Hypersensitivity and Political Correctness

I wrote a blog post this week on how engineers or “technical people” don’t have to, and shouldn’t, be jerks. My argument was that the stereotype that technically-minded people are bad at social skills was just that, a stereotype, and that employers should stop allowing us to get away with it. I knew it was going to be controversial when I wrote it, especially because the type of people who find my blog (HackerNewsers) are usually technically-minded people (with a nod to the rest of you entrepreneurs, biz, and VC folk). As expected, a large chunk of commentors (both on HN and on my blog) disagreed with my argument and a large chunk agreed.

What I did not expect, however, was to be misunderstood so severely that I would be accused of wanting to ruin the lives of those who are “psychologically incapable” of learning social skills. One commentor posted a picture of a child with autism and accused me of trying to make him a second-class, unemployable citizen. Another commentor went as far as to paint a grisly picture of these “psychologically incapable” people committing suicide – all because of me.

This blog is set up in such a way that I must manually approve comments from first-time commentors. This means that I have read every comment that was posted to my article (a few people posted more than once, but I read those too) before they appeared on my blog. I approved the comments despite the fact that I found them extremely upsetting because, even though this is my blog, I felt that everyone deserved to be heard.

I want to take the opportunity to say that I think this combination of hypersensitivity and political correctness is an awful thing. It’s OK to be offended, but I feel that very often the thing that offends us is a misunderstanding. In this case, my point was that engineers shouldn’t be jerks and should instead learn some social skills so they can interact more effectively with co-workers and clients but it was misunderstood as if you’re bad at social skills, even if you can’t help it, then you should be treated like garbage. I don’t think that bloggers should have to acknowledge every exception to the points they make or write disclaimers into each of their posts – that kind of defeats the point (which I feel is free speech on a massive scale, by the way).

So please, the next time you feel offended, consider asking the offender for clarification before you react. You might save yourself, and them, from a lot of unnecessary heartache.