Why obsessively following successful people online is dangerous
durmonski.com
durmonski.com
The truth is that probably most successful people can't tell luck, serendipity and hard-work from wisdom. Times change, opportunities change etc. so how much is advice really worth?
The only good advice is an answer to a specific question with very clear boundaries: "How much is a good amount to spend on Facebook advertising?", "If you have a product aimed at the mass market and you can correlate success of click-throughs, spend as much as you want as long as it's less than what you make per-click".
Otherwise you get stuff like, "Facebook is great value for money" or "Facebook is a disaster" both useless pieces of advice.
I also suspect that those with the correct brain for business probably don't need very much advice because they will quickly work things out themselves.
Once you see the extent of the Matthew Effect [1], it's hard to unsee it.
In that friend's view - and I think mine too - that's the reason why 'how I succeeded' books by people like Warren Buffett or Bill Ackman almost always turn out to be total dross. Not because they don't want to share their secrets (after all, their secrets would require so much capital to apply as to be impracticable for most) – just that they have no idea.
They do know it, at least on some level. For many of them, they could do it again if they had to. They simply aren't consciously aware. (Like Auden once said: "I knew it all the time, but I never realised it before!")
On the other hand, if you can find the person that _isn't_ naturally good at the skill but was somehow able to get decent at it, even if they're not the best at it, they're more likely to have beneficial advice.
This reminded me of the advice to learn how to run a marathon, don't look at what most people in the race were doing to train, look at the person who's doing well despite looking like they shouldn't be there.
I.e., don't look at the 140 lbs guys at the front of the pack for advice, look to the 280 lb guy in the middle of the pack.
Not sure how sage that advice is, but it was an interestingly different way to frame the problem.
While studying older students would start talking, how they get a good grade/easy questions because they gave cookies/whatever or how some prof was super cool for them in some way.
Of course thing was they probably were in a group that prof liked, they had a good connection, maybe someone from the group had good jokes that made that prof laugh. Maybe they were showing up with whole group to his classes and no one made a fuss or other silly stuff at his lectures.
Then freshmen would pick up the story and would try to "trick their way" with the prof that would of course backfire as they totally missed the context of why for the older guys prof was happy with some cookies to ask them "easy" questions.
Just being in shape without any context - like how much in shape - might backfire when some girls think you are a buff so probably aggressive and get scared instead of interested. So just trying to talk up a girl on the street while buffed might scare her much more.
I would not focus on "natural skill" but I would focus on understanding that there is infinite amount of details to life and whole context is missing if someone gives high level advice.
People I've known who are financially successful (some massively so) tend to fall into two categories though. Some will say that this and this and that happened just so, and they wouldn't begin to know how someone else could replicate it. Others will say it's just a matter of perseverance and not making stupid mistakes and anyone can do it if they just bothered to, despite ample evidence to the contrary.
May be they are both right, since surely there's both a repeatable process [0] and a non-repeatable process [1] to get rich?
[0] acquire skill that's highly paid (doctors?); acquire skill needed by rapidly-growing sectors (crypto? biotech?)
[1] right place at the right time
Even unattractive people can do a lot to improve their looks with clothing, diet, and a fitness regimen.
After all, it nets you lots of extra money in book sales, with no real concern that anyone will genuinely read your book and then supplant you.
To turn left, I turned the handlebars ever so slightly to the right. This caused the bike to lean to the left, then I turned the handlebars left.
I know its overly simplistic but isn't the reason why the Matthew effect exists that we deny opportunities to poor people? If there are opportunities that make people not poor then shouldn't we allocate them to the poor first?
He was watching the news and they interviewed the richest man in Canada. The interviewer asked, "How did you make your fortune?"
"Well, when I came to Canada, I had nothing but five cents. I used those five cents to buy an apple. I sold the apple for ten cents, and then bought two apples to sell. I sold those apples for twenty cents, and then I got a telegram that my uncle had died and left me three billion dollars."
The ability to work hard is also always 100% luck.
Humans do not control their DNA or what environment shaped them to be able and have the desire to work hard.
Those factors are not yours to control. Even if you are able to influence some of them, the ability to do so is dependent on factors you do not control.
That all said that still leaves us with our individuality, desire to act and responsibility. And it leaves us with as much control over our ability to act as any other control - you can accept that our actions are rather mechanical results of prior experiences but not reject the fact that they're still our actions.
> And it leaves us with as much control over our ability to act as any other control
No, there is no fundamental ability to control. We have some illusion of control. Don't mistake this for saying that humans can't change, we just have no control over how we change.
