>(OMGOMGOMG Dude, Dr. Kay, sir, your excellency, sir! I'm a huge fan! HUGE! You have made my day. I'm going to be telling random strangers in the street "Alan Kay responded to m'comment on the intertubes today!" and whistling and dancing on lampposts. Okay, deep breath, calming down...)
I find this parallel interesting. I definitely have "fanboys" (I cringe at the term, but it's what pg uses, so I'll be consistent) who drive me crazy with their complete lack of critical thinking about my work -- I can see obvious flaws in many things I do, but they apparently can't -- but I can't think of anyone whom I would describe as hating me. Plenty of people ignore me, of course -- but that's quite different from actively denegrating my work or attacking me at every opportunity.
I can see three possibilities here:
1. I've just been lucky so far.
2. I have haters but I've simply not noticed them.
3. There's a range in the spectrum of "fame" where people attract fanboys but not haters -- particularly when people are famous within narrow niches -- and I'm in that range.
I'm leaning towards the third possibility, but I'm curious what other readers think here.
EDIT: pg points out on Twitter that haters are rarer than fanboys, so it may be a combination of 1 & 3: I've been lucky, but most "minor celebrities" are lucky.
I don't think you qualify as famous in the sense pg uses the word. You're well known and highly regarded in some circles, but that's really different to how people think/feel about Travis, Eric Schmidt, Elon, SamA, etc.
(Or I'm not using the word properly which might be the case because I'm not native English -- I have friends who are as well known/successful on their field as you are (apprx.) and I'd never call them famous.)
I think #3 is spot on; if you have a small amount of fame, especially in a niche area, there are people whose lives and work you'll impact enough for them to think really highly of you.
But that kind of fame doesn't really garner enough envy for people to develop much of a hatred toward you. Also, when someone badmouths a really famous person, that badmouthing can get some traction on its own just from the namedropping. When someone badmouths a niche-famous person, it's hard to get much traction. So their envy/ hatred doesn't really go anywhere.
I do wonder if there should be a third category, for people whose hatred and envy are so deep that they represent a real danger to their target. I will be happy to never have that kind of fame.
> Also, when someone badmouths a really famous person, that badmouthing can get some traction on its own just from the namedropping. When someone badmouths a niche-famous person, it's hard to get much traction. So their envy/ hatred doesn't really go anywhere.
I feel this is very important point pg didn't consider in his essay. The degree of fame one has amplifies the fanboyism and hate they receive, because the more famous someone is, the more status can a fan or hater get with their peers by displaying obsession about said celebrity.
Another factor is what your personality is and what your beat is -- one person I know with half your twitter follower count, IMO not even famous in a niche, seems to have some devoted haters, but he covers, ahem, a wider range of material.
I think another example would be two famous people in a particular industry. With one, you can't find a reddit thread mentioning his work without somebody chiming in to whine about how he presents his opinions; they'll complain the way he expresses himself is that other people who disagree with him are wrong, which irks some people. The other is extremely fastidious about his public image, and he tends to exude a sentiment that what he's saying is just his opinion, and I don't pick up the same level of hater activity. The attack surface just isn't there.
^^ I tried to keep it vague, just for fun, but I guarantee some people can parse out who these two people are.
Of all my work, scrypt definitely produces the most extreme reactions. But I think there's a significant difference between hating a thing and hating a person.
1. Your source of fame is one-dimensional. You're famous for a handful of achievements, they're unambiguously positive, and that's pretty much all that most of us remember.
2. Nobody perceives you as having power over them.
3. They hope that you'll make a 4.4 release of bsdiff with an improved suffix array construction algorithm. Maybe divsufsort, as it looked good in "SACABench: Benchmarking Suffix Array Construction" (2019).
pg points out on Twitter that haters are rarer than fanboys
I wonder if it is rarer, or that haters are caused by a reaction to fanboys?
It seems to me that haters often start off reacting to the uncritical nature of fanboyism, and then that reaction slowly slips into hate directed at the person.
(Not always though - maybe this is one particular type of the fanboy/hater relationship)
> I wonder if it is rarer, or that haters are caused by a reaction to fanboys?
Most ventures fail. Startup ventures fail even more often. If your goal was to be right most often, you would just bet that every new thing would fail. So there's something inherently illogical about being a fanboy about anything. A fanboy is definitely doing more than just looking at the odds and making a rational decision, they are putting their faith in something.
Because a fanboy derives their enthusiasm from more than simple reason and the odds, they become a threat to anyone that eschews emotion and solely uses traditional valuation models. Fanboys are hated not because they believe in a product or idea, but because they ignore tradition.
> Look at Apple fanboys. They seem to cause haters because of their uncritical boosting of anything Apple.
Apple haters have a point: Apple hardware is far more expensive than similar performance on other systems. So using a traditional objective metric such as performance per dollar, Apple is objectively worse.
However, most Apple Fanboys know they are paying a premium. They love Apple for other, less quantifiable reasons, such as design quality, beautiful integration, good marketing, and the vision of making a more human machine.
The metrics that Apple fanboys value are at complete odds with many traditional computer enthusiasts, who value specs and raw performance power.
Therefore, a "fanboy" of anything (whether that's Apple, Tesla, or the startup of the day), is not necessarily being uncritical, they are just using less commonly accepted metrics of value.
>I'm leaning towards the third possibility, but I'm curious what other readers think here.
True "haters" are way more rare than overly sensitive people imagine, and those people have a tendency to label any criticism as "hate". I think it's as simple as that.
How else do you explain Elon Musk being on the cover of mainstream magazine publications 50 times in the past 5 years while at the same time claiming the media treats him unfairly?
These overly sensitive people are the same type who believe their accomplishments are all skill, no luck.
I think there are a few possibilities, some of which are on your list, some of which aren't.
Firstly, there's definitely a point in which you attract fanboys but not haters, and if your popularity/fame is in a smaller niche, you may never end attracting the latter at all. Generally, someone tends to get haters when they go 'mainstream', and their work is shown to people that don't like it/can't see why it's popular or successful.
Number 2 on the list probably has some relevance too. For both fanboys and haters, since it's entirely likely every creator has both people who'd love them/their work if they found it and those that'd hate it, and also likely that not everyone in those camps has come across it yet.
In addition to that though, I think there are two more factors that play into how much of a hatedom you have, and I guess also how many fans you have too.
1. How you deal with attacks or criticism. If you ignore the trolls and haters and respond in a civil way to critics, you'll get a lot fewer haters than if you lash out at people. A lot of the folks with more... dedicated critics fall into the latter group. See Chris Chan, Darksyde Phil, Derek Savage, that guy who makes Yandere Simulator, etc.
2. The topic of your success/supposed expertise. If your work is seen as political, it will get a more backlash than if it's about some hobby/interest than most people are neutral about. For instance, I've recently posted two things that got popular; some videos about glitches in a certain video game, and an article calling out web developers/software engineers for using frameworks in situations where they didn't need to.
The former got mostly praise and questions, the latter has brought about a ton of personal attacks and criticism.
Someone who writes a successful article about why Donald Trump got elected/is popular is going to get a lot more hate than someone who writes about quantum mechanics.
Judging from the people who have self-identified to me as fanboys: They often aspire to follow an example. So the difference between the groups may be less how much they have achieved and how much they hope to achieve -- a question of optimism as much as anything else.
My personal theory: same reason but scoped to a limited domain. You can be a generally happy and successful person but a fanboy of an athlete because you've never achieved much in sports. You want someone to succeed because it resonates with some unrealized potential in yourself.
Being either seems like a lose-lose situation to me. If you are not being critical in your evaluation of someone you may gain from, then that's wasting time. I have found a reasonable way to combat that by always considering how much I would have been paid on average if I tried to work the time I spent. Currently the amount is hypothetical but I think that may change when I get stable income in future. I notice that aspect of thinking matures some people.
The common ground is that these people are way too interested in what other people are doing. As if life is what other people are doing instead of what one is doing oneself. Life is for participation not spectation.
I did not write this as a casting of blame. Merely as an observation. One can observe that having a broken leg is not optimal for locomotion without blaming the person who is in that condition.
I hear you. At the same time, I see this story of “if your life isn't exciting, it's your fault” too often, and I call bullshit.
I believe this story is incredibly harmful because it doesn't help 'non-participants’ or 'spectators’, as you call them, understand the limitations of their society, and how this impacts them. One of the things I'd like to do instead is to help show them (and anyone else who is interested in reflection or meaningful social change) how these systemic inequities are often slowly grinding them down, and how they can organize to change the system. If I don't help do this I think I might doom them to a life of self-loathing, not to mention that I myself would live in a world of self-masturbatory self-aggrandizement, not really connecting to others and relying instead on my perceived superiorty for comfort and safety; which I think starts to taste bitter if used as a strategy for a long enough period of time.
Don't see the inequities I am talking about? I promise you they are there when you start looking. Some of the ones I've found most glaring are (1) the systemic racism at home in the US, (2) the ongoing battles of the Global South against Global North-controlled extractive and exploitative debt, and (3) imperialistic Intellectual Property agreements which causes ongoing local and global information asymmetries. The bravery of the men and women who have been fighting in these battles is astounding: Audre Lorde, Bell Hooks, Cornel West, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Sankara, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Howard Zinn, MLK, Paulo Freire, Cedric Robinson, and many more.
