Being a horrible manipulative jerk seems like a great reproduction strategy to me.
On average women will see through you and won't give you the time of day. Some will fall for your terrible abusive manipulation, though.
They get impregnated and you move on. Your victims will on average have the usual mothering instincts and will do their best to help their kid make it. Eventually, that should result in you generating many offspring.
I hope this strategy isn't conscious on anyone's part, but it sounds like one evolution would reward.
I hope someone can show me a fatal flaw in my reasoning.
There have been any number of leaders that have been horrible people and yet the average normal people excuse their behaviors, and some even buy into their behaviors.
I think it's possible. I feel like even the most normal people can have an off day when they just want to be assholes to people for whatever reason. (I've personally done this, and later regretted.) So maybe the sales folks or bartenders are seeing those people on their off days.
Yeah. Been there, done that, trying to keep it well under 5%.
But that's different. There are people who are nasty more like 50% of the time, or maybe even 95%. It's good to recognize that yes, that's me some of the time, but "quantity has a quality all its own", as Stalin (allegedly?) said. Too much of that attitude and/or behavior puts you in a different category.
And even for people in that category, it's also important to realize that they have their 5% - or even 50% - where they aren't like that. That doesn't make you want to hang around them - even 50% jerk is too much for me to want to spend time with them - but still recognize that the other part is there, and appreciate it when you see it.
Ah I should have added wilfully nasty. The article I thought mentioned discarding "bad days". But then again are the malicious truly aware and holding themselves accountable for their maliciousness instead l just pointing to external circumstances.
This definitely explains a portion of these "nasty encounters", but I think only a very small portion. The majority of people will at least attempt to be gracious even if they're having a really bad day.
Riffing off of the author's restaurant example: at the restaurant I worked at in college there were "known nasty" regulars. They were just...always horrible to the waitstaff. The hosts knew not to seat them in the veteran servers' sections, so I often dealt with them.
If they did happen to get seated in someone else's section, they'd get pawned off. Even the one waitress on the team who was constantly hustling to work every last table/shift/upsell she could manage would hand them off to me and let me keep the tip (if there was one...), rather than having to interact with them herself.
This roughly matches my estimate of evil drivers on the road, people cutting lines violently and not using turning lights, pushing to insert on the right when they used the emergency lane to pass everybody in a slowdown...
I think it’s way less than that. We just got back from a ~1600 mile round-trip to visit family plus a week’s worth of incidental driving around town to buy groceries and visit other family nearby.
On the highway segments, most cars were just trundling along between 2 and 20 mph over the limit, generally keeping reasonably to themselves. When an obstacle appeared on the roadside (stopped motorist, police, other), people flexed to let other cars get left and then returned to normal driving.
Sure, I noticed a few people driving aggressively, following too closely, changing lanes excessively to squeak out one or two extra spots, but that was perhaps 50 cars at the very most in 1600 miles of driving. 1 or 2 per hour, not 1 per 20.
I think there's more variables to it than that. It's absolutely possible to create aggressive drivers out of thin air if you annoy everyone around you enough. I used to drive commercial equipment that simply couldn't keep up with normal traffic. Needless to say when you are a rolling obstruction you see a ton of "aggressive" drivers because "normal" drivers do aggressive stuff rather than get stuck behind you. I can't imagine how bad it would be if I were driving like that in a vehicle that didn't very visibly have an excuse to be acting that way.
In theory the vast majority of your long road trip is going to be on wide open areas with low enough traffic volumes that there is no point of contention.
Add in heavy traffic and the number of negative interactions will go up. Then remember you tend to roll with the traffic in these situations that lower the total number of people you're subjected to.
If you smell shit all day look under your own shoe.
You've listed a few really bad behaviors and then used a bunch of weasel word language to imply a bunch of casual minor rule breaking is equivalent to its worst case forms. No wonder you see bad drivers everywhere.
The guy who's not using his blinker for a lane change on the freeway in light traffic isn't equivalent to the guy weaving through traffic without blinkers and even then is the blinker really the problem there?
Riding in the breakdown lane to pass someone isn't equivalent to getting tin the breakdown lane for a couple dozen feet coming up to a light just prior to the creation of a dedicated turn lane in the same space.
If you didn't get bent out of shape over technical rule violations that are fairly reasonable in context you'd see a lot less bad drivers.
