the wisest lil wayne lyric is "jealousy is love and hate at the same time". often times, a hater is just someone who resents someone's success because they wished they were in that position.
I guess the fact that Paul Graham felt the urge to write and publish this in 2020 is indicative of the toxic relationship that was developing between silicon valley and the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, this essay exhibits the hallmark lack of empathy and self-awareness that perpetuate the toxic dynamic.
Sure, there are "haters", but the mirror effect is equal: powerful people often end up inside of bubbles that shield them from negative criticism, and often become blind to the legitimate criticisms people have of them.
These decisionmakers often have to make difficult decisions with powerful tradeoffs. It's more comfortable to cast those with values differences or who are on the wrong end of that decisionmaker's tradeoffs as "haters".
Using the Michael Jordan vs Lebron James GOAT debate in NBA basketball, haters of one player are often driven by the fanboys of the other player. But NBA players themselves can be haters. Often it's old era versus new where you have older retired players criticizing newer eras with some evident bitterness, and the current players clapping back about how much better they are now, and players in the past wouldn't be able to compete now.
Just one example from popular entertainment, but it complicates the hater/fanboy narrative, and it's simply not true that famous successful people can't be haters (or fanboys).
People get brushed off as being haters when they point out that a lot of SV is morally bankrupt. It has nothing to do with "achievement" to point out that a lot of the people running the show are people that intend a lot of harm outside their class through either carelessness or active malice. IE, I didn't hate Sam Altman or Dario Amodei until they started doom trolling and selling ridiculous fantasies non-stop. I don't hate them because they're successful -- I don't even view them as successful -- I hate them because they take actions that are detrimental for me and the rest of society. I would hate them a lot less if they stopped taking such actions.
Paul Graham, man, the whole reason I'm even on this site was because I was a fan of his essays back in the day. But I think he's too connected to this world to see how shady it is.
So much effort for a self-righteous framework of contempt for certain people. In recent years, I have observed several people up close who uncompromisingly focus their lives on economic success. What these people have in common is a remarkable shallowness of character and intellect, which I also find reflected in this essay.
Haters are described as “losers in a very specific sense”: “some amount of talent” but “never achieved much”, “never will … do great work”.
Haters as “fanboys with the sign bit flipped” is a catchy assertion, but lacks either explanatory or predictive power (how? why? did they get hit by a cosmic ray?).
I think it could just as easily be that the haters are people who can sense that sign bit on the “great work” has been lost in some sort of unsafe bit-aliasing; the famous see their unsigned integers increasing, while the hater sees a large negative signed integer. Certainly this dynamic fits for the rogue’s gallery in the Thanks section.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 28.6 ms ] threadHaha in all seriousness I think reading the news can be very bad for productivity, better to be a producer not a consumer is how I see it.
Both fanboy and hater are consumer so don’t do much.
Personally, I think some people could have used more listening to criticism, cough, I mean haters...
Growth hacking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502774
https://www.sandofsky.com/lambda-school/
Unfortunately, this essay exhibits the hallmark lack of empathy and self-awareness that perpetuate the toxic dynamic.
Sure, there are "haters", but the mirror effect is equal: powerful people often end up inside of bubbles that shield them from negative criticism, and often become blind to the legitimate criticisms people have of them.
These decisionmakers often have to make difficult decisions with powerful tradeoffs. It's more comfortable to cast those with values differences or who are on the wrong end of that decisionmaker's tradeoffs as "haters".
Just one example from popular entertainment, but it complicates the hater/fanboy narrative, and it's simply not true that famous successful people can't be haters (or fanboys).
Paul Graham, man, the whole reason I'm even on this site was because I was a fan of his essays back in the day. But I think he's too connected to this world to see how shady it is.
Haters as “fanboys with the sign bit flipped” is a catchy assertion, but lacks either explanatory or predictive power (how? why? did they get hit by a cosmic ray?).
I think it could just as easily be that the haters are people who can sense that sign bit on the “great work” has been lost in some sort of unsafe bit-aliasing; the famous see their unsigned integers increasing, while the hater sees a large negative signed integer. Certainly this dynamic fits for the rogue’s gallery in the Thanks section.
I wrote about the harms of elitist social models and labels like that before: https://ssg.dev/trolls-dont-exist-9d879b960fd1/