Besides Anand Giridharadas and Rutger Bregman, a recent example of someone doing this important work is Law Professor Mehrsa Baradaran, author of 'The Color of Money’. There is a great summary of her arguments here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/banking-against-black-ca...
I think these are some noteworthy excerpts:
"The problem is, black capitalism has not improved the economic lives of black people, and Baradaran deftly explains the reasons why. Black people were systematically excluded from New Deal policies, including the subsidized FHA mortgages that proved fundamental in increasing white wealth, through redlining and racial covenant agreements. Where black banks did exist, they were consistently less well funded, less profitable, and made fewer loans than white banks, rendering them powerless to substantially improve the prospects of black community members. And herein lies one of the most important lessons of The Color of Money — over the course of American history, white economic success has often been subsidized by black dollars, rather than the other way around."
and:
"Even as Baradaran criticizes the implementation of black capitalism, she claims several times that the reason black banking does not succeed in lifting black people out of poverty is that the mechanisms of free-market capitalism were blocked from proper functioning by the “structural inequalities” of racism, as if these existed outside and apart from capitalism, and infected it. Racism made capitalism sick, and if we could fix the former, the latter would deliver equal benefits to all. And yet, one can take the historical evidence she presents to argue something quite different: racism is embedded in the foundations of American capitalism."
We should realize that there is not always a very sharp distinction between a participant and a spectator. We all are sometimes a participant and sometimes are tired and just want to watch TV and be a spectator. Drawing a disctinction between spectator and participant may on occasion be helpful. E.g., a young person might hear this and start wondering by him/herself 'what am I doing on these social media for hours and hours' and cut back on it. Such things occasionally happen. The question is more whether a person is doing enough participation for the purposes of his/her creativity or not enough.
You are right that systemic inequalities should be pointed out and improved upon. On the other hand we should also not lose sight of the fact that the most equal and fair societies on the planet are the western ones. Even if one is part of a disadvantaged minority it might well be possible to make much of ones life in the West. Try being part of a disadvantaged minority in China and one might find oneself in a concentration camp instead.
I don't live in the US so I am a spectator as far as racism goes there but I agree that this exists and is a problem. Especially police shooting unarmed black people is obviously a horrible thing. I do have to note though, that your example comes from a long time ago and that much improvement has been made on this front over the decades. I also agree about imperialistic intellectual property, especially patents are a big problem. Software patents should just not exist, for instance. As far as the global south vs the global north I was under the impression that this situation has actually been improving in the last decade or so. People starving to death has been a diminishing problem, as far as I know.
On the one hand it is good to point out inequalities and do something about them but on the other hand it can also make people feel hopeless so that they will achieve less then they otherwise would. This is also something that is happening to black people in the US. I once was on an online forum where the posts of a young black person gave me the impression that a case of self-learned helplessness was going on there where most of the racism involved was coming from fellow black persons and that the group-think thing was not beneficial at all.
We always have leaders and followers. I think the haters might be those who are fanboys of someone else.
Think about team-sports, the English soccer hooligans. They succumb to terrible violence because they are fanboys of their own team and haters of the other team, including the followers of the other team.
I'm not a PG fanboy ;) but I usually really admire his writing. He writes so plainly and clearly, it's something I struggle with. My issue is never ever that my writing is not flowery or interesting enough, it's that it's not simple enough. Knowing firsthand how much harder this is than one would think, I quite admire how plainly and straight-to-the-point PG writes.
Enemies make me aware of my flaws. Haters make me aware of their flaws. My enemies make me stronger. Haters are just losers or bullies. I'm not famous so I can't speak about fanboys.
I setup a business which had a reasonable amount of success, and the amount and commitment of some of the haters was a real shock to me.
Just taking a perspective publically on something fairly innocuous such as which is the best programming language seemed to attract something much more aggressive than the usual debate because I had a bit of a perceived expertise.
I had a handful of people follow me online commenting on nearly everything, calling me a fraud etc again it wasn’t justified and the topic did not really warrant such a degree of negativity.
And heaven forbid you do actually make a mistake. I made the most tiny oversight about equality and diversity and the baying mob online wanted to tear me to pieces.
One thing I was disappointed about was how the social media platforms responded. They wouldn’t even help me stop some of it even though it crossed a line.
Though it upset me at first, I successfully tuned out and just used it as motivation to prove them wrong. It’s hard though but a definite fact of life.
> Just taking a perspective publically on something fairly innocuous such as which is the best programming language
I wouldn't call that innocuous at all! Quite the opposite, this is the perfect topic for flame war: people tend to have the same kind of emotional attachment to their favorite programming language as to their favorite sport team. You can't really expect a moderate debate on that kind of topics…
Right, but unlike PG I don't think irrationality is an exclusivity of “losers”. Every human being is deeply irrational, everyone in their fashion and I don't buy the negative correlation between “success” and irrationality.
The issue is not just irrationality, it is toxic, hostile irrationality. Regardless of to what extent everyone is deeply irrational, only a minority are hostile. I have to agree, however, that some deeply hostile people have been successful, often by channeling the hostility of genuine losers.
It is possible to have a moderate debate over strongly-held opinions, so long as everyone is capable of and willing to distinguish between facts and opinions, and agree to differ over the latter. In discussions over which is the 'best' programming language, you can find examples going this way, and examples turning into flame wars. Only the former are worth following.
IRL you can, on the internet the former is much rarer and only works on small groups where the community part is important. And on Twitter or other places where people don't know each other (HN is no exception even if there is a moderation system) it just never happen.
> In Indian villages, even today, when an elephant passes through a village, all the elders gather and fold their hands in reverence. They also nudge the children to do the same and bow to the majestic pachyderm. “This is Lord Ganesha,” they say. And the kids quickly bring their hands together in reverence and holler, “Ganapati Bappa Morya!” and so on. The women step out of their homes to offer sweetmeats, lentils, flour, fruits and veggies to the mahout. Some feed the elephant bananas and sugarcane.
While this procession is on the move, a fascinating, though unsettling, thing happens: all the stray dogs of the village, puppies included, start following the elephant, barking and growling relentlessly.
What problem could the dogs possibly have with the elephant? It’s not like they are a match in any way. What competition could the hounds and pooches pose to the mighty tusker?
I’m sure if someone could ask the dogs the reason for their incessant barking, they would answer, “We have no problem with the elephant per se. It’s these people folding hands and offering all that food to the elephant that bothers us.”
But, the dogs don’t have the nerve to jump in front of the elephant or block his way. They will never come in front and will never stop barking from the back.
And so is the way of the world—the more the number of those who look up to you and stand in front with gifts, the greater the number of those who will bark behind you.
The elephant, however, never stops to shoo away the dogs or to tackle them. It keeps on walking, indifferent to the uncouth and clownish behavior of the dogs. But what makes the elephant truly unique and masterful is not just that it doesn’t stop for the dogs. It’s something more profound.
If the elephant doesn’t stop for the dogs, it doesn’t halt for the ones bowing in reverence either.
It remains unmoved by both the glory and the growls. Our true self is beyond praise and criticism, it is beyond disease, death and decay. It shines in its own splendor. (Though a common analogy, someone had shared this story with me from a discourse by Swami Rajeshwaranand.)
The emotions we experience when showered with praises or hit with criticism are temporary feelings that mostly arise when we forget how incredibly empowered and powerful we truly are.
The path of success is littered with opinions and suggestions. Everyone you meet will have some kind of an opinion and you are likely to cross paths with many who won’t believe in you. They will give you a million reasons why you will fail. It’s alright, that’s all they know. You’ll also meet some who may offer you false praise, just to attain a desired outcome. It’s the way of the material world. Then you’ll also meet some who are genuine and will influence your life in a phenomenal way.
Like the elephant, if you can keep your head on your shoulders and remain unmoved by such people and have faith in your own conviction as well as the wisdom to know when and how much to listen to someone, success is yours for the taking.
it seems possible to cure haterdom: try do to creative work in the same domain and at the level of those you hate. it's almost certain you will come to better recognize their struggles, and may even turn yourself into a fanboy once you understand what was involved for them to reach their fame.
This passage applies so perfectly to obsessed supporters of political candidates, especially in the Trump era (no matter what side):
«A fanboy is obsessive and uncritical. Liking you becomes part of their identity, and they create an image of you in their own head that is much better than reality. Everything you do is good, because you do it. If you do something bad, they find a way to see it as good. And their love for you is not, usually, a quiet, private one. They want everyone to know how great you are.»
> A hater is obsessive and uncritical. Disliking you becomes part of their identity, and they create an image of you in their own head that is much worse than reality. Everything you do is bad, because you do it.
> What sort of people become haters? Can anyone become one? I'm not sure about this, but I've noticed some patterns. Haters are generally losers in a very specific sense: although they are occasionally talented, they have never achieved much. And indeed, anyone successful enough to have achieved significant fame would be unlikely to regard another famous person as a fraud on that account, because anyone famous knows how random fame is.
I guess pg was going more for the startup founder and creative worker aspect but wouldn't a lot of it be explained by the need to be in a tribe?
You can find intelligent people in politics hating others simply due to the mere association.
