The social obligation to be bad at things | Hacker News Reader

The social obligation to be bad at things

notebook.drmaciver.com

297 pointsluu236 comments

I found that, as a person who (sometimes) creates things, my attitude towards other people who create things has significantly shifted.

When I was younger I would just see the fault -- the typos, the narcissism, the pointlessness, the already-been-done-better-by-others -- of people's work. But after trying a bit, it sometimes (for the same reasons the OP talks about) creating anything new ends up being really hard in part because while you struggle everyone is shouting "lame!" from the sidelines (and doing nothing). You see this a lot on this site in particular -- the "middlebrow dismissal" HN is famous for.

So now, even when I see something that I genuinely think is lame, I think of this problem and keep my negativity to myself. I might give useful criticism but I try to keep the balance in mind. Even if you publish something you've made that is kinda lame, I still think it is awesome that you are taking the effort to finish something. The best way to get better is by making multiple attempts.

That's one way of looking at growth.

Another is to learn from the mistakes; this sometimes requires others to point them out. A lot of the issues around it comes down to ego and how one takes criticisms. One needs to learn not to take it too personal. A lot of times, the weak points of one's work is often the bit we're lazy. Of course, many times we already know very well where we're weak, and getting it pointed out repeatedly can sting.

And to make it back to the obligation to be bad, it comes down to recognizing you can always get better. In fact, the more I learn about a subject, the more I see how little I know.

It’s easy to see the world in this black-and-white separation; however there’s a lot of creators who are there to rip you off for some money and they deserve every critique you can get.

Moralising stories like that mask the actual complexity of telling the people who try to be better and are shit (and thus deserve your understanding) from people are fake trying to be better while taking advantage of you (“oh my god I didn’t realise the engine I was selling you is completely covered in rust!”).

The complexity here is not selecting one of the two; but rather consistently selecting one of the two for any given moment in life. And that’s hard.

I think your critique of marketing-oriented folks is valid, but after saying how bad it is to polarize the discussion, you immediately made your own black-and-white view of creators.

I had a similar experience after visiting a modern art museum with a creative friend of mine. I jokingly said "Even I could have done that" about one of the pieces and my friend replied, "But you didn't" -- hit me in one of those profound realization kind of ways. I started thinking about all of the effort it takes to envision something, find the resources, build it, work to get it displayed somewhere. Just creating something from nothing is beautiful (even if it's an upside toilet sculpture).

Oh boy do I resonate with this. Thank you for sharing this!

I remember the first time I saw "Fountain" by Duchamps, which, for the uninitiated, is a urinal, on its side, signed and dated by the artist. For years, decades, I cast it aside in my mind as something silly, something artsy, something that wasn't for me. It was ugly, vulgar, and above all, obvious. For years, seeing replica after replica in modern and contemporary art museums, I continued to breeze past the installation, laughing quietly to myself like I knew something these art people didn't.

Then I had a similar situation happen. While continually saying "anyone could have done that" and "this isn't art" someone finally said to me "yes it is art, you didn't think of this, and without this, you lack the basis for many other contemporary forms of art." It then started to occur to me that this art was anything but obvious; if I so easily cast this aside as "not art," the simple fact of calling this art was a profound statement, one worth considering within its context. Maybe this piece of art had so much to teach me about perspective, context and expression that it was just too much to swallow for years.

The trick is to transport yourself mentally to the time and place where that art was created. This is actually a very hard mental exercise, as art is a sort of "fingerprint" or "hash" of the world it was created in - it includes contemporary thought, politics, science, technology, social attitudes etc.

Looking at art from the perspective of a century after it was introduced and its effects have become incorporated into mainstream culture just not that useful.

This is a great tip, thank you!

I find the best museums and exhibits help you get into this mindset; I'm reminded of an exhibit I saw at the Tate Modern about Picasso in 1932. It provided not only the context to his art, but to him as a person. I was able to better understand how his art was shifting at the time due to the nature of the world around him and his personal relationships. It really allowed me to see the artist through the art and the art in its context. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/ey-e...

I hope that I can take this idea to domains outside of art as well; considering the context of everything we encounter is important for a better understanding of our shared world.

What if, after transporting yourself mentally to the time and place, you still consider it artless or worthless? Is this an opinion that one is still allowed to hold, or would it be a faux pas?

I mean, I can look at art created thousands of years before "Fountain" and appreciate it, but still consider Fountain snobbery, can't I?

Art is just human expression or communication. A lot of the "lazy" art is seeing with how much you can get away and how little meat there is to the word "art".

For centuries artists have tried their best to create the most beautiful artworks possible. This lead to an association of beauty with art. Art must be beautiful. You challenge this idea by making something that is not beautiful but people will still consider as art.

I realize this is spread across multiple comments of mine now, but I specifically said I acknowledge art and beauty are not required to go hand in hand. I acknowledge some pieces of art challenge established boundaries, and some are grotesque or purposefully repulsive. I just dislike Fountain and similar "found objects" and consider them artless.

Otherwise, if everything is art as long as someone tells me it must be so, the concept of "art" becomes meaningless to me.

I feel like it occupying space in your mind for years, even if only for a few minutes at a time, gives credence to it's value as art.

> I remember the first time I saw "Fountain" by Duchamps, which, for the uninitiated, is a urinal, on its side, signed and dated by the artist

I totally, completely agree with your point and with the parent post ("I could have created this", "but you didn't"), but...

...you can still, after all of this, conclude that the piece of art is snobbish, artless garbage. In fact I reserve the right to do so. I agree with your premise and still think "Fountain" is worthless as art. I could indeed have done this -- and yes, I see the irony, "but you didn't" -- and didn't because I didn't think it's the kind of art I want to make or celebrate. It's Duchamp's right to create it but I'm not a mean or ignorant person if I dislike it or consider it snobbish and not worth my time (or even "not art").

I don't know if Fountain is or isn't art. I "know" it's worthless to me. This is a discussion we must still be able to have, otherwise we can't say anything about artistic endeavors unless it's positive...

I agree, and did not mean to imply judgement against anyone who dislikes "Fountain" and other, similar pieces of art.

I don't even know how I truly feel about "Fountain" either; all I know is that it is quite thought provoking for me and has taught me a lot about how I think about and digest the world. To me, even if the art is ugly and snobbish, it still has merit if it helps us better explore our world. The art piece's mere existence allows us to have this conversation about the relative merits of different forms of art, which I believe to be meritorious in and of itself.

I think this has led us to an interesting, if for now rhetorical question: what is art for? Well, at least I'll have something to think about for the rest of the day :)

Thanks for taking this the right way :) It's definitely a conversation worth having. There are plenty of things I consider art that other people despise.

I don’t want to wade too deep into these waters, because I will admit that I am not prepared to properly navigate them myself - but I think it’s a common misconception that art is “supposed” to be good, or have a certain quality about it.

Not all art should inspire wonder. Not all art should be of any kind of quality. I am not a big fan of that piece, myself; but one wonders if perhaps, the very intent of creating that piece was to evoke those kinds of feelings, that kind of reaction?

I listen to a fair amount of noise music. Not all of it is even very listenable. A lot of it evokes feelings of dread, discomfort, pain, anxiety. Of course it sounds terrible - that’s the point. It’s a vehicle for emotional catharsis. It’s a thing that makes you feel something, even if they aren’t feelings that most people enjoy. Even if wanting to experience those feelings is not something that most people could relate to.

Just a perspective. I agree with you, that we should be able to speak freely about art, and that it has nothing to do with how you should be perceived as a person if you do not consider certain pieces to have any sort of artistic merit.

> I don't know if Fountain is or isn't art.

That's the entire point. The fact is so many people discuss this one thing from 1917- it provokes a good discussion on what is and isn't art. I don't see how this is viewed as snobbish. There is no reason one is obligated to make "traditional" art.

> and didn't because I didn't think it's the kind of art I want to make or celebrate

Celebrate isn't really the right term here. It's an art piece that's displayed at a museum. The discussion around it is noted as important.

> still think "Fountain" is worthless as art

"Fountain" is not only art, but it has immense value as comme. Art shouldn't be looked at in terms of "worth". It comes down to human expression, which in turn has a specific context. Art doesn't exist in a social vacuum. Just because it isn't prototypical "beautiful" art doesn't mean it's not worth anything at all.

"Celebrate", "worth", etc, I'm probably not conveying the right meaning. English is not my first language, but even if it was, it's hard to put this into written words.

I think considering Fountain snobbish is my right. I don't think something that fosters discussion is valuable for that alone. Not in all cases anyway. I don't consider all art valuable (not in the sense of money, in case I'm unclear). I rebel against the notion I must acknowledge all forms of art as valuable. I don't and I won't. I've no wish to impose my will on others, of course.

I understand art doesn't mean beauty and beauty doesn't mean art. I'm not artistically naive; in fact I consider myself artistic in the sense I can both create and appreciate art.

After all these words, I still consider Fountain "something that happened and that people acknowledge and discuss", but not good art (good in the sense "it has artistic merit", not in the sense of pretty). That's not good enough for me.

Here's how I look at it: "Fountain" is art, but miscategorized as sculpture instead of performance art.

I’ve been considering Shia LaBeouf’s definition, in response to the question “Are memes art?” on Hot Ones. Art is anything that moves you.

> I dislike it or consider it snobbish and not worth my time (or even "not art").

Sounds like you had a reaction to the piece or at least the performance art of signing it off as art.

Yes, I had a reaction: "this is artless garbage". Whether this reaction transforms the piece into art is up to the reader :)

I'm not saying you don't have a point, but where do you draw the line? Do you draw a line at all? I know I do.

Literally anything can move you, so by that definition everything is art. If everything is art the term loses all meaning.

Last year, I went to a hacker event held in an art space - various things owned by the space were labeled "this is art, don't hack it". However, as the event want on, hastily-printed copies of the same signs appeared on more things - a vending machine, someone's laptop, a staircase, someone's sleeping bag on a balcony. It gave me the opportunity to see these things in a new light - in my opinion, there was art there both in simply labeling these things as art, and in the items that had been labeled as art.

So, what is art? Is it restricted to the common categories - a painting, a poem, a sculpture, a cliche 5 minute film played in a loop on a wall of a gallery? Can new categories of art be created? Are there one-off things that are art, while similar things would not be? What's the criteria? Does it have to be technically brilliant, or intentionally created as art? If I see something as art, but the creator made it by accident or for a practical purpose, who is right? What if we can't ask the creator why they made it? "I know it when I see it" might be the only criteria, but that obviously implies that others might see differently.

And finally: does it matter? If the word "art" has indeed lost all meaning, does that change the way we interact with the world, or communicate with each other? How often does the average person communicate about "art" in a general sense, rather than simply what they enjoy, anyway?

> does it matter? If the word "art" has indeed lost all meaning, does that change the way we interact with the world, or communicate with each other?

It does for me. If "art" and "everything" become synonyms, I feel I've lost a valuable concept, and one I definitely use frequently.

Your anecdote about the "don't hack this" label is indeed clever and funny, and it's making a statement I can relate to. It's like hacking the event, in a way.

I don't see that anyone so far has argued that only a poem, a sculpture or a painting can be art. I'm surprised so many people in this conversation have made a logical connection between "I don't like snobbery like the Fountain/I don't think it's art" and "art must be pretty and only poetry/painting/music are acceptable". Why do people assume it's binary instead of a continuum between art and not-art?

> You're anecdote about the "don't hack this" label is indeed clever and funny, and it's making a statement I can relate to. It's like hacking the event, in a way.

I took away something entirely different from it (I took it as a given that the vending machine was indeed art because someone had proclaimed it to be so, and proceeded to think about what it might have to say within the context of the space and the event), but there you go.

The thing is that simply saying that something is "artless" isn't interesting - someone claimed it is art, and they did it for artistic purpose, and people are thinking about it as if it were art, so why isn't it? There's a big difference between saying that it's a stupid reaction to its context or that it's snobbish, and that it's artless.

