Polite Notice

By default, I try to be polite: I think generally it’s the right thing to do, plus it’s a helpful way of developing virtue & maximising the good (two of my underlying ethical goals, with the former a heuristic for the latter). There’s a convincing feminist critique of conventional politeness – essentially, it argues that emphasising etiquette and conformity is a barely-disguised attempt to reinforce existing status hierarchies and power imbalances – but the meek, rule-following courtesy they object to is not the kind of politeness I'm interested in.

What I care about is being excellent towards other people, and that requires paying attention to how my actions affect them. A lot of the time, that means the advice from guides like Debrett’s is largely irrelevant to me being polite, but if (for instance) I were sat with somebody who was horribly offended by bad table manners, then I’d pay more attention to which hand I was using to hold my fork. I’d describe someone as polite if they notice or model what other people care about and adjust their behaviour in cheap (though not costless) ways to better accommodate those preferences. It is one’s attentiveness and responsiveness to others which matters here, not their adherence to a contingent set of social mores. Saying difficult things isn’t incompatible with being polite: in the vector space of all communication, the direction for kindness & courtesy is almost orthogonal to the direction for criticism, because the tone a message is delivered in can vary regardless of its content. Equally, an attempt to be polite based solely on how we teach it to children (hold open doors, say “please” and “thank you”, raise your hand to speak) will likely fail in the much more complicated real world, exactly as naive rule utilitarianism does. To be polite is to exercise mental & emotional effort identifying small steps you can take which will be good for others.

(As a prompt for further reflection on what exactly makes being polite something worth striving towards, I highly recommend the entry for courtesy in David Groom’s series of “Notes on Virtues”.)

The rest of this post is just a list of gestures which I think are fairly easy to do yet not everyone (myself included) performs. Sometimes there’s a good reason to not be polite, but I optimistically think that much impoliteness is due to a lack of thinking rather than active rudeness (e.g., it hadn’t occurred to me to watch out for people who’re physically cut out of a conversation until I was the person being blocked out and felt upset about it).

If you think I’ve been impolite or otherwise unvirtuous, let me know. It’d be a discourtesy not to!

“Thank you!”

One of the most basic, but the fact that it’s often expected means that its omission is noticeable. (I think this presumption of people saying “please” and “thank you” is an OK state for us to be in as a society, because it’s very cheap, and possibly makes people think about others a bit more compared to the world where nobody said such things and nobody expected it.) Some examples where I’ve found it to be lacking:

• In hall when the serving staff come to clear the table in between courses at formal, or just to bring more water. Probably 90% of people don’t acknowledge them, which is weird to me. Maybe because they’re viewing the staff as automatons rather than people? cf a line in one of my favourite songs from 36 Questions: “We both are actual human beings to waiters”.
• When people give you a card or a letter – I write to people partly because I enjoy doing so, but because I want to make the recipient happy, remind them that I care about them, perhaps bring us closer as friends. If the missive is left unacknowledged then that suggests it never reached them in the post, or they just weren’t very bothered about it. Either way, I’m somewhat less likely to send another, and I feel upset that my making an effort wasn’t reciprocated. (Obviously if you don’t want to associate with whoever sent you the letter, you don’t need to pretend you do – but you could still politely say thank you for it! This is also why substantive thank-yous are better than entirely non-specific ones, because they make it clearer what you actually appreciated about the card/letter, which is both nice and helpful for the writer of it to know.)
• The day after someone travels to see you / hosts you for an event – again, it shows your appreciation and indicates that them making the effort was actually good for you, which is probably at least part of the reason why they travelled/hosted.

Filling people in

• If someone gives you help or advice with something (e.g. a mock interview, proofreading an application) let them know how it went in the end.
• When you get put in touch with person B through person A, tell A about your meeting and how it was.¹ I want to get better at introducing people, but I can’t improve my internal matching algorithm without any feedback!

Being proactive

• Provided you actually want to see them, if somebody proposes meeting up at a time or location that you can’t make, offer a concrete alternative.² Just saying “that doesn’t work for me” or similar is bad because it (a) gives them some evidence that you don’t actually want to see them, thus reducing the chance that they’ll ask again, and (b) is computationally unkind in leaving the work of re-arranging up to them.
• Aim to ask around half the questions in a typical social conversation. It’s inconsiderate to expect your interlocutor to enthusiastically ask questions without that being reciprocated. Even if the talking time is split 50:50 between both of you, not asking questions makes it seem like you’re not really interested in or listening to what’s being said, plus it offloads responsibility by making the other person decide unprompted what to say about themself. (If you simply aren’t interested in talking to the other person, maybe try a bit harder, and if it’s still not working, leave. As I see things, it’s far more polite for a conversation to end quickly than for someone to passively go along with things and feign a desire to keep chatting.)

Communicating online

Again, politeness here is about having respect for other people’s needs and time, within the bounds of your own constraints.

• If you get an email from somebody and don’t currently have the time to reply properly, it’s much more polite to send them a one-liner explaining that and perhaps estimating when you’ll be able to respond fully than to not write anything back at all and force them to chase you up many times.
• It’s also more polite for someone to send a definitive “very short reply” along the lines of “Yes”, “No”, or “Remind me next week and I’ll do it” than to delay responding because they have a tendency to procrastinate adding in salutation / valediction boilerplate, etc. Yes, in an ideal world people would reply quickly and with a friendly greeting & sign-off, but probably you’d much rather just having the answer to your question. This is a good example of where conventional rule-following courtesy isn’t the best or most polite thing to do.
• Don’t sign up for a 1:1s pairing programme (e.g. Donut on Slack) if you are unlikely to go to 1:1 calls with the people you’re matched with.

Widening the circle

• At drinks receptions and similar mixing events, keep an eye out for if you’re physically positioned in such a way that blocks other people from joining the group. Is there someone lingering just over your shoulder trying to get into the circle? Take a step to the side, make space, and help them to actually participate by verbally acknowledging their arrival to the group as a whole – e.g., “Hi! What’s your name? … [introductions] … We were just talking about [X] - what do you think about [related thing Y]?”
• Don’t make subgroups implicitly: whispering at the dinner table is rude; so is messaging one person you’re in a room with whilst others are also there; so is obliquely mentioning an incident some members of your company weren’t present at without explaining it properly. Of course you will be closer to some people than others, but I think if you really think it’s best to only engage with a subset of the room, you should be willing to do everyone the courtesy of saying so explicitly, and avoid making those you’re semi-excluding have to awkwardly figure out if they’re still welcome in the conversation.