A lot of startups are politically and socially charged (disruption in the power balance of society) so it makes partial sense for someone to hate otherwise they may lose their security out of their primal instincts.
It becoming a part of your identity is likely an unintended consequence of validation from enough insecure people.
Further, someone can capitalize being insecure. Probably how a lot of political celebs comes into power.
I thought the article was interesting, but this footnote left me cold:
“How can you distinguish between x calling y a fraud because x is a hater, and because y is a fraud? ... Thoughtful people are rarely taken in by [frauds]“
The world is full of “thoughtful” people who have been taken in by frauds - Theranos is a recent example - and so I think this is pretty terrible advice in general - although I can see how it might work in certain contexts.
For example, frauds often seem to work on smart people who aren’t smart in the specific field in which the fraud operates.
Is it? What ideology was that? It seemed to me like people were legitimately taken in by her. At least, that's what I got from reading Bad Blood. It didn't seem like there was any particular unifying ideology of the investors/believers in Theranos. Some people seemed to like it for its female empowerment narrative, maybe, but I don't think that was a major component for most of the prominent people involved.
Ideology is another word for narrative, and Holmes worked very hard to sell a narrative where she was a disruptive genius who would revolutionise [stale old thing that needed to be disrupted] by sheer force of will and outstanding talent.
Does that narrative not sound a little familiar?
Being a woman genius took it to another level.
It's possible Holmes actually sold the narrative to herself at least as much as she sold it to everyone else.
(But that's not an unfamiliar story either.)
The worrying thing is that Holmes blanked out legitimate criticism. Perhaps she even labelled legitimate critics as haters.
That's an overtly cult-like move. Outsiders who are not aligned with the goal of the cult - often powered by a cult of personality - are dismissed, when in fact their criticisms are realistic and appropriate.
In fact what makes fanboys and haters so annoying is obsessive irrationality. They're noisy, but worryingly content-free.
But not everyone is irrational, and both outsiders and insiders may have valid and considered non-obsessive opinions. Those opinions may be positive, or they may be critical - both for perfectly valid reasons.
> For example, frauds often seem to work on smart people who aren’t smart in the specific field in which the fraud operates.
It also works where smart people are experts in the field the fraud operates. One of the greatest frauds in science was one where an archaeologist ( amateur ) duped the experts.
I've watched for a number of times that a bully became a bully victim, and a bully victim became a bully. So I eventually concluded that they're actually the same kind of people.
> [1] There are of course some people who are genuine frauds. How can you distinguish between x calling y a fraud because x is a hater, and because y is a fraud? Look at neutral opinion. Actual frauds are usually pretty conspicuous. Thoughtful people are rarely taken in by them. So if there are some thoughtful people who like y, you can usually assume y is not a fraud.
I don't think that "some thoughtful people who like y" is good enough. There have been big "frauds" in the tech space (and so many in the finance space) were it took years for public opinion to catch up with their actions (Theranos, WeWorks, Epstien and MIT labs) despite some people (Matt levine, John Carreyrou) knowing they weren't above board these people and companies were defended (or not even questioned) by media coverage and big name personalities.
Basically yes, but it should be said that John Carreyrou didn't act like a hater. Perhaps a better test is, that a thoughtful person thinks y is a fraud, whereas more or less by definition a hater does not come across as a thoughtful person.
Not by common definition, but perhaps by this article’s.
Carreyrou was obsessive, turned his Theranos crusade into an identity component, and repeatedly used the word “fraud.” Externally, his behaviour was indistinguishable from someone with a beef if one ignored the evidence he raised. (Which was, at least early on, mostly circumstantial.)
Toxic personalities must be ignored. But if someone is calling our fraud in your organisation, it’s worth checking if there’s behaviour you may have left unchecked.
That isn't actionable advice. If you think you can reliably identify thoughtful people then you're a fool. Everyone likes to believe that they're good judges of character but we're all very fallible.
I think it's difficult to tell if oneself is thoughtful, but identifying other people as thoughtful or not is not nearly as difficult, if you have known them for any amount of time. If they are commenting on a topic you know about from personal experience, is their commentary more or less well informed than the average person?
We are certainly all fallible, but thoughtful would not imply infallible, only that you are thinking over (in this case) the actions of the person in this case, prior to deciding if they were wrong or right. A fanboy, or a hater, more or less by definition knows the answer ("right" and "wrong", respectively) before thinking about it much.
Paying attention to the opinions of other thoughtful people is a much better strategy than only paying attention to your own opinion, with all of its perspective problems. If all the thoughtful people you know have the opposite opinion of you about someone or something, it doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong, but it ought to at least prompt some double-checking on your part.
> sometimes it seems like on this site 80 percent of people fall in one of those categories for someone like elon musk. for trump it’s like 99 pct. it’s a shame people can’t just be objective and call out good/bad
I actually, uncharacteristically, disagree with a lot of what Paul Graham has said about fans and haters. His basic premise is that we should judge people/endeavors based on critical thinking and solid metrics, rather than how we "feel" about something.
There are two problems with this:
1. Who gets to define the metrics.
Any endeavor can be made to look great or horrible if different metrics are used. People who wish for "critical thinking" in public discourse are really wishing for their own critical thinking to be applied. e.g., building luxery high-rises is good because it raises a community's average home value... lets forget about the people who are being displaced.
2. There are no good metrics.
For most new endeavors, we have very little data about what they are doing. No one knows the details of SpaceX's starship and how it will turn out (probably including SpaceX employees). In politics, no one knows what Trump will do next, or what his strategy (if any) has been. No one has any good data if the next VC backed social media company will be a hit or not.
Generally, in all of these areas, all we have is a leader and sometimes a vision, but rarely a plan. A "fanboy" is someone who believes in the leadership, and a "hater" is someone who does not. It's true that neither looks at the hard details, however those details often don't exist. A fanboy/hater just trust/distrusts the leader and vision, rather than taking a close look at the individual steps that they've made.
This is actually a good thing. Someone offers up a vision and their own credibility, and you make a decision to support them based on them, rather than specific moves they've made. You trust the person first, rather than what they do.
Apple Fanboys are who they are because they believe in Apple's vision of good design to create better electronics. Startup haters are who they are because they see a lack of discipline in the space. It's entirely natural, and probably preferred, for people to make decisions this way rather than unknown data.
One thing I've noticed is confirmation bias causes people to look for any evidence to support their initial gut feeling. It gets worse the more this is tied to identity. I had gear head friends in the 1980's who loved carburetors, thought mechanical fuel injection was wonderful and exotic. And HATED electronic fuel injection. Same guys hated the Prius when it showed up. And now they hate electric cars. They make bargaining arguments why X is bad.
I think the best thing to do with someones vision is try and prove it instead of tear it down. In business the only real show stoppers are, doesn't work, doesn't pencil out[1], no customers/potential customers have no money.
[1] On the other hand see Uber. Maybe you can win with two out of three even.
I’ve definitely seen way more haters who hate simply because they’re fanboys of the competition, than frustrated talent who think they themselves should be famous instead.
Anyway, haters sometimes can’t be ignored since they often spread lies at every opportunity, and these days damaging misinformation travel way faster than truths and are very hard to clear up.
I have seen obvious marketing people starting subreddits with purpose to hate on competition/social rising and carefully craft a cult. I don't believe a wider cult hate singularity can exist without money spent on it somewhere for a purpose.
Follow who is going to profit from the hate. An uncritical hater can't rile up thousands or millions of people worldwide to hate something only specific people have access to.
Ironically, I have noticed strong fans are also strong haters and it doesn't take much for them to change their side.
Yes, these days organized hate is usually led by paid social media influencers, who are often easy to see through for people with critical thinking capacity.
Not always. I disagree with the idea that critical thinking alone is needed and that it doesn't have its own share of spectrum.
To me, critical thinking is like a veil. It describes many of the behaviors and skills underneath which are not so generally applicable. Empathizing is one of them which many critical thinkers outside of their domain forget about (it's not their fault).
A classic HN example is only a few programmers are needed to replace [insert wildly different industry jobs]
Some media influencers are purposefully obvious, critical thinking requires time and energy so once people think they figured out the obvious bait, they stop at that and move their attention to someone who calls out the obvious bait pretending to be an authority of trust. It also gives you power for denial of those untapped as conspiracy theorist or haters.
Sometimes being a hater is not because one is unsuccessful or successful in their craft. A lot of hate in the modern age is driven by ideological capture. If someone is in your ideological outgroup and famous, hate them. If someone is a billionaire and your ideology tends towards the marxist, hate them, etc.
I think tribal hatred is a little different than 'hater' as meant here. Fanboy/hater gets its essence almost from its triviality. I don't think PG was trying to describe all hate in the modern world, but rather this much narrower 'hater' concept as related to celebrity-type fame.
Huh. What do you mean by that? I think of Elon Musk's haters as more coming from the perspective of thinking he's overly self important and irresponsible (I like Elon though, for the record). I don't really think of his haters as ideological per se. What kind of ideology do you see in his haters?
> (I like Elon though, for the record). I don't really think of his haters as ideological per se. What kind of ideology do you see in his haters?
I also like Elon, but the source of the hate probably comes from two sources. The first is the audaciousness of his general proposal: that we give up technology that worked for a century (oil) and try to build something entirely different. It's based on a bias towards the status quo.
