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.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of bad in SV now.
The phrasing already belies the problem. I would naturally and automatically brush off as a "hater" someone who said things like this about me, because it is suggestive of treating one's own idiosyncratic value judgments as objective truth.
Incidentally, "intend... through carelessness" is a contradiction in terms.
It’s another thing entirely to be a Peter Thiel, Austen Allred, or Elon Musk hater because you don’t like how they are literally messing with the world in evil and selfish ways.
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".
The problem is these guys lack "skin in the game". They make decisions that affect people that they never even hear from or speak to -- on purpose. They don't want to speak to the commoners. Like Paul Graham, apparently, they think we're losers because we didn't chase money.
IMO, things don't get better until we abolish citizens united and invoke some pretty hefty progressive taxes. There's absolutely no societal value to allowing someone to become a trillionaire, or even a centi-billionaire. Thats way too much power for a very disconnected group of people to have.
It’s easy to dismiss PG with “SV techbros are nuts”, but that could be (or could be not, but there’s a risk) the same identity over substance bias manifestation. To de-bias, we should look where the class/status/social-circle identity becomes unimportant.
There’s a theory that our reasoning had evolved not for truth-seeking purposes but for a social cohesion, but I haven’t yet read well about it (“The enigma of reason” is on my reading list) to form an informed opinion.
You'd have to spell out for me how this is exhibited, but I'm also not clear on how it's supposed to be relevant in the first place.
> Sure, there are "haters", but the mirror effect is equal
The post starts out with a description of mirrored observers ("fanboys") and extensively discusses the mirror nature.
> It's more comfortable to cast those with values differences
Most of the time that I see criticism of the various big names in tech, it's either failing to exhibit those value differences or failing to establish their relevance. (Which is to say: when we get "person X's actions are objectionable to me because they desecrate value Y", there is not good evidence that this actually happens, at least on anywhere near the scale alleged; the desecration is essentially a meme among detractors.) From TFA:
> When you have a dispute with someone, it's usually a good idea to try to understand why they're upset and then fix things if you can. Disputes are distracting. But it's a false analogy to think of a hater as someone you have a dispute with. It's an understandable mistake, if you've never encountered haters before. But when you realize that you're dealing with a hater, and what a hater is, it's clear that it's a waste of time even to think about them.
In reading HN submissions that have the name of someone important in tech in the title, it's become abundantly clear to me that the bulk of "negative criticism" of those people comes from people in the latter category. The same when the focus is on nations or on governments. When the focus is on the technology itself (and when there isn't a clear agenda of trying to make someone responsible for some particular fault), the discourse noticeably improves.
The commenting guidelines have the right of it:
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
I wrote about the harms of elitist social models and labels like that before: https://ssg.dev/trolls-dont-exist-9d879b960fd1/
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.
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
Just one example from popular entertainment, but it complicates the hater/fanboy narrative, and it's simply not true that famous successful people can't be haters (or fanboys).
I'm reminded of Don Bradman's conversation with Sachin Tendulkar at his 90th birthday (Google who they are), when he asked, "Sir Don, if you were playing today, what would you have averaged?"
Referring to the difference of the modern game.
Bradman replied, "Maybe around 70." Which seemed bizarrely low for a man who averaged 99.
Tendulkar asked, "Why only 70 and not 99?". Suspecting excessive modesty from the great.
"Come on, an average of 70 is not bad for a 90-year-old"