Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed this read. It reminds me of a few things I've observed recently:

* If you give a little, you will be subject to increased disapproval and if you don't care at all, you'll be subject to distant tut-tutting. Examples: the tech industry faces widespread condemnation for its gender ratio while hedge funds face little - only 1 in every 9 senior hedgies is female[0]. I'm not complaining about the gender ratio condemnation, merely commenting on the difference. Another example is that Bernie Sanders's speech was interrupted by Black Lives Matter protestors. Donald Trump's wasn't.[1]

* Internet commenters frequently remark on how they would pay for good news, yet they prefer reading free low-quality news sources over paid high-quality news sources. Similarly with clickbait vs. informative writing. They share the former, they comment on the former, and they enjoy the former. Effectively, they only pay the former.

* Voters and plans (brought up in the article) are my favourite. You cannot attack someone without a plan but every plan has flaws. Therefore, offering a plan is disincentivized while offering mere ideas is incentivized by people who claim the opposite. I'm glad this was example 1 in the article.

* Internet commenters will frequently be unforgiving of errors corrected. They reward hiding errors and punish honest corrections. No apology is sufficient. Often this manifests as upvotes or likes for those who stick brutishly to their positions while merely abandoning to indifference those honestly convinced. Strictly this is not really only Internet commenters. The fact that Red Cross having to not give away free doughnuts resulted in animosity towards them is a lesson for future players: do not give away anything.

* YC's ill-fated attempt at crowd-sourcing a funding target was another amusing result. They intended to support something that they wouldn't have heard of, but they rewarded popularity, which resulted in their having to fund something they'd heard of a million times.

0: https://docs.preqin.com/reports/Preqin-Special-Report-Women-...

1: https://time.com/3989917/black-lives-matter-protest-bernie-s...

A related blog post calls this the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics (your ethical burden increases by interacting with the problem in any way, even positively): https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

There are also other analogies:

At work, if you touch something, you are now eternally responsible for maintaining it. Be it code or process or equipment. Changed the toner in the printer? Great, you can now do it all the time. "But you already know how to do it, it will just take a minute for you". The best tactic at work is to be really competent in the main job and push all energy into furthering the skills and experience and recognition in that and dodging all the crap work by appearing badly suited to them. You want your colleagues to say "ah he's a good guy, really competent, but this type of work is really not his kind, he'd forget it, mess it up or something". Basically the goofy distracted professor meme. Great at focusing on his specialty we pay him for but cannot be tasked with these everyday mundane shit tasks.

On a larger scale, big tribal feuds are often among groups with small differences, like Christian denominations and wars over dogmatic debates on the details.

> On a larger scale, big tribal feuds are often among groups with small differences, like Christian denominations and wars over dogmatic debates on the details.

Did you have a big Christian war in mind which was specifically about dogmatic differences, and not primarily about monarchs exerting their power over some group or another?

Some that come to mind

The Byzantine iconoclastic controversy 8-9 centuries weakened the Empire.

Some bits of the ECW (bishops wars) where religious.

The northern Crusades (much more savage that the eastern ones)

The Hussite Wars

I think the modern version is Islamic- you see many Sunni nations more willing to work with Israel than Shia Iran.

Christianity is not an explicit part of any modern state outside of the Vatican that I'm aware of (with a small technical exception for Britain's monarchy.)

Mount Athos has special autonomous status within the Greek Republic; the Orthodox equivalent of Vatican City for the Catholic world.

(Not the OP)

How about the Albigensian crusade?

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

Also, possibly, sectarian violence in Ireland.

Ireland's feuds aren't sectarian, they're ethno-nationalist. We call them "Protestants" and "Catholics," but really what those names mean are "the group in Ulster and especially in Belfast, whose ancestors colonized the land for England, and a few who cooperated with them" and "the rest of the country whose ancestors lost their war and had to put up with being second class citizens oppressed by the British military and police well into the twentieth century."

And even if the British monarch is a figurehead today, the legacy of violence goes back to the Tudors.

I'm reminded of the classic Emo Phillips joke:

> Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, Don’t do it! He said, Nobody loves me. I said, God loves you. Do you believe in God?

> He said, Yes. I said, Are you a Christian or a Jew? He said, A Christian. I said, Me, too! Protestant or Catholic? He said, Protestant. I said, Me, too! What denomination? He said, Baptist. I said, Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist? He said, Northern Baptist. I said, Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?

> He said, Northern Conservative Baptist. I said, Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region? He said, Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region. I said, Me, too!

> Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912? He said, Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912. I said, Die, heathen! and I pushed him over.

No good deed goes unpunished!

>> The best tactic at work is to be really competent in the main job and push all energy into furthering the skills and experience and recognition in that and dodging all the crap work by appearing badly suited to them.

You can just say "no" and avoid all this. I figured that out as a junior programmer, when a middle manager asked me to create a graphic on a day when everyone else, including all the design team, was in a hackathon (I was stuck working because junior programmer).

It wasn't even a thing I had to think very much about. I was so annoyed to be asked to do work nobody hired me to do that there was no doubt in my mind about the correct response. I dont' think it even crossed my mind to do the job but bodge it. That would mean I'd actually have to, you know, do the job.

So while I recognise the situation, that once you pick up a task you're stuck with it forever, like it or not, I disagree with your tactic. Spending time doing work you don't want to do but badly is just wasting your time and it should be avoided.

> Internet commenters frequently remark on how they would pay for good news...

This is a classic observation in the real word, and well-known to marketers.

What people tell you they would buy and what they actually buy are two different things, and we observe that everywhere in the marketplace.

Actions speak louder than words. Measure actions.

This is precisely the problem I have with how one is supposed to approach looking for product-market fit in a startup: contact customers and ask "would you pay for this? how much? if not, what would make it so you'd pay for it?" I don't feel like that's a good way to find things for customers to buy, but it's the advice from the VCs.

Perhaps this can inspire https://www.pretotyping.org/

Is there an article somewhere describing the last point (YC crowd sourcing)? Sounds like an interesting read, but can't find any thing with just these terms.

Side node: I like how you use the term "Internet commenters". It is a much better and neutral term than most I've seen. Like "XY-crowd", "hivemind", "the Internet" and so on.

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