The second is probably more legitimate. No question Tesla has done amazing things, but is it really worth more than established players that sell 10X number of cars? The stock price doesn't make sense based on any traditional valuation, it can only be explained by popular enthusiasm and exuberance towards the vision that Elon provides. It feels to many that Elon is getting away with things that would doom any other company because of this perception. It feels unfair, hence the haters.
Personally, I do love Elon, SpaceX, Tesla, etc, but I don't want to get involved in the stock market casino. I support what he does because of his vision, but Tesla's stock price makes no sense to me. Instead, I'll cheer from the sidelines, and invest my money in boring ETFs.
What about the fact that he paid a shady PI to shake down a cave diver trying to help with the Thai cave rescue? Or regularly sends his troll army after journalists with baseless accusations? Or that he commited securities fraud in plain site? Or that it looks like he bailed his family out at the expense of company shareholders? Or that he burned taxpayers in Buffalo?
What about the fact that as the world wakes up to atrocities in China, he went there hat in hand, selling out to the CCP?
> There are legit reasons [Elon] could be disliked.
Yes, there are many legitimate complaints about Elon, some disputed, some not. But the legitimate complaints you describe don't create the haters. What hedge-fund short-seller, or random internet troll, really cares about Hong Kong's civil rights? The same folks that are crying fowl on Elon support far more ruthless enterprises, their complaints aren't coming from a morally sound platform.
The vast majority of hatred towards Elon is what I described: (1) his audaciousness; (2) inflated valuations that don't conform to traditional valuation models.
Sadly, any legitimate criticism is lost in this noise.
Oh, ya. Those people are a weird hybrid, I think. They're a sort of mix of hater and ideology, you're right. What it is is haterdom masquerading as an ideology.
Isn't the ideological capture a consequence of being a loser? It's such people the promises of ideologies are targeted at, whether they promise equal wealth for all, punishment of people perceived as responsible for one's ailings, or posthumous rewards for unselfish behaviour.
I think there's a bit of cruelty in so casually reducing people to "losers." Taking what must be a complex set of personal histories and circumstances that lead people to that behavior and framing it as a matter of winner vs loser seems to border on smug, especially when the writer is clearly the former.
The post clearly ignores the use of any form of sensitive language, which in this case I thought helped to illustrate the points quite well.
Personally, I can’t imagine calling somebody a loser, but in my head I have a very clear idea of what a loser is. To me a loser is anybody that, in spite of the opportunity to do so, doesn’t take any control over their own life, doesn’t take responsibility for themselves, and blames others for their failure/lack of success. Such people can become marginally successful, but they’ll always be losers, because they’ll never get what they want from life. To me, this idea seems very similar to what he was getting at.
The notion of control over one's life is elusive. Our futures can be wrought by trauma, poverty and the lottery that is our DNA, and by extension, our brain. Given the randomness/contingency Graham acknowledges explains his and others' success, and by implication the various dependencies en route to that success, I'd just ask for a bit more compassion for those, whether through birth or circumstance, find themselves constitutionally unable to make the most of their lives in the sense you probably mean. Something as simple as a deficit in executive function can wreak havoc on one's ability to self-motivate, just as an example.
I am talking about people who have opportunities they don’t take, so the spiel about circumstances is pretty off topic. In my comment I also made no reference to outcomes. I was specifically describing an approach to life. Anybody, even the most low agency circumstances, can choose how they approach life.
> Anybody, even the most low agency circumstances, can choose how they approach life.
That is a very common ideology around these parts (and also in the US), but it is simply not true. We are constrained by our mental health in how we can choose to approach life, and our mental health is partly due to genetic lottery and partly due to environmental circumstances outside of our control. This is not my opinion, scientific studies are massively (as you would say) in agreement with what I claim here.
The American obsession with "winner" and "losers" is just an excuse to be selfish and cruel. Its fruits are extreme economic equality, school shootings and people dying of easily curable diseases because they don't have money for the treatment (or even the ambulance to the hospital).
I've realized that fanboys are the same as haters with a "bit flipped" when we've had a super fan flip flop to and from being hater. And in each case he was writing articles and tweets about our startup saying why it's the best or why it's the worst.
It was quite disturbing and confusing to watch this happen. Since then I've starting engaging fanboys with caution, the same way I might engage haters. I take their opinions with a large grain of salt and try not give them a reason to get too obsessed.
To me this is such a toxic post. Using sentences like:
"He's less than a man" and "Haters are generally losers"
- to me shows an unhealthy level of grandiosity, and an inability to fully understand another person's experience.
Yes this article might help you deal with some stuff, but it's also not scalable and avoids examining the underlying deep rooted societal inequities that cause these addictive behaviors in people in the first place.
At the same time though, I am grateful to the author for showing himself. I think having these conversations helps us evolve.
I get your point, but I would guess that PG would not think of those people as losers or as haters.
For example, I know an Elon hater (not a critic, a hater). And I tried to understand it, but after asking questions it’s clear that the answers made no sense and they were trying to post-hoc rationalise their emotions. Sure, Elon has done bad things, but overall I’d say he is a net positive for the world. That is not to say we should condone everything he’s done or give him a free pass, but it is to say that the negatives do not cancel out the positives. He is not all bad, and he does not deserve haters (this is not the same as being beyond criticism).
Anyway, the hater I know is pretty privileged, and as Paul speculated really quite talented in some ways. I would also say they have underachieved in their own eyes. And that may be where the hate stems from.
Why did they underachieve? Perhaps lack of commitment and discipline, from my best knowledge. Interestingly, earlier in life they were also a fanboy of some things that may have harmed their career, by influencing their choices in a negative way. That also ties in with Paul’s essay.
I think it’s this type of person PG is labelling as haters and losers. Not people who have had traumatic experiences or very difficult lives.
I agree “loser” isn’t a mature or good choice of term, and ironically I think this is a sign of an emotional reaction from PG - but I empathise with that emotional reaction.
If you want to make the world better and are positive and optimistic, haters can drive you nuts. It’s like - “ok, I get it, you aren’t on the same page or you don’t like me - but please at the very least just ignore me rather than constantly criticise everything single thing I do without rationale. I’m just trying to help the world a bit, whilst you are doing nothing. I’m not asking you to be like me and devote your life to something - just to leave me alone.”
As a good example, consider Greta Thunberg. Regardless of your opinion of her, she is out there every day campaigning for a proper response to climate change. In doing so, she’s devoting her life to helping (even saving) all of us, trying to ensure that when your grandkids grow up they’re not living in some godawful scenario. And then her reward is so much hatred and vitriol from people who aren’t in prison living a terrible life with psychological scars - but rather from perfectly comfortable middle class haters. I can imagine sometimes she must sit down at the end of a hard day and think “what the hell is the point trying to help these people? Why do I even bother?”
(Defending PG here, but I’m not a fanboy. Used to love a lot of his writing, now dislike it more than I like it when I learnt more about the reality of startups and VC. Have really disliked a lot of his recent writing but as a very positive optimistic person I really don’t like the hater culture so this resonated with me).
> As a good example, consider Greta Thunberg. Regardless of your opinion of her, she is out there every day campaigning for a proper response to climate change. In doing so, she’s devoting her life to helping (even saving) all of us, trying to ensure that when your grandkids grow up they’re not living in some godawful scenario. And then her reward is so much hatred and vitriol from people who aren’t in prison living a terrible life with psychological scars - but rather from perfectly comfortable middle class haters. I can imagine sometimes she must sit down at the end of a hard day and think “what the hell is the point trying to help these people? Why do I even bother?”
Come on, this is ridiculous. She’s a political entrepreneur. She has her goals and values and they stand in direct opposition to those of others. She’s fighting effectively for them and they hate her for the threat to them she represents. In that she’s no different to Friedman or Krugman, or among elected officials to Trump or AOC. She put on her big girl pants and got into the political arena. When you do that and you’re good at it people are going to hate you. That’s humanity. People hate their enemies. People hate those who want to take things from them, or who say that they are bad or what they want is bad.
People don’t hate technocrats and engineers who propose keyhole solutions to climate change. They hate peoples who want to take b their nice big houses, their cars, their international holidays. Nobody hates Project Vesta, and they have a workable plan to reverse all CO2 emissions since the dawn of the industrial revolution for a mere 1.7% of global GDP.
Her father, with a prior career in social media, is running the show. That recent Facebook bug even revealed that he was posting on her behalf: https://i.imgur.com/KdsN3u7.jpg
It's really sad that she doesn't get to be a kid. She is being used.
Some people have been asking who manages this page. First of all, since last spring I only use Facebook to repost what I write on my Twitter and Instagram accounts.
Since I have chosen not to be on Facebook personally ( I tried early on but decided it wasn’t for me) I use my father Svantes account to repost content, because you need an account to moderate a Facebook page. The rest that is shared on Facebook is reposted from Twitter and Instagram by the guy who founded the Greta Thunberg Facebook page long before I knew it existed. His name is Adarsh Prathap and he lives in India. Since a lot of people thought it was my official page in the beginning I asked if I could co-manage it and he said yes.
All texts posted on my Facebook page has of course been written by me, just like everything else."
