My advice would have been not to write this blog post. If the author had asked for my permission I would have said "please, no."
I don't see anything wrong with checking with people to see if they have an objection. It is in NO way disrespectful, and strikes me as bizarre to suggest otherwise.
Posts like this seem to be written from a philosophy of anxiety about ever saying or doing the wrong thing, and then proceed to problematize ordinary behavior, which only creates MORE opportunity to say the wrong thing. How about this: don't worry about it! Ask advice, ask permission, whatever. It'll be okay.
Well, when I read the title, I would have thought the same, but I found the article to have a fairly good motivation behind it.
It's fairly vague, though, as all these things are.
My own experience, with almost everything in life, is "It depends."
There's really no such thing as "One Pithy Aphorism to Rule Them All." In my experience, every philosophy works best as a heuristic, to be adapted to the context, and almost every context is different.
That said, we can't be too flexible, or we won't get anything done. I feel that each context needs to have "hard" parameters established and enforced.
It's just that, in my experience, we need to respect each individual context, and many folks are spectacularly bad at that.
This chap is/was the CTO of Meta, though, so he has some fairly solid background in one particular context.
Real people in the real world (not imaginary people in a fictional blog story) don't overthink every word someone is saying.
Asking for "advices" or asking for "permissions" or just - plain asking - is all the same. People don't see the difference, no one is imagining a scenario based on how the question has been asked, people are probably not even going to remember...
> Ask advice, ask permission, whatever. It'll be okay.
Let's take that at face value for the moment.
The person making the request cannot know ahead of time that the person they are asking treats advice/permission interchangeably. Their interlocutor could instead be what the author calls a gatekeeper, in which case permission-seeking will trigger the gate but advice-seeking will not.
On the flip side, someone fielding a question cannot know ahead of time that their interlocutor essentially randomly chooses between advice/permission-seeking, and that their interlocutor would treat the response the same either way. The person asking the question could be a narcissist looking for a place to lay blame if things go wrong.
Where such a choice is possible, standardizing on advice-giving therefore minimizes gatekeeping and ass-covering. Permission-seeking invites one or the other, with no apparent gain.
The results are even more in favor of advice-seeking when you take into account the number of people who have an easy time claiming what you've written-- be direct, we're all adults here-- but end up being gate-keepers/ass-coverers in practice. That discrepancy between words and deeds characterizes the vast majority of narcissists I've ever met.
There are a lot of narcissists out there, so I don't see any reason not to take the author's advice. At worst the standard has no effect at all, and realistically it will probably do what the author says it will.
I don't see anything wrong with checking with people to see if they have an objection. It is in NO way disrespectful, and strikes me as bizarre to suggest otherwise.
Posts like this seem to be written from a philosophy of anxiety about ever saying or doing the wrong thing, and then proceed to problematize ordinary behavior, which only creates MORE opportunity to say the wrong thing. How about this: don't worry about it! Ask advice, ask permission, whatever. It'll be okay.