“For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?” ― bell hooks
"Your intent and your impact may be different, but you are responsible for both."
A "well, actually" happens when someone says something that's almost - but not entirely - correct, and you say, "well, actually…" and then give a minor correction. This is especially annoying when the correction has no bearing on the actual conversation. This doesn't mean the Recurse Center isn't about truth-seeking or that we don't care about being precise. Almost all well, actually's in our experience are about grandstanding, not truth-seeking.
If you overhear people working through a problem, you shouldn't intermittently lob advice across the room. This can lead to the "too many cooks" problem, but more important, it can be rude and disruptive to half-participate in a conversation. This isn't to say you shouldn't help, offer advice, or join conversations. On the contrary, we encourage all those things. Rather, it just means that when you want to help out or work with others, you should fully engage and not just butt in sporadically.
You shouldn't act surprised when people say they don't (or do) know something. This applies to both technical things ("What?! I can't believe you know R!?!?") and non-technical things ("You don't know who RMS is?!"). Feigning surprise has absolutely no social or educational benefit: it's usually makes the other person feel worse or enforces subtle -isms. And even when that's not the intention, it's almost always the effect. As you've probably already guessed, this rule is tightly coupled to our belief in the importance of people feeling comfortable saying "I don't know" and "I don't understand."
Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, able-ism, age-ism and other kinds of bias. This one is different from the rest, because it covers a class of behaviors instead of one very specific pattern.
Subtle -isms are small things that make others feel unwelcome, things that we all sometimes do by mistake. For example, saying "It's so easy my grandmother could do it" is a subtle -ism.
We are all part of a society where these -isms are a daily reality and we don't have any delusions that we can keep them all from creeping in while we work on hard problems together. Here are some ideas of what to do when you "oops" or are "ouched." This is not the exhaustive list but some ideas of approaches to getting to the other side of conflict.
You realized that you "oopsed", now what?
Someone pointing out that you "ouched" them, now what?
You were "ouched", now what?
Someone realized they "oopsed", now what?