How would you express the central point? Or is it the central point that you disagree with, or feel is "toxic"? (I dislike that word, because it's one of those words that has a tendency to shut down rational discussion).
On a certain level, I probably agree with you. The word 'loser' dehumanizes people by focusing on their lack of achievements that society cares about, and achievements or agency in their own life.
How do they feel about this state of things? Probably not so good. Why did this happen, and what can they do about it? Well, maybe they're stuck in a shitty situation due to a confluence of psychological or even medical factors that's largely outside of their control. Maybe they're deserving of a break, some sympathy or a helping hand.
But if a person (who might or might not be in this situation) happens to behave destructively towards others, it's possible to discuss that while still acknowledging the points above.
Maybe 'loser' and 'less than a man' is an insensitive way to express it, which is why I was asking how you would express the central point. I think that "Ignore the haters, they're just fanboys with the sign flipped and not important" is sound advice to someone who tries to keep their sanity while attempting to do something good under a massive amount of scrutiny and criticism (some founded, most unfounded).
I don't think we have to go so far to see examples of famous people that would have been much less stressed, had less problems and kept their focus if they'd been able to follow this advice in times of extreme stress. A couple of Elon Musk's famed Twitter episodes come to mind, if you're looking for examples.
Even though famous people are in a position of privilege, they're still humans and have to endure the same emotional reactions as the rest of us. Usually amplified, since they get such a massive amount of attention. I think it's valuable to give them some coping tips.
Not the OP but as I grew older I started to realize that calling someone a “loser” (seen as bad) just because they haven’t “achieved” much is simply not ok, it only helps to prolong this (I think unhealthy) state of affairs where everyone should be seen as doing something, anything, preferably something “productive”.
This is unrelated to the article, but: Regarding the sense of the word loser you're using, there's also a fallacious aspect to it. Someone's worth as a human isn't defined by what they want to/are able to contribute with in society. You could live a perfectly good life that didn't contribute much more than your own survival and happiness.
I think that a majority of the people who post on HN are ambitious people who have such contributions as a very central part of their identity. Many people here might unfairly judge someone who works a part-time job, mostly watches Netflix in their spare time and is generally a good person in most interpersonal exchanges. And there's certainly a lot of people here who would judge themselves if that's all they did.
I find it fascinating how civil servant jobs don't pay well, yet the workers work for the government (and therefore, the people). David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs touches on this subject. And then just today there was this story about Kevin Rosenberg [1] who, after failing to pay off his debts by working hard, sued successfully to have his student loans discharged via bankruptcy. Yet he served 5 years in the military, and studied to become a lawyer (which he ultimately did not pursue a career in because of the conundrum between helping people versus getting paid well). Is he a loser? The word loser is a simple ad hominem, a DH1 based on PG's own essay about How To Disagree [2].
Gary Vee has a great pov on this...his thesis is that we hoist our self image problems inot most situations and that we should fix our self image first and that will take care of us in that we will not a negative reaction to critics
You're taking two sentences out of context here. pg's main point is that haters are just fanboys with the sign flipped, whereas your critique seems to just hone in on the two least politically-correct sounding sentences. Both sentences could have be massaged to be more PC but less direct, and the original thesis would still stand.
Your point seems to be though that we need to understand haters more (and if pg's thesis is correct, fanboys). I agree that as social planners, we do need to see why they arise, what their background is, and how social media amplifies it. But that's a big topic and pg doesn't even claim to address that.
By analogy, when you are being attacked by a hater, like many famous people, I don't think social planning is your first order response. Much like if someone were to hold you up with a gun, your immediate response wouldn't be a reflection of the societal conditions of the assailant.
Also, I'm curious whether you'd think this post would be equally toxic if pg only addressed fanboys: "Some fans slavishly love you. It's probably best to ignore them." Is that toxic? Does that generate a similar call-to-action to see why some people are so uncritical?
> By analogy, when you are being attacked by a hater, like many famous people, I don't think social planning is your first order response. Much like if someone were to hold you up with a gun, your immediate response wouldn't be a reflection of the societal conditions of the assailant.
Your analogy seems inapplicable here. This was an essay, not an immediate response. Whatever we may think of the response, it seems fair to put it down as the well-considered position of the author, unless they retract it later.
First - his example of the 'hater of the pop singer' I think is wrong.
Someone likely 'hates' the pop singer because their popularity is not justified, i.e. lacking talent or authenticity.
They don't 'hate' an obscure pop singer, because there's no point.
This is not arbitrary disdain.
I think a better example would be the comments section in HuffPo or Breitbart on politics. It's just pure political identity and nothing else: all actions of the opponent must be bad.
Second - I think his characterisation of 'loser' might be very wrong as well. A lot of very rich dudes got that way by being obsessively competitive, sometimes full of arbitrary rage at 'the other guy'. 'Vendetta' is not a word we usually associate with losers, I think it comes from the same place.
It just might be that anger is a little stickier and motivating than other things?
> I think a better example would be the comments section in HuffPo or Breitbart on politics. It's just pure political identity and nothing else: all actions of the opponent must be bad.
I don't actually think this is a better example. People have a lot on their plate, they can't be expected to investigate every issue to extreme depth. They rely on institutions. Many people join Breitbart politics because they trust Breitbart, even if they know little about it's underlying reasoning. Similarly, many people trust the national academy of sciences, even if they know little about the underlying science.
Even a critical reader can't know everything, and so they must trust people and institutions to represent them.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alankay1
>(OMGOMGOMG Dude, Dr. Kay, sir, your excellency, sir! I'm a huge fan! HUGE! You have made my day. I'm going to be telling random strangers in the street "Alan Kay responded to m'comment on the intertubes today!" and whistling and dancing on lampposts. Okay, deep breath, calming down...)
Whether he is Satoshi or not, he certainly did a brilliant launch of BSV
I can see three possibilities here:
1. I've just been lucky so far.
2. I have haters but I've simply not noticed them.
3. There's a range in the spectrum of "fame" where people attract fanboys but not haters -- particularly when people are famous within narrow niches -- and I'm in that range.
I'm leaning towards the third possibility, but I'm curious what other readers think here.
EDIT: pg points out on Twitter that haters are rarer than fanboys, so it may be a combination of 1 & 3: I've been lucky, but most "minor celebrities" are lucky.
(Or I'm not using the word properly which might be the case because I'm not native English -- I have friends who are as well known/successful on their field as you are (apprx.) and I'd never call them famous.)
But it's interesting to ponder when the whackos start to gather and why.
But that kind of fame doesn't really garner enough envy for people to develop much of a hatred toward you. Also, when someone badmouths a really famous person, that badmouthing can get some traction on its own just from the namedropping. When someone badmouths a niche-famous person, it's hard to get much traction. So their envy/ hatred doesn't really go anywhere.
I do wonder if there should be a third category, for people whose hatred and envy are so deep that they represent a real danger to their target. I will be happy to never have that kind of fame.
I feel this is very important point pg didn't consider in his essay. The degree of fame one has amplifies the fanboyism and hate they receive, because the more famous someone is, the more status can a fan or hater get with their peers by displaying obsession about said celebrity.
I think another example would be two famous people in a particular industry. With one, you can't find a reddit thread mentioning his work without somebody chiming in to whine about how he presents his opinions; they'll complain the way he expresses himself is that other people who disagree with him are wrong, which irks some people. The other is extremely fastidious about his public image, and he tends to exude a sentiment that what he's saying is just his opinion, and I don't pick up the same level of hater activity. The attack surface just isn't there.
^^ I tried to keep it vague, just for fun, but I guarantee some people can parse out who these two people are.
1. Your source of fame is one-dimensional. You're famous for a handful of achievements, they're unambiguously positive, and that's pretty much all that most of us remember.
2. Nobody perceives you as having power over them.
3. They hope that you'll make a 4.4 release of bsdiff with an improved suffix array construction algorithm. Maybe divsufsort, as it looked good in "SACABench: Benchmarking Suffix Array Construction" (2019).
At least, that's my personal guess. :P
I wonder if it is rarer, or that haters are caused by a reaction to fanboys?
It seems to me that haters often start off reacting to the uncritical nature of fanboyism, and then that reaction slowly slips into hate directed at the person.
(Not always though - maybe this is one particular type of the fanboy/hater relationship)
Most ventures fail. Startup ventures fail even more often. If your goal was to be right most often, you would just bet that every new thing would fail. So there's something inherently illogical about being a fanboy about anything. A fanboy is definitely doing more than just looking at the odds and making a rational decision, they are putting their faith in something.
Because a fanboy derives their enthusiasm from more than simple reason and the odds, they become a threat to anyone that eschews emotion and solely uses traditional valuation models. Fanboys are hated not because they believe in a product or idea, but because they ignore tradition.
Look at Apple fanboys. They seem to cause haters because of their uncritical boosting of anything Apple.
(Also PG's essay seemed mostly about fanboys and haters of people, not of a particular startup)
Apple haters have a point: Apple hardware is far more expensive than similar performance on other systems. So using a traditional objective metric such as performance per dollar, Apple is objectively worse.
However, most Apple Fanboys know they are paying a premium. They love Apple for other, less quantifiable reasons, such as design quality, beautiful integration, good marketing, and the vision of making a more human machine.
