People get brushed off as being haters when they point out that a lot of SV is morally bankrupt. It has nothing to do with "achievement" to point out that a lot of the people running the show are people that intend a lot of harm outside their class through either carelessness or active malice. IE, I didn't hate Sam Altman or Dario Amodei until they started doom trolling and selling ridiculous fantasies non-stop. I don't hate them because they're successful -- I don't even view them as successful -- I hate them because they take actions that are detrimental for me and the rest of society. I would hate them a lot less if they stopped taking such actions.
Paul Graham, man, the whole reason I'm even on this site was because I was a fan of his essays back in the day. But I think he's too connected to this world to see how shady it is.
> when they point out that [some ideological outgroup] is morally bankrupt...
The phrasing already belies the problem. I would naturally and automatically brush off as a "hater" someone who said things like this about me, because it is suggestive of treating one's own idiosyncratic value judgments as objective truth.
Incidentally, "intend... through carelessness" is a contradiction in terms.
You can be careless in a way where it's obvious you'll cause harm, but you just don't do anything about it because you don't care. Drunk driving for instance. SV is the equivalent of a societal drunk driver right now because our normal institutions for regulating these things have been captured mostly by financial interests and corruption. The harm might not be the goal, but SV is not going to do anything to prevent it when it comes to their products (Read "Careless People", as a great example). SV's big projects right now are things that harm almost everyone (surveillance state, data centers, education, massive financial bubble, job losses, AI that's "more dangerous than nuclear weapons but we can't figure out how to build a sandbox".) Most these guys do not give a shit about what they're doing to society, until we start shaming them for their recklessness or even better start voting and enacting policies to stop the bullshit. I will happily own the title hater for saying that.
So much effort for a self-righteous framework of contempt for certain people. In recent years, I have observed several people up close who uncompromisingly focus their lives on economic success. What these people have in common is a remarkable shallowness of character and intellect, which I also find reflected in this essay.
I guess the fact that Paul Graham felt the urge to write and publish this in 2020 is indicative of the toxic relationship that was developing between silicon valley and the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, this essay exhibits the hallmark lack of empathy and self-awareness that perpetuate the toxic dynamic.
Sure, there are "haters", but the mirror effect is equal: powerful people often end up inside of bubbles that shield them from negative criticism, and often become blind to the legitimate criticisms people have of them.
These decisionmakers often have to make difficult decisions with powerful tradeoffs. It's more comfortable to cast those with values differences or who are on the wrong end of that decisionmaker's tradeoffs as "haters".
I think the biggest problem we have right now is our billionaires essentially live in a completely different society from the rest of us. Some of these guys are building doomsday bunkers! From their perspective, if things get really really bad, they'll just use their infinite money glitch to go somewhere safe.
The problem is these guys lack "skin in the game". They make decisions that affect people that they never even hear from or speak to -- on purpose. They don't want to speak to the commoners. Like Paul Graham, apparently, they think we're losers because we didn't chase money.
IMO, things don't get better until we abolish citizens united and invoke some pretty hefty progressive taxes. There's absolutely no societal value to allowing someone to become a trillionaire, or even a centi-billionaire. Thats way too much power for a very disconnected group of people to have.
I don’t think it’s about powerful people or personality cults. The same dynamic surely can be observed in any communities (interest groups, even families), where people take sides based on personalities rather than facts about events alone. It’s just less prominent, but same overall phenomena - the bias exists, and there are cases where it becomes severe and nearly unconditional.
It’s easy to dismiss PG with “SV techbros are nuts”, but that could be (or could be not, but there’s a risk) the same identity over substance bias manifestation. To de-bias, we should look where the class/status/social-circle identity becomes unimportant.
There’s a theory that our reasoning had evolved not for truth-seeking purposes but for a social cohesion, but I haven’t yet read well about it (“The enigma of reason” is on my reading list) to form an informed opinion.