I really enjoy witnessing the tagging and graffiti around the railways in the cities I've lived in, and feel there's definitely art in claiming the space in that way, but others feel it's spoiling the view and artless. Which of us is right?

No-one is right about graffiti. I like graffiti too, by the way.

I think I'm as entitled to claiming something is not art as the author who claims it is. For some creations, the consensus will side with one or the other. Nobody can put pigeon feces on display in a museum and force me to think of them as art, no matter what they think.

A lot of people don't consider found objects "real" art, by the way. I'm not alone in this.

That reminds me of a story from 2016 where somebody left a pair of glasses lying on the floor in a gallery and it was interpreted as an exhibit: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/27/pair-of-glas...

Also, the time in 2006 when an artist sent a sculpture to be displayed in a gallery, with a tiny plinth to prop it up: the gallery rejected the sculpture and displayed the plinth: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/jun/15/arts.artsnews

>you can still, after all of this, conclude that the piece of art is snobbish, artless garbage.

>I "know" it's worthless to me.

So long as one understands the "to me" is implicit, and so long as one understands that POV to be one of countless POV's, I don't see any issue with criticism.

For myself, if something doesn't work, and I see that it's not the work of a novice, I tend to default to, "It's not for me right now," rather than, "It's garbage." I can still discuss the reasons it doesn't work, but I find this perspective to be more helpful. It makes me more curious about the opinions of people who like it, which gives me more access to more perspectives. When something doesn't work for me, I want to know why it works for others. I don't mean this to come off as a game of semantics.

Yes, of course, it's always "to me". I don't wish to stop other people from liking it, or set fire to the museum that displays it. I wish we didn't have to be this careful about language.

Note I will, however, make a mental judgment of someone who finds "Fountain" very moving or noteworthy. Again, this is my personal judgment and I think I'm entitled to it.

edit:

> "It's not for me right now"

This has definitely happened to me, but with books and movies.

>I wish we didn't have to be this careful about language.

I didn't mean to say you do. I was talking about perspective, because it impacts how we experience things and can help or undermine our ability to enjoy and understand.

>This has definitely happened to me, but with books and movies.

Same - also happens a lot with music.

Your post is saying something roughly parallel to what I've been saying in my other, rather less tolerant posts. It's a good description.

The Fountain is just one in a series of Duchamp's 'readymades' which are found objects that became works of art when the artist identified them as such. Duchamp was not doing this to be a snob but rather to draw people's attention to appreciation of the design of everyday things.

Yes, I'm familiar with Duchamp's work and still don't like it :)

Sometimes snobbery finds you even when you don't seek it. This can apply to the spectators of Duchamp's work even more than to Duchamp himself!

> I don't know if Fountain is or isn't art. I "know" it's worthless to me.

It's 103 years old and today you are taking the time to discuss it in public. There, at least, is a demonstration that this piece made a dent in the universe.

I'm unconvinced by this line of argumentation, which others have tried before. Age and my attention cannot define art -- are you saying that something that is new or hasn't caught my (very brief) attention is not art? Or let's say it's not about me specifically, but rather about public impact: if something is new and known only by very few people, so that it hasn't really made a big public impact, does this prevent it from being art?

My very standard toilet has caught my attention -- and discourse, dare I say -- way more than Duchamp's urinal. Would most people consider my toilet art? Or would it need to be put on display in a museum?

Can you think of any man-made things older than a century that you wouldn't consider art? I sure can!

I didn't even use the word 'art' let alone propose any of these definitions. I just pointed out that 'Fountain' made an impact on your choices today.

Fair enough. Would you say anything that I single out as worthless is, by the act of giving it my attention, worthy?

I assure you my toilet made an impact in my choices today of far greater import than Duchamp's found object.

Yes, it’s mentioned as a canonical example of not-art masquerading as art in the eyes of many.

"Made a dent in the universe" isn't really a synonym for worthwhile.

I thought this PBS video about "Fountain" and similar pieces of art was very good at describing why they matter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZlrHyzIwcI

This.

When you see an upside down toilet in a museum and art enthusiasts in awe and say "I could have done that" you express you incomprehension : why is something so trivial admired? I thought I had to do something exceptionnal to get admired. The answer you get is "But you didn't", yeah because I didn't think a toilet had value.

You feel mocked by the artiste. Cheated.

So yeah, creating is hard and it's pretty hard to understand how hard before you tried it yourself but still people should be able to express their total incomprehension of the enthusiastic response de see around them for weird stuff without getting dismissed by a "but you didn't".

Yeah. The debate over Fountain is really a proxy for wider and more important debates about social class, the value of labour etc.

When someone can take a toilet, say it's art, and then it sells for >$10 million, it feels to a lot of people like some parts of society are just deliberately mocking them, rubbing their face in it. They're so rich they can flush $10 million on what looks like trying to grab some brief attention, or be what we now call a social influencer, whilst many other people who work hard every day to develop some truly difficult craft end up with far less or nothing.

Nobody who hates Fountain hates it because it's "not art". They hate it because someone managed to convince a whole lot of rich people to pay them way over the odds for a toilet. It looks and feels like some sort of long con.

This is my main problem with the "but you didn't" objection. I could have made that, in the sense that I am clever and imaginative and creative enough to look at a toilet and say "wouldn't it be funny to take this toilet and put it in a museum and call it art". It's not a high bar. I could not have made that, in the sense that I lack the power to get things into museums, no matter how much artistic merit they have, and the existence of Fountain confirms that this skill is orthogonal to creating things people want to look at.

Damien Hirst takes this mockery you mention and makes it the very focus of his "art". He took a skull and coated it in diamonds and called it "For the love of god". Even the title seems to say "jesus, how far can I push this?"

I believe the original was disposed of and only a photograph of it remains. All the physical versions would be replicas.

For some of these pieces, I feel like the hard part is going to art school, obtaining notoriety, etc. The art is part of a larger endeavor in which I haven’t invested the necessary work, or experienced the luck to have it pay off. When I see a piece where “I could do that”, part of what I’m feeling is that nobody would care if I did it. From my perspective, it seems like the artist is cashing in on some status they obtained. It makes me think the artist must be really charming at cocktail parties. I’m more interested in art that pushes the boundaries of what a mind can conceive, rather than pushing the boundaries of how little an artist can expend and still have their output celebrated.

Some writers become comedians and are famous for their one-liners.

So my post was downvoted and flagged. And without any reply, ok, here's why I said you'd swallowed the bullshit.

> the simple fact of calling this art was a profound statement,

A statement of what? Why is it profound?

> one worth considering within its context.

Why is it worth considering? Why is it worth doing so within its context? Its context is its siting within an art gallery, so does the re-siting it into an art gallery de-facto make it art? If so that's a pathetically shallow achievement.

> Maybe this piece of art had so much to teach me about perspective, context and expression

What effing perspective? What context particularly? What expression - what does 'expression' even mean here?

This trademark nebulousity characterises self indulgent bullshit that props up 'art' and the people who 'consume'[0] art.

(not knocking art, far from it, but lack of rigorous thinking is dangerous. Think for yourself, don't let others do it for you).

[0] Damn, I hate that word.

I would like to know why some people get so extremely angry about something being in a museum that they don't think should be in a museum.

I'm not with @odshoifsdhfs on the taxes (well, maybe) but on all else he is IMO spot on. If it was wrong enough to downvote and ultimately kill, why has no-one bothered to point out exactly why it's wrong?

>so does the re-siting it into an art gallery de-facto make it art? If so that's a pathetically shallow achievement.

Yes it is art. There is no barrier to turning into something into art. You don't need to go to a government office and license your work as art. You don't need to go to an established committee of artists to approve your work as art. Art can be bad, otherwise good art couldn't exist. Every good artist started out as a bad artist. People started to think all art must be good because that's the only form of art they see and the only way to counteract that is by showing them bad or ugly art.

> There is no barrier to turning into something into art.

Then what divides art from not-art? Is there even a difference?

> Art can be bad

Then why do people look at it? Are you saying they can't distinguish good art from bad?

Isn't at least one of the purposes of an art gallery to exhibit good art and not bad? If not, what is an art gallery for?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_%28Duchamp%29 it was made in 1917. If it was bad art as you imply, it's been over a century and no-one's officially dismissed it as bad (or is it described officially as bad art?). What does that say.

"Fountain was not rejected by the committee, since Society rules stated that all works would be accepted from artists who paid the fee" - ah,. so money changing hands was a requirement for it to be treated as art.

"The work is regarded by art historians and theorists of the avant-garde as a major landmark in 20th-century art."

Apparently it's good art then. I guess. AFAICT. Who can say?

It's like nobody's even thinking about this, just "it's art so it's art", whereas "am I being suckered" doesn't come into it.

>A statement of what? Why is it profound?

I view it as part of the wider conversation at the time, where many artists were challenging the standards of art. The Fountain is a little more on the nose than - say - Paul Klee intentionally using imperfect lines to give his art more feeling (which brings to mind J Dilla's slightly off-beat drum patterns). On the nose works better for some people.

> Maybe this piece of art had so much to teach me about perspective, context and expression that it was just too much to swallow for years.

I dunno. The aesthetics of contemporary art place no value on skill or craft. Minus the idea, anyone really could have created this piece. That's the point... or anything and everything is art, or quality doesn't matter so nothing is good or bad or better or worse, or art doesn't live in some sacred realm (we would be pissing on it in any other context), or "interesting!?" as a principal aesthetic... So sure, we can recognize (works of post modernism) both as art and culturally significant/important, but at the same time, they tend to be profoundly un-engaging. They are more fun to talk about than to experience in person which is deeply weird for the visual arts! They may as well be a post on /r/hmmm/ because "hmmm" is all they are really going for. "look at me, I'm a urinal, but I'm still art!". hmmm...

* Fountain is technically Dada and dates to 1917

Personally I always saw Duchampis and Dada in general as a case of what we would now call trolling. An expression of intenral disgruntlement in and by the art community of the time and taking the piss a bit more literally than usual. There were already several cases of feigned identity of painters to gain more fame already and it seemed to be a sincere expression of frustration by mockery. Which exasperated them further by being taken seriously.

Ironically the "missing of the point" seems to have become a point in itself even without the historic context. Weird accidental statements by society in its reaction like ignoring the virtuoso playing the Strativius in the subway station because they don't recognize the quality without the trappings. A mere portrayal would be a ham handed allegory but if it really happens a lesson can be learned instead of an expression of another's opinion.

> "Even I could have done that" about one of the pieces and my friend replied, "But you didn't"

They actually sell a poster that says this at the Guggenheim gift shop.

I can just write the same thing on a piece of paper at home.

But you didn't :)

For what it's worth, that is a meme regarding modern art ("I could have done that" + "But you didn't").

When I make a snarky comment about that sort of concept art, and somebody gives me the "but you didn't" response, I usually double down out of spite. When the only thing anybody can say about some art that it's "interesting" or "cool", it generally means it's pretty awful.

I think 'truely interesting' is one of the highest compliments you can give to art.

Art is about how we convey emotional information -- the "But you didn't" part of modern art is a reference to the hard part of creating art being the conception, not the implementation.

In other words, making is art is hard NOT because of the physical act BUT because of the intellectual labor of distilling or serializing emotions into something that can be made is hard.

It's kind of a two-for-one in this way since you can delight people with the novel use of technology -- something they have the same access to as the artist and genuinely could have physically done as well as convey the actual message of the art.

Writing software is generally pretty similar, the hard part isn't mashing the keys in the right order -- almost anyone can do that, literally. It's asserting a what will be out of the infinite possibilities of what could be.

Exactly! It's awful art and you probably shouldn't go to the exhibit and waste your time but more importantly it's still art.

There's often an implied point in the "but you didn't", which is that it might be harder than you think.

I knew someone who was a big fan of Jackson Pollock. He's famous, and he's also a useful punching bag because his paint splatters just look random. It wasn't until I tried it myself that I realized that splattering paint in a way that looked to me like a Jackson Pollock painting was... not something I could easily do.

