A Love Letter to People Who Believe in People

Not entirely sure what you mean. Care to expound?

Are you talking about people who act out on their fandom by criticizing others? "Oh I'm a fan of X, therefore I'm a vocal critic of Y". I agree that such things are toxic -- fandom doesn't need to be a polemic.

I want to cultivate the kind of fandom that builds up without feeling a need to tear down others.

I imagine being a healthy critic is a skill, something personal to be worked on.

It’s just so easy to be critical and even if you have good intentions, being critical can take the wind out of a dreamers sails.

Critics maybe. Antagonists no.

it's easier to image a dystopia than an eutopia, or even utopia, depending how you see it

I think the key distinction is between critics and cynics. Critics serve a purpose that provides value, whereas cynics are just all-around bummers who negatively impact the world around them.

In fact, the best critics of something are often its biggest fans. Roger Ebert, for example, wrote some pretty critical pieces, but nobody can deny that he was driven primarily by a love of cinema. Or take politics: I've seen people complain that left-wing commentators were too critical of Biden when they should have been criticising Trump, but often it's easier — and more useful — to criticise the things you like in the hope that they will improve, rather than spending all your time criticising something you don't like that will never listen to you.

That said, it's still important to take the time to sing the praises of something you like. If Ebert had spent all his time talking down bad films, reading his columns would have been painful drudgery (see also: CinemaSins, Nostalgia Critic, and similar attempts at film-criticism-by-cynicism). A good critic wants their target to succeed, and celebrates when that happens.

If you're a real critic, absolutely. But most of what passes for criticism today is just hindsight dressed up as insight. It ignores the fact that choices are made in a fog, assumes outcomes were inevitable, and retroactively assigns blame. It feels like scorekeeping not being a rational/fair critic.

The absolute irony of this comment :)

Oh the irony - Sometimes people need to stfu and root for something without pointing out how it could be better. "Awesome! Did you think about..... STFU!"

The truth is that for many people criticism and contrarianism serves an extremely simple function: It allows them to sound smart and distinguish themselves from others.

And that explains 90% of all the criticism that has ever been given.

Critics could be experts of past era who have seen it all and are now seeing the same mistakes being repeated.

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again. -- André Gide

Harems did not had much of heterosexual sex going on in them. Whole point was gender segregation. Eunuch in harem have seen women, but did not seen them having sex with men.

Behan's criticism of critics then makes him an eunuch who's criticizing eunuchs... according to his own "logic".

Feeling good about things has nothing to do with liking or disliking something though. I dislike things about the Rust language and the larger ecosystem around it (things like async/await as the dominant concurrency model, or the separate and very different macro syntaxes), but I'm still a fan of seeing rust projects and things people do in and with Rust. If someone builds a database driver built on Tokio, no one (not eve me) benefits from me doing drive by "async/await is complex and annoying, you should have done this differently" criticism. I may think that, and I may not like a Tokio based driver. But I don't have to "feel bad" about it, and neither do the creators. Feeling bad about it won't make a non Tokio driver appear. Nor will just criticizing Tokio and Async/Await. For something different and better to appear, I have build enthusiasm for an alternative and I have to engage with the parts I do like. Spending a hour building the starts of a a non Tokio driver and giving it to other enthusiastic people would be a far more effective use of my time than spending an hour writing a take down of async/await and giving it to other like minded critics. The phrase "preaching to the choir" comes to mind, and too often these days I feel like criticism online is largely geared towards exactly that. Polemics for people who already agree with the author, about some thing that the author dislikes.

I advocate for going to a Hurricanes game :) loudest barn in the NHL, baby!

> I really believe in the importance of praising people and acknowledging their efforts, when they are...

alive!

At a funeral of a controversial activist, where all the living activist sang their praise, I watch their child stand up and say "...where were you all when my dad was alive"

I now go out of my way to tell people I admire them, if I do, while they are still here.

Yeah, I live in sweden and a compliment by a swede about how I play music is completely meaningless to me. On the other hand a compliment from my bosnian or croatian friends is a big deal.

I feel this is a culture problem that can be localized on a per organization basis. If people are getting promoted for be douche bags you're working at the wrong organization. We feed sociopathy by our choices.

> It's so hard to to believe in people or have a positive opinion of them when much of my interactions are negative. Or when people who embody the opposite of goodness are promoted and have status. It's like we live in a society in which mediocrity, borderline sociopathy, and meanness are rewarded.

