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Comment by rjdagost | Hacker News Reader

I have to totally disagree with this statement:

> There are of course some people who are genuine frauds. How can you distinguish between x calling y a fraud because x is a hater, and because y is a fraud? Look at neutral opinion. Actual frauds are usually pretty conspicuous. Thoughtful people are rarely taken in by them. So if there are some thoughtful people who like y, you can usually assume y is not a fraud.

Just look at recent history- Enron, WorldCom, Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes (and many more) were ALL widely celebrated by neutral third parties before being exposed as frauds. Neutral opinions are often neutral because they haven't done much research on a topic. Thus, they are often relatively uninformed opinions.

And these frauds were NOT conspicuous at all. They worked very hard to present the appearance of success. It took some dogged investigations from "haters" (by PG's definition) to reveal the truth.

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> How can you distinguish between x calling y a fraud because x is a hater, and because y is a fraud?

The very premise of this question is broken.

What matters is whether y is a fraud, not why x is calling them a fraud. The way to discover whether y is a fraud is to look at any evidence x provides, and/or think about any questions x proposes.

If x is correct, what does it matter if they’re a hater? If x is incorrect, what does it matter whether neutral opinion agrees with x?

Imagine we applied this logic to barristers. The defence rises to argue that the police exceeded their authority by searching the accused’s home without a warrant.

“Your honour,” the district attorney/crown attorney drawls, “My friend acting for the defence is a notorious police hater. Day after day, all they do is nitpick and question the actions of the police and the conclusions we the prosecution draw from the evidence.”

> What matters is whether y is a fraud, not why x is calling them a fraud. The way to discover whether y is a fraud is to look at any evidence x provides, and/or think about any questions x proposes.

If x is a hater, they may indeed bring forward useful evidence. Even their silence can be useful evidence: if a Courtney Cobain hater doesn't think she killed Kurt, that's pretty good evidence that there isn't even the flimsiest case that she did, since if there was, the hater would have obsessively investigated it and presented the best case.

However, the existence of a hater, or many haters, doesn't provide any real evidence that y is a fraud. It's just evidence that y is famous. In the same way, a defense attorney questioning the actions of the police doesn't in itself provide any real evidence that the police acted questionably. It provides evidence that they are a defense attorney.

It probably isn't a good strategy for finding the truth to carefully consider all the claims that y is a fraud if they are famous. That's because any famous person will have many thousands of haters, and so there will be many thousands of such claims to review. Maybe if a friend of yours is such a hater, talking to them is worthwhile. Or maybe it's worth reading one or two antifan diatribes. But at some point you probably want to plow your attention into more fertile fields.

Speaking of which, I have appreciated and admired your thinking for many years, having learned a great deal from you, and I even thought of you as a friend. So it came as a shock when you blocked me on Twitter. What did I do?

Courtney Love. Fuck.

Bravo. I thought the comment you replied to was spot on. Yours just nails it.

"What matters is whether y is a fraud, not why x is calling them a fraud."

Isn't the "why" quite important? I mean, probably the one thing that is important? I.e., that the hater is a "hater" is not important, but why he is a hater. If there is no reason than the "hater" is unfounded.

I would argue that "hater" mostly is an ad hominem attack on someone. It would be interesting to know what haters bother P. Graham for. In general for being a kinda celeb? He doesn't write the "why" in his essay and neither tries to understand it, but argues they are irrational fanboys.

I disagree. The people you refer to did not hate Holmes/Enron/etc unilaterally because of a vague feeling that their talents were overestimated. They had, to use PG's term in the article, a dispute with them over a particular issue that they had picked up on, often as a result of having domain-specific knowledge that allowed them insight into their operations (i.e. that financials did not seem to be adding up for Enron or that Holmes's promised device would require significant breakthroughs in analysis that they thought she did not achieve given her evasiveness on technical questions).

But that's also true for those who call Elon Musk a fraud. Disputes such as "funding secured" (securities fraud), "full self driving coming later this year" (false advertising), booking warranty expenses as goodwill (accounting fraud), Musk's claim he had "recused himself" from the SolarCity acquisition when he hadn't (securities fraud).