I still don't particularly care for Jackson Pollock's paintings, but that moment was a useful reminder to me that even for things like programming, we have a tendency to underestimate the subtlety required to produce "good enough" work product.

If your works are displayed in a museum, you're not a struggling amateur. You're supposed to have some kind of ability and that ability shouldn't have to be defended by pointless platitudes.

"Modern" "Art" is very far from someone actually creating something out of passion or curiosity. Last time I visited the Guggenheim, there were three different "works" from three different "artists" on display - all of them were plain, white canvases.

I could have done that, but I didn't - because I'm not sufficiently full of shit. I'd much rather enjoy someone's first attempt at C64 graphics or short story writing or programming, or try to improve my own skills in any of those areas (and many other).

If your works are displayed in a museum, you're not a struggling amateur. You're supposed to have some kind of ability and that ability shouldn't have to be defended by pointless platitudes.

The criteria for what goes on display in a museum is not ability but significance. If someone is does the first version of style X, if style X is significant, then that someone's art rates museum display even if their version is a bit amateurish.

The significance of blank canvas in particular is detail I wouldn't otherwise comment on, however.

> I could have done that, but I didn't - because I'm not sufficiently full of shit.

I think you're missing the point though.

The whole significance of that exhibition is that esteemed artists are given a grand platform (with a long history) to express any idea they want and this (the 3 blank canvases) is the one they chose. That in and of itself is the art.

They had no obligation to display those 3 blank canvases. In fact, they could have just as easily whipped up something that was technically impressive with the finest strokes and details (presumably if you're at the level of getting museum exhibits, this is just a base level of skill you've acquired and is trivial to display).

But the very fact that the artist used the platform to express the idea that the canvas itself is the art and the entire point is beautiful. They placed an emphasis on the very beginning rather than the end of the creative process.

In some ways, the exercise is totally pointless, cliche, and lazy. I agree. But there is also immense beauty in the same exercise because somewhere along that very seam lies the answer to the question "What is the meaning of anything at all? What's the point of this museum?".

If that pointless piece with 3 blank canvases led to you and I to having this conversation here, then I think in that artist's eyes "mission accomplished".

> That in and of itself is the art.

I'm pretty sure we could argue for the rest of our lives about what art is. Suffice to say, I disagree.

> they could have just as easily whipped up something that was technically impressive

I honestly doubt that. At one point, most avant-garde artists were also very capable craftsmen, but that's a long time ago.

> there is also immense beauty in the same exercise

While there is truth to the old adage of the eye of the beholder, I happen to believe there is also universal, objective beauty. I sincerely disagree that any of the two need to be constructed by some contrived abstraction and over-interpretation of the act of exhibiting three blank canvases.

> I think in that artist's eyes "mission accomplished"

I think they considered their mission accomplished by the sheer increase in worth their work will have from being displayed at the Guggenheim.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I thought I would jump in.

Just the fact that there is a disagreement about what is and isn't art points to the reality that there isn't an objective standard for judging art. Art by it's nature is personal.

If there was truly an objective standard of beauty, then you could measure it, and there wouldn't be a debate. Unless you're claiming that there is an objective standard, but it's secret knowledge only known to you. Then I would be the one calling you full of shit.

You can call this or that "full of shit" and that's your opinion, not some objective fact in reality.

Jump right in! I seem to be in rant mode anyway. :)

Defining art and defining beauty must not be confused. I don't think art _must_ be beautiful, I was commenting on whether three blank canvases could convey some kind of beauty. Perhaps, to some, depending on how they were arranged, the background offsetting them, the overall surroundings, etc. But having to construct some abstract concept around exhibiting them and calling that concept beautiful is, I think, a bit of a stretch. Beauty is a very profound concept. We know if it's there.

Objective beauty is measurable. There's for example a definable, codifiable way of determining what we consider to be a beautiful face (it's about symmetry and averages).

Nature is objectively beautiful. Symmetry. Harmony, for example in matching colours or colours offsetting each other in specific ways (such as complementary colours).

There can be art without beauty and there can be beauty without art, but the art I find most lasting, enjoyable and interesting is the one that manages to convey beauty above all else.

> Perhaps, to some, depending on how they were arranged, the background offsetting them, the overall surroundings, etc. But having to construct some abstract concept around exhibiting them and calling that concept beautiful is, I think, a bit of a stretch.

But it's precisely the context that makes this art in my view. I don't think someone displaying 3 blank canvases in their garage would be the same. It's different when a highly respected artist chooses to do that in the Guggenheim. It adds an element of theater that produces an emotional response.

This is quite a messy conversation since the bounds are effectively "what is art?". But it's always a fun one to have.

I don't think you've found bedrock.

Don't confuse being able to measure something with attempts to explain what the measurement means.

Even if everyone agrees the mathematically-perfect face or landscape is beautiful, "we" are what was actually measured. If there isn't absolute agreement that the mathematically-perfect face is beautiful, be very suspicious of the interpretation.

Beauty is an experience, not a thing. It is inherently relational, not absolute or objective. If all things were equally "beautiful", the concept would vanish. If we all had mathematically-perfect faces, that particular spell would be broken.

Art--like beauty, boredom, and curiosity--is a relative, relational experience.

Don't get confused by the art-object; it is not the art. It is, at best, a call to have an art-experience, which you may or may not respond to.

Don't get confused by the art-museum; it is not where art lives. It is, at best, a physical space where it is socially acceptable to have art-experiences and leave art-objects laying around.

You expressed the idea I wanted to far better than I did. Great framing around the personal and experiential nature that drives (what I consider) art.

>Objective beauty is measurable. There's for example a definable, codifiable way of determining what we consider to be a beautiful face (it's about symmetry and averages).

>Nature is objectively beautiful. Symmetry. Harmony, for example in matching colours or colours offsetting each other in specific ways (such as complementary colours).

These are opinions. I can find things that are symmetrical that are not beautiful. I can find things from nature that are definitely not beautiful.

Many times it's the exceptions to things that are beautiful - the out of place line in something that's otherwise symmetrical. But there are very few things in life that I think people will universally say is beautiful. There are always exceptions, people who do not like this thing or that.

You really seem to be suffering from an inability to differentiate opinion from fact.

Nature is subjectively beautiful for us because we are a part of nature. It's very easy to disprove that nature is objectively beautiful. Just write a computer program that calls images of nature ugly.

Knowing artists that have done the blank canvas thing when invited to show work, they are often on board with your interpretation that it’s contrived and absurdly priced.

That our culture rewards such non-effort so generously is the set up.

“The mission” isn’t to make a statement. But to get a doofus with more money than brains to pay rent for no effort whatsoever so they can make art for themselves.

You haven’t even seen it and you had an emotional reaction enough to keep posting about it.

There’s no contrived setup required. You replied with a contrived setup about art the way you did. Others replied with a contrived setup about art the way they did.

Please explain how that amount of subjectivity in this story alone create a framework for objectively beautiful art?

Too many ways in which chemical loops in billions of brains can flow to suggest such a thing.

Whether you can based upon some theory of pure science doesn’t matter since it’ll end up a cognitively subjective answer.

That's precisely what angries up my blood: If the doofus is going to pay for it, The Right People has to acknowledge it as art first. And if they do that, it's suddenly awarded significance it doesn't deserve, because, hey, it's art!

Except that entire idea is cliche at this point. It’s not that we don’t get the artist’s point, it’s that that point has been made to death already and doesn’t reveal anything new.

By the time stuff ends up in a huge museum, it's almost certainly going to be cliche. Those places will collect striking or significant examples of whatever styles and times they're featuring, and then the "anybody could've done this" discussion is similarly played out and tired.

If you don't like a style, don't go to exhibits that feature it. That's why I avoid still lifes and portraits and a lot of other pre-19th-century work. I find them dreadfully dull.

And if you want to see new things vs things you've already made up your mind about, you're gonna have to do more work and more digging to find the right venues!

Reminds me of a quote from Picasso: "When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine."

I can appreciate the type of conceptual art you're talking about as like a commentary on the very context it has ended up in, or as a way to question what makes us call an object "sculpture" vs. "garbage", or whatever. But I'm with you. I want to see folk art, outsider art, works-in-progress, beginner projects, and new experiments - both to connect with the community around me and so I can steal some of what I'm seeing to adapt for my own projects.

I like to do the critic thing too, but for me experiencing the products of art does not get me nearly as excited as experiencing the processes of it, whether I'm the artist or someone else is.

> I could have done that, but I didn't - because I'm not sufficiently full of shit.

It sounds like you're disparaging the art (and in fact the artists for producing it) because you think it's not sufficiently technically difficult. It also sounds like you believe the artists are trying to present it as more than it is. But tell me if I've misunderstood you.

This is a very antagonistic attitude. You're approaching art with an adversarial mindset that only recognizes it if it's something nontrivial. I don't think anyone is trying to bullshit you - art is just subjective.

For many people, what's more important than the competence is the originality. Not even necessarily the originality of the thing itself, but of the meta surrounding it. In that sense, plain white canvas in a museum is actually pretty original. It's certainly less derivative than a lot of the highly competent also-rans who painted the same scenes in the same (highly proficient) styles in the same time period. Moreover, it made you think. You didn't have a positive reaction to it, but then (as any artist would tell you) art doesn't restrict itself to positivity :)

Now with that in mind, let's circle back to your other statement:

> You're supposed to have some kind of ability and that ability shouldn't have to be defended by pointless platitudes.

It seems like they do have an ability, it's just not an ability you respect because your definition of art is more narrow than theirs. And that's okay! No one is forced to deeply appreciate all forms of art. But the way you're disparaging this kind of modern art is a perfect example of the middlebrow dismissal that's already been brought up in this thread.

People are not full of shit just because you don't appreciate the (highly subjective) things they do. The triviality of many modern art pieces is part of a broader context which your criticism completely fails to capture.

> In that sense, plain white canvas in a museum is actually pretty original.

Is it? I have a plain white canvas sitting in the garage. Maybe I should charge admission? :-)

> because you think it's not sufficiently technically difficult

Yes and no. I can find beauty in - or otherwise appreciate - simplistic creations as well. For example, a lot of contemporary photography is very little about technical skills and very much about selection, timing, subject and setting. I can find that highly engaging. But yes, there has got to be some thought behind it other than that it's supposedly "unique".

> Moreover, it made you think.

Lots of things make me think. I believe this is a simultaneously pretentious and simplistic approach to defining art.

> meta (...) original (...) derivative

What about beautiful? Emotional? Timeless and with lasting meaning? The kind of meta-art "commenting" on what art is or trying be "unique" that seems to make up the bulk of today's production is more than a century old by now.

> bullshit

Quoting this last because this is the core of my reasoning. The majority of the contemporary art world has long since lost any kind of connection to what's worthwhile, beautiful, thoughtful, insightful or interesting. It's a massive bullshit machine, propped up by nothing but a lot of pseudo-intellectual meta-reasoning about made-up abstract concepts commenting on themselves.

Many are provoked and angered by people getting famous for participating in reality shows or exposing their lives on Instagram. I can find the concept absurd, but it doesn't bother me as such. It's easy to ignore and if they can monetize their fame, good for them. That's between them and their audience.

As soon as something is considered art, on the other hand, it's considered to be of such significance that it warrants not only recognition, but also for example public funding, the interest of academia and a self-evident spot in any public place. It demands to be taken seriously, and people in positions of power will comply, no matter how inane it is. It's the naked emperor, if you will: it permeates society in ways that are systemically upheld by people who, when asked the question, probably couldn't explain what's actually good or beautiful or interesting about it, yet I'm expected to accept it at face value. For every blank canvas exhibited, there is one carrying true beauty that is left ignored. That bothers me copiously, however much I wish it didn't.

I like to define "art" as "A display of intent".

Example: the Voyager record. Any sufficiently-intelligent alien who comes across it is likely to conclude "That object probably wasn't an accident".