Judges that decide over parole won't attribute their decision on the last time they ate, even if it is the single most important factor to their decision.
It will be interesting to observe how society will react to this in the next 50 years when the science will become harder and harder to deny.
This finding doesn't replicate[0]. In the original study, there was a more mundane explanation: "Defendants without representation have their hearings scheduled at the end of sessions, before breaks."
You have much more confidence in the current research than I think is warranted. Genes are indeed a small portion of our DNA, but your statement that "the interesting stuff happens in the other 95%" is unbounded and poorly defined.
Personally, I think we have some control over things, and probably less control than most people perceive themselves as happening. But this research is in its infancy and having trouble with basic replication, so holding a strong opinion is a recipe for making poor decisions off it.
[0] https://www.annieduke.com/no-judges-dont-give-harsher-senten...
My understanding is that a portion of the remaining 95% are responsible for turning genes and whole chains of them on and off or something in between.
There is no place in the physical world where this control could come from.
The factors that influence are hugely complex and very hard to separate. Just because we do not understand how certain factors interact and influence our behavior doesn't mean we have control.
Put a little differently, regardless of what the absolute truth resolves to - it's in my best interest to take the illusion of control.
Poverty and Crime are not moral failings.
Presumably we would make the lives of such people far better if we attribute their missfortune to just bad luck.
Redistributing wealth from people that got lucky is also simpler than if we'd attribute their success to their goodness.
My comment was mostly about my own orientation towards the world. Maybe I do have control, maybe I don't - but I feel better (and hopefully have better outcomes) with the illusion of control/actual control, instead of letting go. OTOH, I also get a lot of stress relief from letting go and not trying to control things during meditation.
Living is hard.
Again - in a way this is something I entirely agree with but not in the important way. We are all automata in a society and society can attempt to fix broken components. Even if all your actions are just a result of past experiences - you yourself are no more meaningful and it's thus appropriate to assign you responsibility for your actions. If your experiences had shaped you differently then you'd probably make different ones - but you are who you are because of how you were shaped - and the you who is shaped in that manner is responsible for the actions you've taken. Hypothetical other yous that had slightly different experiences don't exist and are therefore irrelevant - but you're responsible for what you do.
I don't follow this.
We don't blame people for actions when we think that they don't have control over these actions.
If someone has their first epileptic episode while driving a car and they kill someone because of it, we understand that they had no control and don't hold them responsible for the accident. Why should it be different if the causes are more complex and harder to trace back?
And, on the otherside, we are a funny animal that takes comfort in the fact that we control our own destinies so, even if we don't - we'd like to empower ourselves as if we were in some manner. At a basic level our misunderstanding might be the fact that the ability to choose equates responsibility - without any responsibility (good and bad) your choices have no power - choosing to not do the shitty thing lets you avoid a penalty and so you can be happy with yourself. This equation of choice and responsibility is why punishment is so necessary (both big-j Justice like cops jail and the like - and little-j justice like being shunned, not getting a raise and failing to find an equal partnership in a relationship) so responsibility exists to add meaning to our lives. In fact denying it to people permanently (i.e. the developmentally disabled) does come with a strong cost to their sense of self - a lot of folks who live in support systems can struggle to define themselves, but, at the same time, neurodiversity means that different folks can find contentness in different ways.
It's all terribly complicated I think.
Because if you go that far you deny the whole concept of individuality and humanity even, up on which all of our moral and legal system were built. What are we but cogs in a machine?
It's not that there isn't any logic in it, it's just not an useful thing to contemplate about while you obviously still cling on to your sense of self so far as to having an argument with others.
Except maybe in how we think about justice perhaps. But that's not useful now.
This is a big one.
Income and wealth inequality is another one.
The only reason why someone should have more than someone else is to incentivize to increase the total cake. But you probably can redistribute far more without reducing the total cake too much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#:~:text=Ear....
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://www.gwern...
So genetics plays a significant part in personality traits and iq. Having high conscientiousness is the trait that correlates with work ethic and drive.
It's definitely not 100% but genes play a big part. Twin studies are cool - even though there's usually something tragic involved with twins separated at birth, it gives you an excellent way of assessing genetic influences on a huge array of factors.
Doesn't work if you think humans are special and above biological definitions though :)
Determinism isn't exactly useful as a personal guideline, or anything. So I don't know why some people keep digging that hole.
