What's not a sign someone's an asshole, but is often misinterpreted as one?

Honestly I'm an extrovert that gets lost in thought sometimes. I have the meanest looking resting removed face when I am. But I'm as gentle as a butterfly and always up for a good conversation if anyone approaches.

Yes

Closely related is someone who's just a bit to the point with their responses. I don't mean the "I'm just saying" people; those people are assholes. I mean stuff like when someone skips the pleasantries and dives right into their question or comment. Instead of saying "hi", they'll dive right into saying "I have an issue with X". Or when they see something wrong when reviewing your work, they'll just outright say "this isn't right" without trying to sugarcoat it.

Personally, I like when people do that, particularly from people I know have good intentions. I don't want to waste time doing some "hi, how are you / I'm good, yourself?" sort of handshake when someone has a question for me. And reviews are a constant, daily thing in my job (software dev), so I don't want time wasting flowery language in review comments, nor do I want to waste time typing such up myself.

Why not both

Oh, like Mr. Darcy!

Could be someone who's genuinely trying to understand someone's viewpoint, but it reveals inconsistencies in the other person's logic, so they get irritated.

Eh, if it's coming from an adult who should know better, I wouldn't say it's being misinterpreted as a sign of being an asshole.

I think the big deciding factor is how they're approaching the questions and what the questions are. Like, if someone is "just asking questions" where the questions just so happen to be a common bad faith talking point, yeah, I'm gonna assume they're also acting in bad faith.

Eg, leading questions are a particularly common example here. The amount of lean towards their already-decided viewpoint can vary. They might word their question to be convinced away from their viewpoint as the default ("why isn't the moon landing fake?"), or maybe they'll provide a statement that obviously gives more weight to their side ("the government is so untrustworthy, so how can we trust the moon landing was real?").

But often, they even do word the questions in a perfectly valid way, because they're not trying to get an answer. They're not gonna be convinced and they're trying to get an answer. What they want to do is make someone else mistake being stumped for "this person might be right". Eg, if someone asks you "is the moon landing real?" and you don't actually know how to prove that it's real, that can make you think that perhaps it wasn't real. After all, you can't explain how it is. But that's a fallacy. You not being able to explain it has nothing to do with whether or not it's real. Asking questions is cheap and easy. It takes no time investment compared to answering or understanding an answer. That makes it effective for planting seeds of doubt. And of course, people should think critically, but many folks aren't going to or aren't don't have the time. So they'll retain this low effort seed of doubt and that's it.

Plus of course, searching for these questions, especially leading ones, can get you to fall into conspiracy theory or alt right echo chambers, which will have the leading question included in multiple times and technically is a better match from a pure SEO point of view. Search engines do try and train themselves against the common leading questions, but they often have to do that explicitly. This is actually an area where search engines like DuckDuckGo do worse at. You're more likely to have a leading question in the top results because, again, it really is the most accurate match for that question. Should search engines direct you to the correct results or should they direct you to the results that are most accurate for what you searched for? Nobody really agrees and it'll be criticized either way (personally, I think that correctness is far more important because otherwise the search engines propagates misinformation).

As an autistic person I love interacting with people like you.

listen, as someone who needs to be social but isnt, it is ok to let there be awkward silences. it is ok.

it isn't your job to be entertaining. conversation is a 2 way road.

contribute, motherfucker

You'd like Northern Europe.

It took me way too long to realize when someone asks how my weekend was it's because they want to talk about their weekend

My trick is earbuds. Even if I'm not listening to anything. Also helps to be living in a country where you're not generally supposed to go talk to strangers

I think we are the same person

It's bizarre to me how many people assume that disabilities must be visible. And not just visible, but that it has to be glaringly visible.

You'd think that it'd be well known that visibilities might not be obvious, but nope.

What about parking diagonally across two or three disabled parking spots?

In particular, women are more likely to be viewed as "removed", "bossy", etc for doing the exact same thing that a man could do without being considered as such.

So it's not just women speaking up, but also that there's a gender imbalance in how that speaking up can be viewed.

Karen?

To be fair though, sincerity without empathy is just assholeness. There are way to many people justifying their asshole behaviors with “being sincere”.

In addition:

Beating around the bush, with way too soft language.

The way you can tell the difference between honesty and being an asshole is of they say they just "tell it like it is," they're assholes.

This is a joke, not a rule, but it's based in reality.

This seems to be a cultural quirk in North America in particular.

Massive one. People automatically assume those who have defined areas that others are not allowed to access (ie personal/physical contact, topics of communication, literal areas they restrict in their home, etc) are prudish and being willfully obstinate for unfounded reasons, without considering why these boundaries are set in the first place.

The second you inconvenience someone, they assume you're the problem.

I find that struggling to be on time is fine, actually not being on time is disrespectful of my time. In modern society we have so many options available to make sure we can keep on time. Set up alarms, time how long it takes you to get dressed and out the door, time how long it takes you to get somewhere, set alarms to keep you on time based on what you've actually measured, not what one "feels" is enough time.