Compare this to tabloid articles with stories like "The face of Jesus appeared in my toast this morning!". Regardless of whether you're an atheist or not, the Voyager record undeniably offers a higher standard of evidence that some intelligent entity intentionally produced it. Somebody spent time and energy to make it look exactly like that.

I like this definition because it acts as an interesting litmus test.

Fantasy novels? Art.

A toilet? Definitely intentional, but how much thought went into every little aspect? How much of the design and production was left to chance?

An extremely ergonomic and well-designed toilet? Inching more towards "art", because it's not just any old toilet -- it's that toilet.

Plain white canvas in a fancy modern art museum? Debatable. Why does it look like that? Is the intent intrinsically obvious? Maybe it's obvious to serious art critics with a background in this stuff, but maybe it seems meaningless to everybody else.

Random squiggles in a fancy modern art museum? Still debatable, but more obvious than the white canvas - even if it was all random, somebody decided that they really liked those squiggles, and made the call that the squiggles were "done", and they decided to put it up on a wall instead of trashing it. From the artist's perspective, this is definitely art - it encodes a number of judgement calls on the part of the artist. To everybody else, it might just look like squiggles, so everybody else doesn't have to agree that it's art.

Ah, wow. My personal definition of music is "intended sound". (Needs additional qualifications, but most are obvious. "Intended sound that is not purely functional"?)

All art worlds, including the international fine art world, require an amount of buy-in, or, if you'd like, delusion. The fine art consensus about what art is and what art is worthwhile is built on centuries of conceptual, aesthetic, philosophical, and market progression. If you don't believe in it, it's not for you. The problem with The Art World is that people think it's THE art world. There are many art worlds. You can always find another "art world", like that of C64 graphics creators. See people making motion graphics on Instagram, wallpaper artists on DeviantArt, folk artists around the world, hobbyist landscape artists. All of these have theories of what's worthwhile and what's not. It's unreasonable to use the standards of one in another. If, in The Art World, a clay folk figuring is cool but not worthy of exhibition, in the Indian folk art world, it might be what's actually worth making and continuing to make, not a white canvas.

Presumably you're talking about Agnes Martin, who had an exhibition at Guggenheim a few years ago. If you aren't my apologies.

She had a lot of paintings that look like empty canvas from afar but show lot of details up close [0]

You don't have to like her work, but dismissing her paintings as "full of shit" is, well, remarkably full of...

Minimalism was her artistic choice that spanned many decades, and who knows how much time she spent to master her pursuit. She was so into her choice, she sought out to destroy her earlier works [1]

She was recognized by her peers, who are more qualified than you and I in judging at the very least technique and dedication.

[0] - https://www.moma.org/artists/3787 [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Martin

This was a mixed exhibition 11 years ago. The blank canvases were by three different artists. At least one of them had white primer on it, though. There were other paintings by other artists on display, too. I believe the main exhibition was designer clothes, can’t remember what brand (LV or Gucci or something like that).

> "But you didn't"

I don't do a lot of things, often because I see no value in doing them.

Don't think any of us could have done this beauty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Fire

Okay, you're being sarcastic here, and I know this isn't your main point, but I think you're still underestimating how many of us actually have the time, resources, or know-how to make an 18 foot tall museum-grade painting

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Teddy Roosevelt

Such a good message. I stumbled upon that quote from Brene Brown's TED talk on shame [0], which I definitely recommend.

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame

/me wipes the dust and sweat and blood off his face, and feels good about his efforts for a little while

Just curious, would you view politicians in the same light?

This quote was printed out and stuck on the wall of the changing room of the gym I used to go to.

There are many variations on this theme, and the message is all the same - it's better to try and fail than to not try at all. And to expand on it further, growth and learning comes from the the struggle and often coming up short. I was about to walk out onto the mat for my first BJJ comp and told my trainer I was nervous about letting him down. He paraphrased the Roosevelt quote above with 'any person who steps into the arena isn't letting me down'.

Another, what I would also consider a variation of the above, is the quote from Michael Jordan, "I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

BJJ=Brazilian Jujitsu

I want to take a step further and say that it's the character of the individual, the bravery of the one who's willing to shut out the outer world in pursuit of what's intrinsically valuable to the inner world. It's those who are critical that live at the mercy of the criticisms of others, and those will never be able to live the lives that'll fulfill them. This way of phrasing helped me understand more emotionally.

There's no shame in trying and failing, but at the same time, criticism is a completely valid thing. It can, of course, be presented in a poor way, or it can just be poor criticism. But you don't have to be a professional opera singer to know that a professional opera singer gave a poor performance and there's absolutely nothing wrong with pointing it out.

If you're trying to entertain or inform me and you failed to do that, I will absolutely say that I was not satisfied with the result (especially if I paid for it!). Criticism is the only consistent way the world moves forward. We all need it in our lives. I don't know Mr. Roosevelt's context for that quote, but seeing it in isolation, it does not resonate with me at all. It sounds like a child trying to justify why they did win the race even though they came in last.

Years ago I can remember seeing an artist on Twitter hitting back against some critics in the comments, saying something like "I didn't ask for your criticism".

At the time, I didn't understand why they were posting their work online if they didn't want to be criticized. I thought they needed to get a thicker skin.

Now that I've started sharing my own work with others, I completely see where they're coming from. Having someone who makes nothing and shares nothing log on to tell you how you should have done things differently is unwanted and not at all useful. Show me you know what you're talking about first, and I'll reconsider.

> Having someone who makes nothing and shares nothing log on to tell you how you should have done things differently is unwanted and not at all useful.

Until you're trying to sell your work instead of just exhibiting it.

I love the "feedback bucket" method for dealing with this.

Feedback/criticism is basically shit. 99% of it is utterly worthless and useless. So I mentally put it into the "feedback bucket" together with all the other crap (my inner critic is a plentiful source of vicious, spiteful, targetted feedback).

Eventually, from the bucket, the Flowers of Insight will grow. My mind's background processing will distill all that crap into some genuinely useful insight that I can use to improve the thing.

So I listen to feedback, nod and smile, thank them for their contribution, and move on, waiting for the flowers to grow.

That is brilliant. As someone who can rely on only getting negative feedback from certain people in my life, I can definitely see myself benefiting from this approach.

The visualization alone is helping with compartmentalizing negative feedback. That's a unique way to find insight by having sheer concentration of negative feedback.

Remember though, that the positive feedback goes in the bucket too.

That also helps with the "shucks, thanks, but it's really not that good" reaction. If someone gushes praise over your work, then that goes in the bucket. Smile and nod, thank them for their contribution, move on.

Could you expand on "I completely see where they're coming from"?

I kind of learned this over time. So when someone shows off something lame, I just keep quiet. Sometimes I try to find something praiseworthy.

Personally, I do post stuff online to get feedback and I am willing to take vicious criticism. My stuff is not art. Well, maybe that small fanfic a while ago [0]. It is certainly lame compared to some but feedback is the only way I can improve. I don't think critics are obligated to phrase their criticism nicely.

[0] http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/sacrifice_of_scar.html

I think if you're posting your work with the goal of getting feedback, then that's totally fine. I'm not trying to say that all critique has to sound nice (I actually don't believe this at all). But if you are going to seek out critique online, I would like to offer some advice.

Something I see a lot of beginners doing after they post up a piece of work is say "if anyone has any critique or feedback, I would love to hear it!". I have a couple of problems with this approach:

1) You should be able to discern what's wrong with your own work. In order to improve, you need to complete the feedback loop of 'making an attempt, recognising where improvement is needed, studying how to improve that thing, and then making another attempt'. You need to learn to identify your own weaknesses, as well as your strengths, and not expect other people to do it for you.

2) It's not specific enough. If you're going to ask for feedback, mention a particular thing you've been working on that you're still struggling with. For an artist, it might be that the perspective feels off in their image, but they can't figure out why. For a writer, maybe they've been trying to work out an ending to their story, but they can't quite crack it. Asking for 'any suggestions for improvements' is well-meaning, and signals that you're interested in learning, but unfairly puts the burden on other people to decide what's wrong with your work (and often with beginners, the list is far too long to even know where to begin).

> You should be able to discern what's wrong with your own work.

I think thats why people ask for critique or feedback, because they don't know yet. If you had a teacher they would be right there to help you lean the words and how to figure that out. Asking for feedback is really just trying to use the internet as a replacement for a teacher or mentor.

I understand what you're saying, that to beginners there are a lot of "unknown unknowns", but not everything should fall into that category. Even with a real-life teacher or mentor I'd give the same advice: go to them with a problem you're having or something you're trying to work on, rather than asking for general tips on how to get better.

We might have different fields of study in mind. In everything I've studied, even a beginner should be able to compare their work to the work of others and identify things that they need to work on. Do you have an example of a field of study where a beginner could look at their own work and not be able to identify anything that needs improving?

I was thinking about my experiences drawing and painting. If you do something like impressionistic it can be hard to judge, did I do to much detail, not enough detail. With pen drawing it took me awhile to realize how much more depth i needed to add by using darker values. It did take me a while to have that click. I suspect it would have been obvious if I took a drawing I did and one I considered well done to compare and asked someone experienced to point out the differences.

But also personally when writing it helps to get feedback to a vague question like what do you think. The writing I've done is non fiction, technical blog like stuff. I think the vague question of "what do you think", "how can i make it better" works there because it stands alone. Even when presenting a picture I can almost kind of prime you're reaction with a blurb about it.

> go to them with a problem you're having or something you're trying to work on, rather than asking for general tips on how to get better.

I agree with that, you does help to have a goal when asking for help to make it effective

> 1) You should be able to discern what's wrong with your own work. In order to improve, you need to complete the feedback loop of 'making an attempt, recognising where improvement is needed, studying how to improve that thing, and then making another attempt'. You need to learn to identify your own weaknesses, as well as your strengths, and not expect other people to do it for you.

That's a pretty insane thing to expect from someone trying to learn. It's something you eventually get to, but to get there, sometimes you need help finding the way. This is like saying, "I'm not going to teach you to read until you can read this sentence." Um... Thanks? You often don't know what you don't know.

> often with beginners, the list is far too long to even know where to begin

That's a pretty defeatist attitude. You don't have to tell them everything that's wrong with their work. You wouldn't tell a small child who drew you a picture that their light logic is wrong. You can pick a single thing that you think is the biggest problem and explain that.

> Having someone who makes nothing and shares nothing log on to tell you how you should have done things differently is unwanted and not at all useful.

What is especially frustrating is that inevitably 99% of such comments are also ideas that you had in your first seconds of thought on the subject, but discarded for good reason by the end of the first minute after thinking it through.

None of the people commenting gave it a minute of thought.

If the under-informed comments were at least kind that would be something else, but often they are not.

Sometimes a lovely conversation can arise from sharing your insight but you can't tell when instead of finding joy at a shared interest you'll find someone who just wants to debate and win at all cost, where their toy misunderstanding is the hill they want to die on. ... so you don't bother.

> Having someone who makes nothing and shares nothing log on to tell you how you should have done things differently is unwanted and not at all useful.

Just saying the work sucks is unproductive. When giving criticism I try my best to give productive feedback. For example if two colors clash in a way that doesn't work for me, I try to explain what it is about it that makes me feel that way, and maybe come up with some alternatives or variations to further explain what I'm trying to convey. Similar when reviewing text or code etc.

I also try to chose my words so that I don't sound demanding. I'm conveying my point of view, it is up to the receiver to decide what they want to do with it.

In any case I also always end with something positive. If I can't find _anything_ genuinely positive to say, I'll drop the whole thing and not say anything.

Of course in certain settings I have to be more authoritative. For example if I'm mentoring a new programmer on the team who just wrote some really bad code, that code needs to go and I can't skip talking about it. But I still try to follow the above as best as I can.

The Man in the Arena is almost obligatory at this point:

>It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_in_a_Republic

To me this also works the other way around. If am overly critical to others' work, my own work suffers. Only realized this now, thanks.

