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Comment by advael | Hacker News Reader

As someone who spent an inordinate amount of time trying very hard to be less angry despite having a lot of good reasons to be, a chunk of which overlap with this piece, I get a lot of dismissal from people who seem to think any expression of any negative emotion, especially anger, deeply discredits a person on its own. It's so pervasive that I find even addressing it to be refreshing, so thank you

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Be angry more. I work in China but Im French, so people assume (and I nudge them to think), that it's a culture thing for me to express anger publicly at injustice or idiocy.

But it's liberating to be angry at bullshit (and God knows China is the bullshit Mecca), and AI is the top bullshit these days. We're not anti innovation because we say chatgpt is not gonna maintain our trading systems or whatever you work on. It's a funny silly statistical text generator that uses hundreds of thousands of video cards to output dead http links.

We're far from anything intelligent but it's at least indeed very artificial.

As someone who was in academia at the right time to really contextualize the seismic shift in the capabilities of automated natural language processing models that came of both attention and the feasible compute scale increase that allowed for them to use long enough context windows to outpace recurrent models in this regard, I really didn't think I'd end up having to roll my eyes at people falling over themselves to exaggerate the implications, but in retrospect it's clear that this was more me being unconscionably naive then than it being that unpredictable

Thanks I will get down voted to oblivion for it.

Cause getting angry at a problem and spending 2 days coding to completely replace a long standing issue isnt something that happens...

People need to be less precious. You cant be happy all the time. In fact you probably should not be (life without contrast is boring). A little anger about the indignities and bullshit in the world is a good thing. As long as you're still rational and receptive, it can be an effective tool for communicating a point.

Or just communicating the emotion! I think aligning on an emotional layer of perception is important for shaking people out of automated behaviors when it's necessary to, and I dislike this cultural shift toward punishing doing any of that from the standpoint of its mechanism design implications almost as much as I hate it on vibes

Not only that, but the thing is that it’s all fake in our industry and the companies that we work on. People seem to be very sensitive today to showing any kind of actual emotion or feelings, be it anger or frustration. Everyone puts on the fake american service industry smile, say words like I hear you, we’re a team, we must be constructive. Then in the background all do the most insane political backstabbing, shit talk about other teams, projects, people walk over the careers and the future of others just to advance themselves, but as long as you put a smile on your face in the meetings and in public, none of that matters.

I mean you make some very good points but you sound like you could be kind of mildly upset if I squint at it right so I think you should really be more mindful and adopt a positive additude before I will even consider listening to anything you have to say

If you want a theory; a man who isn't in control of his emotions can present anything up to an immediate mortal danger to the people around him (particularly if they are female).

Being able to control negative emotions isn't a nice-to-have trait or something that can be handled later. There is an urgent social pressure that men only get angry about things that justify it - a class of issues which includes arguably nothing in tech. Maybe a few topics, but not many.

Anger isn't a bad thing in itself (and can be an effective motivator in the short term). But people get very, very uncomfortable around angry people for this obvious reason.

Okay but we're not talking anger that's expressed by violent behavior or even clear significant loss of control, I'm talking people on the internet can pick up the mildest hint of anger from your tone or even subject matter. As a woman and a pretty scrawny one at that, as well as being, well, obviously very opinionated and belligerent, I have experienced every flavor of the threatening behavior you're invoking and I can assure you this has nothing to do with why people reflexively dismiss people who they think are being "emotional". More and more, the accusation of being angry specifically seems to be all people think they need to say to smugly claim to be speaking from a "rational" high ground, often despite having contributed nothing of substance to the topic at hand. Like pointing out that this person's blog post aimed at no one particular person did not really have to contend with the perception that this person was going to actually become violent at anyone, although actually I could see getting that impression from this post more than most, since it frequently explained the anger as cartoonish threats of hypothetical violence. I'm not exaggerating. When I see this in person and can make better assumptions about the genders of the people involved, this seems disproportionately likely to be leveraged against women, as are most arguments to "obvious" or "apparent" disqualifying irrationality, and this is not a shock because we are within living memory of much of work culture treating it as conventional wisdom that this should be assumed of all women by default. People really be trying to win epistemic pissing contests by posting something that looks like running "u mad" through google translate and back once, unironically, just as surely as you're trying to do that obnoxious thing of trying to invoke the gravity of situations in which people genuinely fear for their safety, hoping that gravity will somehow make it harder to question what you said for fear of seeming chauvanistically oblivious or whatever that's supposed to do

I propose the alternate theory that as in-person interaction becomes a smaller portion of most people's social experience, many have gotten worse at handling even mild interpersonal conflict without the kind of impersonal mediating forces that are omnipresent online, and this kneejerk aversion reaction can rationalize itself with the aid of this whole weird gilded age revivalist-ass cartoon notion of "rationality" that's become popular among a certain flavor of influential person of late and, especially in a certain kind of conversation with a certain kind of smug obnoxious person, seems kind of like classic Orwellian doublespeak

Also this position that "arguably almost nothing" in tech warrants anger seems super tonedeaf in a context where most of the world has become a panopticon in the name of targeting ads, you need a mobile phone owned by a duopoly to authenticate yourself to your bank, and large swaths of previously functional infrastructure is being privatized and stripmined to function as poorly as the companies that own them can get away with while the ancillary benefit of providing employees with subsistence and purpose wherever possible, while still managing to nickel and dime you for the privilege with all manner of junk fees, and offer poorly-designed phone trees in place of any meaningful documentation or customer service

Just going through your last paragraph; the logical implication of getting angry about any of that is either living in a state of ignorance or getting angry all the time. Either of those options is far inferior to just taking note of what is happening and calmly suggesting some improvements or working to make things better when the opportunity arises.