These accusations of fraud are all truth-claims about the world. They are provable, or they may turn out to be false. But what cannot be disputed is that these are claims of substance.

pg argues that accusations of fraud are simply playground style insults lobbed towards those who are too successful by spiteful and bitter haters, who are mediocre and unaccomplished, and therefore not worth paying any attention to. I think that's way too dismissive.

Well, it's a great way to shut down whatever criticism without saying "because I say so", at least not straight away.

Is he arguing that or just asserting it because it’s uncomfortable for him to have to hear consistent criticism from people online in a way he was previously shielded from?

I don't think PG is talking about accusations that the person is engaging in fraud. I think he's talking about claims that the person is a fraud - that they have (to use the singer example) no actual talent.

If I claim that Tom Brady, say, defrauded someone, that's an accusation about actual deeds involving actual money. If I claim that he's a fraud, though, I'm claiming that he's not actually any good as a quarterback. That's a very different claim. One claim lives in the realm of objective facts about actions; the other lives in the realm of emotional reaction to success.

>If I claim that he's a fraud, though, I'm claiming that he's not actually any good as a quarterback.

For many people, calling someone a fraud is simply shorthand for saying they are a fraudster. Not that they have no talent, but that they commit fraud.

PG has explicitly defended Elon Musk from criticism and what he considers "haters" before. It's who I thought he had in mind when I read his piece.

https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1122987659079618563?...

Of course, when all these substantive points were raised to him on Twitter, he slinked off and didn't respond to a single one. PG also seemed to be implying that Tesla/Musk criticism was "too dedicated" or "too committed" to be organic, lending support to Musk's tactic of deflecting all criticism as oil industry funded propaganda.

Did you ever read about the obsessive determination with which Harry Markopolos worked to expose Bernie Madoff? He had a visceral obsession with Madoff, working for almost a decade to expose Madoff's scam. John Carreyrou likewise had a longterm fixation on exposing the Theranos scam. These weren't mere "disputes" over technicalities- they were all-consuming endeavors that became core to the identifies of the whistleblowers. They were most definitely "haters".

That’s crazy. They weren’t haters.

In both cases there were career incentives that drove each to pursuing their targets. At no point did either say to themselves, I hate this fraud because why good on him/her and not me? They thought, I’m going to bust this crooks ass because this is a true injustice that should be exposed, and I’m going to be the one who benefits from doing it.

There’s a big difference between cheating and succeeding (that’s what I think haters don’t want to believe), and in some cases like the two you mention, it wasn’t just perceptual. There was hard evidence of fraud.

What is your standard for determining that someone else is actually a "hater"? Because people like Carreyrou were most definitely considered "haters" by Holmes' supporters – Tim Draper in particular called Carreyrou "a hyena" [0].

Your reasoning that Carreyrou is not a hater because he had "career incentives" that drove him is not a sound argument. A hater is not necessarily some kind of evil altruist, i.e. hating purely with no respect to personal gain. If you seek to destroy something by violating your own principles (e.g. journalistic truth), then you can be thought of as "hating"/"despising" that something, whether or not you personally gain from its destruction.

[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/bullied-into-submiss...

> A hater is not necessarily some kind of evil altruist, i.e. hating purely with no respect to personal gain.

That is exactly the thrust of PGs essay. Neither of those people violated their own principles. Holmes and Madoff are frauds. Full stop.

Tim Draper did consider Carreyou a hater. Draper was proven wrong the instant Carreyou was vindicated. Carreyou didn’t want Holmes to fail because “why her and not me” like Draper might have thought. He wanted her to fail, if anything, because she deserved to. Truly deserved to.

Holmes and Madoff were frauds after sufficient evidence (including the consequences of their business practices) were made public and heavily scrutinized.

That said, I agree PG's essay isn't intended to be about people like Carreyrou, or the SEC investigators into Madoff, etc – I am confused about which real-life people of consequence he's actually thinking of, because it's strange to write an essay about such an abstract strawman.