> If you smell shit all day look under your own shoe.
Ha I'm going to have to remember that one.
I used to get all steamed up about crap other drivers do on the road. Now, I generally just ignore it. I don't know why they might be in a hurry or what kind of day they've had, and it's not like I can actually do anything about it anyway.
So true. I take this as an aid towards my customer support approach. I guess it’s a good idea to include a slide on the onboarding process where we mention this and give some tips into how to deal with this in the most respectful, yet decisive way.
It's perhaps worth noting that in excess of 5% of the populace have one form of mental disability or another.
ADHD alone is estimated to be a disorder present in 5% of the adult population (2% are currently diagnosed; the 5% is based off childhood diagnosis rates and the fact it usually doesn't go away when becoming an adult).
And while those with ADHD are unlikely to populate the OP's 5%, those with pathological narcissistic, sociopathic, schizophrenic (and other) disorders very well could.
Spot on. It's a shame that we haven't prioritized (and de-stigmatized) mental health, especially at a young age, so horrible children don't grow up to be horrible ego-centric adults.
This probably also raises if you incorporate people who were traumatized as children. Someone having a trauma response can definitely look like horrible ego-centric behavior, when actually they're having an internal meltdown where they're emotionally re-experiencing their trauma with no coping mechanisms because we basically never teach adults to recognize when this is happening.
A lot of hyper-toxic fiddly freakouts over small things actually turn out to be deeply rooted in some sort of horrible trauma.
Absolutely agreed, and I hate to sound like a Scientologist here, but I think a lot of people's struggles have roots in some trauma in their past. We're all shaped by bad things which happen to us, and for some people -- the ones especially with low Emotional Intelligence -- they can be re-balanced quite a bit in their thinking and patterns but ONLY if they're willing. That's like 80% the battle.
Arguably these kind of personality disorders aren't really "mental health" issues. Or, certainly not in the same way that something like ADD, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, etc. are. It's basically a nice way of saying "your personality sucks so much that we've decided to label it".
I disagree, I believe they are mental health issues because they're highlighting a process breakdown in how someone is perceiving the world, relationships and challenges.
Is that to say that people don't have personalities which suck? Of course they do. That being said, there are many ways of balancing a person's tendencies towards negative outcomes, but ONLY if they can admit they have a problem and they're willing to put in the effort to re-balancing themselves.
Except those disorders don't often translate to people acting terribly towards acquaintances. Sociopaths may be the nicest people you've ever met, if and when they want something from you. Schizophrenics may be various levels of detached from reality and perhaps difficult in that way, but only a tiny fraction of a percentage are so unhinged that they would act abusive or destructive.
There just isn't a large enough population of mentally ill with symptoms that would manifest as described to make up 5%, though they surely make up some part of it.
Also when you consider other dimensions of personality that are normally distributed, and intelligence which is also normally distributed... it's not hard to imagine the bottom tails of some of those being contributing factors.
I sort of think what you're really seeing within that 5% is a majority fraction of "baseline shitty" people, and a minority people of "momentarily shitty" people.
The baseline shitty people are likely a kaleidoscope/patchwork of pathologies, and the momentarily shitty people fall within normal ranges but circumstances have pushed their stress levels north of what they can handle.
I've found that a lot of people in our industry (higher than 5%, probably much higher the smarter they are) have BPD or are on the spectrum which causes anger issues when things don't fit the pattern or outcome they're expecting.
I'm not saying that to disparage these people, but I've learned to be careful in how I interact with certain people, especially as that top tier of brilliant engineer are the ones I want to learn from and respect, technically. They literally don't know they're being awful, but in realizing the deficits here -- even they do not -- it helps in not dismissing certain people or just throwing them into the 'crappy' bucket.
Agreed, on a personal level, a little less so on a professional level (within reason) in that I want smart co-workers. I don't need to invite them all over to dinner to meet the family.
That being said, we try to hire for low ego, high humility and good communication skills plus technical. Very hard in Silicon Valley.
> As an example: one time a lady threw a huge fit about a 2-3 inch smooth brown hair being in her meal when her server was a blond girl and the entire kitchen staff were 35+ year-old Mexicans/ African Americans with completely shaved heads. Now I'm not saying this woman brought the hair into the restaurant and planted it in her meal... but I know for a fact it couldn't have been from any of our staff in the restaurant, so you can make your own decision.
