Do you think people are a little too open and honest here?😅

@hartfire Now there's a contradiction in terms.

Emotional intelligence? Ha!

@SteelHands Look it up. It's real. And it's been proven to be a better predictor of success in both relationships and work than IQ.

@hartfire Success is a relative term. If someone defines marriage as getting married and getting divorced and remarried over and again it's very different from being wed to the same person for life.

Likewise. A business can be successfully begun or a career commenced, but retirement or divestiture might not be the definition of success in every case.

The problem thinking emotionally is that illogical statements taste very good in the mouth of an emotional person but grow bitter in their guts later on.

@hartfire Honestly, is not as easy as writing down some words or reading some. Leaving out the expressions of the face and the vocal inflections. Having that information missing. It shallows out the full meaning of the information exchanged. I reckon the intent to be completely honest can be there and making the assumption that I'm understood exactly as my writing intends, incorrect or not, impossible to know for sure.

Seems like the same thing is true for conversing in person one on one and conversing in a group. The more people added to hearing a conversation the more likely that some are not going to fully gather all otherwise mutual understandings of the ones engaged in a conversation.

Unless I'm being naive, people are little very patient with these realities in this age of easy information exchanges. Something that I had already observed back in the heyday of citizens band clubs and ham radio, where we actually found that by use of exaggerated vocal intonation and catch phrases, we compensated for a lack of physical gesture, (Don'tcha know) as it were.

Not that we lack substansial methodologies Oftener than not, they're
misapplied.

@SteelHands Interesting.
When this thread began, I was responding to your comment, "By proxy, isn't everyone here just avoiding being honest with the one person they should never mislead? One's self?"

There was nothing in that comment which suggested the we were talking about communications outside the presence of the other - ie, on radio or online. I agree that lack of seeing someone's facial expressions and body language does remove about 60 - 80% of the communication.
But that loss it caused by the medium. It has nothing to do with honesty or lack of it.

I see several styles of communication where confusions and misunderstandings can easily arise in the written word online.
- The writer uses slang or cultural idioms which the other is unfamiliar with.
- The writer uses irony as a form of humor, but ironic meaning often doesn't come across accurately unless the listener knows the whole context.
- The writer is not very articulate and uses malaprops, ambiguous words or phrases or bad grammar, making it very hard to guess what they mean.
- The sense of humour doesn't match.

None of the above have anything to do with honesty. They're more about poor writing and language skills.

The other side of it is how the reader reads.
I've several times made mistakes by reading too quickly.
It helps to read questions and replies closely, preferably at least three times with the more complex and longer posts.

@hartfire We can never know what it is that we do not know.

Though by will alone we may construct whatever belief we wish.

And I suppose. Update what we thought we knew if we discover otherwise.