I'm sure there are ways to interpret this as: this arbitrary list of things is achievable, the rest is out of your reach. But then it's your job to find out what those things are, the determinism "insight" is useless.
I am familiar with a key difference here:
Some people find nihilism to be demotivating
Some people do not
For me, it helps me remember to try to recognize my privileges, support systems and luck. I respect people that play the cards they are dealt. Any child prodigy with a lot of resources could just as easily done nothing with them, so the nihilistic approach more so helps me not resent people that won a birth lottery and also appreciate what I do before I forget and start giving generic success advice.
"Justice, What's the right thing to do" is one of my favourite books. I'm sure you know it.
1) We still don't really understand the effects of DNA on human behavior.
2) Environment is influential, but it's an influence not something that shapes you in stone forever and ever. Plus, there are all sorts of characters from all sorts of environments.
I'm sure there are some exceptions, but I'd say it mostly comes down to a personal decision to nurture willpower.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/15/16863374/wi....
Still, it poses tons of questions.
As the article suggests at some point, it could very well be that people who have decided to work harder have found they enjoy the work. So it could really begin with a personal decision and not some lucky random factor as a previous comment suggested.
This doesn't mean that working hard shouldn't be rewarded, it creates value.
That's a pretty bold claim.
Cultural influences, biological influences, prenatal environment, etc.
I will agree that it's probable our conscious part of the brain is less in control that we tend to believe. Still, the rest of the brain is still part of an individual.
If you're lucky enough, talent and work ethic matter less. If you're talented enough, maybe you don't need as much luck. Etc. But for the vast majority, there's going to be a combination.
I think that's what people don't truly get. You can work as hard as possible, but you do need a little luck to get that work noticed.
I'm a dev/tech blogger, and I can say, following the right people is half of the success.
Not just because of the things they say, but because they can share your work.
Every time my work was shared by an influencer in the field, I got one or multiple job/project offers and over the years I made a good living out of it.
"being good at tech" only helps in the next step, when you need to proof that you can write better about a tech topic than the average marketeer/content creator.
Take responsibility for things that happen to you. Taking responsibility means you can do something about it if it isn't what you want.
Assigning responsibility to others means there's nothing you can do about your situation.
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Obsessively following anything or anyone is not good for you and that's very likely a 99% universal advice.
I was super good at multi-tasking all my life... until 2-3 years ago my brain started resisting me and sabotaging me at every turn. Gradually I realized that I am gulping waaaaaaaay too much information online; not just HN but favourite forums like ElixirForum, Rust Users, OCaml, and a few very big subreddits on top of that.
Starting to gradually dial down things did wonders. Even today I still insist on checking 2 outlets from the above listing and I am working on eliminating my fear of missing out. So far a good compromise has been to never check them during this or that hours. And even that helps.
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Here's something even more generic as an advice but I also feel it applies well, especially nowadays with all the distractions that bombard us:
Do your own thing. Develop problem-solving skills. All the out-of-context advice is still out there. If one day you need it, you can get metric tons of it in minutes.
Start focusing. Start analyzing your own life, your own personal / work faults, and optimize for your own unique circumstances. Treat your life (or whatever part of it you want improved) as an optimization problem and work on that.
>If one day you need it, you can get metric tons of it in minutes.
I think the problem with reducing the advice to this level is that it reduces away the idea that some information is much less healthy than other information.
When you follow other people online, you are always learning from the information you gather. The problem is that you aren't always aware of what you are learning. If one is constantly following very successful people, they are learning how filled with the success the life of others are. This begins to contrast the lack of success in their own life. Not that their life lacks any success, but it isn't filled with only success. You get a false impression of the life of others which results in an unhealthy judgment of your own life.
This can become a significant problem on social media and one that I've seen brought up before in regards to teens and instagram. The older one is the more life experience and other sources of learning one has and thus the less susceptible to the effect, but less susceptible doesn't mean immune.
In contrast there is a flood of other information that isn't as toxic. Follow your favorite hobby by someone who shows both their success and failures and you don't risk building the same unrealistic picture. Follow a bunch of information largely freed from daily grind, like watching videos that dig into math, history, and science and you would have even less risk. That's not to say you can just assume the information has no risks at all, addiction and such are still a concern, but short of some very specific scenarios I would find it much safer to consume.
It is like telling someone to not overeat. While that's good advice, it is important to make sure the person you are talking to understands that overeating refined sugar and fats are much more a threat than overeating vegetables. Such an example almost feels silly because of how common sense the information feels, but when it comes to following people and information sources online I find people aren't as well informed as to what is the deep fried refined sugar and what is the vitamin packed fiber.