The metrics that Apple fanboys value are at complete odds with many traditional computer enthusiasts, who value specs and raw performance power.
Therefore, a "fanboy" of anything (whether that's Apple, Tesla, or the startup of the day), is not necessarily being uncritical, they are just using less commonly accepted metrics of value.
True "haters" are way more rare than overly sensitive people imagine, and those people have a tendency to label any criticism as "hate". I think it's as simple as that.
How else do you explain Elon Musk being on the cover of mainstream magazine publications 50 times in the past 5 years while at the same time claiming the media treats him unfairly?
These overly sensitive people are the same type who believe their accomplishments are all skill, no luck.
Firstly, there's definitely a point in which you attract fanboys but not haters, and if your popularity/fame is in a smaller niche, you may never end attracting the latter at all. Generally, someone tends to get haters when they go 'mainstream', and their work is shown to people that don't like it/can't see why it's popular or successful.
Number 2 on the list probably has some relevance too. For both fanboys and haters, since it's entirely likely every creator has both people who'd love them/their work if they found it and those that'd hate it, and also likely that not everyone in those camps has come across it yet.
In addition to that though, I think there are two more factors that play into how much of a hatedom you have, and I guess also how many fans you have too.
1. How you deal with attacks or criticism. If you ignore the trolls and haters and respond in a civil way to critics, you'll get a lot fewer haters than if you lash out at people. A lot of the folks with more... dedicated critics fall into the latter group. See Chris Chan, Darksyde Phil, Derek Savage, that guy who makes Yandere Simulator, etc.
2. The topic of your success/supposed expertise. If your work is seen as political, it will get a more backlash than if it's about some hobby/interest than most people are neutral about. For instance, I've recently posted two things that got popular; some videos about glitches in a certain video game, and an article calling out web developers/software engineers for using frameworks in situations where they didn't need to.
The former got mostly praise and questions, the latter has brought about a ton of personal attacks and criticism.
Someone who writes a successful article about why Donald Trump got elected/is popular is going to get a lot more hate than someone who writes about quantum mechanics.
I'd say it's a mix of those factors myself.
So if people become haters because they never achieved much, why do people become fanboys?
oh yes, blame them! the lazy buggers! [1][2]
[1] https://medium.com/@dr_eprice/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-2TEwdRnX0
edit: avoid Medium paywall on [1] = http://archive.is/ksROw
I believe this story is incredibly harmful because it doesn't help 'non-participants’ or 'spectators’, as you call them, understand the limitations of their society, and how this impacts them. One of the things I'd like to do instead is to help show them (and anyone else who is interested in reflection or meaningful social change) how these systemic inequities are often slowly grinding them down, and how they can organize to change the system. If I don't help do this I think I might doom them to a life of self-loathing, not to mention that I myself would live in a world of self-masturbatory self-aggrandizement, not really connecting to others and relying instead on my perceived superiorty for comfort and safety; which I think starts to taste bitter if used as a strategy for a long enough period of time.
Don't see the inequities I am talking about? I promise you they are there when you start looking. Some of the ones I've found most glaring are (1) the systemic racism at home in the US, (2) the ongoing battles of the Global South against Global North-controlled extractive and exploitative debt, and (3) imperialistic Intellectual Property agreements which causes ongoing local and global information asymmetries. The bravery of the men and women who have been fighting in these battles is astounding: Audre Lorde, Bell Hooks, Cornel West, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Sankara, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Howard Zinn, MLK, Paulo Freire, Cedric Robinson, and many more.
Besides Anand Giridharadas and Rutger Bregman, a recent example of someone doing this important work is Law Professor Mehrsa Baradaran, author of 'The Color of Money’. There is a great summary of her arguments here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/banking-against-black-ca...
I think these are some noteworthy excerpts:
"The problem is, black capitalism has not improved the economic lives of black people, and Baradaran deftly explains the reasons why. Black people were systematically excluded from New Deal policies, including the subsidized FHA mortgages that proved fundamental in increasing white wealth, through redlining and racial covenant agreements. Where black banks did exist, they were consistently less well funded, less profitable, and made fewer loans than white banks, rendering them powerless to substantially improve the prospects of black community members. And herein lies one of the most important lessons of The Color of Money — over the course of American history, white economic success has often been subsidized by black dollars, rather than the other way around."
and:
"Even as Baradaran criticizes the implementation of black capitalism, she claims several times that the reason black banking does not succeed in lifting black people out of poverty is that the mechanisms of free-market capitalism were blocked from proper functioning by the “structural inequalities” of racism, as if these existed outside and apart from capitalism, and infected it. Racism made capitalism sick, and if we could fix the former, the latter would deliver equal benefits to all. And yet, one can take the historical evidence she presents to argue something quite different: racism is embedded in the foundations of American capitalism."
You are right that systemic inequalities should be pointed out and improved upon. On the other hand we should also not lose sight of the fact that the most equal and fair societies on the planet are the western ones. Even if one is part of a disadvantaged minority it might well be possible to make much of ones life in the West. Try being part of a disadvantaged minority in China and one might find oneself in a concentration camp instead.
I don't live in the US so I am a spectator as far as racism goes there but I agree that this exists and is a problem. Especially police shooting unarmed black people is obviously a horrible thing. I do have to note though, that your example comes from a long time ago and that much improvement has been made on this front over the decades. I also agree about imperialistic intellectual property, especially patents are a big problem. Software patents should just not exist, for instance. As far as the global south vs the global north I was under the impression that this situation has actually been improving in the last decade or so. People starving to death has been a diminishing problem, as far as I know.
On the one hand it is good to point out inequalities and do something about them but on the other hand it can also make people feel hopeless so that they will achieve less then they otherwise would. This is also something that is happening to black people in the US. I once was on an online forum where the posts of a young black person gave me the impression that a case of self-learned helplessness was going on there where most of the racism involved was coming from fellow black persons and that the group-think thing was not beneficial at all.
Think about team-sports, the English soccer hooligans. They succumb to terrible violence because they are fanboys of their own team and haters of the other team, including the followers of the other team.
http://paulgraham.com/speak.html (counter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3720459)
http://paulgraham.com/writing44.html
http://paulgraham.com/essay.html (counter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3306364)
http://paulgraham.com/talk.html (counter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448643)
Just taking a perspective publically on something fairly innocuous such as which is the best programming language seemed to attract something much more aggressive than the usual debate because I had a bit of a perceived expertise.
I had a handful of people follow me online commenting on nearly everything, calling me a fraud etc again it wasn’t justified and the topic did not really warrant such a degree of negativity.
And heaven forbid you do actually make a mistake. I made the most tiny oversight about equality and diversity and the baying mob online wanted to tear me to pieces.
One thing I was disappointed about was how the social media platforms responded. They wouldn’t even help me stop some of it even though it crossed a line.
Though it upset me at first, I successfully tuned out and just used it as motivation to prove them wrong. It’s hard though but a definite fact of life.
I wouldn't call that innocuous at all! Quite the opposite, this is the perfect topic for flame war: people tend to have the same kind of emotional attachment to their favorite programming language as to their favorite sport team. You can't really expect a moderate debate on that kind of topics…
> In Indian villages, even today, when an elephant passes through a village, all the elders gather and fold their hands in reverence. They also nudge the children to do the same and bow to the majestic pachyderm. “This is Lord Ganesha,” they say. And the kids quickly bring their hands together in reverence and holler, “Ganapati Bappa Morya!” and so on. The women step out of their homes to offer sweetmeats, lentils, flour, fruits and veggies to the mahout. Some feed the elephant bananas and sugarcane.
While this procession is on the move, a fascinating, though unsettling, thing happens: all the stray dogs of the village, puppies included, start following the elephant, barking and growling relentlessly.
What problem could the dogs possibly have with the elephant? It’s not like they are a match in any way. What competition could the hounds and pooches pose to the mighty tusker?
I’m sure if someone could ask the dogs the reason for their incessant barking, they would answer, “We have no problem with the elephant per se. It’s these people folding hands and offering all that food to the elephant that bothers us.”
But, the dogs don’t have the nerve to jump in front of the elephant or block his way. They will never come in front and will never stop barking from the back.
And so is the way of the world—the more the number of those who look up to you and stand in front with gifts, the greater the number of those who will bark behind you.
The elephant, however, never stops to shoo away the dogs or to tackle them. It keeps on walking, indifferent to the uncouth and clownish behavior of the dogs. But what makes the elephant truly unique and masterful is not just that it doesn’t stop for the dogs. It’s something more profound.
If the elephant doesn’t stop for the dogs, it doesn’t halt for the ones bowing in reverence either.
It remains unmoved by both the glory and the growls. Our true self is beyond praise and criticism, it is beyond disease, death and decay. It shines in its own splendor. (Though a common analogy, someone had shared this story with me from a discourse by Swami Rajeshwaranand.)
The emotions we experience when showered with praises or hit with criticism are temporary feelings that mostly arise when we forget how incredibly empowered and powerful we truly are.
The path of success is littered with opinions and suggestions. Everyone you meet will have some kind of an opinion and you are likely to cross paths with many who won’t believe in you. They will give you a million reasons why you will fail. It’s alright, that’s all they know. You’ll also meet some who may offer you false praise, just to attain a desired outcome. It’s the way of the material world. Then you’ll also meet some who are genuine and will influence your life in a phenomenal way.
