migrate to a different hobby community. Eventually the same problem comes up again. Repeat ad nauseam.
What is going on here and why won’t it stop? I’ve tried phrasing my questions as politely as I can and being non-confrontational, and that doesn’t help. The only common denominator(s) I can find are that the people I’m communicating with deal with niche things with niche terminology that, while specific to them, can be very general to regular people like me, but every group of those niche people I interact with seems to assume everyone knows or should know everything they know, and when someone doesn’t they explode.
4 comments
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I think you are kind of describing the curse of knowledge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge. But here’s the deal, some people like hoarding knowledge and enjoy making you feel stupid, some people just don’t know how to share their knowledge, and some people enjoy teaching and remember what it’s like when they first started. The last type is rare. The other thing, and this is important, you have to show you did some research before asking the question. Otherwise people just think you’re lazy. It can take quite a bit of effort to help people, and you’ll get better responses if you demonstrate you at least tried. You might be doing this, I’m just stating the obvious.
You sound aggressive in your explanations. You are probably coming off as a know-it-all that isn’t open minded to new knowledge. If I am explaining something to you that I know and you don’t, I don’t want to have an argument with you. If you keep telling me I am wrong or that the terminology doesn’t mean what it means, I will lose interest in helping you.
What you should be doing if you don’t understand something is ask questions about what you don’t understand from a place of learning instead of a place of knowing. Your examples are you asking from a place of knowing, and no amount of explanation will help you because you already know. It is not uncommon for terminology in a field to not make sense or conflict with laymen terminology, for example. You arguing that point shows that you aren’t genuinely interested in learning anything and are just trying to get attention and flex your own knowledge.
>For a concrete example let’s say there’s a situation like this when dealing with software: “program X is separate.” But to a layman user like myself seeing that I am required to have program Y to run program X, it does not appear separate…
If this is how a lot of these conversations go, then it sounds like you’re getting overly bogged down in semantics and pressing these points too far, which is alienating the people who are trying to explain things to you. I don’t know how seriously to take this example, but in this scenario it sounds like program X and Y are indeed separate programs. The fact that you need one to run the other properly doesn’t change the fact that they’re separate.
In this situation, it would make more sense to make a mental note that you need program Y to run program X correctly and move on rather than to keep trying to convince the other person to change how they speak to accommodate your viewpoint.
Also, remember that people tend to be less empathetic online than they are in person, so you need to be more mindful of how you talk to people to not wear out their patience.