Whether it's from the kitchen staff or waiter is kind of irrelevant; throwing a "huge fit" is ridiculous regardless. Kitchen staff make mistakes all the time because it's hard work with a lot of pressure. You deal with it by saying "sorry to be a bother, but I'm afraid there's a mistake" and that should solve it. No fits needed. (Of course, we have just one side of the story and it could be that the staff was rude or dismissive after she politely pointed this out, so we'll never be able to judge this specific incident; but people exploding over minor things is something I've experienced as well when I worked in retail).
We don't really know what her tantrum really was. Was she apologized and compensated for her meal or OP told her "we don't have anyone with black straight hair" (and while he has such hair, heh)
Maybe it was a hair stuck to someone's clothes and that fell of (or maybe it was OP's hair indeed if even he don't go near the food!). Or that blond person's hair looking darker after being soaked in meal. Or someone with curly hair had sime straight strands or they were less curly after falling off. I would assume any of those before assuming customer intentionally put that hair
This has been my experience as well. I, too, have met and talked to thousands of people from every possible background on seven different continents of this world. From the poorest people on Earth to some of the richest.
I've seen the same thing. About 5% are nasty and about 1% are truly bad people who commit horrible crimes.
Makes me wonder if the distribution is independent of other personality and socioeconomic factors.
Much earlier in life I helped recruit for a cult (much has changed since then). 3% - 5% seems on the high side for people who "just suck" -- perhaps by an order of magnitude. But perhaps the "just sucks" is context dependent. I found early on the FORD bulletpoints makes it pretty simple to start smalltalk (Family, Occupation, Recreation, Dreams/Desires).
Saying this from my personal experience [ workspace related not familial ] : What happens is that some of these bad people have charisma, can make you follow them, for their ulterior motives. So if you get trapped in that circle, because you tolerated for so long, you probably did not get to experience the 5% bad, but maybe 20% bad over your lifetime. So my lesson there is ... walk. You recognize a problem, you walk, rather than try to fix it. Of course you should give a chance, but that is it - just one chance and then none.
IDK about "horrible" but https://www.sentencingproject.org/research/ puts it at 1.5 million peak. Thats not quite 1 percent of the US population but its also not that far off. And we can quibble about US sentencing rules but the BoP has a count[1] of felony categories and drugs make up less than half, and its even less in state prisons.
The reason the estimate feels high is likely that the HN crowd is progressively separated from less stable elements of society. The bullies picking on kids at recess don't generally make it onto the gifted / accelerated track, or your 4 year degree granting university. You're going to encounter fewer of them at upmarket shopping centers and corporate offices, if for no other reason, 1.5 million people are in prison.
My phrase for this is “unreasonable hostility” and it really is sobering to behold every time. I do wonder if there is some correlation between this 5% and the percentage of sociopaths in society.
Surely it’s more time based too, the ebb and flow of people sucking at different times has to be a factor. Not even 5% suck 100% of the time. There’s no way that 95% of people don’t suck 100% of the time either.
Are we saying that 5 in 100 people will suck. If so think that’s an underestimate.
Many laws, company policies, etc exist to prevent those 5% from causing damage to the rest of the population. So 95% of people have to live with restrictions and bureaucracy that merely exists for those small group.
"Live with" is a weird framing, isn't it? If we accept the claim for a moment, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the restrictions exist to give the 95% the best chance at a reasonable, unmolested life?
Yes - at the price of restrictions that apply to all of us, not just to the 5%. The powers that be are trying to tune the restrictions to some kind of global maximum of organizational output. Rules hinder that - they slow you down. But the lack of rules increases the damage that the 5% can cause, which also slows you down.
The hard part is, when something causes damage, it's easy to make a rule, but harder to see that the rule will cost more than the damage.
100 - ɛ percent of the population have to lock their cars and homes so that the ɛ percent of people won't steal or vandalize their property. The ɛ may be small, but while ɛ > 0, they can deal disproportionate damage unless everyone implements restrictions.
