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.

I don't really understand what you're nitpicking, the rule is "don't feign surprise". It seems perfectly well-stated to capture the spirit of the intent, and it explicitly allows for genuine surprise as you suggest.

Now, human interaction is squishy, so yeah, they are also trying to cover the all-too-common-in-tech case where someone is just being an asshole. Let's call it the Comic Book Guy case. In this case, it actually doesn't matter whether surprise is feigned or not, because what's actually happening is this person is listening and waiting for someone to express a blind spot so they can prove their intelligence by correcting them. You can't really write down an explicit deterministic rule for this, because it's all cognitive behavior social stuff that people are generally unaware of moment to moment. However the recurse center rules plus live feedback when it happens is as good of a solution as I can imagine.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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

> 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 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...

Hmm... the reactions to this post are rather revealing about the HN community.

One quite positive, and sharing an excellent link (thanks).

One neutral, and sharing the original xkcd link (thanks).

A couple of anonymous downvotes. I assume because it says something positive about someone, and we'll have none of that, here, thank you very much.

XKCD: 10,000 people learn something “everyone knows” every day:

https://xkcd.com/1053/

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.

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.