Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

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It’s close enough to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to work for me. I’m more concerned with whether the general idea adds some value to my thinking than trying to take them down a peg for any perceived smugness.

And speaking as an ex-salesperson, this general model is extremely relevant when attempting to persuade someone to change. Within the narrow confine of a single decision, different people are at different places in a hierarchy like this, and you are wasting your time if you argue at the wrong level.

It’s important to remember that placement in the hierarchy with respect to a specific choice is not a value judgment about a human being. I spend a lot of time daydreaming about programming languages, but when there’s a plumbing problem in my house I just want it fixed. Someone might be a latte-sipping derivatives poet but happy to hack together some Perl to process some data feeds.

It’s up to you of course, but I find I get a lot less out of essays I read if I get sidetracked into making value judgments about the authors. If there’s something there worth thinking about, why let the other stuff distract you?

I find I get a lot less out of essays I read if I get sidetracked into making value judgments about the authors

Similarly, I find I get a lot less out of essays when it seems that the authors are making value judgments about me.

Again you inject the authors into the discussion. Why don’t we pretend I have this warehouse full of monkeys tapping on typewriters. We walk by one of the monkeys and look at what it has written. Hmm, seems interesting. It could be all wrong, it could be useful. Why can’t we just just examine the words on the paper for what they are and see if they're useful to think about?

If you’d rather not, you go your way and I will go mine.

You're missing my point. I wasn't saying that the problem was that the document came from DHH or 37Signals. I like 37Signals!

What I was saying was, if you remove the author's identity from the document and just look at the actual words on the paper, you find that the words on the paper have a pretty clear value judgment embedded in them: that "a single consultant serving local businesses in Schaumburg, Illinois" is by definition someone who doesn't care about beautiful code, quality engineering, etc. A beyond-saving rube, in other words.

If a warehouse full of monkeys produced the same argument in the same words, I'd have reacted to it just as strongly. Elitism is a turn-off for me.

I kind of agree with you, but if I was walking by a warehouse of typing monkeys I would by default assume all of their articles are not useful. 37 Signals seems like a successful company to me. That is why I think the articles they write might have useful content.

Great point, I agree that the provenance of an article is useful for telling us whether we should consider reading it. Is it upvoted on HN? Was it written by some bozo named raganwald or by someone who has actually accomplished something significant? Did a trusted buddy tweet it?

All I’m saying is that once I decide to read it, I try to let go of that and take the article on its own merits. It could be that an idiot has written something interesting. Or the reverse, a well-repsected person is just plain wrong today.

(And in reality, I’m just as prone as the next guy to think about the author. This business of being detached and zen-like is me aspiring to read essays at a high level on the hierarchy!)

I agree with you. While the tone of the message matters in terms of how effectively it is conveyed (and how receptive readers will be to the ideas presented), it's not something to get too focused on.

I find that people are much more likely to perceive value judgments and look for hidden meanings in things when they are feeling insecure. Did that guy just insult me? Is he trying to imply that I don't move the industry forward? How dare he?!

In an ideal world, this is precisely what we would do.

Unfortunately, this is a world constrained by time and by knowledge. I do not have the time or expertise to evaluate everything I read in a clinical fashion.

Given those constraints, who the author is becomes a very powerful signal. If Neil De Grasse Tyson says something about astrophysics I can probably take it at face value, at least until I have a reason to question. On the other hand, someone with a self-interested reason to get me to believe something will rightly get far more scrutiny, even if they are eventually proven completely right.

Because sometimes authors have ulterior motives that you have to watch out for.

I'm not saying this article does have ulterior motives, just that acting as if every article has no author and hence no motive behind its writing is naive.

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