Tenacity and Life Lessons through the 33% rule | Hacker News Reader

Tenacity and Life Lessons through the 33% rule

vincentntang.com

Even though I agree with the premise that there are all sorts of opinions out there, and the conclusion that most of those opinions don't matter, be wary of trying to fit your world view into made up theories (like opinions into buckets of 33% discouraging / 33% indifferent / 33% encouraging / 1% life-changing). It may be detrimental for your own good. [0]

Following a similar line of thought from TFA, see this recent discussion on unkind retorts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29367924

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(psychological_...

> For X number of people that hold an opinion on you, 33% will support you, 33% don't care, and 33% will dislike you. 1% of the opinions may change you

I've had my fair share of 15-minutes of fame online. I will tell you that 80% of people don't care and the 20% of people who do either really love your stuff or constantly sling shit at you for no reason other than envy or to prove you wrong.

You do get these 1% life-changing gems though where someone will email or message you saying you changed their life in some way. They always outweigh the trolls.

On-top of that, developers and software/tech types are just generally hard to please. Especially when it comes to community things and when they feel said community is being "threatened". People would get very territorial over meetups that I created for similar dev groups and provide similar feedback when they would hardly ever show up nor help pay for any of the pizza/swag. Lots of entitlement for the spectators vs. those who are actually in the arena.

The example given is a single negative interaction in a slack community, which does not seem to support a rule that 33% of people want to see your idea fail.

Do you truly believe he was suggesting 33/33/33/1 as an accurate rule? I think he was just suggesting that X% of people like you, X% are ambivalent, and X% dislike you, so you have to know this to properly understand feedback. Some people will be like your grandmother and always have a kind, positive word, some will basically not care, and some will try to hurt you regardless of how good your idea actually is. For example, they might totally miss the point of a blog post you make, and nitpick you on the precision of the numbers you used despite that precision being irrelevant to the point you are making.

Yeah! you can't just expect people to mean what they say.

For example, I truly believe that all statistical percentages are roughly plus or minus 20% in any direction.

I think it's accepting context and intent. I if I say 'Half the time when I get to work the door is ajar' I'm not claiming to be precise. To your point, since I didn't give the expected error for my claim I'm not attempting to be rigorous or precise by saying that fraction. If you jump on my back and say 'it's actually only 30% of the time that we leave the front door to our business open all night!!', then you are just failing to adapt to the way everyone communicates in a very bad faith way, and holding onto some false belief that you are 'technically correct'.

Yeah, you can't take the negative comments to heart. Anything successful will have detractors.

Cool idea. Devs need something like this for sure.

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