Dear X-person –
I am sorry. I regret my actions and I learned from my mistakes. I wish that I had not upset you and I regret my behavior for that reason. Since I cannot change what has happened, I hope that you find consolation in the fact that I am making an effort to change my behavior for the future and also I will try to teach others what I learned. There is no need for you to read further than this, but if you want to do so, then it is an apology in the Greek sense of the word as what follows is an explanation for my behavior.
I have an insatiable hunger for data discussion. Because of my time as a criminal investigator, social researcher for meth users, commission salesperson, extremely dense student who was forced to ask for help, oppressed poor youth with little to lose, various public speaking jobs, and as a general gay dude… I have a lot of experience in approaching people who had no plans to talk to me and making requests for things without concern about whether it is in that person’s interest to give me anything. I am not shy and I take huge rejection well. Beyond that, I also am experienced at pressing people when I get soft rejections, such as non-answers to questions or indefinite refusals to my requests. Sometimes I even press people in the face of hard rejection! But I would never want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
I just had a situation where I asked a researcher for data which she had cited in a presentation which I attended. I have gotten a lot of rejection from a lot of researchers over the years because I fire off lots of requests… but this is the first time I have become aware of making someone feel bad. Undoubtedly I must have bothered other people also but they did not tell me. My perspective is that I got several answers which demonstrated a lack of understanding of my question, but no refusal to assist me or any reason to quit asking, so I kept asking. After some back and forth, the person whom I asked suggested that I was “frustrated” and “adversarial” and that she had given me “quite a bit of time to assist” me. Certainly I do not emotionally identify with the content of data exchange conversations but evidently I should be more conscious of how I present myself because I hurt someone.
Regardless of how I got into this situation, now I definitely owe her an apology! I feel terrible! What can I learn from this? What happened and why?
I have some regrets about the way I spoke with this person and if I had things to do again, I would have responded differently. This person told me to check some websites, and actually I did and so did a friend, but I turned up nothing. I told the person that I had some experience using online searches, and if I had the situation to do over again, I think I would have instead said that I actually know very little about academic searches which is closer to the truth. In the end she provided me with a link she found through the university databases. I did not have access to these searches so what she gave me was helpful.
Another reason why she was upset was because I asked her the same question five times – twice in her in-person presentation and three times by email. In all the cases, her answer was as such: the data exists and that I should be able to find it, but she did not actually provide the data to me. She still never gave me the data from her report, but she gave me something else similar so I will make due. I really expected her to have the answer at hand without doing any research for me. I am uploading a copy of the emails – minus names! so that anyone can see me at my foulest and most argumentative.
The bigger picture in all this is that this is not an isolated situation; it is not an excuse, but I think my behavior is representative of what my generation expects of others and her interpretation of it is representative of how her generation experiences the actions of mine. Students often feel afraid to question their teachers, laymen often feel scared to question scientists, and patients often feel afraid to question their doctors. What does the person of lower status do when he feels that the person of higher status has given an insufficient answer?
Wikipedia has commented that the lower status person feels shame for asking and then often abandons their pursuit of help, and this problem has been the focus of lots of policy research. I would argue that the person of lower status should persist and the person of higher status should assume good faith (Wikipedia essay!) and not bite the newcomers (Wikipedia essay!). Jimmy Wales made an innovative choice for making an etiquette code one of the pillars of Wikipedia, because this is the surest way to encourage a newcomer base to engage the educational process and grow of their own volition to the level which they choose. In contrast, education used to be of necessity an elitist system which could not support the burden of inquiries from the most untaught. This is not to say that the scientist I engaged did not act entirely as she should – I am just suggesting that her duties put her in a situation where to preserve her job safety as a community outreach worker, she gets no benefit and risks reprimand from saying “Your question is unclear”, “I do not know”, “I do not have time”, “Look somewhere else”, or anything other than the best attempt at an answer she can generate to immediately resolve the query using her presently available resources, even if she knows that her answer might not be sufficient.
The problem that I think is coming into play here is that the internet has changed the nature of the expected etiquette between researchers because now entities are subject to receive huge amounts of communication requests. Whereas before the internet, students would have done best to accept the first answer from the time-consuming in-person teacher consultation even if it did not satisfy them, now I think it behooves students to spend the tiny amount of time it takes to demand answers online until they get a hard refusal. This XKCD comic about being wrong on the internet pokes fun at this societal change – whereas previously it made sense to take pride in giving thoughtful answers to everyone in person and to tie one’s self worth with the response of one’s geographically-close tribe, now because communication is done en masse it makes no sense for the active generation to self-identify with the response of strangers on the internet.
I regret my incompetence but on the other hand I work in the field of dispelling the inability of people to relieve their own ignorance and the time is great for promoting this ideology. The mistake I made really could be a model for what goes wrong in a lot of interaction between the community and science institutions trying to ride the trend of doing public outreach now. Still, I cannot regret asking multiple times in more pointed ways. Would it not have been more wrong for me to say I understood when I did not? And could I have asked my question in better ways? Yes to the latter… and next time I will.
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