Question remains: why is so much self-help posted and so many people are upvoting it on HN. I'm not sure the OP meant "featured" as opposed to "naturally upvoted".
Why not? I think this type of educational content for betterment is quite a desirable trait of HN. If you want an alphabet soup of what’s hot, corpo PR or clickbait content there’s many other places on the internet, like Reddit just for that. I view the intellectual and thoughtfulness of HN as a feature, not a bug.
>I think this type of educational content for betterment is quite a desirable trait of HN
I think one complaint can assume the opposite: that it's trite, snake-oil, or vacuous content, usually chased compulsively one-after-another, by people far from actually improving (or, in lieu of improving).
Yeah, I mean some of it is interesting but you hit diminishing returns after like two talks because it's so personal, vague, vast, and complex to give meaningful advice when the speaker/writer isn't there with the audience.
I think it can become detrimental procrastination content quite quickly because it gives the illusion of "doing something about a problem", without really doing anything.
I also find it can keep you from moving on from things, if you don't yet know "how to think" why are you thinking? Therefore you should stop and read the article. lol.
Bit abstract there, but there is an assumption that you don't already know pretty well how to think that's being thrown at you, and this bugs me.
Self help is a bit like fad diets. It's a painkiller for a burning problem. It works instantly, and often for a few months, but suddenly you're at a point where you're no better off than not following it.
It's still useful to have all the comments around to judge the pros and cons of a technique, but HN leans cynical, so it's often not that useful either.
1. Deep Work by Cal Newport has made a long-lasting effect in my life. My life is significantly better because I read it.
2. I got to know about The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa through HN. Literally changed my life.
Self-help is too broad. There are master marketers with shallow content like Robin Sharma, blog-post-inflaters like Mark Manson, and genuinely helpful content like Prsgmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt.
Like novels, movies, and anything else, there are many kinds of self-help.
Most self-help stuff online is click-baity nonsense which a lot of very analytical people like us see right through. Maybe the HN audience appreciates more anecdotal discussions of what others, like us, have found success with.
I think its also because the HN crowd is more curious, introspective and career driven than a lot of other forums.
I think the concentration of content like this is a crucial feature of HN I know and love. You have shown some rare examples of topics I am interested in up to the last day of my life. Most of cool things becomes less interesting while age is going on, but I can not imagine any healthy-minded person who is not interesting in enhancing some cognitive functions.
A lot of autodidacts in the HN community. After Google, you ask your community.
A lot of people who have "high achiever" aspirations who are concerned about aspects of their lifestyle in a world where they feel they have lost connection to family and peer group or fear the consequences of opening up.
Possibly a return to more balanced male/female participation? I say this with some trepidation, it might be seen as objectifying.
Tech is changing rapidly. So everyone feels as though the 70ish cubic inches of their skull are the bottleneck. Hence the demand for shortcuts, and for anything that promises to make you more efficient in learning and working.
Human brain is still primitive, nearly the same with that of a hunter-gatherer.
Technology has progressed in an unthinkable pace. Society, economics have changed to keep up.
Human brain did not have the time to evolve to the changed scenario.
Human brain is fantastic but it never evolved for what most of us in HN do- knowledge work.
Agriculture, and even industry after the first revolution did not demand human beings to be changed by much.
That is not true with knowledge work. You need effective, designed methods to learn, store knowledge, apply them to different scenarios, be focused for longer hours, and so on.
At the same time you want to be happy. You need to find balance. Society changed very rapidly. It does not give you learned frameworks for the new scenario.
You need to actively, vigilantly, deliberately learn how to manage yourself, your knowledge, your relationships, your business.
Most HNers have their basics solved, and they want to grow further into the area for which evolution or even society has not prepared us.
It makes me happy to see that people realize this one way or the other- and try to solve this problem. We acknowledge that a gap exists, we only try to fill that by any amount we can. I applaud those who do this.
I think that is debatable, at least from the Western standpoint. Much of Western society and its economics produce tremendous amounts of depression and anxiety (rooted mostly in fear).
Does it matter? The question was stated rather neutral and the answers he/she got are very insightful imo. No need to drag this in a (forum-) political direction (:
It mattered to me. Despite the quality of responses, the question was asked in bad faith if the goal was to make a statement instead of seek an answer.
A plausibe "big-picture" explaination is attributing it (partly) to several intertwined cultural movements, originating or being popular in California in the 60s. They focussed on individual self-improvement, particularly the human potential movement with its idea of self-actualization as highest virtue (See Maslow’s pyramid of needs) and claims that we "only use 10% of our brains". Human potential matches some other ideas that are influential in the tech industry, like frontier-ism and libertarianism and engineering technological solutions for problems (Herbert Simon might be an example for putting forward a problem focussed model of thinking, which also influenced Artificual Intelligence and thus probably the rather AI-influenced early hacker culture).
