To be mean, or not to be mean--that is the question

Actually, it's not usually much of a question for me. It's rare that I feel an intention to be mean* in what I write. When I do, I'd like to believe that I leave no room for a reader to doubt my feelings about the subject at hand. For example, when I have written about cheating and cheaters in poker, or Richard Marcus plagiarizing poker bloggers, or Phil Hellmuth's embarrassing ego and antics, or several other topics that get my dander up, I do my best to deploy my limited rhetorical talents in a way that gets readers to share my disgust and/or outrage. If anybody running their eyes over those posts fails to grasp that I despise the people or actions that are in my crosshairs, then I have failed very, very badly. After all, when I check the thesaurus to make sure that I have exhausted every synonym of "stupid" or "wretched" or "evil" or "contemptible," I certainly hope that the point has been made.

But far more often, even when I'm criticizing and/or disagreeing with something or somebody, I feel no malice; I simply think that something that was said or done was wrong, and wish to explain why I think that. I have previously compared my sense of mission in such instances to that of the robot "Nomad" in an old Star Trek episode: to find and eradicate error. (As the currently popular joke puts it, "Somebody is wrong on the Internet!") My goal is to convey information, not to condemn in any moral or personal sense, nor to arouse any negative emotion in a reader. If I'm not feeling outrage, I don't have any motivation to trigger it in my readers.

Just before I left for a week's vacation with Cardgrrl, I wrote a post responding to something Very Josie had written about counting outs and estimating probabilities in poker. My intention was to set the record straight, not to be insulting or condemnatory--or, to return to the central word in today's post title, to be mean.

Shortly after publishing that post, I read an article in a poker magazine that made exactly the same mistake as Josie had, and so I whipped out a post about it just a couple of hours before I was to be leaving for the airport for my week away. Even though the error was the same, I was much harsher on the magazine columnist, for several reasons: He was writing for publication, which, in my mind, requires more care than a personal blog. He presumably has at least one editor, who should have noticed the problem. He describes himself as a poker teacher or coach, and says that he emphasizes the importance of math to his students. Finally, he took a rather haughty tone toward those who don't see basic poker math as being important. To have such a fundamental error of understanding of poker math under those circumstances strikes me as a far worse sin than having the same misconception as a recreational player, and my language reflected my sense of indignation and condemnation.**

I think that the sarcasm, the snarkiness, the sense of meanness in the latter post is self-evident. But I also think that the absence of such qualities in the first post is equally self-evident. In fact, I reread it just now and still don't see it as mean-spirited.

It was, therefore, quite a surprise and mystery to me when I started getting complaints about how I had been, well, mean to Josie. Commenters used words such as "painful," "harsh," and "crime of courtesy." Josie told me she felt I had been--here's that word again--mean, and that I had ridiculed her. She said she had received a number of emails sympathizing with how she had been "wronged." Even Cardgrrl mentioned that she was surprised Josie was still talking to me.

It's hard to describe how confused this makes me feel. How could I write something that to me felt completely neutral and dispassionate, lacking any of the markers that I deliberately include when I want to be mean, yet have it apparently come across to so many people as being vicious?

It's true that I didn't pad my criticism with softeners, such as starting with compliments then gently bringing up the points of disagreement, or qualifiers like "maybe" and "I think," nor did I hold open the possibility of this being a matter on which reasonable people might disagree, with language along the lines of "my opinion is..." or "I see it differently." I just said, in essence, here's what's wrong and here's what's right.

I don't see that as being mean. I neither felt nor intended readers to feel anything negative about the person who made the mistakes. I even started the post with an admission that I've made a whole bunch of mathematical errors in my posts--and I might as well expand that to having made all kinds of errors, not just mathematical ones. My readers point these out to me, sometimes gently, sometimes harshly. When I see that I've been wrong, my usual response is to acknowledge it, either in a comment or an addendum to the post or a whole new post revisiting the subject. I don't see this process--either having my mistakes pointed out or issuing some form of mea culpa and correction--as any big deal; it's just the way I've been taught that one should communicate in public forums.

One might certainly take issue with whether I should ever inject meanness into posts, even when I think the targets deserve being blasted with both barrels. I remember when I was a teenager and had one of my first letters to the editor published in the local newspaper. I was slamming somebody who had written about the evidence for UFOs, which I thought was ridiculous, and my language left no doubt about my feelings. My father, upon reading it, didn't commend me for my superior facts and reasoning, as I had thought he would. Instead, his reaction was, "You could have made your point just as well without being insulting." So if I were to be charged with being rhetorically heavy-handed sometimes when it isn't necessary, I'm afraid I would have to plead guilty to a very long roster of offenses.

But that's an aside, and fundamentally a different issue. What I'm talking about here is being perceived as having been mean when I had no such intention. That, too, is hardly unprecented, I'll admit. I have many times ruffled feathers when that wasn't my goal. It happens much more often in written communications than in person, perhaps because I'm at least averagely able to sense from nonverbal cues that something is amiss when I'm face to face, and can right away try to figure out where the message went wrong. In writing, though, I don't get the feedback telling me that I've accidentally stepped on a toe until the damage is done.

I'm sorry that I injured Josie's feelings and ticked off some of her friends. It was not my intention to either hurt or ridicule. I didn't even realize that my words could be read that way, since hurt and ridicule were not in my mind when I wrote. It should be clear from my previous posts that I genuinely like Josie (see, e.g., here and here and here and here and here). She's smart and funny and fun to be around. I hope that she will continue to consider me her friend, in spite of my failings and missteps.

*The word mean has several possible definitions, even when dealing with it solely as an adjective. I'm using it herein to broadly refer to the set of concepts in Definition 5b and 5c here, i.e., "characterized by petty selfishness or malice," "causing trouble or bother; vexatious."

**The second post also mentioned Josie in passing. The juxtaposition of seeing the same error in two places so close in time made me wonder if they were connected--specifically, I wondered whether Josie had read the poker magazine article, and that is why she had the same misunderstanding as its author. This speculation on my part annoyed her even more than my first post had. She commented, "Really? Now you think I'm plagarizing a dumb magazine article?" Not at all. Had I thought that the connection was suspicious of being conduct that I would find unethical, I would have said so explicitly (as I did when I wrote that I thought Josie acted more unethically than she was aware of when she agreed to soft-play a friend). For example, when I discovered that somebody had flagrantly plagiarized a friend's published column, I called the violator a "low-life scumbag" and a "scummy thief." That's not even remotely what I thought about the connection here. Even if I had known for sure that there was a cause-and-effect relationship, I would not have labeled it plagiarism. Learning for the first time some widely recognized concept and then restating it in one's own words without specific attribution is not, in my mind, plagiarism. If I assert that a flush beats a straight, I don't need to footnote where I first learned that. I also don't remember with confidence where I first learned the "rule of 4" shortcut that was the subject of both posts under discussion here. Maybe Phil Gordon in his commentary on "Celebrity Poker Showdown," but I'm not sure. It doesn't matter. The more widely known something is, the less need there is to point to any particular source when discussing it. Josie says that she never read the article in question, and I believe her. But even if she had, and even if that had been where she first learned that rule of thumb, I would have thought nothing wrong with not bothering to mention that fact when she decided to post about it.