But referring back to u/rjdagost's top comment, about totally disagreeing with the footnote that begins with "There are of course some people who are genuine frauds", and that PG's reasoning is unsound because Enron, Theranos, Madoff, etc. "were ALL widely celebrated by neutral third parties before being exposed as frauds"...people like Carreyrou were not seen as "neutral third parties". Again, with respect to Carreyrou, Draper and allies accused him of chasing a Pulitzer, i.e. advancing his career.

It's only through the passage of time and accumulation of evidence that people like Carreyrou are vindicated as being "neutral" or "objective". I guess this is a long way of saying that PG's essay feels like drawn out exercise of begging the question.

Sure maybe Carreyou wasn’t advancing his career. I should have said that was one possibility. It would be a noble pursuit because he did the world good.

> That said, I agree PG's essay isn't intended to be about people like Carreyrou, or the SEC investigators into Madoff, etc – I am confused about which real-life people of consequence he's actually thinking of, because it's strange to write an essay about such an abstract strawman.

The whole point of his essay is that haters are inconsequential and can safely be ignored. If you don't think these are real people who exist, spend more time on social media and they'll inevitably appear.

I think his essay is explicitly addressed less to those of us here in the peanut gallery and more to the people who accumulate haters.

> I hate this fraud because why good on him/her and not me?

> Carreyou didn’t want Holmes to fail because “why her and not me”

Why is envy assumed to be the motivation of the "hater"? If I recall correctly, Markopolous was driven by the idea that cheaters shouldn't win. Is that any different than the "hater" who is driven by the idea that person/product/concept "X" is unworthy?

The world needs haters for the same reason it needs entrepreneurs. They're usually wrong, but sometimes they're right.

I think you can qualify a hater as someone who wishes someone else would fail for no good reason other than making them feel better about themselves. Maybe that’s envy, maybe it’s not.

I don't think it makes sense to include as unknowable as a hater's internal motivation as a defining characteristic.

Moreover even when there is "no good reason" initially, good reason might be found eventually. Scrutiny usually begins with the intuition that something doesn't add up, with the actual evidence arriving later. The "hate" for the fraudster precedes the exposure of the fraud.

PG's definition qualifies "uncritical". These examples of dogged hatred are extremely critical with merit.

I think we're all saying the same thing just fighting on semantics.

>that financials did not seem to be adding up for Enron or that Holmes's promised device would require significant breakthroughs in analysis that they thought she did not achieve given her evasiveness on technical questions

This is always obvious in hindsight.

But there are companies for which the "haters" are doing this sort of analysis right now, and they are regularly dismissed because "this time it's different" or because "they are on <insert lobby>'s payroll".

This feels out of touch in light of Epstein, who had connections to MIT, Harvard, Bill Gates, etc

Exceedingly so. I used to really enjoy pg's writing back in the day, but now I find it myopic, stunted, tone-deaf, and predictable VCese, regularly oversimplifying (either out of ignorance or willful avoidance) the most important failure modes that any given controversy would raise. You see him double down on this with his handwaving regarding Away's CEO.

PG defined haters as being obsessive and uncritical. By definition, someone who actually investigates is critical, therefore not a hater.

The problem, of course, is that it is not trivial to identify who is critical and who is uncritical, and that famous individuals by definition have significant means to portray strong critics as haters.

To take the Elizabeth Holmes example from the top of the thread, people were very quick to associate critics as sort of bitter, mysoginist people who were uncomfortable with entrepreneurial women, and the media was enamoured with Holmes even when it became increasingly obvious that something was extremely fishy about the whole business.

If we were living in a world where successful people were heavily scrutinized rather than treated as celebrities then PG's rather dismissive tone of 'haters' would make sense. As it stands haters can often be people who have contrarian and angry reactions for relatively good reasons.

And I'd go a step further. Uncritical hate can be useful in right dosage. Hunter S Thompson is one of the most important journalists of the last few decades, and he made it very clear that the civil, nice, polite, pseudo-critical attitude is often just a way to shield people in power.

"Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful."

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