I think it is influenced by Paul Graham (a YC co-founder) who write similar articles and naturally they get so much praise etc. Also I will be honest I feel like IT people are more prune to self-help.
I think that's just you. I'd be surprised if it's 5%, although the % of AskHNs that could be called "self-help" is, I'd guess, usually higher than on the main page.
"So much" compared to what, anyway? You assume it would/should be 0%, or what? It sounds like you don't want any, or at least think there's too much.
Personally, in my life I've gotten an enormous amount from self-help, psychology, spirituality, philosophy-of-life books of all kinds, but 95% of the time on HN the subject comes up in comments, I read that self-help-type books are nonsense, worse than useless, full of filler when they could be a list of points, etc. I get the impression people don't know where to find the good books, or don't believe they exist, so they ask on here.
If you remember when book stores were still around, you would have noticed that the self-help section was one of the largest sections in the store (compared to say, Philosophy, which arguably has much deeper ideas on the human condition). YouTube is filled with self-help. You can’t get through a Joe Rogan podcast without self improvement advice.
It can be exhausting for sure. It’s a mutation of self-pity, which is a mutation of self-absorption, if we had to root cause analyze this.
To put it simply, we have a very vain and narcissistic society at this point. We can’t clearly pin point if this is a modern advent or truly an everlasting dynamic of humanity (has it always been here, and will it always be here?). In the contemporaneous, all we can do is contemplate if it’s particularly worse right now, but, that in itself is … also self-absorption.
I think people who have energy for conspiracy ideas should find a healthy outlet like fiction. Similarly, those who are in the higher end of the self-absorption spectrum (most everyone I’ve met), should find a healthy place to put that like Philosophy. Contemplate existence and Cogito, ergo sum. The low level “how do I, me, and past me and future me, continue being me and finding meaning in me, myself and I, and feel good about it”.
Overall, it’s a form of egotism to recommend such people seek therapy. That’s putting one of the most common human traits on a pedestal. As in, your vanity is soooo serious that you need clinical professional help - lol. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen that ridiculous recommendation for run of the mill stuff. Half the reason these things become compulsive pattern thoughts is because we validate it.
Take a Philosophy 101 Couesera course over a glass of wine, and laugh about it. I promise you the “I find no meaning at work” questions will become hilarious soon enough.
And there it is, the grand hypocrisy. I just ultimately gave some self-help advice.
Many people are concerned about whether they're doing the best for their lifes or not, and it isn't always easy to talk about this things face-to-face because of the expectations that society places on us. Therefore, many people end up seeking help online and Hacker News Ask gives that possibility.
These are meta problems, not the nitty-gritty low level aspect of programming, so there is always room to improve on the larger scale of things. Self-improvement is still hacking. Coding is sweating the details, cultivating good headspace precedes that. If you're not mentally & physically fit to code, then don't do it.
Your post was like an epiphany. I suddenly realised that the content has shifted over the years. it used to be heavily tech based with a smattering of startup and business stuff. Now...it's half marketing dribble, weird single posts, and political commentary
because we're surrounded by folks with higher IQs on this platform and so there is demand for tools to help bridge the gap. besides making you feel good for a few minutes, the efficacy of which are questionable IMHO.
HN members are possibly more easily seduced than others by the idea of "hacking" one's brain to become more productive.
As for why such articles are commo, I'd guess the following:
1) these articles get more engagement from the broader HN community because they're more general than the niche topics that are often posted.
2) we're about 10-15 years into the era of hustle culture. Regardless of where you are on the career ladder, there's pressure to do more, make more.
3) we're 15 years into the smartphone era, and our collective attention and focus have taken a beating, and people want to address that.
4) Tim Ferris, the erstwhile Tony Robbins of Silicon Valley has been pushing the idea of shortcuts and 'hacks' for life issues for a decade, and has been pretty influential.
engineers have a lot of mental health challenges due to the general abusive work environments, unrealistic expectations about performance on both sides, and the constant relearning of tools, grueling degrees followed by coding test grinding etc
the solution is there, to say no to a lot of this, but this requires a collaborative effort.
Depression goes hand to hand with self-help as major themes on HN: two faces of the same phenomenon.
As already mentioned but worth it repeating, most self-help advice, in posts or books, are without ground.
Only experimental psychology can provide such a ground, but this is yet another academic field were the reproducibility crisis is high.
