Hi everyone

First of all apologies for the gap since my last newsletter. I was in London to visit my wife for the last time before she will move to Switzerland. We had a lot of things going on that the I didn’t keep up with some of my usual routines, including this newsletter.

Anyways, now let me write about the topic I chose for this week: nice vs kind.

Nice vs Kind

Being nice and being kind are both about doing something positive towards someone else, but at a different level.

Being nice is about using a certain language and behavior when interacting with people. It’s about dress code, formalities, smiling, and fulfilling expectations of others.

Being kind on the other hand is about doing what’s good for others in the long term. It means really caring, potentially even inflicting some pain in the short term if it leads to better results and more happiness in the long term.

Let me make this a bit clearer with an example.

Let’s for example say I have a friend who is trying to lose weight but loves eating donuts.

Now he comes and visits me. I know he would love to eat a donut. Should I give it to him?

If I want to be nice I will give him all the donut’s he wants.

But if I wan’t to be kind I won’t give him any donuts, because that’s supporting his goals even if it’s not nice in the short term.

Now you might say that I chose a rather special example. Aren’t being nice and being kind usually correlated?

The Correlation Trap

I do indeed think there is usually a high degree of correlation between being nice and being kind.

For example if someone is just rude (randomly shouting and cursing at others for example) this is not nice, and it’s also very hard to imagine that this person could be kind.

However the correlation is definitely not 100%, as my example above showed.

Unfortunately a 100% correlation is a mental simplification that many people make though. (it’s partially also a mental bias also known as the halo effect. One great source to learn about that is the book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman, a fantastic book!)

This becomes especially obvious when looking at politicians. Many of them learn to act in a way that they appear to be very nice, but in reality they are actually selfish.

Look for example at South African politician Jacob Zuma who always acted nice and charismatic but was only interested in his own gain. Other examples are many of the leaders of former communist countries who pretended to be nice but were in reality brutal selfish dictators.

We have many of this type of people today in Europe and the USA as well, but this might be more controversial so let’s not get into it now.

On the other hand there are also some people who are not nice but actually very kind.

In recent history this description fits for example Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, which also just happen to be the two most important technology pioneers of the 21st century so far.

Both of them were and are endlessly criticized for the way they deal with other humans, yet what they actually did was improve the life of millions (arguably billions) of people by making their lives better.

I titled this section ‘the correlation trap’ because it turns out that there are many people, including journalists, who just don’t understand that being nice and being kind are not the same.

For example, I recently saw several articles that criticize Elon Musk for wanting to end democracy in the USA and similar nonsense. But even though those articles are often long and even go into many details, they are so shallow and one-sided that it almost hurts to read them.

On the other hand it is hard to find anything positive about Elon Musk in legacy media. He is more or less completely demonized now, which makes journalists feel that they can and should write ever nastier things about him.

Even though if they would look just a little deeper, they would see that this man has a very kind heart. But all they see is that he is superficially not as nice as they would wish. Perhaps the way those journalists write and think tells us more about them then about the subject they try to write about but fail to understand.

Kind > Nice

So what should be done?

Personally I think being kind is much more important than being nice.

But being kind and figuring out what other person is kind takes a bit more effort than just being nice and looking for other people who act nice.

It means evaluating people by their actions and their long term impact rather than just caring about the latest thing someone said and what precise words a person used.

By the way that’s also a reason why I reject German gender language that sadly became the norm over the last 10 years. German gender language makes almost every human communication more complicated and slower, because it always explicitly mentioning both (or even more) genders when talking about a group of people. It’s a typical example of something that is nice but not kind.

Alright, I’d have much more to say but I think that’s enough for this week.

Have a great time everyone!

Greetings from Olten

Gregor