Like the elephant, if you can keep your head on your shoulders and remain unmoved by such people and have faith in your own conviction as well as the wisdom to know when and how much to listen to someone, success is yours for the taking.
«A fanboy is obsessive and uncritical. Liking you becomes part of their identity, and they create an image of you in their own head that is much better than reality. Everything you do is good, because you do it. If you do something bad, they find a way to see it as good. And their love for you is not, usually, a quiet, private one. They want everyone to know how great you are.»
> What sort of people become haters? Can anyone become one? I'm not sure about this, but I've noticed some patterns. Haters are generally losers in a very specific sense: although they are occasionally talented, they have never achieved much. And indeed, anyone successful enough to have achieved significant fame would be unlikely to regard another famous person as a fraud on that account, because anyone famous knows how random fame is.
I guess pg was going more for the startup founder and creative worker aspect but wouldn't a lot of it be explained by the need to be in a tribe? You can find intelligent people in politics hating others simply due to the mere association.
A lot of startups are politically and socially charged (disruption in the power balance of society) so it makes partial sense for someone to hate otherwise they may lose their security out of their primal instincts.
It becoming a part of your identity is likely an unintended consequence of validation from enough insecure people. Further, someone can capitalize being insecure. Probably how a lot of political celebs comes into power.
“How can you distinguish between x calling y a fraud because x is a hater, and because y is a fraud? ... Thoughtful people are rarely taken in by [frauds]“
The world is full of “thoughtful” people who have been taken in by frauds - Theranos is a recent example - and so I think this is pretty terrible advice in general - although I can see how it might work in certain contexts.
For example, frauds often seem to work on smart people who aren’t smart in the specific field in which the fraud operates.
Does that narrative not sound a little familiar?
Being a woman genius took it to another level.
It's possible Holmes actually sold the narrative to herself at least as much as she sold it to everyone else.
(But that's not an unfamiliar story either.)
The worrying thing is that Holmes blanked out legitimate criticism. Perhaps she even labelled legitimate critics as haters.
That's an overtly cult-like move. Outsiders who are not aligned with the goal of the cult - often powered by a cult of personality - are dismissed, when in fact their criticisms are realistic and appropriate.
In fact what makes fanboys and haters so annoying is obsessive irrationality. They're noisy, but worryingly content-free.
But not everyone is irrational, and both outsiders and insiders may have valid and considered non-obsessive opinions. Those opinions may be positive, or they may be critical - both for perfectly valid reasons.
But it's not?
I mean I guess there is some kind of relationship - ideologies usually have some kind of story that goes with them.
But a narrative in itself isn't an ideology.
But I do agree that Holmes was able to project a "reality distortion field" in the same way Jobs could. I think that's different to ideology though.
Even more recently, "John Carmack and Amazon's $30 1TB thumb drives"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22018782
> For example, frauds often seem to work on smart people who aren’t smart in the specific field in which the fraud operates.
It also works where smart people are experts in the field the fraud operates. One of the greatest frauds in science was one where an archaeologist ( amateur ) duped the experts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
Sometimes, in banking, finance and fine art, the scammers scam the experts in banking, finance and fine art.
If there's better evidence that VCs think they're smarter than everyone else, I' don't know what it is.
The Waltons; Carlos Slim, Rupert Murdoch; Robert Kraft; George Shultz; Larry Ellison. Are these not "thoughtful people"? This is from ONE FRAUD.
Articles like this are how you get "haters".
I don't think that "some thoughtful people who like y" is good enough. There have been big "frauds" in the tech space (and so many in the finance space) were it took years for public opinion to catch up with their actions (Theranos, WeWorks, Epstien and MIT labs) despite some people (Matt levine, John Carreyrou) knowing they weren't above board these people and companies were defended (or not even questioned) by media coverage and big name personalities.
Those aren't examples of "thoughtful people".
Not by common definition, but perhaps by this article’s.
Carreyrou was obsessive, turned his Theranos crusade into an identity component, and repeatedly used the word “fraud.” Externally, his behaviour was indistinguishable from someone with a beef if one ignored the evidence he raised. (Which was, at least early on, mostly circumstantial.)
Toxic personalities must be ignored. But if someone is calling our fraud in your organisation, it’s worth checking if there’s behaviour you may have left unchecked.
We are certainly all fallible, but thoughtful would not imply infallible, only that you are thinking over (in this case) the actions of the person in this case, prior to deciding if they were wrong or right. A fanboy, or a hater, more or less by definition knows the answer ("right" and "wrong", respectively) before thinking about it much.
Paying attention to the opinions of other thoughtful people is a much better strategy than only paying attention to your own opinion, with all of its perspective problems. If all the thoughtful people you know have the opposite opinion of you about someone or something, it doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong, but it ought to at least prompt some double-checking on your part.
for trump it’s like 99 pct.
it’s a shame people can’t just be objective and call out good/bad
I actually, uncharacteristically, disagree with a lot of what Paul Graham has said about fans and haters. His basic premise is that we should judge people/endeavors based on critical thinking and solid metrics, rather than how we "feel" about something.
There are two problems with this:
1. Who gets to define the metrics. Any endeavor can be made to look great or horrible if different metrics are used. People who wish for "critical thinking" in public discourse are really wishing for their own critical thinking to be applied. e.g., building luxery high-rises is good because it raises a community's average home value... lets forget about the people who are being displaced.
2. There are no good metrics. For most new endeavors, we have very little data about what they are doing. No one knows the details of SpaceX's starship and how it will turn out (probably including SpaceX employees). In politics, no one knows what Trump will do next, or what his strategy (if any) has been. No one has any good data if the next VC backed social media company will be a hit or not.
Generally, in all of these areas, all we have is a leader and sometimes a vision, but rarely a plan. A "fanboy" is someone who believes in the leadership, and a "hater" is someone who does not. It's true that neither looks at the hard details, however those details often don't exist. A fanboy/hater just trust/distrusts the leader and vision, rather than taking a close look at the individual steps that they've made.
This is actually a good thing. Someone offers up a vision and their own credibility, and you make a decision to support them based on them, rather than specific moves they've made. You trust the person first, rather than what they do.
Apple Fanboys are who they are because they believe in Apple's vision of good design to create better electronics. Startup haters are who they are because they see a lack of discipline in the space. It's entirely natural, and probably preferred, for people to make decisions this way rather than unknown data.
I think the best thing to do with someones vision is try and prove it instead of tear it down. In business the only real show stoppers are, doesn't work, doesn't pencil out[1], no customers/potential customers have no money.
[1] On the other hand see Uber. Maybe you can win with two out of three even.
Anyway, haters sometimes can’t be ignored since they often spread lies at every opportunity, and these days damaging misinformation travel way faster than truths and are very hard to clear up.
Follow who is going to profit from the hate. An uncritical hater can't rile up thousands or millions of people worldwide to hate something only specific people have access to.
Ironically, I have noticed strong fans are also strong haters and it doesn't take much for them to change their side.
To me, critical thinking is like a veil. It describes many of the behaviors and skills underneath which are not so generally applicable. Empathizing is one of them which many critical thinkers outside of their domain forget about (it's not their fault). A classic HN example is only a few programmers are needed to replace [insert wildly different industry jobs]
Some media influencers are purposefully obvious, critical thinking requires time and energy so once people think they figured out the obvious bait, they stop at that and move their attention to someone who calls out the obvious bait pretending to be an authority of trust. It also gives you power for denial of those untapped as conspiracy theorist or haters.
I also like Elon, but the source of the hate probably comes from two sources. The first is the audaciousness of his general proposal: that we give up technology that worked for a century (oil) and try to build something entirely different. It's based on a bias towards the status quo.
The second is probably more legitimate. No question Tesla has done amazing things, but is it really worth more than established players that sell 10X number of cars? The stock price doesn't make sense based on any traditional valuation, it can only be explained by popular enthusiasm and exuberance towards the vision that Elon provides. It feels to many that Elon is getting away with things that would doom any other company because of this perception. It feels unfair, hence the haters.
Personally, I do love Elon, SpaceX, Tesla, etc, but I don't want to get involved in the stock market casino. I support what he does because of his vision, but Tesla's stock price makes no sense to me. Instead, I'll cheer from the sidelines, and invest my money in boring ETFs.
What about the fact that as the world wakes up to atrocities in China, he went there hat in hand, selling out to the CCP?
There are legit reasons he could be disliked.
Yes, there are many legitimate complaints about Elon, some disputed, some not. But the legitimate complaints you describe don't create the haters. What hedge-fund short-seller, or random internet troll, really cares about Hong Kong's civil rights? The same folks that are crying fowl on Elon support far more ruthless enterprises, their complaints aren't coming from a morally sound platform.
The vast majority of hatred towards Elon is what I described: (1) his audaciousness; (2) inflated valuations that don't conform to traditional valuation models.
Sadly, any legitimate criticism is lost in this noise.
