&gt; Well, my straight-up critique is that you&#x27;re trying to pass your personal preference off as some sort of broad rule, and I think that&#x27;s bunk.<p>Ehhh. I think it&#x27;s just a consequentialist statement. &quot;Everyone will be more effective at achieving their goals if they don&#x27;t get offended by criticism.&quot; This says nothing about whether the other person <i>is</i> offensive; they probably are! But allowing that to determine to what degree you absorb the factual statements of their critique is a suboptimal game-theoretic strategy. No general ever won a war by ignoring information he didn&#x27;t like the tone of. (But he still probably tried to get the source to be less offensive, both for the sake of that person&#x27;s effectiveness at interacting with others who aren&#x27;t as pragmatic, and for the sake of his own mental energy spent putting up with the offense.)