And yep, people very easily miss nuance.
> Do your own thing.
The article points out "A delusion is created that progress is made." and I agree that consuming content should not be mistaken for progress, rather you should also actively act on the content you consume. Create something out of it.
On Instagram he and his (soon to be ex) wife just tagged themselves this weekend putting up Halloween decorations, all smiley buying pumpkins and cooking truffle mac and cheese, liking each other's posts.
Meanwhile he is calling me at 1:30am asking if he can come sleep on our couch. I kind of want to ask him about the discrepancy between his online persona vs real life, but I don't want to offend him.
It's almost easier to appear happy online when you know you're not; you don't want people to try and offer you unsolicited advice about how "exercise worked for them" or "changing to this particular diet changed my life" or crap like that, so you fake it [1]. You only post things that you think are interesting, you minimize how much you talk about your personal life, and when you do it's only to flex about something cool you did. Whenever I did open up to friends later about my mental health stuff, they were always really surprised to hear it, and that was by design.
[1] To be clear, I'm not knocking diet and exercise. If you're feeling depressed, eating healthier and getting regular exercise is probably the best (and cheapest) place to start, and offers a bunch of other benefits too. My life did improve when I stopped eating Taco Bell ever day.
I’m only interested in the outgoing and interesting things, inspiration about locations or events, things that could include me. When these things really seem like they will never happen I typically remove them as followers and unfollow them. (Its much easier to curate your social graph as you go, instead of waking up one day and finding it too hard to fix your feed by attempting to unfollow lots of people)
I like to know people personally and I do that in person or over direct message
I only use the story for entertainment personally
Like someone else mentioned, I don't find many people’s online persona that interesting, and I have abruptly deactivated and/or deleted my own profiles before. Periodic curating has been good for me.
Most people want to deal with their shit internally.
I guess the wife could have put the picture of the burning car or a snap of an affair sex tape, but then they'd both have more drama to deal with from people contacting them trying to "fix" things.
Intimate moments are private, happy moments are okay for public. Bad moments can be used against you so you keep them private.
Unfortunately this fact is not made explicit anywhere - I can imagine the self-loathing Facebook or Instagram would have generated in my naive, socially-inept, teenage self.
It's common sense that you don't put vulnerable stuff online. Parents should explain this to children when they are growing up. Sure I guess you could put disclaimers everywhere "LIFE MAY NOT BE AS HAPPY AS IT APPEARS" under each photo. Maybe California will require a banner for that soon.
Here GP is gossiping about them, this is what they were trying to avoid amongst their peers.
If anyone REALLY wants to know they can find out when the single photos come out.
I thought HN understood privacy.
Once again, the thing we're discussing is social media making people think everyone else has a great life, and your response is basically that... people should be able lie on social media? Which is fine, and also proves the original point that social media is misleading people.
This thread was ridiculous. Nothing but the GP gossiping about sensitive information and many of you trying to figure out whether it's fantasy or not.
This is why people act happy, because vultures like you guys trying to sniff out drama. God forbid anyone post a happy photo, the nerve!
It's simple. Know that only happy moments are posted. Don't nose into people's lives but know everyone goes through shit just like you.
Yes, but do people have a gut, visceral knowledge about this when they see stuff online?
Knowing something intellectually doesn't mean one's internal bias (and their effects on the individual) will stop working.
The irrational reaction itself may be triggered by the event of seeing someone else's perceived happiness, but is probably a manifestation of a deeper self issue like an insecurity or unfulfilled fantasy.
I heavily disagree with that one! Most gut reactions aren't followed at all by any rational realizations, and on the few occasions when they are followed by intellectual ruminations those ruminations will often try to rationalize their gut reaction instead of analytically criticizing them.
> Unfortunately this fact is not made explicit anywhere
People don't wear their struggles on their sleeve in person, either. People are allowed to have fun even while struggling elsewhere in their lives. There's no rule that people aren't allowed to thrive or be happy in public if they're struggling with something private.
I don't understand why anyone would think that social media would be any different.
In my house we call this 'Hashtag Blessed".
Because the people we know that write posts with #Blessed are the ones with a completely different reality online.
One dude is sleeping in his camper parked at work because wife saw a screen shot of pornhub on his phone (seriously Apple, so many accidental screen shots weren't a problem when the power button was on top), she's telling him he's cheating on her, and there was a couple in the picture, but the guy was clearly exposed, so while she's having a fit of over this and kicking him out she's seriously asking him if "Like, are you gay now!?"... Next day they need to do some cubscouts events, so it's smile #Blessed.