Personally, I can’t imagine calling somebody a loser, but in my head I have a very clear idea of what a loser is. To me a loser is anybody that, in spite of the opportunity to do so, doesn’t take any control over their own life, doesn’t take responsibility for themselves, and blames others for their failure/lack of success. Such people can become marginally successful, but they’ll always be losers, because they’ll never get what they want from life. To me, this idea seems very similar to what he was getting at.
> in spite of the opportunity to do so
I am talking about people who have opportunities they don’t take, so the spiel about circumstances is pretty off topic. In my comment I also made no reference to outcomes. I was specifically describing an approach to life. Anybody, even the most low agency circumstances, can choose how they approach life.
That is a very common ideology around these parts (and also in the US), but it is simply not true. We are constrained by our mental health in how we can choose to approach life, and our mental health is partly due to genetic lottery and partly due to environmental circumstances outside of our control. This is not my opinion, scientific studies are massively (as you would say) in agreement with what I claim here.
The American obsession with "winner" and "losers" is just an excuse to be selfish and cruel. Its fruits are extreme economic equality, school shootings and people dying of easily curable diseases because they don't have money for the treatment (or even the ambulance to the hospital).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It was quite disturbing and confusing to watch this happen. Since then I've starting engaging fanboys with caution, the same way I might engage haters. I take their opinions with a large grain of salt and try not give them a reason to get too obsessed.
How about "Taylor Swift has haters, but so did Jeffrey Eipstein and Elizabeth Holmes".
"He's less than a man" and "Haters are generally losers"
- to me shows an unhealthy level of grandiosity, and an inability to fully understand another person's experience.
Yes this article might help you deal with some stuff, but it's also not scalable and avoids examining the underlying deep rooted societal inequities that cause these addictive behaviors in people in the first place.
At the same time though, I am grateful to the author for showing himself. I think having these conversations helps us evolve.
Now go watch 'The Work' (2017): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8OVXG2GhpQ
For example, I know an Elon hater (not a critic, a hater). And I tried to understand it, but after asking questions it’s clear that the answers made no sense and they were trying to post-hoc rationalise their emotions. Sure, Elon has done bad things, but overall I’d say he is a net positive for the world. That is not to say we should condone everything he’s done or give him a free pass, but it is to say that the negatives do not cancel out the positives. He is not all bad, and he does not deserve haters (this is not the same as being beyond criticism).
Anyway, the hater I know is pretty privileged, and as Paul speculated really quite talented in some ways. I would also say they have underachieved in their own eyes. And that may be where the hate stems from.
Why did they underachieve? Perhaps lack of commitment and discipline, from my best knowledge. Interestingly, earlier in life they were also a fanboy of some things that may have harmed their career, by influencing their choices in a negative way. That also ties in with Paul’s essay.
I think it’s this type of person PG is labelling as haters and losers. Not people who have had traumatic experiences or very difficult lives.
I agree “loser” isn’t a mature or good choice of term, and ironically I think this is a sign of an emotional reaction from PG - but I empathise with that emotional reaction.
If you want to make the world better and are positive and optimistic, haters can drive you nuts. It’s like - “ok, I get it, you aren’t on the same page or you don’t like me - but please at the very least just ignore me rather than constantly criticise everything single thing I do without rationale. I’m just trying to help the world a bit, whilst you are doing nothing. I’m not asking you to be like me and devote your life to something - just to leave me alone.”
As a good example, consider Greta Thunberg. Regardless of your opinion of her, she is out there every day campaigning for a proper response to climate change. In doing so, she’s devoting her life to helping (even saving) all of us, trying to ensure that when your grandkids grow up they’re not living in some godawful scenario. And then her reward is so much hatred and vitriol from people who aren’t in prison living a terrible life with psychological scars - but rather from perfectly comfortable middle class haters. I can imagine sometimes she must sit down at the end of a hard day and think “what the hell is the point trying to help these people? Why do I even bother?”
(Defending PG here, but I’m not a fanboy. Used to love a lot of his writing, now dislike it more than I like it when I learnt more about the reality of startups and VC. Have really disliked a lot of his recent writing but as a very positive optimistic person I really don’t like the hater culture so this resonated with me).
Come on, this is ridiculous. She’s a political entrepreneur. She has her goals and values and they stand in direct opposition to those of others. She’s fighting effectively for them and they hate her for the threat to them she represents. In that she’s no different to Friedman or Krugman, or among elected officials to Trump or AOC. She put on her big girl pants and got into the political arena. When you do that and you’re good at it people are going to hate you. That’s humanity. People hate their enemies. People hate those who want to take things from them, or who say that they are bad or what they want is bad.
People don’t hate technocrats and engineers who propose keyhole solutions to climate change. They hate peoples who want to take b their nice big houses, their cars, their international holidays. Nobody hates Project Vesta, and they have a workable plan to reverse all CO2 emissions since the dawn of the industrial revolution for a mere 1.7% of global GDP.
https://projectvesta.org/
Her father, with a prior career in social media, is running the show. That recent Facebook bug even revealed that he was posting on her behalf: https://i.imgur.com/KdsN3u7.jpg
It's really sad that she doesn't get to be a kid. She is being used.
"Greta Thunberg - January 11 at 7:36 PM:
Some people have been asking who manages this page. First of all, since last spring I only use Facebook to repost what I write on my Twitter and Instagram accounts.
Since I have chosen not to be on Facebook personally ( I tried early on but decided it wasn’t for me) I use my father Svantes account to repost content, because you need an account to moderate a Facebook page. The rest that is shared on Facebook is reposted from Twitter and Instagram by the guy who founded the Greta Thunberg Facebook page long before I knew it existed. His name is Adarsh Prathap and he lives in India. Since a lot of people thought it was my official page in the beginning I asked if I could co-manage it and he said yes.
All texts posted on my Facebook page has of course been written by me, just like everything else."
Source: https://www.facebook.com/gretathunbergsweden/posts/103195633...
On a certain level, I probably agree with you. The word 'loser' dehumanizes people by focusing on their lack of achievements that society cares about, and achievements or agency in their own life.
How do they feel about this state of things? Probably not so good. Why did this happen, and what can they do about it? Well, maybe they're stuck in a shitty situation due to a confluence of psychological or even medical factors that's largely outside of their control. Maybe they're deserving of a break, some sympathy or a helping hand.
But if a person (who might or might not be in this situation) happens to behave destructively towards others, it's possible to discuss that while still acknowledging the points above.
Maybe 'loser' and 'less than a man' is an insensitive way to express it, which is why I was asking how you would express the central point. I think that "Ignore the haters, they're just fanboys with the sign flipped and not important" is sound advice to someone who tries to keep their sanity while attempting to do something good under a massive amount of scrutiny and criticism (some founded, most unfounded).
I don't think we have to go so far to see examples of famous people that would have been much less stressed, had less problems and kept their focus if they'd been able to follow this advice in times of extreme stress. A couple of Elon Musk's famed Twitter episodes come to mind, if you're looking for examples.
Even though famous people are in a position of privilege, they're still humans and have to endure the same emotional reactions as the rest of us. Usually amplified, since they get such a massive amount of attention. I think it's valuable to give them some coping tips.
I think that a majority of the people who post on HN are ambitious people who have such contributions as a very central part of their identity. Many people here might unfairly judge someone who works a part-time job, mostly watches Netflix in their spare time and is generally a good person in most interpersonal exchanges. And there's certainly a lot of people here who would judge themselves if that's all they did.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/student-loans-discharged-in-b...
[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
... plus some very unfortunate gender stereotyping.
Your point seems to be though that we need to understand haters more (and if pg's thesis is correct, fanboys). I agree that as social planners, we do need to see why they arise, what their background is, and how social media amplifies it. But that's a big topic and pg doesn't even claim to address that.
By analogy, when you are being attacked by a hater, like many famous people, I don't think social planning is your first order response. Much like if someone were to hold you up with a gun, your immediate response wouldn't be a reflection of the societal conditions of the assailant.
Also, I'm curious whether you'd think this post would be equally toxic if pg only addressed fanboys: "Some fans slavishly love you. It's probably best to ignore them." Is that toxic? Does that generate a similar call-to-action to see why some people are so uncritical?
Your analogy seems inapplicable here. This was an essay, not an immediate response. Whatever we may think of the response, it seems fair to put it down as the well-considered position of the author, unless they retract it later.
First - his example of the 'hater of the pop singer' I think is wrong.
Someone likely 'hates' the pop singer because their popularity is not justified, i.e. lacking talent or authenticity.
They don't 'hate' an obscure pop singer, because there's no point.
This is not arbitrary disdain.
I think a better example would be the comments section in HuffPo or Breitbart on politics. It's just pure political identity and nothing else: all actions of the opponent must be bad.
Second - I think his characterisation of 'loser' might be very wrong as well. A lot of very rich dudes got that way by being obsessively competitive, sometimes full of arbitrary rage at 'the other guy'. 'Vendetta' is not a word we usually associate with losers, I think it comes from the same place.
It just might be that anger is a little stickier and motivating than other things?
I don't actually think this is a better example. People have a lot on their plate, they can't be expected to investigate every issue to extreme depth. They rely on institutions. Many people join Breitbart politics because they trust Breitbart, even if they know little about it's underlying reasoning. Similarly, many people trust the national academy of sciences, even if they know little about the underlying science.
Even a critical reader can't know everything, and so they must trust people and institutions to represent them.