On a similar vein of thought, I asked someone yesterday if certain best practices were relevant to their use case, instead of talking about how many shortcomings their app has.

Couldn't agree more

> creating anything new ends up being really hard in part because while you struggle everyone is shouting "lame!" from the sidelines

This reminds me of the 'curse of development' from the Gervais Principle.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/04/14/the-gervais-principle-...

People who makes things are the real mvp, not the critics. The thing is that critics are funny.

I think I comprehend the difficulty of creating something but I still rant about things freely.

Not if it isn't interest me and not by shouting lame if there is no interest in the topic. I know how quickly people grow expectations and you begin to put them on yourself. If your most loyal fan would like an update before christmas, you might find yourself putting in quite some extra hours.

Underselling yourself might be from a time when humility was a virtue. I don't see modern societies reflecting that too much anymore. But you can also find yourself in a situation where you have to justify your abilities.

But I believe underselling also keeps you from creating expectations. Smart thing to do is tell everyone how stupid you are. And suddenly you are the guy full of surprises. Better than the other way around and being completely honest is of course out of the question for humans.

I find a lot of contemporary art awful.

Yes, I did not do it because I find it awful. When something is "though provoking" (a blank painting, or the urinal discussed elsewhere) I am simply reinforced in my opinion that people think differently (and obviously my thinking is the most appropriate). There is nothing to provoque here, just diffrent galaxies of concerns and thoughts.

I think about this all the time. I am simultaneously someone who wants to learn and create a lot of things, likes to share stuff online, and is very self-conscious about failure. So this challenge with facing my own not-goodness-at-things is one of the major emotional themes and challenges of my life.

I believe that broadcast social media is the primary reason why this is such a big thing these days. Everyone is so self-conscious all the time. It's like we've created a giant world-spanning panopticon where we can all see everyone at their worst moments all the time. We spend our days tip-toeing around the Earth hoping we don't get caught having our own personal "Stars Wars kid" moment and being shamed for it for the rest of our lives.

It used to be if you did something dumb or awkward, the five people around you laughed at you, told stories about it for a while, and that was it. Now it's literally captured from five different perspectives in high definition video and stereo audio and uploaded to the Internet for all to see until the end of time. It's no wonder awkward teens flocked to Snapchat and its ephemeral videos.

I used to go out to clubs dancing a lot when I was younger. I love dancing (which is unusual for a skinny nerdy white dude, but I guess you don't get to pick your passions). I believe moving your body to music is one of the fundamental human experiences. You don't have to love it, of course, but it's something we have been doing since the caveman days. It is as primal to being human as feasting.

It kills me that so many people who do have that desire don't get to satisfy it because of cripping self-consciousness about getting on a dancefloor. When I went out, I often heard people on the sidelines making fun of people out there dancing. I recognized that it was really their own insecurity being projected onto others. They were saying what they feared people would say about them if they were out there. My response was always, "Anyone who has the courage to dance at all is better than everyone on the sidelines."

I try to maintain that perspective with all activities, especially online. The world has enough criticism to last until the end of time. Today, anyone who at least tries is a winner in my book. Is it often cringy or mediocre? Yup. Will I tell them that? Hell no. They're at least trying.

As Jake in Adventure Time says "Dude, suckin' at something is the first step to being sorta good at something."

I see things a bit differently.

Being on the dance floor brings me happiness. Wooing the people on the sidelines brings me nothing at all.

I tried to appeal to everyone. It made me miserable and boring. I'd rather market myself to my target demographic.

Wooing/mocking other people do feel good. At least for short term. It makes us ‘feel superior/luckier’ over others. It contributes nothing good to society tho.

"wooing", not "booing"

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wooing

I'm glad the author is talking about this problem, but I think there's a slight misidentification of the cause.

I don't think it's that we're supposed to be bad at things, it's that we're expected to already be good at things. This still applies (irrationally) even when:

1. There is no mechanism provided for becoming good at the things we're expected to be good at.

2. Most people aren't good at the things we're expected to be good at.

The underlying thing here, is that ignorance, a temporary condition, is conflated with stupidity, a permanent condition.

Carol Dweck puts this another way: she describes a "fixed" mindset, where people believe that mistakes are examples of their inherent value, and therefore fear taking risks, and try to hide their mistakes. This is contrasted with a "growth" mindset, in which mistakes are seen as a necessary part of growth and risks are seen as learning opportunities.

Also related is Brene Brown's theory of vulnerability as being a necessary part of forming relationships.

I will say, I'm not entirely convinced by all the details of either Carol Dweck's mindset theory or Brene Brown's vulnerability theory, but the generalities seem to be evident in my own life.

EDIT: I'll also add that this conflation is particularly damaging to people and communities where intelligence is highly valued, and people base much of their self-worth in being knowledgeable. My personal experience is that growing up I based a lot of my self-worth in "being smart" so anyone disagreeing with me or pointing out something I didn't know felt like an attack on the very thing that made me feel worthwhile. Building real self-esteem made it possible for me to start seeing that when I don't know something that doesn't decrease my value as a person. This has allowed me to admit I don't know things more often, and actually fill in some of those gaps with real knowledge. I'm still a growing person, and I'm still not good at this, but the progress I have made has improved my life immensely.

This was my experience in most of my primary and secondary education (K-12) in Canada. If you were good at something right away, math, science, 2nd language, art, even gym class, you basically got some instruction and were able to learn a bit more and maybe even excel. This was my experience in Math and Science (I'm a Scientist/Engineer now). However, learning French, I struggled and rapidly fell behind. If you didn't excel you didn't really get enough teaching or attention to learn. Basically, as you say, you were expected to already just be good at stuff even from a young age and the system appeared to be designed around this idea. Learning (and critically practice) takes a lot of time for most things and everyone isn't good at it right away.

I had a similiar experience with driving lessons, I didn't take naturally to it and the limited number of lessons and the relative ease by which you can pass the test means I never really learned adequately during the "learning period" before you are granted a full license. In this case my mom forced me to continue and I continued to practice and eventually became competent and mostly comfortable. Many other activities I just gave up, no one wanted me on their T-ball team.

"the system appeared to be designed around this idea"

It is. If you have a bunch of people tied together by chronological age, who only in extreme circumstances can be held back or advanced early, in a 20th century classroom environment all sitting together listening to one person "teach", then structurally, an environment is created that can handle only one speed of learning. There is no good choice for that one speed, because the standard deviation is too large. In the worst cases, since neither the teaching pace nor the learning pace is itself a constant, you end up with a situation that serves no one at all a good chunk of the time.

I'm not saying this was or is the deliberate intent; it's just what the structure inevitably produces. It's not clear how to structure it any other way with 20th century technology in a cost-effective manner (e.g., "classrooms of 3 people" was never on the table). I'm hoping we'll start cracking this nut in the next few years, though. The tech is increasingly there and it's the social inertia about what school has "always been" holding us back now.

Homeschooling is a simple, effective way to achieve "classrooms of three people".

It is brutally difficult, as you have to sacrifice many of the things you want to do in favor of things your kids want to learn and do, but it is worth every ounce of that sacrifice.

It's also a very costly method that many people cannot afford. Doubly so if it'll impact the long-term career prospects of the parent that spends their time teaching.

Is it?

If one of you stays at home with kids, all the costs of childcare and that partner's potential commute are removed.

Anecdotally, I've met people who homeschooled because they thought it was cheaper than their other options.

If you're in an expensive school district, then you receive little benefit from your relatively high school taxes, but so it goes.

Again anecdotally, one of the poorest persons I've ever personally known pulled her kids out of public school to homeschool them.

I thought she was unqualified (despite my pro-homeschooling bias), but she got them from remedial classes to gifted status in two years, IIRC (when she put them back in school).

Some of my assumptions changed after that.

> Anecdotally, I've met people who homeschooled because they thought it was cheaper than their other options.

This almost, but not quite, matches my anecdotal experience. Basically, from what I've seen, it's not that it's cheaper[1] to homeschool, it's two things:

1. They don't trust the childcare they can afford. You can hire a 16 year old to care for your kid for minimum wage, but a trustworthy adult costs more.

2. The work they could be doing does gain them some net income, but the net income isn't worth the effort. I.e. if you can work for $30/hour for 8 hours with a 2 hour commute, and childcare is $20/hour, that's $30 * 8 = $240, $20 * 10 = $200, $240 - $200 = $40, $40 / 10 = a whopping $4/hour. It's not cheaper to homeschool, but it's not worth it to work for $4/hour.

[1] I'm interpreting "cheaper" to mean "cheaper in terms of money"--if that's not what you meant, my apologies.

> I'll also add that this conflation is particularly damaging to people and communities where intelligence is highly valued, and people base much of their self-worth in being knowledgeable

Another issue with intelligence-idolizing environments like the ones you describe is that if you don't find a way to gain the self-esteem needed to admit not knowing something, you might end up coping by pretending that you know that thing, and in doing so, suppressing your propensity to curiosity and growth, and increasing your propensity to use BS and manipulation - both of which admittedly also require a lot of intelligence.

> Building real self-esteem made it possible for me to start seeing that when I don't know something that doesn't decrease my value as a person. This has allowed me to admit I don't know things more often, and actually fill in some of those gaps with real knowledge.

I had the same transformative experience early in my life of developing the self-esteem to admit that I don't know things. It goes hand in hand with the skill of asking more questions of others than telling them what you know.

Just to point out: Hacker News is definitely an intelligence-idolizing environment. :)

Yep, which is what makes your original comment so interesting in this context.

It so visible whenever people react to mistakes: some will seek fault to play the blame/punishment game. Other will see it as opportunity to learn and to try it differently the next time.

"When you say you are good at something, that's arrogant."

Learned that the hard way.

When I was young (college in the 90s), I had a Software Development class. We formed small teams and created a piece of software in a waterfall methodology.[1]

Why I thought I was so great: I had taken independent study in high school to learn algorithms and data structures to take the Computer Science AB(now discontinued) AP test (covers recursive algorithms and dynamically allocated data structures, in Pascal at the time) and got a 5 out of 5.

So when we got together to discuss who would work on what, and we needed to code our own data structures in C/C++ for the project, I was excited and said "I'm the master!" of that. There was an older member of the team (who even developed and sold his own software product, a program to print booklets, for DOS already) who later in the meeting made a very sarcastic reference to me being the "master" of that and it really stung.

[1] Looks like they still have it. They added github, UML, and user stories. C S 371 https://pixl.nmsu.edu/files/2017/05/syllabus-SDev-2017-1-V10...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science#AP_Compute...

I have to question why someone with that level of seniority would need to be in a software development class. Generally my experience with people who are demonstrably successful is that they are not insecure like you described. Is it possible they were bluffing?

I think he was just going back to get his degree. I should say that it was just a shareware product he had developed that I was talking about. I don't remember what he had done for a living up to that point.

Software development classes are mandatory for some courses, and it is not that uncommon to find some already-not-so-green programmers in them. Some are just looking for the certification at the end of their programme.

> Generally my experience with people who are demonstrably successful is that they are not insecure like you described.

Is it really insecurity? Teasing someone about their previous arrogance when they're actually a beginner is one of the better forms of putting-down IMO. Teaches 'pride cometh before fall' and all that. And a group project is a quite informal space to do that in.

I agree. As colleagues/collaborators it is almost a responsibility to keep each other in check like this. As long as it is skillfully applied and empathic. Sprinkling a bit of humor on top can help too (for both sides).

In the old days there was actually quite a few companies that was created and run by people with very little programming experience but a lot of business sense. In about 1995 I worked for a company that had sold their business system to companies like Eriksson and Dell. But the codebase was about 5 million codes of CBasic, copy and paste programming and GOTOs everywhere. It all started in a guys basement in early eighties. It all started to crumble around the time I was there, because porting that old DOS system to Windows just wasn't possible. And a ew batches of thousand of tons of steel had got lost for big a customer in our inventory management system...

Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that just because someone had developed a successful (in making money) product doesn't mean they are actually good at programming.