Speed limits, building codes, the list goes on and on an on. And of course the wealth of society is sapped to pay for enforcement of all this stuff. Pretty much all civil regulation and the associated enforcement costs could be scaled way way way back if the single digit percentage of people who really suck didn't or the low double digit percentage of people who really get bent out of shape over these people got somewhat over it.
Ever get approved for a home loan? Much of that laborious process is to thwart fraud committed by a small percent of people. If everyone was trustable on good faith, computers could do most of the work almost instantaneously.
How about the entire organized crime bureaus of police forces worldwide?
That might be the wrong way to look at it, or rather, it doesn't take into consideration the natural minimum.
It may be that just 5% of people will continue to break the rules _despite_ the bureaucracy.
So, how many of the 95% are following the rules _because_ of the bureaucracy? I suspect it's much higher than most people would care to admit.. just look what happens when the system or enforcement mechanisms break down.
How many of those 95% will find their own equilibrium outside of official laws? Do the laws only apply strictly-defined caps so everyone is on the same page as to what is or is not acceptable?
I was actually thinking this morning about a rash of surprisingly bad Covid etiquette I'd seen recently, and one thing might fit this "5% rule"...
A minority of the bizarre Covid bad-etiquette incidents I think can't be attributed to accident, grogginess, preoccupation, symptom fatigue, etc. Specifically, I've seen a few incidents in the last week or two, of people who really did seem to go out of their way to intentionally cough on/at someone.
It's sad, but I guess I can believe it: some people will be nasty sometimes, and Covid time gives them a weapon (whether they have it, or the victim merely wonders whether they have it), and they can do it with impunity.
(I saw something related, earlier in Covid, but it was usually presumed anti-maskers who seemed to do an intentional/faux cough as they passed someone wearing a mask, more like they intended it to be a joke. What I've seen recently seems to have nastier intent.)
I have only a handful of anecdotes, but I wonder whether the idea of intentionally spreading Covid (or making people think you did) was introduced in pop-culture recently, and people more inclined to be nasty latched onto it.
If they really wanted to act nasty and annoy germophobes, they could just use the bathroom and conspicuously not wash their hands--no pandemic required. I would assume these are the same people who are amused by intentionally coughing at others, and the coughing probably does less damage, so the net result is an improvement.
Clearly it's performative, and when no applause (from any similar assh#les in the immediate vicinity) is forthcoming, they take it as oppression, and the brainwashing of society in the large. Chip on shoulder, but scaled up by orders of magnitude via mass media assist.
While I’m sure this is a real problem, I’ve been on the other side of this equation where you’ve tried your level best to get a problem resolved, and not only haven’t had it resolved, but have been repeatedly screwed even more.
For example, many years ago, I signed up for a landline phone (when that’s all there was), and signed up for a particular special service that Ameritech was offering that would allow me to have a computer on a modem running 24/7 without getting unreasonable charges. Eventually, I get the first bill and it’s charging me the regular rate. I sigh and call them. They agree it’s their mistake and they’ll fix it to remove the charge and it will be reflected in the next bill. It isn’t. I go around in circles for 6 months, with my bill increasing to thousands of dollars. Finally I call them up and just start screaming at someone, and that is what finally got it fixed.
I’m not proud to have done that, but sometimes it’s the only option. The person I was yelling at wasn’t the one who caused the problem or lied to me, but I didn’t know of any other options at the time. (I was raised by wolves, it turns out.) And, ultimately, it worked.
Yes, this was my question. Are 3-5% of people horrible all the time, or are we all horrible 3-5% of the time? Or more likely at any given time 3-5% of us are horrible, with some of us entering the group more often than others.
Off the top of my head, I can think of a half dozen people I've known who are just horrible all of the time. Nasty to their family, nasty to coworkers, nasty to strangers. I can think of another half dozen who are just in the habit of mistreating service workers.
Some people you're just catching on a bad day, but there is definitely a portion of the population that are just crappy people.
Disagreeable personalities are definitely a thing, and some have some other stuff stacked on top that can make for persistently unreasonable people.
Off the top of my head I knew someone who had a really hard loss that they couldn't cope with, and you could basically just see them reeling it in all the time, and that was expressed outwardly as anger. Really tragic situation though, and if you didn't know the details you'd just assume they're a raging prick.