Struggling people are allowed to have, and share, enjoyable moments. Going through a divorce doesn't mean someone must be miserable 100% of the time, nor that you have to hate your spouse. Nobody is obligated to share the negative parts of their relationships and lives online, even if they're struggling.
Having a perfectly happy and problem-free marriage isn't a prerequisite for posting a happy family photo online with your kids. Nor should it be!
I don't understand why this is even a question. Just support your friend. Don't try to poke fun at the one moment of joy he shared online or call him out for some perceived discrepancy just because you know his struggles. It's not hypocritical for someone to have fun while going through tough times. It's bizarre that you'd even consider asking someone about this.
well, he is supporting him. Wondering what's going on mentally is part of that. I don't understand why this is even posed as a solution.
The friend called him up and asked if he could sleep on his couch as well as opened up about the issues. Grilling him about his recent social media posts is wholly inappropriate and unnecessary.
Everyone keeps their public and private lives separate. People prefer to limit the audience for their struggles. It's weird that anyone would think that public social media photos need to be brought up in conversation when someone is separately opening up about their personal problems to a private audience.
The person might not be vain, it's just we're all trapped in this system of toxic positivity & unrealistic expectation created by social media.
> Instead of just watching, reading, listening to other people doing fancy stuff. We need to get going. Overcome the general feeling of malaise by start running, failing, getting up, and trying again.
This is basically the same advice that a lot of self-help gurus give. The only difference is in the packaging.
Here's a tangential piece of advice about listening to "successful people online": not everything is as it appears. In fact, much of the time these days, it isn't. Never forget that you have no way of knowing whether people are as happy, rich, etc. as they say they are, and even if they are, you have no way of knowing whether or not the advice they're selling you is how they got to where they are.
That kind of writing
is so bloody annoying
please read some books
and then write more.
It just strikes me as lazy writing. If each sentence is its own paragraph then you don't have to worry about structuring the article well or writing transitions or intro/outro sentences.
Of course, then the people who told us not to panic about the coronavirus ended up panicking about the coronavirus because when they said "don't panic", they meant, "ignore the problem until you are overwhelmed by it", which is exactly what leads people to panic in the first place.
Facebook Network Admins Are Doing Their Part To Reduce The Risk
Everyone needs to live their own life and do what's right for them. Whether your life looks like your glamorous neighbors or not shouldn't matter to you.
obsessively --> dangerous.
My fingers bled, but I learned "Tico-tico no fubá".
Dangerous. Q.E.D.
Meaning - they have a big online presence post-success. They use the online presence to bask in their own glory.
But this isn’t just for the sake of basking in ones glory. It is a sort of way for the successful person to leverage their success into more success. A positive feedback loop of sorts.
I think there's also an issue where you can follow a bunch of people that are already very successful and at the top of their fields on Twitter; they comment on the latest news, post their big conference talks, their brand new tool on Github, etc. You may have had a very unproductive day (or week) at work, and seeing these other people continue to ascend and excel makes you feel like you are not working hard enough. If only you picked up that new front-end framework. If only you went and got another certification. If only you created your own side hustle and turned it into a profitable business.
There are benefits to surrounding yourself with motivated, successful people - it can also create and foster a drive in you. But it's also important that you can relax and take the night off after work , even if you're not keeping pace with the most vocal and prominent avatars.
The advice is separate from the number of successful people you follow online. The advice is simply to follow through with the tips you see from the successful people you follow with some tips on how to do that. Very meta.
I do find a bunch of irony in the dissing of self-help books, when you could copy-paste this entire article verbatim into like half the self-help books out of there and it'd fit right in.
Why has that obvious knowledge been forgotten? Have we forgotten to be skeptical?
So don't think about doing it, actually go out and do it
On the other hand, I really enjoy the occasional pieces of fluff and advice offered by, e.g., the true outliers (e.g., the Elon Musks and Peter Thiels walking among us; the people have have actually come into contact with reality and accomplished non-trivial things that are very hard to repeat and generalize from). Not just tech billionaires; I think the same for the comparably successful scientists and technologists.
These people can't give you cookie cutter formulas for success other than "try to break other formulas". It's still inspirational, IMO, and far preferable coming from them than the phonies on Twitter seeking validation and fame.
I must say, I'm envious of "thought leaders" but the net result seems to always lead back to "create your own knowledge product and sell it to other people."