When you're new to CS, you're excited and kind of have that Dunning Kruger effect of not knowing how much of a noob you really are. I think all of us who have gotten to the senior level were there at some point.

And when we see the same noobishness in young people just getting started, especially if they're making the assertion that they know much more than they actually do, you can't help but playfully put that attitude in check.

I've done/said similar things to junior members on my team, always in jest, but only because I know where their head is at and that I've been there too. I hire attitude and well, they're ready to go from day 1. And of course, the more they learn going forward, the more they realize the extent of their former bravado.

Hopefully the guy referring to you as the master was constructive and congenial overall.

You were probably more excited that you were arrogant, but your choice of words "I'm the master" implied an attitude that your abilities were unsurpassed, to which anyone would be incredulous. It was probably that perceived attitude of arrogance that the others were reacting to, not your actual skills as they were.

To claim mastery to a group of people who have no prior experience with you seems like a result of misreading the social environment. Whether that misreading is borne of arrogance or naivety is a separate thing.

Software development classes are themselves more about learning how to socially coordinate people to complete a project with ambiguous requirements, which depends far more on social and situational awareness than raw skill in a particular technical area. So if your takeaway years later was learning how to better communicate your abilities with a team of people, perhaps you learned exactly what was intended by that class.

See: The myth we love new ideas - people resist change, including progress from https://scottberkun.com/2013/ten-myths-of-innnovation/

> We are a conservative species: try something as simple as standing, rather than sitting, in your next group meeting. How accepting were your peers? Conformity is deep in our biology. While talking about creativity is very popular, actually being creative puts your social status at risk. All great ideas were rejected, often for years or decades, yet we bury this in our history (see Myth #1 & #2). The history of breakthroughs is a tale of persistence against rejection. Much of what makes a successful innovator is their ability to persuade and convince conservative people of the merits of their ideas, a very different skill from creativity itself. Your problem is likely not your ideas, but your skills for pitching ideas to others. Ideas are rarely rejected on their merits; they’re rejected because of how they make people feel. The bigger the idea, the harder the persuasion challenge.

> I was at a liberating structures event recently, and one of the people I was working with related an anecdote in which he tried a party game as an ice breaker. Many of those are cringe, but this one sounded fun and inoffensive (it was a sentence continuation game where each person said a word following on from a previous one, in an attempt to construct something that sounded like an aphorism). Most people were reluctant initially but got into the swing of things, but a few people just dug their heels in and would not engage properly with it because of concern over looking weird.

Perhaps some of them were indeed concerned about looking weird. I guarantee you that at least a few of them didn't want to engage because they're introverts who just generally hate awkward group getting-to-know-you games.

Amen.

I don't think there's anything wrong with not wanting to participate in silly games like that all the time, but if you never try to step out of your comfort zone in a public setting, I think you're missing out on an opportunity to grow as a person. You might just have fun doing something you thought was stupid or you thought you would hate.

Ahh hello there, good'ol FOMO. Let me show you a little trick:

I don't think there's anything wrong with not wanting to participate in silly games like that all the time, and if you never try to step out of your comfort zone in a public setting, I don't think you're missing out on an opportunity to grow as a person.

Not fomo IMO. Rather, experimenting and discovering new things, incl about oneself.

That can happen outside of attention-seeking exercises organized by extroverts, FYI.

Basically Bandit algorithm: balancing between exploitation (doing same things that already work) vs exploration (try out new things)

I think you are conflating introversion and shyness or a broader uncomfortableness / inexperience with social interactions.

Yes, these things can be related. Spending less time socialising will lead to fewer opportunities to learn social skills, and to being less used to interactions with strangers.

Things being (perceived as) awkward are in my experience a result of lack of knowing what's appropriate behavior in a given situation. Something that will come with experience, and with self-confidence (reduces the need to "know the protocol" to feel comfortable in a social situation).

I would consider myself an introvert. I also used to be very shy, and was very concerned about appearing weird to others. In retrospect, one of the reasons for that was that _I_ was judging people all the time for all kinds of things, and believed they must be doing the same, and I couldn't bear that thought.

Nowadays I am comfortable in social situations and enjoy them greatly with the right people. Still don't go to parties a lot, still spent a lot of time by myself.

By self-proclaiming yourself as introvert and implying that entails unchangeable defects in social abilities, you will prevent yourself from learning and acquiring these abilities.

> I think you are conflating introversion and shyness or a broader uncomfortableness / inexperience with social interactions.

Respectfully, no. It's not about knowing appropriate behavior, it's about the fact that "getting to know you" type exercises in a large group format often serve, de facto, as a power-grabbing / power-flexing exercise for extroverts who need affirmation and attention for their mind to be at ease.

The world has a natural extrovert-bias as humans gather in groups, e.g., if 10 people who don't know each other show up for a seminar or something, and 2 of them are extroverts and 8 are introverts, the two extroverts will have a loud and spirited conversation that they then try, often successfully, to pull the others into. Some of the introverts will play this game, others will not, but all of them will hate it.

Another example of this would be company offsites where the senior leadership team wants to discuss company culture -- like clockwork, they usually turn into a gabfest where the office manager and senior recruiter suck up all the air time with yap-yap-yap while the dev team zones out and waits for this bullshit to wrap up.

Productive introverts' coping techniques for toxic, needy extroverts seems to me to be a largely ignored topic in business literature -- probably because introverts generally don't like talking about stuff.

Can I agree with his overall premise but disagree with thinking that scheduling weekly one-on-one's with your wife is in any way a good idea?

I also wonder if the social obligation to be bad at things - that is, to avoid arrogance at all costs, even at the risk of withholding potentially useful advice - is more an American thing than a worldwide phenomenon. Not being embarrassed when you can't spell words correctly seems to be unique to American culture.

> Can I agree with his overall premise but disagree with thinking that scheduling weekly one-on-one's with your wife is in any way a good idea?

No. That's the whole point. If it works for them why would it be bad? Let's try and not shame people for having different approaches to things.

Well, depends what he means with "your"; OP specifically, or an arbitrary person? Because I think we are getting dangerously close to shooting down useful criticism and discussion for fear of hurting someones feelings. It's obviously insensitive to say that OP is a bad person because he is doing one-on-ones, but it should be totally acceptable to say "this is weird (from my perspective), I can see several issues with this, I wouldn't personally do this, but you-do-you", and often "(from my perspective)" and "but you-do-you" parts are implied; their absence shouldn't necessarily be taken as proof of mocking.

(Disclaimer: I have no opinion on partner one-on-ones.)

Weird is one of those truly terrible words that's used to control people who are different than us. It's nice for the person using it, since it doesn't actually mean anything and is thus impervious to arguments stronger than "nuh uh". It's almost never actually the right word, and should be avoided in favor of more descriptive language. In order for criticism to be constructive, it must be easily understandable by the person receiving it.

"Don't call people weird" seems like a good general principle (unless they self-identify as weird, in which case knock yourself out). I don't understand this compulsion to try and get people to fall in line and stop being weird.

The from-my-perspective and you-do-you parts are the most important parts, why would you leave them out? You're not in charge.

It sounds silly, but set aside time for a purpose is a good thing. A friend of mine and his spouse do a twice a year “offsite” where they go camping somewhere and spend half of the Saturday talking about where they are in the year financially, relationship, what they want to accomplish as a couple, etc

Sure, as long as you acknowledge that trying to date your employees/manager as a regular part of your professional interactions is also not "in any way a good idea". Getting your translation files mixed up when communicating can make anything seem weird and out of place. Find the root - "intentional interaction with the other party within the established context of the existing socio-personal relationship for the purpose of strengthening and improving said relationship" - then retranslate into the environment in question. You date your wife and hold one-on-ones with co-workers. Its not weird, its just the wrong translation.

> Can I agree with his overall premise but disagree with thinking that scheduling weekly one-on-one's with your wife is in any way a good idea?

Some folks have a gut-level extremely bad reaction to structuring or treating relationships (romantic or otherwise) "scientifically" or in some structured way. I'm one of them. Grosses me out as surely as seeing maggots burrowing in my steak. It's not rational and goes against everything I rationally believe about the power of systems and environment to engineer success, and I've had to learn to work against that feeling pretty often, but, there you go. Knowing that doesn't get rid of the feeling and tendency toward aversion.

I suspect the people making posts that "pissed off" OP were largely having this reaction and didn't get that not everyone has it.

> It's not rational and goes against everything [...]

It's a justified reaction to how corporations work[0]. Similar to how people feel viceral revulsion at burn scars, even though burn scars are not in any way contagious, (in part) because they look similar to horrible skin diseases that are quite contagious.

It's (probably) unfair in this particular case, but it's not at all unjustified.

0: As usual, someone more eloquent than me has put it:

"This company is my dream. ...And it's built from the dreams of people who work here. Just the way this building is built out of stone."

"This building is made of concrete. Actually. [...] Stone that's been ripped out of the ground, pulverized, mixed with foreign materials, and forced into molds to fit the will of the designer. Stone that bears no resemblance to its original form."

Yeah, you're the person he's talking about. If that's the way he can better communicate with his wife and she's ok with it, that's all that matters.

I used to randomize calendar events on my phone to remind me to call grandma, see dad, game with my brother, etc. It was very robotic looking and if I told anyone about it, I got weird looks but years later, I have great relationships with everyone in my family because I basically trained myself and the people I reached out to communicate well and not let conversation be awkward. If OP kept this up, I bet his relationship at worst would be the same and more likely healthier.

A "one-on-one" is a weird way to phrase it but I've done regular "relationship check-ins" and it worked pretty well. It wasn't weekly though, that's too much for me, I'd probably go for monthly.

Recurrent meetings is another thing people rarely do in personal relationships that I found works pretty well.

I got the idea from the fox in the Little Prince:

The next day the little prince came back.

"It would have been better to come back at the same hour," said the fox. "If, for example, you come at four o'clock in the afternoon, then at three o'clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o'clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you . . . One must observe the proper rites . . ."

"What is a rite?" asked the little prince.

"Those also are actions too often neglected," said the fox. "They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all."

So I tried it. For a while I had a recurrent Wednesday lunch with a couple of friends, and I had a weekly scheduled date with my girlfriend at the time. It really does work like the fox says, after a while I started being happier the day before, expecting the event - in a way I don't for one-off scheduled things. Of course, I didn't call them "recurrent meetings", that's business-speak.

I did weekly one-on-ones with a former gf. We'd just check in, see how the week went.. make sure everyone is feeling good and getting enough attention and whatnot.

I thought it was a good idea, and maybe it was. It felt fine at the time. Our lives took us in different directions and we parted ways after a couple years dating. I thought we left things amicably, but I got an email a few years later (after I had married someone else) that made it clear that my then-gf does indeed seem to hate my fucking guts now.

I don't do one-on-ones with my wife, but it still doesn't strike me as a bad idea.

It's entirely possible I'm an idiot.

I think the main reason people don't like it is aesthetic.

If you told people that whatever else was happening, you always made time to have a conversation with your wife at least once a week that wasn't purely transactional (discussing the week's meal planning, children's school schedules etc.). I think people would think that was a good idea.

Using a "corporate" term for it, rubs many people the wrong way.

Secondarily, some people are uncomfortable using scheduling for personal relationships in general because they feel that these things should be spontaneous. That is, this should be unnecessary because you have deep meaningful conversations with your wife all the time as a matter of course.

That's nice if that's the case, but what is not so nice is the attitude that if it doesn't happen spontaneously then it is somehow illegitimate to schedule it.

When I was younger, I thought "date night" for couples was unbearably gauche. Surely, going out for dinner, going to a concert was just an inevitable part of a relationship? If you're going to plan it, you might as well move to the suburbs, buy a Subaru, and give up.

I don't think that any more. If you're living a life where spontaneous time is indeed filled with activities like that, that's great and no need for cringy "date nights". Realistically for a lot of people that's just going to mean sitting at home eating takeaway in front of the tv.