I find it hard to mine compassion when I don't know someone's backstory, and I usually default to filling in the details with some kind of dismissive story about them just being self centered and belligerent (probably true some of the time though). I find life goes better when I try to fill in the blanks with some kind of reasoning that would explain that behaviour better (while still not excusing it).
>Disagreeable personalities are definitely a thing, and some have some other stuff stacked on top that can make for persistently unreasonable people.
I score in the bottom 3rd percentile for trait agreeableness. I'm mostly polite unless perhaps I know something is not right and someone is trying to pull a fast one. I can totally see how low agreeableness combined with being towards the lower end of the distribution on intelligence would make a default strategy of loudly saying your piece and being too dense to a) know you shouldn't do that, b) consider your lack of understanding might be the root of the problem and c) comprehend the implications of what you're being told so that you can calm the heck down.
I think it’s more likely that most of the call centre staff were reasonable people who followed the process they were trained to do, but the process is broken. Some of them may have known it was broken, but either not known how to work around that, or faced barriers to doing so such as having to talk to an a-hole boss about it.
I think it's more than 5% on the service personnel side. Customers are a more reliable random sample than service personnel, who are likely to not like their jobs in the first place.
No this should not be correct (that is if you are assuming the 3-5% rules is correct and I'm not saying it is). The people who work for companies are vetted by the company so in theory the percentage of people who are bad would have to in theory be less simply because of that filter. The people a company (or someone is dealing with) is unfiltered hence the probability in theory again should be higher.
Some percentage of managers, including hiring managers, will also suck, and these can make crappy employees out of people who otherwise have potential to be good.
None of the examples given in the article make me think it would consider screaming at a representative of a company that’s wrongfully cost you thousands of dollars after you’ve spent months trying to rectify it as part of the “5%”. That’s totally reasonable, even if it want directly the representative’s fault. Screaming at a service worker because of a hair in your food isn’t—that’s psychotic.
No, screaming at a worker whose job is to answer the phones is not reasonable. It shouldn't have cost them anything either - you shouldn't be paying incorrect bills.
Had they filed official complaints? Gone to any regulator? Had the issue escalated?
Miss Manners reported her newspaper delivery going astray and calling the paper. The nice man told her "We don't do anything about that, unless the caller is really angry."
She asked if he would put her down as being irate, and he agreed. Her newspaper delivery resumed.
The OP clearly said they tried for months and stated they did not feel good about being pushed past their limit, so yes, I'm assuming they tried less extreme solutions over those months.
Otherwise, I agree with you. I'm trying to say it's psychotic for your _primary_ reaction to be rage.
I will say that I have since grown and become more emotionally intelligent and am far less likely to do that now. My comment about being raised by wolves was intended to convey that I was brought up poorly and not taught how to handle myself in situations like this without yelling.
> Had they filed official complaints? Gone to any regulator? Had the issue escalated?
At the time I wouldn’t have known how to file an official complaint or even that there were regulators who could do anything. What fixed it was that my screaming got it escalated to an appropriate person who could actually do something. I didn’t know the term “escalate” in that context at that time, and customers shouldn’t have to know how customer support works to get things escalated. That should have just happened when I described the problem the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th times.
I think your comment was fine by the way, I got the raised by wolves part and you clearly stated you weren't proud of it. It's entirely understandable as a response, and it's not like it's some mortal sin. I was more responding to someone saying that was the right thing to do.
While I agree, I’d also argue that some companies put out purposefully bad policies and then staff customer service reps to handle the blow back. These situations are often really bad for the consumers and the staff.
I have screamed at support people, but only in the rare cases (maybe three times on the last 30+ years would qualify) where they personally acted unreasonably and reasoning with them did not work, and they refused to pass me to a supervisor. The last part being key to me.
In the vast majority of cases I agree with you - if it's the company's fault it's not fair to scream at people with no power to do what you ask (but if there are no other means it may be fair to be intentionally difficult to force them to escalate - but you don't need to be rude to be difficult).
It isn't your fault. Support systems are designed to triage and remediate. This means the loudest voices get served the best, or, that the squeaky wheel gets what they need. Of course, there are limits to this. One thing I've noticed is when I am in an automated call tree with voice recognition, speaking loudly (almost yelling), gruffly, and demanding a human will often get you an level 2 or higher support tech. I tend to shut this off when a human gets on the line, but the call does get dispositioned and often white-gloved.