The bubble comes because of the haters. Any decision that is made will piss off someone even if it's for stupid reasons (classic example: https://xkcd.com/1172/) and powerful people make decisions that affect many people. When any choice they make aggravates people and even choosing to do nothing aggravates some people, they quite sensibly stop listening to public opinion entirely.
You'd have to spell out for me how this is exhibited, but I'm also not clear on how it's supposed to be relevant in the first place.
> Sure, there are "haters", but the mirror effect is equal
The post starts out with a description of mirrored observers ("fanboys") and extensively discusses the mirror nature.
> It's more comfortable to cast those with values differences
Most of the time that I see criticism of the various big names in tech, it's either failing to exhibit those value differences or failing to establish their relevance. (Which is to say: when we get "person X's actions are objectionable to me because they desecrate value Y", there is not good evidence that this actually happens, at least on anywhere near the scale alleged; the desecration is essentially a meme among detractors.) From TFA:
> When you have a dispute with someone, it's usually a good idea to try to understand why they're upset and then fix things if you can. Disputes are distracting. But it's a false analogy to think of a hater as someone you have a dispute with. It's an understandable mistake, if you've never encountered haters before. But when you realize that you're dealing with a hater, and what a hater is, it's clear that it's a waste of time even to think about them.
In reading HN submissions that have the name of someone important in tech in the title, it's become abundantly clear to me that the bulk of "negative criticism" of those people comes from people in the latter category. The same when the focus is on nations or on governments. When the focus is on the technology itself (and when there isn't a clear agenda of trying to make someone responsible for some particular fault), the discourse noticeably improves.
The commenting guidelines have the right of it:
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
the wisest lil wayne lyric is "jealousy is love and hate at the same time". often times, a hater is just someone who resents someone's success because they wished they were in that position.
Haters are described as “losers in a very specific sense”: “some amount of talent” but “never achieved much”, “never will … do great work”.
Haters as “fanboys with the sign bit flipped” is a catchy assertion, but lacks either explanatory or predictive power (how? why? did they get hit by a cosmic ray?).
I think it could just as easily be that the haters are people who can sense that sign bit on the “great work” has been lost in some sort of unsafe bit-aliasing; the famous see their unsigned integers increasing, while the hater sees a large negative signed integer. Certainly this dynamic fits for the rogue’s gallery in the Thanks section.
Using the Michael Jordan vs Lebron James GOAT debate in NBA basketball, haters of one player are often driven by the fanboys of the other player. But NBA players themselves can be haters. Often it's old era versus new where you have older retired players criticizing newer eras with some evident bitterness, and the current players clapping back about how much better they are now, and players in the past wouldn't be able to compete now.
Just one example from popular entertainment, but it complicates the hater/fanboy narrative, and it's simply not true that famous successful people can't be haters (or fanboys).
I'm reminded of Don Bradman's conversation with Sachin Tendulkar at his 90th birthday (Google who they are), when he asked, "Sir Don, if you were playing today, what would you have averaged?"
Referring to the difference of the modern game.
Bradman replied, "Maybe around 70." Which seemed bizarrely low for a man who averaged 99.
Tendulkar asked, "Why only 70 and not 99?". Suspecting excessive modesty from the great.
"Come on, an average of 70 is not bad for a 90-year-old"
It’s one thing to be a Taylor Swift hater because you don’t like her music, popularity, attitude, or whatever.
It’s another thing entirely to be a Peter Thiel, Austen Allred, or Elon Musk hater because you don’t like how they are literally messing with the world in evil and selfish ways.
People get brushed off as being haters when they point out that a lot of SV is morally bankrupt. It has nothing to do with "achievement" to point out that a lot of the people running the show are people that intend a lot of harm outside their class through either carelessness or active malice. IE, I didn't hate Sam Altman or Dario Amodei until they started doom trolling and selling ridiculous fantasies non-stop. I don't hate them because they're successful -- I don't even view them as successful -- I hate them because they take actions that are detrimental for me and the rest of society. I would hate them a lot less if they stopped taking such actions.