We are in a slightly odd place in society where it is considered a bit lame to try. Society feels that it is indeed better to go out for a nice dinner than to sit on the couch watching sitcoms, but society is also a little uncomfortable with people who put effort into doing that rather than it just happening effortlessly.

> It is considered a bit lame to try.

I believe this is the real thesis of the article. Why it is okay to be successful is that you no longer need to try - or if you believe talent is innate that some people never had to try. Struggling to get better, being bad, and improving all reek of “trying.”

Note that the term try-hard is an insult.

Of course you are allowed to disagree. But would you think of it differently if it was phrased as "We go to couples therapy to strengthen our marriage"? What about "We have a weekly date night."

I believe the larger point is not about the status of the author's marriage, not about American arrogance,or even our spelling. Instead it is to see the underlying goal people are trying to achieve, and appreciate that they are working to improve something in their life.

I've found that one-on-ones are vitally important for any relationship, no matter what you call them.

I would even make one observation. If there is a sort of time or power imbalance in a relationship, the personal meeting is probably of vital importance to the one with more time or less power. In other words "the meeting is for them, not for you"

> Why don't we want people to be good at things?

Because if A and B start out at the same place, and A succeeds, then B lacks an excuse to justify his non-success. So B needs to tear down A in order to feel better about himself.

Yes, precisely. Well, minor thing:

"in order to continue seeming to be a useful member of the group", I'd say.

And there're other strategies too, of course, one includes trying to help A become even better

>When you say you're bad at something, people tell you that you're not, or treat it as weakness.

As a Brit who has worked with Americans I think this is very cultural. From my judgement of my interactions if I say "I know nothing about this but..." there's probably a 50% chance I know more about the thing than you. If I say "Have you considered..." that means you're talking about my area of expertise. That's not been my experience of how Americans approach things -often from a perspective of trying to prove themselves. From a social point of view I've always found it more useful to under-estimate my own abilities than to ever-estimate. There's good reason too, if you claim authority and are wrong then you burn a lot of credibility.

Having said this, I also subscribe to the idea that criticising other people primarily makes you look bad no matter the truth of the matter and that sounds a lot like what the people the author describes is doing.

Arrogance can sometimes get you in the door quicker. You can be modest once you are in. Or take the slow road with modesty from the beginning.

To perhaps state the obvious, the reason we don't encourage people to say that they're good at things is that it's hard to judge for yourself. It has as much to do with your general view on yourself, and what your standard of "good" is, than what the average other person would think. So, you try to prove you are good by doing things, not saying things.

I have worked with people who could say they were good at things without sounding arrogant, and after a great deal of thought I have concluded that it's because of two things.

1. those same people are quick to say when they're bad at things as well.

2. their competency is never the point of the sentence, it's always a supporting argument on the way to the point. E.g. I'm an expert in this library and I struggle with using that part correctly, we should consider reworking it so it's possible for novices to use it.

3. Express it in terms of experience, which is a quality that I think people are more comfortable with because it doesn't imply innate or "fixed" talent. Experience is widely understood as a function of time & effort so people feel less insecure about it because everyone can gain experience.

Eg. I would say "I'm pretty familiar with this library, so here's my perspective"

Reminds me back when I went skiing for the first time with my gf at the time.

She had lots of experience skiing and I guess wanted to “show me the slopes”. In showing me how to do the pizza stop, I said “but all the pros do the side to side thing...” so I did that instead.

By the end of the day I was going down all the slopes with her (I still lost my skis a couple times), but she seemed a bit pissed off and I remember her saying “how can you do in one day what took me three months?!”.

She did not seem happy...

The correct answer is "because I had a great teacher". She probably learnt skiing with less guidance and had to figure out a bunch of stuff on her own.

I still empathize with the phenomenon though. No matter what mindset you have or humility or conscious understanding of the differences between human ability, it's often viscerally frustrating to see others pick stuff up way quicker than you could ever hope to.

> I still empathize with the phenomenon though. No matter what mindset you have or humility or conscious understanding of the differences between human ability, it's often viscerally frustrating to see others pick stuff up way quicker than you could ever hope to.

The irony of this is that she had a high IQ so was used to learning things much quicker than others.

> The correct answer is "because I had a great teacher". She probably learnt skiing with less guidance and had to figure out a bunch of stuff on her own.

The reason I was good at skiing was because a) I had done aggressive inline skating for many years, and b) I had been snowboarding a few times

The confidence and similarity from rollerblading along with familiarity of how the snow moves from snowboarding allowed me to pick it up quickly.

This is the same misunderstanding as the one that leads to angst at interview selection. You don't have a social obligation to do anything. It's just that you share some characteristics with a lot of kooks.

For instance, I have a few views that would flip the bozo bit on most people (I am anti-organ-donation, pro-lower-quality-healthcare, anti-Office-of-the-First-Lady, and I think people tried to scapegoat Andrew Wakefield for a lot of shit) so I don't usually state those views and attempt to explain until people know I'm not a bozo.

I know that P(bozo | having these views) is pretty high, so I first have to demonstrate that P(bozo) is low in the first place.

P(can't write code | can't write code in an interview) is pretty high. P(isn't that good | claims to be good) is pretty high.

You know you so you know you are not a bozo, that you can write code, that you are good. But the other party is operating in the space of not-just-you. It's just an information asymmetry that works against you. So, if the social validation matters to you, you have to symmetrify that in a trusted fashion. And honestly, life is short, no human has infinite time to evaluate another human, so your symmetrification had better be speedy if you want the effects you desire.

> pro-lower-quality-healthcare

What does that mean? What bigger goal lies behind that?

> you have to symmetrify that in a trusted fashion.

Yes I think so too. And I suppose sometimes someone who, say, wears formal clothes and a suite, does that not because s/he wants to dress like that, but because s/he knows about this too

Haha we both know it's probably best for me not to elucidate here but the gist of it is that I'm convinced that cutting healthcare requirements can vastly increase healthcare access and that access to bad care is far superior to inaccessible good care and that we are in a situation where we are forcing the trade-off. I don't really care to speak more of it on this forum because it's hard to get the nuance out in text.

> And I suppose sometimes someone who, say, wears formal clothes and a suite, does that not because s/he wants to dress like that, but because s/he knows about this too

Almost suspected you knew me. Except that I've since developed an appreciation.

> cutting healthcare requirements can vastly increase healthcare access

Sounds good to me, thanks for explaining

> Almost suspected you knew me

I'm thinking you're in the US? I've never been there; I'm in Europe

>>Why don't we want people to be good at things?

In general it may be that it reminds people of their own failings and nobody likes to feel like a loser.

Most people are just "professionals." As in they talk a lot of shit at work, but don't really care about the field. It's role playing, and they usually have imposter syndrome.

When someone comes in who isn't an imposter, the "professionals" best strategy to keep their ill-earned position is to attack what makes a true scholar: their "unprofessionally uncertain" curiosity, and their "unprofessionally risky" willingness to try something new. True creatives aren't very "professional" because they don't act like they know everything, and they don't just do the same thing over and over again.

I remember the Car Talk guys Click and Clack talking about their tongue-in-cheek (or maybe not) advice for being married. It was something like:

"The very first time that they ask you to do the laundry, say 'Yes, honey! I'd love to!'. Then, do it so horribly bad. Turn everything pink or whatever. Shrink, ruin some clothes. Then, they'll never ask you to do the laundry again."

This is often called "strategic incompetence" (or feigned incompetence).

I really miss Car Talk.

I wish there were a good comprehensive catalog of all their old episodes online...

> 1. You will be punished for trying new things.

> 2. You will be punished for trying things that don't work.

> 3. You will be punished for trying to understand how good you are at something.

> 4. You will be punished for succeeding.

This is a fascinating conclusion, and first of all, I think it's entirely valid to feel that way. And it must feel incredibly frustrating.

But I think if we zoom out a bit, we can gain a broader perspective.

Which is that, no matter what you do, you'll always be "punished" by some people. There's no right answer here. But other people will also reward you. (Also, funnily, sometimes when you don't even deserve it.)

And part of being an adult is in finding the right groups of people who are constructive and supportive, rather than tearing you down due to their own insecurities and egos.

This applies in finding a supportive spouse, supportive friends, and a supportive workplace. And it takes work to identify and find the right supportive people.

Supportive people will celebrate you for trying new things, celebrate you for trying things even when they don't work, celebrate you for trying to understand how good you are, and celebrate you for succeeding.

It's also very easy to have been surrounded by negative people for so long that you feel helpless, that you don't even know how to find supportive people or trust that they're there.

And that's a hard rut to be in, and there are a bunch of techniques to help you get out of it, which you might need a therapist to identify for you if it gets really bad.

But one that really speaks to this specifically is enrolling in local improv comedy classes. You spend three hours in a group of equally embarrassed "newbies" learning to follow the cardinal rule of "yes, and". Everyone is forced to be supportive. Improv is about literally coming up with new things for three hours straight, and everyone celebrating it no matter what happens (the only limit is not being offensive). I know people that credit it for turning their lives around, and where they made their best friends.

Obviously improv isn't the answer for everyone. But I hope the author can find the support they're looking for.

The point about space and understanding to try new things and not be amazing at them isn't a bad one, but the thing about having 1:1s with your partner that is drawing ridicule isn't the idea of having a scheduled, weekly check-in with your partner; it's that business-talk is intentionally de-personified and using it in a personal context implies a lack of respect for the human you're dealing with.

Consider that I called it a "weekly check-in with your partner" above. That phrasing focuses on the existing relationship and the consideration of checking on how they're doing. A "1:1" is called that to distinguish it from other meetings that involve more than two people, and drops all the connotations of concern or supporting an existing relationship. That's what people are reacting negatively to.

Yes, you're right that business talk is depersonified and implies a lack of respect for the human you're dealing with. And this is an assertion backed up by lots of other business talk--referring to humans as "resources" is probably the worst I hear often. And this assertion is further supported by the frequent, sociopathic behavior of businesses which goes beyond how they communicate.

But surely the fact that they are married to this other person is a bit stronger evidence that they cares for them, than a slightly off wording?

And further, it's completely absurd to hear this objection from Hacker News, where the most common viewpoint seems to be "if it makes money then it must be ethical". If this is really dehumanizing, then isn't the bigger problem that most people are totally okay with dehumanizing language in a business context? Is the objection here that he doesn't stand to turn a profit?

> But surely the fact that they are married to this other person is a bit stronger evidence that they cares for them, than a slightly off wording?

No one's saying they don't really care about their partner. It's possible to be put off and derisive of that language without judging whether they truly care.

> And further, it's completely absurd to hear this objection from Hacker News, where the most common viewpoint seems to be "if it makes money then it must be ethical". If this is really dehumanizing, then isn't the bigger problem that most people are totally okay with dehumanizing language in a business context? Is the objection here that he doesn't stand to turn a profit?

I mean, yeah. That part of Hacker News is pretty appalling. We _should_ be angry about dehumanizing language in a business context.

There is such a thing as a hacker ethic. To me the core is something like "Try to save the world through math, science, understanding, and making cool things."

The term has much more history than startup culture, although the goals of startups (many YC funded) can be in line with those ideals (if imperfectly).

This seems a bit off-topic, but is more interesting to me than the topic, so I'll roll with it. :)

I don't think the hacker ethic is necessarily about saving the world, and I while I can hypothesize a startup that aligns with a hacker ethic, I have not in practice seen any examples.

The hacker ethic is about gaining a deep functional understanding of a system, and then using that deep functional understanding to make that system do something unexpected or cool.

As soon as you bring money into the equation, it causes people to do all sorts of predictable and boring things. There are certainly people with hacker cred who have gotten rich, but the money was incidental to the hacking. For example, Woz has it because he designed computers he wanted to use and that happened to turn out to be very profitable.

> I don't think the hacker ethic is necessarily about saving the world, and I while I can hypothesize a startup that aligns with a hacker ethic, I have not in practice seen any examples.

I guess it's more of a particular interpretation, of me growing up with a 90s idealism of saving the world. It's a bit naive of course, but a naivety of the hopeful kind, not of ignorant kind.