I’ve seen people who are very nice and one context be very not nice in another.
As an example, try being a medical doctor on HN. The toxic few are why I stopped posting about medical things here.
I’m not saying those responders are generally mean people. I think they’re normal people who for whatever reason feel wronged and are part of my world’s 5%.
The old adage: 'The customer is always right' which means a business should always have the best interests of customers at heart and always assume good faith, has turned on its head. Now customers have weaponized that old adage and presume an air of ugly hubris and are mean spirited because hey, 'The customer is always right'. Eh no, sometimes the customer is an asshole.
> which means a business should always have the best interests of customers at heart and always assume good faith
I thought it meant, at least originally, that a customer's choice to shop, or not, at your store needs to be treated as your failure to attract the customer, not the customer's failure for making the "wrong" choice.
Looking further into it, there's more nuance to it. Of the several people who popularized the phrase in the early 1900s, one of them was Harry Gordon Selfridge. While he is lumped in with the others, the phrase he used was actually "The customer is always right, in matters of taste." With the idea being that a salesperson shouldn't judge the wants of the customer. If they want an ugly sweater, sell them an ugly sweater, don't try to convince them to get a good looking sweater.
Others said slightly different things. Like Cesar Ritz who said "The customer is never wrong", where the idea is that the moment the customer complains, you take action to solve the problem the customer has stated, even if they are incorrect.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadBeing a horrible manipulative jerk seems like a great reproduction strategy to me.
On average women will see through you and won't give you the time of day. Some will fall for your terrible abusive manipulation, though.
They get impregnated and you move on. Your victims will on average have the usual mothering instincts and will do their best to help their kid make it. Eventually, that should result in you generating many offspring.
I hope this strategy isn't conscious on anyone's part, but it sounds like one evolution would reward.
I hope someone can show me a fatal flaw in my reasoning.
As long as there are less than nineteen people in the pool...
There have been any number of leaders that have been horrible people and yet the average normal people excuse their behaviors, and some even buy into their behaviors.
But that's different. There are people who are nasty more like 50% of the time, or maybe even 95%. It's good to recognize that yes, that's me some of the time, but "quantity has a quality all its own", as Stalin (allegedly?) said. Too much of that attitude and/or behavior puts you in a different category.
And even for people in that category, it's also important to realize that they have their 5% - or even 50% - where they aren't like that. That doesn't make you want to hang around them - even 50% jerk is too much for me to want to spend time with them - but still recognize that the other part is there, and appreciate it when you see it.
If this was a general rule, it would be easily noticeable, and I haven't seen this in people I interact with.
Riffing off of the author's restaurant example: at the restaurant I worked at in college there were "known nasty" regulars. They were just...always horrible to the waitstaff. The hosts knew not to seat them in the veteran servers' sections, so I often dealt with them.
If they did happen to get seated in someone else's section, they'd get pawned off. Even the one waitress on the team who was constantly hustling to work every last table/shift/upsell she could manage would hand them off to me and let me keep the tip (if there was one...), rather than having to interact with them herself.
On the highway segments, most cars were just trundling along between 2 and 20 mph over the limit, generally keeping reasonably to themselves. When an obstacle appeared on the roadside (stopped motorist, police, other), people flexed to let other cars get left and then returned to normal driving.
Sure, I noticed a few people driving aggressively, following too closely, changing lanes excessively to squeak out one or two extra spots, but that was perhaps 50 cars at the very most in 1600 miles of driving. 1 or 2 per hour, not 1 per 20.
Add in heavy traffic and the number of negative interactions will go up. Then remember you tend to roll with the traffic in these situations that lower the total number of people you're subjected to.
People can be just plain dumb.
You've listed a few really bad behaviors and then used a bunch of weasel word language to imply a bunch of casual minor rule breaking is equivalent to its worst case forms. No wonder you see bad drivers everywhere.
The guy who's not using his blinker for a lane change on the freeway in light traffic isn't equivalent to the guy weaving through traffic without blinkers and even then is the blinker really the problem there?
Riding in the breakdown lane to pass someone isn't equivalent to getting tin the breakdown lane for a couple dozen feet coming up to a light just prior to the creation of a dedicated turn lane in the same space.
If you didn't get bent out of shape over technical rule violations that are fairly reasonable in context you'd see a lot less bad drivers.
