It’s like when you don’t like someone’s friends but you’re not actually going to say that out loud. Instead you say “I'm just too tired to go out” — it’s a “diplomatic out.” Yes it’s a lie at face value but you leave people with their dignity while simultaneously signal your intent. Your friend, who presumably has social skills, picks up the subtext and you successfully communicate two layers of meaning with one sentence.
You're absolutely right, this is basic courtesy, and the sort of polite awareness that everyone should have when dealing in public. If you can't understand why you would often softpedal criticisms in public (while forthrightly addressing them privately!), you're hurting youself.
No, what you call "basic human social skills" is literally opposite of it. Having good social skills also involves saying "this person/institution is lying". Or even "this person/institution is harming people".
Having social skills means also being able to distinguish between innocent nicer phrase, outright enabling and being coconspirator.
I’m sure this is also cultural, but that approach is terrible. Your friend can’t automatically guess you’re lying, not for the first few times, anyway. Of course they’ll believe you if you say you’re too tired to go out. Then they inadvertently catch you or you reject them so many times they start to believe you don’t want to go out with them, not the other friend. All the while they became closer with the other person, who actually did hang out with them.
Stop lying. You’re hurting the friendship. If you care about the person, eventually you’ll have to be an adult and explain why you’re not comfortable with the third person.
You don’t get it. We are all extremely good friends and there is no friendship being hurt.
Talking in private is different where we are bluntly truthful.
This is how we talk in public.
It’s like doing steganography[1] on language. I can pass a secret message to my friend plainly in front of someone else using subtext.
And it’s not even contrived most of the time. Sometimes someone inadvertently leaks out subtext by their posture or tone and an observant person can read that the person is uncomfortable or comfortable.
So what you’re describing is a situation where the three of you are together and you want to cut the evening short for yourself because you don’t like one of the people? If that’s the case, I don’t think that was at all clear in your original post. Judging from the downvotes and the other responses, I think everyone assumed a situation like your friend calling you up and saying “hey, want to hang out with me and <person you dislike>?”.
And press releases are the same way. There is a literal message but often times there is subtext. They can’t say the subtext literally because it is inherently hurtful and burns a bridge (just like me saying “this guy sucks let’s leave”) so you read between the lines.
Outright lying in press releases is different. That’s a company saying “AI caused our company to fail” but actually you invested in the wrong product and don’t want to admit it.
It may even be that they have no alternative but to lie in their press release. Like say hypothetically they went to Flock and said “I know we have a contract saying we’re gonna do this partnership but given the optics and the amount of heat we’re getting we have to cancel”.
Flock may well have agreed on a break to the contract but stipulated that Flock had to agree to the wording of the press statement and Amazon was not going to disparage Flock yadda yadda.
Saying good things can get you sued. The truth doesn't need to be disparaging. If you are uncomfortable about the privacy implications of some action, just say that. You don't have to use words like "evil" or "villian" to express that you are not comfortable with a particular path.
it really is getting ridiculous; atlassian has this other totally useless ai called rovo that invents events/meetings and notes when it tries to summarize a tree of documents and offers random useless "suggestions" for jira docs...
Apple will provide software and hardware support for any given product for at least 5 years. After those 5 years, you sometimes will still get security fixes.
The reason for this is that newer software will start using hardware features and capabilities that only exist on newer hardware, not because Tim Cook is evilly cackling in his office "hahhahha! Let's force people to buy new Macs!!!"
If only there was a way to write software that uses the new hardware features if they're available but falls back to a legacy path, if the hardware features were not available.
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