I’ve previously discussed in an earlier chapter the Jumbotron rule (anything you say will be put onto the Jumbotron in Yankee Stadium) in the context of the broader point that you need to assume anything negative you say about anyone will get back to them, always, no matter what.
But the Jumbotron rule has another important consequence: people taking one line out of context, and using it against you, is far too common. This happens privately within companies when enemies within the company want to make you look bad, and it happens on Twitter when mobs try to go after you.
What rarely ever happens is that people take long and thoughtful analyses and use them against you. Whoever said, “So-and-so wrote a 100-page book that makes this very complex and subtle point, go read it and you will see he’s evil!” No one! Instead, in those cases, they find one line from that book, and take that one line from that book and twist it to make the author look as bad as possible.
How do you combat it? We can’t change the world, but we can change how you write. So just avoid using those pithy-one-liners that are at high-risk of being distorted or misinterpreted.
Look at it this way: which of these two is more likely to have a war against him in two very hypothetical scenarios? Note that both of these people are saying things that shouldn’t even be thought but I can’t control what you think. Compare someone who posted to the company internal Slack, “that fuck-up reaching the top-shelf and making everything tumble down was by a midget? Surprise, surprise” to the person who posted to the company Slack, “who is the person behind that fuck-up, reaching the top shelf and making everything tumble down, if it was indeed a person and not caused by an AI-powered robot? It would be interesting for someone to do a deep-dive into analyzing which countries of people of different heights have which cultural characteristics that encourage or discourage people who participate in that culture to give different priorities to product-shelf organizing capabilities as compared to people from other cultures.” The latter example, being much more sophisticated, complex, euphemistic, with the key points hinted at and not said, is just a lot less risky than the one-liner. And to repeat: both versions of those thoughts are things you may not even want to think, but only you can decide what you will think.
A broader version of this argument is that you should be careful of the words you say out loud, especially in a universe where your starting expectation is that every written word has the opportunity to be taken out of context. Perhaps another solution to consider is to know when to go to voice, and when to go to writing.