Ha I'm going to have to remember that one.
I used to get all steamed up about crap other drivers do on the road. Now, I generally just ignore it. I don't know why they might be in a hurry or what kind of day they've had, and it's not like I can actually do anything about it anyway.
ADHD alone is estimated to be a disorder present in 5% of the adult population (2% are currently diagnosed; the 5% is based off childhood diagnosis rates and the fact it usually doesn't go away when becoming an adult).
And while those with ADHD are unlikely to populate the OP's 5%, those with pathological narcissistic, sociopathic, schizophrenic (and other) disorders very well could.
A lot of hyper-toxic fiddly freakouts over small things actually turn out to be deeply rooted in some sort of horrible trauma.
Is that to say that people don't have personalities which suck? Of course they do. That being said, there are many ways of balancing a person's tendencies towards negative outcomes, but ONLY if they can admit they have a problem and they're willing to put in the effort to re-balancing themselves.
There just isn't a large enough population of mentally ill with symptoms that would manifest as described to make up 5%, though they surely make up some part of it.
I sort of think what you're really seeing within that 5% is a majority fraction of "baseline shitty" people, and a minority people of "momentarily shitty" people.
The baseline shitty people are likely a kaleidoscope/patchwork of pathologies, and the momentarily shitty people fall within normal ranges but circumstances have pushed their stress levels north of what they can handle.
I'm not saying that to disparage these people, but I've learned to be careful in how I interact with certain people, especially as that top tier of brilliant engineer are the ones I want to learn from and respect, technically. They literally don't know they're being awful, but in realizing the deficits here -- even they do not -- it helps in not dismissing certain people or just throwing them into the 'crappy' bucket.
I will take an average but nice person over a genius asshole every time.
That being said, we try to hire for low ego, high humility and good communication skills plus technical. Very hard in Silicon Valley.
Check the author’s photo!
Maybe it was a hair stuck to someone's clothes and that fell of (or maybe it was OP's hair indeed if even he don't go near the food!). Or that blond person's hair looking darker after being soaked in meal. Or someone with curly hair had sime straight strands or they were less curly after falling off. I would assume any of those before assuming customer intentionally put that hair
I've seen the same thing. About 5% are nasty and about 1% are truly bad people who commit horrible crimes.
Much earlier in life I helped recruit for a cult (much has changed since then). 3% - 5% seems on the high side for people who "just suck" -- perhaps by an order of magnitude. But perhaps the "just sucks" is context dependent. I found early on the FORD bulletpoints makes it pretty simple to start smalltalk (Family, Occupation, Recreation, Dreams/Desires).
The reason the estimate feels high is likely that the HN crowd is progressively separated from less stable elements of society. The bullies picking on kids at recess don't generally make it onto the gifted / accelerated track, or your 4 year degree granting university. You're going to encounter fewer of them at upmarket shopping centers and corporate offices, if for no other reason, 1.5 million people are in prison.
[1]: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
And for trying to prop up OP's 5% stat.
Are we saying that 5 in 100 people will suck. If so think that’s an underestimate.
Most people suck some of the time.
But almost nobody sucks none of the time.
The hard part is, when something causes damage, it's easy to make a rule, but harder to see that the rule will cost more than the damage.
A higher level optimality can be achieved wherever truly nasty people can be pre-screened out of situations
100 - ɛ percent of the population have to lock their cars and homes so that the ɛ percent of people won't steal or vandalize their property. The ɛ may be small, but while ɛ > 0, they can deal disproportionate damage unless everyone implements restrictions.
How about the entire organized crime bureaus of police forces worldwide?
It may be that just 5% of people will continue to break the rules _despite_ the bureaucracy.
So, how many of the 95% are following the rules _because_ of the bureaucracy? I suspect it's much higher than most people would care to admit.. just look what happens when the system or enforcement mechanisms break down.
Maybe Google or Facebook already has such a list for internal use. All that data mining ought to yield one.
A minority of the bizarre Covid bad-etiquette incidents I think can't be attributed to accident, grogginess, preoccupation, symptom fatigue, etc. Specifically, I've seen a few incidents in the last week or two, of people who really did seem to go out of their way to intentionally cough on/at someone.
