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Comment by j7ake | Hacker News Reader

I think it is appealing because it is in such stark contrast to today's culture of constant self promotion and exaggeration of mediocre achievements.

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> today's culture

Not a historian but I strongly suspect self-promotion is not something new.

Agreed, but also internet basically gave everyone a megaphone, so that they can shout their mediocre achievements.

The world has also become more top heavy than a few decades ago. Competition for the top x% of a field has likely become fiercer as the alternative has become less self-sustaining.

There is nothing wrong with being mediocre.

There is also nothing good with being mediocre.

It's almost as if being mediocre is fairly mediocre

There's a lot of good with being mediocre. normalcy, so long as you're not in some sort of barbarian culture. is a net positive.

I excel at mediocrity.

Just compare Bardeen to Shockley.

Yep. Newton tried to discredit Leibniz for example even though Leibniz was the first to publish calculus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz–Newton_calculus_contro...

Do you think shameless self-promotion has always been as culturally acceptable as it seems to be today (in American culture, let’s say)?

I used to be a much humbler person, especially in college, when I witnessed people much more capable than I.

Once I entered the workforce I became less humble and self-promoted a lot more. I think this is because how performance evaluation and job promotion works at my employer and similar employers: people doing a lot of great work but without self-promotion are given lower ratings and passed over for promotions.

Most people I know who fail at self promotion solve that issue by finding other jobs that value them. Obviously it depends on the job market you are in. But getting a better job is quite easy in competitive industries especially if you remove location-bias. A friend refused to move to SF from San Jose and despised the commute, and thus turned down a massive career (and money) opportunity.

Self-promotion and exaggeration of mediocre achievements as the path to success has been around since time immemorial. If you can't do, talk.

Julius Caesar didn't become dictator for life by doing a great job repressing the Gauls. He became dictator for life by doing a great job of talking about how bad-ass the Gauls were, and how hard he had to work to repress them.

Yup. Napoleon was also a terrific writer who carried a printing press with him as a (just another) General in Italy to be sure his first-hand heavily spun reports of his fighting prowess were the first French citizens would see. Of course, we see more of this now, in a mass civic rather than rural society.

Some to better effect than others.

“Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal says with a laugh. “Who’s that?”

“Biden?” suggests a top adviser. “Did you say: Bite Me?”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-runa...

I suppose in the case of Caesar, one must be able to talk and do - if we consider his narrative as mostly grounded in fact, which I do.

If you can do, also talk. I'd like to find out!

Comentarii de Bello Gallo is a masterwork in PR :)

IMO this is what causing this huge self-promotion trend.

1 - it's become so much easier and accessible, with twitter, blog, FB, IG, YT.

2 - your ability to promote yourself has great impact in your financial and career growth.

3 - EGO. Remember when you were the smartest kid in your high school and then went to university and realized, there are many smart people like you.

SV, is the next step above. Everyone thinks they're the next Steve Jobs, Musk, etc. until the start working with other smart peers.

You were once the smart kid in the family, high school, your university classes, etc. Then you come to SV and realize wow, so many other smart people here. I'm just another average guy/gal who was in my top 1% of my college or high school. Some of these peers are even more driven than me and they're great hustlers.

So you either accept that you're not so special, or you try to out hustle others for recognition.

> [self promotion has] become so much easier and accessible

True. But why has it become acceptable? We choose to use micro-publishing to brag. It's just as easy and accessible to publish your own bowel movements, but we haven't normalized that.

It's not the tech doing it by itself.

There are even some in SV who are clearly a step-function smarter than most other intelligent folk. Balaji Srinivasan, Marc Andreesen, Larry Page, Eric Yuan, Peter Thiel, Taher Elgamal and Naval Ravikant are amongst them in the famous league. Eric Yuan is also hilarious in real life despite English being his second language.

Self-esteem movement of phony over-confidence, crumbling under pressure, and no depth of knowledge.

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