Personally I'm more often than not 5+ minutes early; I can always wait a little more before I go in or something, it's often harder to "just get there faster".

BTW; if someone is late because of something outside their control that's fine; just make sure to inform me ASAP.

I think it's important to bear in mind that some of those things are what neurotypical folks, I guess you could call them, use to convey interest or disinterest. Eye contact is a way to express interest, and helps to show one is intently listening to the speaker. Conversely, frequently glancing away is kind of the body language equivalent of giving short "uh huh" type answers when one is trying to disengage from a conversation.

My point isn't that you should feel bad about struggling with these nuances; I just think it's worth mentioning that some of those negative reactions you may have experienced just has to do with expectations in body language. It's not that someone who's neurodivergent is being an asshole, it's just that they're sending out signals we're otherwise used to interpreting as disinterest, and that is (often) off-putting.

Again, it's not something to feel bad about, it's just communicating on different wavelengths so-to-speak. Sort of like a language/culture difference.

Yeah, i can relate. Yesterday i empathized with people doing moral wrong stuff, saying that i can understand their logic. And than was acused that it would be my logic. That irrate me the whole night, but in the end it just was my brutal honesty and a lack of black and white thinking.

But yeah, it hurts when people missread that. I hope you doing good :)

Not to be mistaken for "tough love," the concept that manipulative people will often use to defend their coercive verbal assaults on their targets.

aka Boundaries.

Too many people can't deal with that, but that's their problem.

Same goes for having no record, aka the famous gap in a resume. It's not really about being perceived as a dick, but the same applies nonetheless.

I tell people this all the time. But I have to. It's like... If I don't, I won't know if I'm still real.

I was on the train once headed into the city. A dude getting off the train looks me dead in the eye and says "never trust unsolicited advice" and then stepped through the door.

That was it. That was the entire interaction. Completely blew my mind. I did ultimately decide it was legitimate advice. But still, it was wild being told not to trust the advice I was receiving.

And some people genuinely want to help, without implying the other person is stupid, weak, incompetent either.

It's worse after you vent to someone and they give you it. Especially when it was unwanted.

"I'd love to, but unfortunately I am busy tonight."

I once had a coworker tell me he wasn't going to a company event because he "was working on saying no to things." I thought that was really cool. Not sure how well it would work though for, say, saying no to a friend's invite 🤷‍♂️

Reminds of a post a few days ago, that described how people think you're condescending and sit on a high horse, just because you use some fancy words here and there.

Meanwhile I'm just trying to describe something with as much detail as possible, because it's important to convey exactly what I mean.

North Dakota? Non-dairy?

Being vague and expecting everyone to know what you mean with a particular acronym. HFAYQT? 🤷‍♂️

Agreed, and along the same lines, pointing out bad logic or factual errors used to support a point you actually agree with.

When you make up fake science out of whole cloth, it's easy to make up something to that accords with people's biases. Actual truth is simply less likely to fall into that category, and more likely to be uncomfortably inconvenient or terrifying. There's nothing fun about global warming, deadly pandemics, nor microplastic pollution.

Fake news never makes demands on its target audience. Sometimes it says "you are the victim", or "those people are the problem", or at the very least, "this is fine." But it never says "if we don't get our shit together we and our children face a dismal future." Instead it always appeals to the greedy and the lazy amongst us.

That really depends on if it's an exception or a consistent pattern.

In Spain it's a way of life. If I'm 10 minutes late for something I just call it Spanish On Time.

Hey I think you need to change your username. Musk baggsied that font for twitter, I mean X.

100% depends on the opinion

I'm not a bigot, but in my opinion the sliding scale between jam and marmalade is so fine that it's not worth distinguishing between them, it should be a spectrum of preserves.

Whoa, cool your jets.

Worst is stating an opinion to a group of people that all disagree. It doesn't matter whether you have good arguments or not, what matters most is whether they respect you.

I'm interested in the thought process of both upvoting and downvoting people to SmokeInFog's comment 👀

The line between assertive and aggressive can be pretty thin.

If your trait as the word brutal in it, you're probably an asshole.

Honesty? Yes. Brutal honesty? Hell no.
If you don't want to be a twat, you should take at effort at considering how your words will impact a person, and try to take brutality our of it. Not lying, not hiding anything, but being considerate, that's, like, bare minimum

This is almost always just being an asshole. You can be honest and be an asshole all at the same time. There is a reason that people train in conflict de-escalation and how to talk to people in a tactful way.

People using "honesty" as a veneer to be brutal aren't the same as people that are genuinely honest.

I'm gonna be straight with you, apart from the music the Rocky films were not the peak of cinema. I'm sorry, but it had to be said.

Please take some of these, and put them at the appropriate places in your sentence: , . ?

What is not a sign

Not a sign that someone is an asshole

But is often misinterpreted as one

What is something people see as assholish behaviour that really isn't