And these issues are just minor compared to all the terrible stuff that happens routinely. If we're ranking issues from most to least important things like "you need a mobile phone owned by a duopoly to authenticate yourself to your bank" are just so far down it is laughable (the wry type, like "why do I even care"). The fact that you need a bank at all is a far more crippling issue. Let alone all the war, death, cruelty and disinterest in suffering that is just another day in a big world.

Two things can be true at once. We live in a big world and in that world, there are many things that warrant our anger, some of which are more important or urgent than others. Yes, it's probably more important that there are two wars going on or that the rich country that I live in has become a police state that jails millions of people on dubious and often bigoted pretenses or that the capital that owns the industrial capacity that won the last major era of technological progress is hell-bent on continuing business as usual in a way that we're now pretty sure will drastically harm the ecological infrastructure we depend on to survive, and has been engaged in decades of attacking the scientific and political capacity to dismantle them. Also, many of these problems are directly aided and abetted by the owners of the current wave of technological advances, who have also created and continue to iteratively worsen a pervasive network of surveillance and control, as well as an experiential environment that reliably produces apathy and learned helplessness, while destroying significant hard-won freedoms and infrastructure in the process (including uber rolling back labor rights gains, amazon crippling public delivery infrastructure it views as competition, etc)

Epictetus wrote of concerning oneself more with that which one may be able to control than that which one can't, and people who aren't familiar with the Enchiridion have nonetheless internalized this wisdom. It pops up in lots of places, like in various schools of therapy, or in the serenity prayer. My career is in computers, and this website is a nexus wherein people who do computers for a living gather to discuss articles. Therefore, the shared context we have is disproportionately about issues surrounding computers. We are all of us likely better positioned to enact or at least advocate for change in how computer things are done in the world, and in each of the last 7 decades this has become a larger share of the problems affecting the world, and anger is difficult to mask when talking about problems precisely because one of the major ways we detect anger in these text conversations devoid of body language or vocal tone is expressing a belief that something is unacceptable and needs to be changed

> If you want a theory; a man who isn't in control of his emotions can present anything up to an immediate mortal danger to the people around him (particularly if they are female).

What emotions do you really control?

We expect men to suppress this emotion. And there's is 400k years of survival and reproductive success tied up with that emotion. We didn't get half a percent of the population with Ghegis Khans Y chromosome with a smile, balloons and a cake.

It's not like violence doest exist. But we seem to think that we can remove it just like the murder in the meat case. Are we supposed to put anger on a foam tray and wrap it in plastic and store it away like a steak because the reality of it upsets people?

It's to the point where words murder, suicide, rape and porn are "forbidden words"... were saying unlike, grape and corn. So as not to offend advertisers a peoples precious sensibilities. Failing to see this behavior is a major plot point in 1984.

I think we all need to get bad to the reality of the world being "gritty" and having to live in it.

1) If you are comparing people's behaviour to Genghis Khan, don't expect positive social reinforcement. The man was a calamity clothed in flesh, we could do without anything like him happening ever again.

2) Violence != anger [0]. I don't know much about him, but Ghengis Khan could have been an extremely calm person. It is hard to build an empire that large and win that many campaigns for someone prone to clouded thinking which is a point in favour of him being fairly calculating.

> What emotions do you really control?

3) In terms of what gets expressed? Nearly all of them. Especially in a written setting, there is more than enough time to take a deep breath and settle.

> We expect men to suppress this emotion.

4) As an aside, I advise against suppressing negative emotions if that means trying to hold them back or something. That tends to lead to explosions sooner or later. It is better to take a soft touch, let the emotion play out but disconnect it from your actions unless it leads to doing something productive. Reflect on it and think about it; that sort of thing.

[0] Although maybe I should not that angery violence is a lot more dangerous than thoughtful violence; angry violence tends to be harder to predict and lead to worse outcomes.

> If you want a theory; a man who isn't in control of his emotions can present anything up to an immediate mortal danger to the people around him

You cant posit this and then go on to try and claim Violence != anger.

> The man was a calamity clothed in flesh Nice, well said!!! He was also likely brilliant. Its rare stupid people make it to the top!

I hope that Ghengis Kahn NEVER happen again...But I think society is just a thin veil between us and those monsters. The whole idea of pushing down anger is just moving us one more steep from that reality!

Sure I can posit both. They're both true.

There is a Venn diagram here. One circle is violence and one is anger.

it turns out Lucidity has written about this precise phenomenon too - the relentless positivity of toxic environments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39702323

I know someone that got bullied for taking leave to care for their special needs kids, and the positivity people came pouring out of the woodwork to accuse her of being confrontational when she was understandably upset. Not that the commenters above have indicated that they'd do anything like that, but yeah, it's WILD out there.

There is at least one German comedian who made an entire career solely out of being angry...

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Joachim_Heist ? :)

Yup, exactly this guy! Known and beloved in his stage persona Herr Hassknecht...

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