I read several times in academic sources that around 60% of psychological experiments' results can not be reproduced.
Many scandals revealed that very famous experiments had been willingly falsified, such as the "Stanford experiment". Stockholm syndrome is also a myth. The Hearst heiress has not been the "victim" of it, since just absolutely no academic psychologist investigated the case. It has not been proved since either.
I consider experimental psychology, and History as well, as Science. But the publish or perish system has killed probity in most academic fields. Biology, medicine, nutrition and even astrophysics are gangrened.
When you poll the general population, honest is a value important to the lower economic classes. "Do not steal" is an important moral rule since the temptation is high in our society of abundance (not for everybody) and constant call to consume through pervasive advertisements.
But the curve is linear: the more you go up in the social ladder, the lower honesty is ranked as a major value. White collars and capitalists escape taxes by fraud all the time, but very few end in jail. As recently shown, the IRS is more devoted to track the poor's fraud. It's the same in Europe. Luxemburg lives thanks to fiscal fraud of EU's firms.
Success ranks very high in the upper classes. Hence the self-help. People feel they are failure if they are not at least millionaires at 30. So they make do by picking up "methods" or set of tricks to get there. Or they get depressed.
Note also how often psychedelic products are mentioned as the panacea for depression. It is a very promising field (I can tell by experience and more and more scientific papers confirm it).
But it's often the immediate result that is researched. Gob some mushrooms, feel better, go back to the billionaire game... and back to depression a few weeks or months afterwards.
One need therapy to really get out if depression (or burn-out). If you feel the constant urge to be always more productive, maybe it's that surge that needs to be interrogated.
It doesn't mean to never try a method that you read about to be more this or that. Why not? Improving oneself is good. Just keep the whole picture in mind, eg be mindful of what you are looking for. Basic common sense that I myself forgot many times.
38 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 85.8 ms ] threadI think one complaint can assume the opposite: that it's trite, snake-oil, or vacuous content, usually chased compulsively one-after-another, by people far from actually improving (or, in lieu of improving).
I think it can become detrimental procrastination content quite quickly because it gives the illusion of "doing something about a problem", without really doing anything. I also find it can keep you from moving on from things, if you don't yet know "how to think" why are you thinking? Therefore you should stop and read the article. lol. Bit abstract there, but there is an assumption that you don't already know pretty well how to think that's being thrown at you, and this bugs me.
It's still useful to have all the comments around to judge the pros and cons of a technique, but HN leans cynical, so it's often not that useful either.
Erm, not really.
1. Deep Work by Cal Newport has made a long-lasting effect in my life. My life is significantly better because I read it.
2. I got to know about The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa through HN. Literally changed my life.
Self-help is too broad. There are master marketers with shallow content like Robin Sharma, blog-post-inflaters like Mark Manson, and genuinely helpful content like Prsgmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt.
Like novels, movies, and anything else, there are many kinds of self-help.
I think its also because the HN crowd is more curious, introspective and career driven than a lot of other forums.
A lot of people who have "high achiever" aspirations who are concerned about aspects of their lifestyle in a world where they feel they have lost connection to family and peer group or fear the consequences of opening up.
Possibly a return to more balanced male/female participation? I say this with some trepidation, it might be seen as objectifying.
Technology has progressed in an unthinkable pace. Society, economics have changed to keep up.
Human brain did not have the time to evolve to the changed scenario.
Human brain is fantastic but it never evolved for what most of us in HN do- knowledge work.
Agriculture, and even industry after the first revolution did not demand human beings to be changed by much.
That is not true with knowledge work. You need effective, designed methods to learn, store knowledge, apply them to different scenarios, be focused for longer hours, and so on.
At the same time you want to be happy. You need to find balance. Society changed very rapidly. It does not give you learned frameworks for the new scenario.
You need to actively, vigilantly, deliberately learn how to manage yourself, your knowledge, your relationships, your business.
Most HNers have their basics solved, and they want to grow further into the area for which evolution or even society has not prepared us.
It makes me happy to see that people realize this one way or the other- and try to solve this problem. We acknowledge that a gap exists, we only try to fill that by any amount we can. I applaud those who do this.
I think that is debatable, at least from the Western standpoint. Much of Western society and its economics produce tremendous amounts of depression and anxiety (rooted mostly in fear).
I agree. They have kept up as much they absolutely had to.
Very little amount of thoughtful, apt changes.
Do you really not know this or are you saying popularity if such posts bothers you?
A nice introduction to this perspective is Christina Dunbar-Hester ’s talk on "Hacking Diversity": https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-11569-hacking_diversity_the_polit...