Paul Graham, man, the whole reason I'm even on this site was because I was a fan of his essays back in the day. But I think he's too connected to this world to see how shady it is.
Graham's book "On Lisp" is really good. I think we should all try to recognize what's good from people, and call what's bad what it is.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of bad in SV now.
> when they point out that [some ideological outgroup] is morally bankrupt...
The phrasing already belies the problem. I would naturally and automatically brush off as a "hater" someone who said things like this about me, because it is suggestive of treating one's own idiosyncratic value judgments as objective truth.
Incidentally, "intend... through carelessness" is a contradiction in terms.
You can be careless in a way where it's obvious you'll cause harm, but you just don't do anything about it because you don't care. Drunk driving for instance. SV is the equivalent of a societal drunk driver right now because our normal institutions for regulating these things have been captured mostly by financial interests and corruption. The harm might not be the goal, but SV is not going to do anything to prevent it when it comes to their products (Read "Careless People", as a great example). SV's big projects right now are things that harm almost everyone (surveillance state, data centers, education, massive financial bubble, job losses, AI that's "more dangerous than nuclear weapons but we can't figure out how to build a sandbox".) Most these guys do not give a shit about what they're doing to society, until we start shaming them for their recklessness or even better start voting and enacting policies to stop the bullshit. I will happily own the title hater for saying that.
So much effort for a self-righteous framework of contempt for certain people. In recent years, I have observed several people up close who uncompromisingly focus their lives on economic success. What these people have in common is a remarkable shallowness of character and intellect, which I also find reflected in this essay.
I guess the fact that Paul Graham felt the urge to write and publish this in 2020 is indicative of the toxic relationship that was developing between silicon valley and the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, this essay exhibits the hallmark lack of empathy and self-awareness that perpetuate the toxic dynamic.
Sure, there are "haters", but the mirror effect is equal: powerful people often end up inside of bubbles that shield them from negative criticism, and often become blind to the legitimate criticisms people have of them.
These decisionmakers often have to make difficult decisions with powerful tradeoffs. It's more comfortable to cast those with values differences or who are on the wrong end of that decisionmaker's tradeoffs as "haters".
I think the biggest problem we have right now is our billionaires essentially live in a completely different society from the rest of us. Some of these guys are building doomsday bunkers! From their perspective, if things get really really bad, they'll just use their infinite money glitch to go somewhere safe.
The problem is these guys lack "skin in the game". They make decisions that affect people that they never even hear from or speak to -- on purpose. They don't want to speak to the commoners. Like Paul Graham, apparently, they think we're losers because we didn't chase money.
IMO, things don't get better until we abolish citizens united and invoke some pretty hefty progressive taxes. There's absolutely no societal value to allowing someone to become a trillionaire, or even a centi-billionaire. Thats way too much power for a very disconnected group of people to have.
I don’t think it’s about powerful people or personality cults. The same dynamic surely can be observed in any communities (interest groups, even families), where people take sides based on personalities rather than facts about events alone. It’s just less prominent, but same overall phenomena - the bias exists, and there are cases where it becomes severe and nearly unconditional.
It’s easy to dismiss PG with “SV techbros are nuts”, but that could be (or could be not, but there’s a risk) the same identity over substance bias manifestation. To de-bias, we should look where the class/status/social-circle identity becomes unimportant.
There’s a theory that our reasoning had evolved not for truth-seeking purposes but for a social cohesion, but I haven’t yet read well about it (“The enigma of reason” is on my reading list) to form an informed opinion.
The bubble comes because of the haters. Any decision that is made will piss off someone even if it's for stupid reasons (classic example: https://xkcd.com/1172/) and powerful people make decisions that affect many people. When any choice they make aggravates people and even choosing to do nothing aggravates some people, they quite sensibly stop listening to public opinion entirely.
> hallmark lack of empathy and self-awareness
You'd have to spell out for me how this is exhibited, but I'm also not clear on how it's supposed to be relevant in the first place.