Which I think is why the original article has an important idea. We need to be fans more and encourage that as a way of thinking. If mediocrity and borderline sociopathy are rewarded by society at large, it must mean that mediocrity and borderline sociopathy are rewarded by society in the small. And sure enough, take a look around (and look at pop culture over the last couple decades) and you'll see that's true:

* American "Kitchen Nightmares" took what was an often genuinely heartfelt show about struggling restaurants in its UK incarnation and turned it into a circus side show complete with jeering at the freaks.

* Reality competition shows thrive on marketing terrible performances and smug take downs by Simon Cowell and his various low rent knockoffs.

* The Daily Show / John Oliver thrives on the sort of smug "I'm better than these obvious idiots, and wink wink you are too because you watch me and we know we're very smart" behavior that ironically also powers the Glenn Beck / Rush Limbaugh contingent on the other side of the spectrum.

* Trump himself made his own reality TV show where the entire premise was just firing people for not being sufficiently subservient.

* And remember things like "The Weakest Link"?

We've built a culture over the years, that has turned large swaths of the internet from small communities of fans and enthusiasts to large communities of "take down" artists and drive by clap backs a la twitter. We promote criticism and boarderline sociopathy on a daily basis and hold it up as an ideal to strive for, and turn to "You just can't handle the truth" whenever someone calls it out. Is it any wonder then that the people that are rising to the top in a world that promotes crab bucket mentality are the biggest and meanest crabs?

But if we don't work to be different in the small. If we don't try in our day to day efforts even when it's extremely difficult to do so, to be kind, positive, and enthusiastic, where do we expect that behavior to come from in our leaders and the people we promote? If "harsh truth" people who "say what they want" and "don't care about your feels" are the sort of people we lift up at the bottom, why do we expect it to be any different the higher up we go?

> We have too much fake-niceness, and we are over-enthused quite often on things that turn out to be nothing, at least in the U.S. We don't need more of it, at least IMO.

I don't think the original article is advocating for "fake niceness". It's advocating for enthusiastic uplift. That spirit that tends to pervade small hobbyist communities, where everyone is iterating and building on everyone else. If you've been in the 3d printing space over the last decade or so, there's plenty of honest criticism and knowledgable discussion. But it's also infectiously enthusiastic and there's a sense of exploration and desire to see everyone* succeed that's very genuine. Things don't always succeed or work out, but it's pretty rare to encounter hard "that's stupid, you're stupid and you should feel bad" sort of commentary.

Compare this to the broader tech community as it appears in places like HN. Open any thread on someone's new project or experiment here and count the number of comments that are genuinely positive and encouraging vs the number that are nit-picking for the sake of nit-picking, dismissive and just generally unhappy or are outright actively tearing down the item in question. Even the ones that are "Oh this is nice, but hey you could do XYZ to improve it" very rarely have any follow up that submits the suggested improvements, even when the original item is an open source project that they clearly could submit improvements to. People love to talk about the shortcomings, but unlike "fans" rarely tend to put out the time and effort to make it better.

It's bad enough that my general approach to HN these days is to only read the articles and make an effort to avoid the comment threads or at a minimum make sure I've read the original link in its entirety and thought about my own opinions of it before heading into the comments. And when I find something in a project that I think could be improved, I make an effort to ensure that I'm putting proper effort into trying to improve it, either with a patch/fix or if I'm incapable of patching/fixing, as much detail and testing as I can document in order to have contributed more than just a drive by criticism.

Also, I'm not sure a "too much niceness", fake or otherwise, is the problem in the US right now.

Thanks for posting this. I learn some about the topic as I am not very good receiving criticism.

> I can't doubt that I want to eat a doughnut or that I want to be healthy or that I want a world with less cruelty in it.

The common case of the smoker (or someone around them) doubting whether they "really" want to quit cigarettes or not, after claiming they do want to quit and will quit, and then failing to do so, shows this is coherent though. It's just not applicable to the two examples you gave, because that's not what is meant.

The thing that makes you different from the beasts is that you believe that there is a way things ought to be, regardless of how they are. You can view your desire to eat a doughnut separate from your prescriptive belief of whether you ought to eat the donut. You can beliefe that you ought not to eat the donut even though you want to, you can beleive that you ought to eat the donut even if you don't want to. You can even believe that you ought not hold any beliefs regarding what you ought to eat based on your desires to eat it.

Accepting that prescriptive beliefs exists, the claim by Chesterton is quite simply factual. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness.

The question as to what prescriptive beliefs we ought to hold is another matter, and one Chesterton has dealt with masterfully.