I think that's just you. I'd be surprised if it's 5%, although the % of AskHNs that could be called "self-help" is, I'd guess, usually higher than on the main page.
"So much" compared to what, anyway? You assume it would/should be 0%, or what? It sounds like you don't want any, or at least think there's too much.
Personally, in my life I've gotten an enormous amount from self-help, psychology, spirituality, philosophy-of-life books of all kinds, but 95% of the time on HN the subject comes up in comments, I read that self-help-type books are nonsense, worse than useless, full of filler when they could be a list of points, etc. I get the impression people don't know where to find the good books, or don't believe they exist, so they ask on here.
It can be exhausting for sure. It’s a mutation of self-pity, which is a mutation of self-absorption, if we had to root cause analyze this.
To put it simply, we have a very vain and narcissistic society at this point. We can’t clearly pin point if this is a modern advent or truly an everlasting dynamic of humanity (has it always been here, and will it always be here?). In the contemporaneous, all we can do is contemplate if it’s particularly worse right now, but, that in itself is … also self-absorption.
I think people who have energy for conspiracy ideas should find a healthy outlet like fiction. Similarly, those who are in the higher end of the self-absorption spectrum (most everyone I’ve met), should find a healthy place to put that like Philosophy. Contemplate existence and Cogito, ergo sum. The low level “how do I, me, and past me and future me, continue being me and finding meaning in me, myself and I, and feel good about it”.
Overall, it’s a form of egotism to recommend such people seek therapy. That’s putting one of the most common human traits on a pedestal. As in, your vanity is soooo serious that you need clinical professional help - lol. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen that ridiculous recommendation for run of the mill stuff. Half the reason these things become compulsive pattern thoughts is because we validate it.
Take a Philosophy 101 Couesera course over a glass of wine, and laugh about it. I promise you the “I find no meaning at work” questions will become hilarious soon enough.
And there it is, the grand hypocrisy. I just ultimately gave some self-help advice.
As for why such articles are commo, I'd guess the following:
1) these articles get more engagement from the broader HN community because they're more general than the niche topics that are often posted.
2) we're about 10-15 years into the era of hustle culture. Regardless of where you are on the career ladder, there's pressure to do more, make more.
3) we're 15 years into the smartphone era, and our collective attention and focus have taken a beating, and people want to address that.
4) Tim Ferris, the erstwhile Tony Robbins of Silicon Valley has been pushing the idea of shortcuts and 'hacks' for life issues for a decade, and has been pretty influential.
the solution is there, to say no to a lot of this, but this requires a collaborative effort.
As already mentioned but worth it repeating, most self-help advice, in posts or books, are without ground.
Only experimental psychology can provide such a ground, but this is yet another academic field were the reproducibility crisis is high.
I read several times in academic sources that around 60% of psychological experiments' results can not be reproduced.
Many scandals revealed that very famous experiments had been willingly falsified, such as the "Stanford experiment". Stockholm syndrome is also a myth. The Hearst heiress has not been the "victim" of it, since just absolutely no academic psychologist investigated the case. It has not been proved since either.
I consider experimental psychology, and History as well, as Science. But the publish or perish system has killed probity in most academic fields. Biology, medicine, nutrition and even astrophysics are gangrened.
When you poll the general population, honest is a value important to the lower economic classes. "Do not steal" is an important moral rule since the temptation is high in our society of abundance (not for everybody) and constant call to consume through pervasive advertisements.
But the curve is linear: the more you go up in the social ladder, the lower honesty is ranked as a major value. White collars and capitalists escape taxes by fraud all the time, but very few end in jail. As recently shown, the IRS is more devoted to track the poor's fraud. It's the same in Europe. Luxemburg lives thanks to fiscal fraud of EU's firms.
Success ranks very high in the upper classes. Hence the self-help. People feel they are failure if they are not at least millionaires at 30. So they make do by picking up "methods" or set of tricks to get there. Or they get depressed.
Note also how often psychedelic products are mentioned as the panacea for depression. It is a very promising field (I can tell by experience and more and more scientific papers confirm it).
But it's often the immediate result that is researched. Gob some mushrooms, feel better, go back to the billionaire game... and back to depression a few weeks or months afterwards.
One need therapy to really get out if depression (or burn-out). If you feel the constant urge to be always more productive, maybe it's that surge that needs to be interrogated.
It doesn't mean to never try a method that you read about to be more this or that. Why not? Improving oneself is good. Just keep the whole picture in mind, eg be mindful of what you are looking for. Basic common sense that I myself forgot many times.