Bluntness and honesty vs. politeness and white lies

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This is a university class that students are paying a lot of money for, and you want to give them incorrect information and not be corrected, just to save yourself a bit of a bruised ego? And when someone explained the information to you, you got pissed? I wouldn't want to take a class with a teacher like that. Would you rather have a reputation for not being a very good teacher, and never have anyone say anything? Or maybe one day, years later, find out that students told each other not to waste their time and money taking classes with you?

I don't get this NT attitude of not caring if you're any good at something, so long as nobody is "rude" enough to tell you. Anyone who knew the difference and didn't say anything would just be laughing at you. To me this is the same as the issue with therapists not wanting to be told when they're completely off-base with something. You're being paid to do something, and don't care if you're doing it badly??

You can be both polite and honest.

The problem is that NT society associates honesty with being rude. If you tell someone the truth with humbleness, that is being polite. If someone finds being truthful "rude" they basically embrace an insane concept.

Would your doctor be considered rude to tell you that you have a disease vs. that you're healthy because the lie is more pleasant?

I take pride in my work.

Why do you want to know that? Do you want to do them professionally?

The people you ask--are they artists and musicians? If not, then they are not qualified to give you the kind of feedback you need. If they are, you should be paying them for that information, possibly as their student, because the skill that they have is developed over years of hard work, and doesn't come free.

Nobody owes anyone an opinion, honest or not, unless the two have made some kind of arrangement.

Greetings, all. I'm the NT who wrote the comment to Greentea & I thought I'd respond to a few things.

Xanovaria, all I know about Asia is what I've heard, especially from the hundred or so students I've had from there; I don't really know how saving face works there, but it's a term that's been adopted into English because we didn't have a term like that in English before (as far as I know), and as I understand it, it's exactly as Kajjie says: Criticism can hurt. So people try to sound less like they are criticising so as not to hurt others so much.

Coadunate, you write, "Calling someone an “as*hole” (unless they used the word first) to their face is just plain rude and antagonistic and has NOTHING to do with being honest or blunt. This is an argument of fallacious logic of exaggeration of non sequitur and made up story with attempt to change the subject by getting one bogged down in the use of a word. NTs do this a lot. Instead of teaching people to tell “white lies” maybe they should be thought how to endure honesty."

My use of the term "as*hole" was hypothetical: I said I would rather someone didn't call me that to my face. In fact, something like that has only happened once in fifteen years of teaching, and it was because of a misunderstanding, a miscommunication between me and one of my students.

So to you, I was exaggerating. In my case, in the circles where I learned to speak (i.e., my family and friends), "calling someone an as*hole" is understood as a salient metaphor for criticizing them strongly. When writing to Greentea, perhaps I should have allowed for the fact that she (or anyone else reading my message) wouldn't understand that it's an exaggeration. But none of us can imagine all the possible interpretations that listeners or readers might put on our speech or writing.

But since we're on the subject, I'll present an example of a real-world event in which a student (metaphorically) "called me an as*hole" in class--i.e., disrespected me / told me an inconvenient truth. Note that there are a lot of situations where Person A says something, feeling honest, and Person B hears it and feels disrespected.

An example is close at hand. You wrote: "This is an argument of fallacious logic of exaggeration of non sequitur and made up story with attempt to change the subject by getting one bogged down in the use of a word. NTs do this a lot. Instead of teaching people to tell “white lies” maybe they should be thought how to endure honesty." That felt disrespectful to me when I first read it. After I thought about it a while, it also felt true.

Now, the example of my class. One day a year and a half ago I started teaching at a new school. It was my first time teaching officially at a university. The subject was Business English. The place, a town 42 minutes by train outside Vienna, Austria. I got up at 4:30 AM to catch the 6:14 train. Started teaching at 8, a little nervous, a little tired, a little wired from the coffee I'd drunk. I had three classes to teach, which would take me to 12:50 PM.


At the beginning of my second class, I said something that was factually not true. Not being an expert in Marketing, I said something in which I implied that "market niche" and "market segment" were the same thing. My students were all studying Marketing. One of my students raised his hand and, with a superior smile on his face, explained to me that I was wrong, they're quite different. On an ordinary day, I would have said, "Ah, good, thanks for the information," but on that particular day, already fatigued and out of my element, I felt attacked and disrespected; I felt unwelcome there. I would have preferred for him to remain silent, even at the risk of some of the other students in the class getting mixed up over the terms--which they probably wouldn't have, because, as I said, they were becoming experts in that stuff anyway.

So as a result, he and his friends always acted bored in my class, as if they had better things to do, and since the others had seen me shamed, they were harder to teach, too. I eventually figured out a way that he and I could work effectively together, but that was always the least enjoyable of the three classes I taught there that semester.

On the bright side--and here's where your point comes in, that NTs should learn to handle honesty--the experience prodded me to find and read an introductory textbook in English on Marketing, so that I would understand better the material that my students were learning in their other classes.

For a while, I've been wondering what purpose is served by having autism in the human species. I don't approach it from the point of view of it being a genetic mistake, but from the point of view of diversity being strength, and the question of how might this neurobiology benefit the human species as a whole? It seems to me that some of you may be here to tell some of the rest of us truths we don't necessarily want to hear. The smoothness of the social fabric is good, as far as it goes, but it has its disadvantages; truth-telling is also good and has its disadvantages; they'll always be in creative tension. You want a historical antecedent? The prophet Isaiah. He was all about truth, and happy to rip to shreds a social fabric built on lies.

You sat there and typed that you'd rather your students be confused about the information that you were teaching than question you, and you expect me to believe that you take pride in your work?

The level of disrespect that that shows for your students and your university just astounding. Do you really expect nobody to take offense to a professor saying that they don't mind students being confused about the material, so long as they don't bruise your ego??

NT society equates honesty with being rude because too much honesty gets in the way of smooth social interaction. NT society is all about social cohesiveness. If everybody was totally honest with each other at all times, society would fall apart. "White lies" are the glue that holds society together.

In the doctor example, it wouldn't be rude for the doctor to tell you that you have a disease because you have paid him to be honest. But there are limits on the doctor's honesty too. The doctor has been paid to tell you if you have a disease or not and what to do about it. The doctor may not tell you that he is bored with your disease because he is sick to death of people coming into his office with boring hypertension and he wishes somebody would come in with something challenging for him to diagnose, even if this is the absolute truth.

White lies make all relationships possible- parent/child, spousal, coworker, friendship, neighbor, absolute stranger you find yourself talking to while trapped in an elevator. Total honesty is called "brutal" honesty for a reason. It dioesn't need to be a verbal attack to be brutal. A gently worded, "I love you son, just not as much as I love your brother" is brutal even if not an attack.

Since you've decided to come back and say more things after you said you had nothing more to say

I'm still challenging you to provide an example of honesty without aggresivenss where lying would've been preferable.

And please don't quote South Americans. There's a reason I left that continent 30 years ago.

Your first question to me, in our emails, was about why you suddenly lose all your NT friends.