(quoted)

When I had written this down, I felt once again the presence of something else in the discussion: as a man hears a church bell above the sound of the street. Something seemed to be saying, "My ideal at least is fixed; for it was fixed before the foundations of the world. My vision of perfection assuredly cannot be altered; for it is called Eden. You may alter the place to which you are going; but you cannot alter the place from which you have come. To the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution; for in the hearts of men God has been put under the feet of Satan. In the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven. But in this world heaven is rebelling against hell. For the orthodox there can always be a revolution; for a revolution is a restoration. At any instant you may strike a blow for the perfection which no man has seen since Adam. No unchanging custom, no changing evolution can make the original good any thing but good. Man may have had concubines as long as cows have had horns: still they are not a part of him if they are sinful. Men may have been under oppression ever since fish were under water; still they ought not to be, if oppression is sinful. The chain may seem as natural to the slave, or the paint to the harlot, as does the plume to the bird or the burrow to the fox; still they are not, if they are sinful. I lift my prehistoric legend to defy all your history. Your vision is not merely a fixture: it is a fact." I paused to note the new coincidence of Christianity: but I passed on.

> Chesterton is just giving clever voice to the eternal prediction that the decline of traditional morals will produce a fundamental degeneration of humanity.

No.

(quoted)

We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. But this which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human things. An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old. It is the custom in passing romance and journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies. But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies; under tyrannies that had been public liberties hardly twenty years before. Thus England went mad with joy over the patriotic monarchy of Elizabeth; and then (almost immediately afterwards) went mad with rage in the trap of the tyranny of Charles the First. So, again, in France the monarchy became intolerable, not just after it had been tolerated, but just after it had been adored. The son of Louis the well-beloved was Louis the guillotined. So in the same way in England in the nineteenth century the Radical manufacturer was entirely trusted as a mere tribune of the people, until suddenly we heard the cry of the Socialist that he was a tyrant eating the people like bread. So again, we have almost up to the last instant trusted the newspapers as organs of public opinion. Just recently some of us have seen (not slowly, but with a start) that they are obviously nothing of the kind. They are, by the nature of the case, the hobbies of a few rich men. We have not any need to rebel against antiquity; we have to rebel against novelty. It is the new rulers, the capitalist or the editor, who really hold up the modern world. There is no fear that a modern king will attempt to override the constitution; it is more likely that he will ignore the constitution and work behind its back; he will take no advantage of his kingly power; it is more likely that he will take advantage of his kingly powerlessness, of the fact that he is free from criticism and publicity. For the king is the most private person of our time. It will not be necessary for any one to fight again against the proposal of a censorship of the press. We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press.

---

The pagans had always adored purity: Athena, Artemis, Vesta. It was when the virgin martyrs began defiantly to practice purity that they rent them with wild beasts, and rolled them on red-hot coals. The world had always loved the notion of the poor man uppermost; it can be proved by every legend from Cinderella to Whittington, by every poem from the Magnificat to the Marseillaise. The kings went mad against France not because she idealized this ideal, but because she realized it. Joseph of Austria and Catherine of Russia quite agreed that the people should rule; what horrified them was that the people did. The French Revolution, therefore, is the type of all true revolutions, because its ideal is as old as the Old Adam, but its fulfilment almost as fresh, as miraculous, and as new as the New Jerusalem.

I am a fan of both of you, and now a have to find his writing.

The simple act of voicing the true recognition of brilliance.

I am going to ...

Mostly, yes, but I think at its core, the world benefits from honesty more than out right agreeable- or disagreeableness. We should speak up when we feel the need to agree or disagree, but we shouldn't play devil's advocate for the sake of it.

You can be competitive and supportive of your enemies.

> In order to “win,” someone else needs to “lose.”

Only in zero sum. I don't think many things are really zero sum. The reason why both parties say thank you in a financial transaction is because the first party values the thing more than the money and the other party values the money more than the thing. Win-win.

I prefer winning as a team. I also like significantly contributing to that, but never at someone else's expense. I am the first to say "we did this" vs "i did this."

What I have encountered, is a bit different.

There’s a fetching shade of gray, to my well-coiffed pompadour, and I find many younger folks are almost immediately hostile, before I’ve even had a chance to give them a reason to be.

Speaking only for myself, I am very enthusiastic about all kinds of things, and devote a great deal of effort towards helping folks out. There’s reasons for that, which is a story for another time. Suffice it to say that I’ve seen darker times, and that can add a lot of shine, to what others take for granted.

That said, I’ve also seen quite a bit of life, and have learned where a lot of the claymores are planted, so some of that “helping folks out,” is mentioning things like “Are you sure you want to pet that rattling snake?”.

I don’t consider that “real” enthusiasm, though.

It’s “cargo-cult enthusiasm,” where they believe that keeping an almost manic level of energy will magically transcend the bourgeoisie prison of reality, and poop out rainbow unicorn turds.