Comment by fzeroracer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fzeroracer | Hacker News Reader

This article honestly read like something out of a bullshit self-help book. There's a lot of tidbits in there that sort of ignore the reality for most people and how one small injury, accident etc can spiral out of control and bankrupt someone, at least in America. But reading this part especially stood out to me

> We all know people who are consistently pessimistic, who will shoot down everything. Everyone in their life has the helpful critical guy, right? He thinks he’s being helpful, but he’s actually being critical, and he’s a downer on everything.

> That person will not only never do anything great in their lives, they’ll prevent other people around them from doing something great. They think their job is to shoot holes in things. And it’s okay to shoot holes in things as long as you come up with a solution.

This is silicon valley in a nutshell. Silicon valley needs more pessimists, people that understand the problems with all the nonsense they push in attempt to solve problems while exploiting people along the way. It needs people that are willing to question people and tell them to stop doing things that are fucked up. Because these companies don't think about what will happen if they fuck up and break things.

> This article honestly read like something out of a bullshit self-help book.

There's a reason for that. That reason isn't that what he's telling you is largely bullshit, because much of it is true enough to be useful at a first approximation (although one could argue that some points aren't a fully articulated picture of reality -- in particular I'd assert he's mixed the concerns of status and values and that's going to make certain muddled conclusions easier).

It's that part of what he's doing here is in fact playing a version of the status games he defines, partly on a direct level (wealth creators are high status on by a certain measure of values, critics are just downers for competing values into the ring), partly on a meta level as the narrator who is telling this revealing story to an eager audience who, if they take this advice, will also almost certainly be successful because THIS is the mindset of SUCCESS and of course there is no survivorship bias.

It's pretty standard if quality work in that respect, which is why it has a ring of aspirational self-help.

One good response is to learn from what he's doing as well as carefully weighing the merits and limits of what he's directly saying.

Usually when they break things they break other people, for profit. So having a conscience doesn't help them.

To me this part is particularly amusing, since one of the most successful and lauded CEO ever was that notoriously hyper-critical guy named Steve Jobs. Turns out people whose "job is to shoot holes in things" can do pretty well...

No, we really don't need any more pessimists. That just results in nothing ever getting done.

It's easy to sit around and come up with hypothetical problems about anything. They may or may not become realities. We'll never know until we try something.

The right course is not to try and fix every possible conceivable problem before starting. This is impossible because there are infinitely many. The right thing is to start, do something, see what actually breaks, and then fix that.

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