> Sure, there are "haters", but the mirror effect is equal
The post starts out with a description of mirrored observers ("fanboys") and extensively discusses the mirror nature.
> It's more comfortable to cast those with values differences
Most of the time that I see criticism of the various big names in tech, it's either failing to exhibit those value differences or failing to establish their relevance. (Which is to say: when we get "person X's actions are objectionable to me because they desecrate value Y", there is not good evidence that this actually happens, at least on anywhere near the scale alleged; the desecration is essentially a meme among detractors.) From TFA:
> When you have a dispute with someone, it's usually a good idea to try to understand why they're upset and then fix things if you can. Disputes are distracting. But it's a false analogy to think of a hater as someone you have a dispute with. It's an understandable mistake, if you've never encountered haters before. But when you realize that you're dealing with a hater, and what a hater is, it's clear that it's a waste of time even to think about them.
In reading HN submissions that have the name of someone important in tech in the title, it's become abundantly clear to me that the bulk of "negative criticism" of those people comes from people in the latter category. The same when the focus is on nations or on governments. When the focus is on the technology itself (and when there isn't a clear agenda of trying to make someone responsible for some particular fault), the discourse noticeably improves.
The commenting guidelines have the right of it:
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Similar to how Trump and his supporters use "Trump Derangement Syndrome" to dismiss any criticism of him.
What the article tells us isn't about a certain group of people interacting with this person, but about that person's mindset, how he sees others.
I wrote about the harms of elitist social models and labels like that before: https://ssg.dev/trolls-dont-exist-9d879b960fd1/
Dear diary......
[dead]
the wisest lil wayne lyric is "jealousy is love and hate at the same time". often times, a hater is just someone who resents someone's success because they wished they were in that position.
Haters are described as “losers in a very specific sense”: “some amount of talent” but “never achieved much”, “never will … do great work”.
Haters as “fanboys with the sign bit flipped” is a catchy assertion, but lacks either explanatory or predictive power (how? why? did they get hit by a cosmic ray?).
I think it could just as easily be that the haters are people who can sense that sign bit on the “great work” has been lost in some sort of unsafe bit-aliasing; the famous see their unsigned integers increasing, while the hater sees a large negative signed integer. Certainly this dynamic fits for the rogue’s gallery in the Thanks section.
It's rather amusing to see a PG post flagged on HN.
(2020)
narcissistic personality disorder.
> Thanks to Austen Allred
Personally, I think some people could have used more listening to criticism, cough, I mean haters...
Growth hacking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502774
https://www.sandofsky.com/lambda-school/
Labelling people as haters (or fanboys, for that matter) is just another way of dismissing people.
Using the Michael Jordan vs Lebron James GOAT debate in NBA basketball, haters of one player are often driven by the fanboys of the other player. But NBA players themselves can be haters. Often it's old era versus new where you have older retired players criticizing newer eras with some evident bitterness, and the current players clapping back about how much better they are now, and players in the past wouldn't be able to compete now.
Just one example from popular entertainment, but it complicates the hater/fanboy narrative, and it's simply not true that famous successful people can't be haters (or fanboys).
Oh, that kind of goatlover:)
I'm reminded of Don Bradman's conversation with Sachin Tendulkar at his 90th birthday (Google who they are), when he asked, "Sir Don, if you were playing today, what would you have averaged?"
Referring to the difference of the modern game.
Bradman replied, "Maybe around 70." Which seemed bizarrely low for a man who averaged 99.
Tendulkar asked, "Why only 70 and not 99?". Suspecting excessive modesty from the great.
"Come on, an average of 70 is not bad for a 90-year-old"
[dead]
[flagged]
It’s one thing to be a Taylor Swift hater because you don’t like her music, popularity, attitude, or whatever.
It’s another thing entirely to be a Peter Thiel, Austen Allred, or Elon Musk hater because you don’t like how they are literally messing with the world in evil and selfish ways.
[flagged]