Orgs that come to mind are Wikipedia, Khan Academy, various Open Source projects and foundations, etc. I do think maintaining a good, coherent mission is still an open problem with successful companies, but many do help one way or another. For example, Dropbox was quite revolutionary in the way everyone uses and shares files I think. Reddit changed internet discourse (in some valuable, and in some complicated ways), though its trajectory is uncertain.

Maybe there could be a stronger version of a Mission statement? Something like companies committing to a mission statement, and being liable somehow to acting inconsistency with it (who would monitor this though? should be some kind of external entity), and shareholders/board members should not be allowed to modify it in a manner gravely inconsistent with the original vision.

> I guess it's more of a particular interpretation, of me growing up with a 90s idealism of saving the world. It's a bit naive of course, but a naivety of the hopeful kind, not of ignorant kind.

I think you're missing the critical disconnect between startups and hacker ethic.

There's no conflict between hacker ethic and saving the world. Wikipedia in the early days is a great example of that, but I'd really hesitate to call Wikipedia a "startup" at that time. Hacker ethic isn't about saving the world, it's about doing something cool. But saving the world can be cool.

The conflict between hacker ethic and startups is money, and Wikipedia as it has grown is a great example of that too: as Wikipedia started taking on more projects, they started needing funding. In order to get that funding, they needed respectability, because donors wouldn't donate to some weird offbeat hacker project. This caused the rise of deletionism: a respectable encyclopedia doesn't have a separate article for every Pokémon. Wikipedia did originate with the hacker ethic, but that hacker ethic became irrelevant as soon as money became a motivating factor.

And that's also the thing about open source: yeah, open source software (and moreso free software) are part of hacker culture. People who hand-wring about how open source isn't profitable don't get it: that's not why a lot of open source developers write open source software.

If you want to make money off writing code, you don't create an open source project, you create a startup: create a platform, track your users, find the thing they value the most about the platform, and monetize that. Oh, and while you're doing that, you've made enough ethical compromises that you can't really be said to be saving the world any more, but that wasn't really ever the goal, now was it?

The people in the world who need saving the most are the ones who can't pay to be saved--if they could pay to be saved they would have done it already. There isn't money in saving the world.

Maybe part of the problem is the author is engaging with people on Twitter. Twitter appears to me, an outsider, as a messy hateful place where people throw one-liners of hate at each for reasons that are very difficult for outsiders to understand.

Somewhat unrelated, but last night I was trying to make sense of the trans-activist hatred towards J. K. Rowling and I could not understand what was going on. Like, it wasn't that I couldn't understand the argument that was generating such strong emotions, it is that I couldn't even find the argument in the first place. There was just a heap of hatred and anger being spewed across twitter and I had no idea who they were really angry at and what their argument was. Frankly, I think we would all be better off if Twitter didn't exist. It seems to be a very stupid place.

"When you say you are good at something, that's arrogant. When you say you're bad at something, people tell you that you're not, or treat it as weakness."

There are a thousand ways to say you're good at something. Some of them will make you appear arrogant, some will make you appear humble, with endless options in between. I don't know who this author is or what specific axes they have to grind, but instead of taking broad swipes at all of society, maybe consider your own communication skills and how they are not leading to the results you desire. If you're starting from a position of "there is one way to express a thought and it will always be met with this specific response", you are a pretty far way from actually improving your situation.

This is basically a restatement of the core of Robin Hanson’s years-long set of Overcoming Bias posts about “homo hypocritus”.

The short answer is status. The game you are playing with others (whether you want to or not) is all about political status. It’s not at all about objective successful outcomes. It’s about who can utilize politics as a resource to take what they want and entrench their hold of it.

For example in medieval times, decrying scientific progress as heretical served the purpose of allowing monarchs and religious figureheads to retain power. Who gives a shit how planetary orbits work if you can decapitate your enemies becuz god.

This is a very deeply ingrained evolutionary aspect of humans and we are not modern or sophisticated in terms of defeating it.

To expect otherwise is naive & frankly frustrating.

This is why it's important to choose very carefully who your friends are and who you associate with: you want people around who are going to be positive and encouraging, not tear you down no matter what you do. You also need to develop a very thick skin.

One also needs to be careful not to fall into the same trap of criticism and negativity oneself - it's just way too easy to be a hypocrite.

(An aside: constructive criticism can be helpful, although I think almost any kind of criticism too early in any learning/exploratory/discovery process can be counter-productive. Some people couch tearing you down as "constructive criticism". Again, it's a good strategy to simply avoid such people, or manage them out of your life, where you can.)

I think it's a social status quo deadlock. People want to appear flawless because any flaw in one domain will affect how they are seen in other domains. It's a signal that says "Look at this person making mistakes, he/she is worst than all these other people that didn't make one!" [1].

Best way to avoid making mistakes ? Not trying.

I was at an interview once and the job description said they wanted an expert in sql. So when they asked me to rate my sql skills I felt I should say expert since that’s why I’m there.

Well the “expert” word triggered them and they said “well, if you’re an expert you can answer these obscure questions ...” and obviously I failed it.

This article made me think of that.

I have observed this behavior, but never really understood it. Sometimes I have to think of people as having left over bits of event based code that overrides everything else in certain circumstances. Trying to remember what effects which people in which ways is my biggest challenge in work and probably life in general.

I've always thought that most people either judge you for being below them or worship you for being above them.

Very few people occupy that middle ground where they are just happy for you and treat you as a person with motivations, flaws, and gifts.

I'd gander to say this hierarchical primitive behavior is a major impediment to human progress.

There's a lot to unpack here.

I have noticed the opposite. My impression is that most people's identities are so coloured by their insecurities that people usually come together more on being able to laugh at their common insufficiencies and also on the things they hate in common. But this is perhaps because I'm still relatively young and the people I encounter are still working on realizing themselves.

Well you work in a remarkably status free place or, possibly, you're one of the privileged ones and might not even know it!

> If I sat down and tried to design a set of social norms for discouraging people from being their best selves, I honestly don't think I could have done a better job than this.

> Why don't we want people to be good at things?

Historically most people were peasants or serfs. The only thing they were expected to be good at was that, and were actively discouraged from doing anything else.

We have gone from "Civilization and Its Discontents" to the Human Potential Movement in the blink of an eye.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Disconten...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Potential_Movement

> A thing I got pissed off at a while ago was reactions to someone talking about having weekly one-on-ones with his wife

My guess is that it would have gone over a lot better if the person had stated that he had weekly scheduled dates with his wife.

> When someone tries to do something good and we don't think it's the right thing, we punish them.

Why are you announcing your good deeds to the whole world? A lot of religions and cultures condemn things like that. Do good for its own sake, not to be rewarded and praised by your peers. I think a lot of the issues the author describes are a backlash from oversharing.

Example of author's point?

I think it is, yes.

You don't know that there was oversharing. Or in any case, consider situations in which they're not oversharing. Everything he says might still be true in those cases. So your argument kind of slides around the point, it doesn't counter it.

The author is using a blunt kind of language that may encourage us to disagree. You're right that it could be said better ("date" is a good example). But there's still truth in it.

> Why are you announcing your good deeds to the whole world? A lot of religions and cultures condemn things like that.

Most religions are built upon stories of other people's good deeds. It seems hardly fair to disallow people from airing their own :)

Most religions are built on third-party narratives of other people's good deeds; it's absolutely self-consistent for them to have negative view of first-party narrative of the same topic.

I'm guessing a "one-on-one" is more like a relationship check-in than a date.

It's possible they just didn't know the term "relationship check-in" and reached for a term they know. Using business-speak to describe personal relationships sounds wrong but conceptually one-on-ones and check-ins are not that far off.

A "Culture Club" seems to have been a place people went in soviet times when they were bad (or even already halfway decent) at things, in order to improve in a supportive environment.

So far, the only clue I have as to how close practice came to theory is the 1956 film "Carnival Night", in which old-school russian hackers mess with the power and information nets of their club in order to save their New Year's party from a Party functionary who takes his leadership role entirely too seriously.

(would a community college be a rough US equivalent?)

Author is overlooking an important point: we tend to only judge people who compete with us directly. To paraphrase Nietzsche:

"The vanity of others offends our taste only when it offends our own vanity."

La Rochefoucauld (1670s) :

"What makes the vanity of others insufferable to us is that it wounds our own."

I beleive this thread would be even more popular with the last line in the article as its title on HN: "Why don't we want people to be good at things?"

This is what we need to be asking ourselves in our current society, especially given the often very real torturous cycle regarding success and others which the author outlined in their post.

Is there really droves of people waiting to shame others who aren’t good at things? Generally every community I have joined (rock climbing, lifting, programming) has been really supportive to new people. Maybe most of this shame OP is feeling is internal? I can relate to that, it’s hard to be weak/bad at something.

Just ignore the idiots if it works for you. If you are a public figure online and your ideas/thoughts are viewable by the entire planet, don't expect everyone to think they are good ones. The entire planet is not your friends, just a bunch of idiots looking for temporary amusement/distraction.

There isn’t an obligation to be bad.

But there are things in life that people generally feel lose their meaning when subjected to the dispassionate tools of efficiency and productivity.

For many “engineering types”, we may not feel the distinction as acutely (isn’t all the world just problems to solve?)

I think anything anyone does will get varying types of attention if enough people see it, some of it will be negative and some of it positive. Each of the "You will be punished for X" could just be "Someone will try to punish you for X".

This is known as the Law of Jante:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

"You can either do something, or be someone" -- John Boyd

This is because people have egos. Most people have fragile ones. All this pussyfooting is to protect their egos.

Watching Revoler (2005) is very eye opening in this regard.

don't dismiss so quickly the importance of some "pussyfooting".

we're all thrown together randomly, at different points in our various growth cycles, so we stub toes and step on foots constantly, in that relentless sorting of status in the midst of developing ability.

it's good to remember that we need to constantly build our own fragile egos, protecting them when necessary, and do the same for others. chicks are encouraged out of the nest when their wings are likely strong enough to fly, not before.

We do want to be good at things but humans are very good at putting structures in place with easy to see benifits and difficult to see costs.

It isn't always the case, but a lot of times people do this to other people because they themselves are insecure.

I haven't found this to be a problem.

Sounds like the author needs better friends and/or a more supportive social circle.

Stop caring what other people think of you. The ego is the problem.

Ehhh, I think I might agree with what you're trying to say, but I don't think I'd say it this way. What other people think of you is a great source of information which shouldn't be discounted. In fact, I think there's a lot of value in soliciting feedback from the people around you.

We have a name for people who don't care what other people think: narcissists.

What I think you're getting at is that you can't please everyone, and there are many cases where risking someone's opinion of you is the right thing to do.

I agree this works on an individual level. But if other people few insecure by your confidence, security or success, they may try to sabotage you. You still need to be aware of this dynamic so that you aren't blindsided people jealous or angry over your success and their own relative failure by which they are comparing you to even you are not comparing them or judging them yourself.

I can't see the original tweet, so I don't know the full details. But my first reaction to hearing "weekly one-on-ones with the wife" is that it sounds impersonal and disrespectful. You don't describe personal relationships with business jargon.

It's an unspoken social rule, so maybe the person who said that wasn't aware. If that's the case, they deserve leniency for an honest mistake.

Or, maybe the person really thinks of their relationship in terms of a business arrangement. Maybe the husband and wife have a mutual understanding of that. Or maybe the husband sees nothing wrong with treating love like a business transaction, and the wife does. Of course people would call that out, to re-enforce the norm that this is not okay.

So what's the reality? You don't know. You don't know this person, and they don't know you. So why are they posting this, to an audience of strangers, who have no context for their remarks? And why are you replying to it, acting like you understand the context?

Twitter is designed to nurture this sort of discourse. It's the perfect medium for drive-by commentary, arm chair experts, and context-free conversations. Not to mention, the perfect vacuum for bad faith actors to spread bullshit.

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