It's sad, but I guess I can believe it: some people will be nasty sometimes, and Covid time gives them a weapon (whether they have it, or the victim merely wonders whether they have it), and they can do it with impunity.
(I saw something related, earlier in Covid, but it was usually presumed anti-maskers who seemed to do an intentional/faux cough as they passed someone wearing a mask, more like they intended it to be a joke. What I've seen recently seems to have nastier intent.)
I have only a handful of anecdotes, but I wonder whether the idea of intentionally spreading Covid (or making people think you did) was introduced in pop-culture recently, and people more inclined to be nasty latched onto it.
For example, many years ago, I signed up for a landline phone (when that’s all there was), and signed up for a particular special service that Ameritech was offering that would allow me to have a computer on a modem running 24/7 without getting unreasonable charges. Eventually, I get the first bill and it’s charging me the regular rate. I sigh and call them. They agree it’s their mistake and they’ll fix it to remove the charge and it will be reflected in the next bill. It isn’t. I go around in circles for 6 months, with my bill increasing to thousands of dollars. Finally I call them up and just start screaming at someone, and that is what finally got it fixed.
I’m not proud to have done that, but sometimes it’s the only option. The person I was yelling at wasn’t the one who caused the problem or lied to me, but I didn’t know of any other options at the time. (I was raised by wolves, it turns out.) And, ultimately, it worked.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xtgH74hh6pQ
Some people you're just catching on a bad day, but there is definitely a portion of the population that are just crappy people.
Off the top of my head I knew someone who had a really hard loss that they couldn't cope with, and you could basically just see them reeling it in all the time, and that was expressed outwardly as anger. Really tragic situation though, and if you didn't know the details you'd just assume they're a raging prick.
I find it hard to mine compassion when I don't know someone's backstory, and I usually default to filling in the details with some kind of dismissive story about them just being self centered and belligerent (probably true some of the time though). I find life goes better when I try to fill in the blanks with some kind of reasoning that would explain that behaviour better (while still not excusing it).
I score in the bottom 3rd percentile for trait agreeableness. I'm mostly polite unless perhaps I know something is not right and someone is trying to pull a fast one. I can totally see how low agreeableness combined with being towards the lower end of the distribution on intelligence would make a default strategy of loudly saying your piece and being too dense to a) know you shouldn't do that, b) consider your lack of understanding might be the root of the problem and c) comprehend the implications of what you're being told so that you can calm the heck down.
I really feel for those people.
...unless call center support is a biased sample.
Had they filed official complaints? Gone to any regulator? Had the issue escalated?
She asked if he would put her down as being irate, and he agreed. Her newspaper delivery resumed.
So yes there are other ways :)
Otherwise, I agree with you. I'm trying to say it's psychotic for your _primary_ reaction to be rage.
> Had they filed official complaints? Gone to any regulator? Had the issue escalated?
At the time I wouldn’t have known how to file an official complaint or even that there were regulators who could do anything. What fixed it was that my screaming got it escalated to an appropriate person who could actually do something. I didn’t know the term “escalate” in that context at that time, and customers shouldn’t have to know how customer support works to get things escalated. That should have just happened when I described the problem the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th times.
In the vast majority of cases I agree with you - if it's the company's fault it's not fair to scream at people with no power to do what you ask (but if there are no other means it may be fair to be intentionally difficult to force them to escalate - but you don't need to be rude to be difficult).
If your kids grade is ~100 people, five parents will be absolute pieces of shit.
Figure out who these are and avoid at all costs.
We’ve had two big societal changes since then that seemed to make things worse to me, the latest being Covid.
I really wonder if that 5% would be noticeably higher today.
As an example, try being a medical doctor on HN. The toxic few are why I stopped posting about medical things here.
I’m not saying those responders are generally mean people. I think they’re normal people who for whatever reason feel wronged and are part of my world’s 5%.
I thought it meant, at least originally, that a customer's choice to shop, or not, at your store needs to be treated as your failure to attract the customer, not the customer's failure for making the "wrong" choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_not_a_moron
Others said slightly different things. Like Cesar Ritz who said "The customer is never wrong", where the idea is that the moment the customer complains, you take action to solve the problem the customer has stated, even if they are incorrect.
If customers keep asking for green shirts with red polka dots, you sell green shirts with red polka dots, even if you don’t like them.