However, as many others mention below, most people dislike Arrington because Techcrunch has no journalistic scruples. The way they attacked Last.fm without even bothering to properly check into facts was yet another example of this.
pg cites his own curt/succint approach to writing as a reason people dislike him and speculates that people dislike Arrington for the same reason, thus using Arrington as an example for part of his argument. While pg's central thesis in the essay stands, the Arrington example does not.
This can extend even further--from everything I've gathered, George W. Bush is a very easy person to like once you know him in person. Yet he was very recently one of the most widely despised people in the world. Your actual personality doesn't seem to matter once you start doing things people don't like, or otherwise become famous outside people who know you in person.
I offend people by writing. And I do it the same way Michael offends people in person:
Other commenters have referred to this as well. I'm curious: how do you know it was baseless? All I remember is an unsatisfyingly ambiguous they-said-they-said dispute that was never resolved in my mind (and apparently not Google's as well, because a quick search doesn't reveal anything). IIRC, Techcrunch printed what they said was a leaked email substantiating the base of their claim. Was that email a forgery?
Just to spray some anti-troll foam on this, I mean my questions strictly literally. I don't have a preference for the truth to be one way or the other. I'm just curious (mildly; enough to post the question) what it actually is.
That's a bit of an logic leap though. Common sense suggests that if someone is disliked by a person, the reason is most likely evident and known. Most don't dislike as a default response.
Assertions not following Occam's Razor need citation.
You've heard "First impressions last", right? So obviously we judge people outside of conscious, logical thought processes.
Person and Costume: Effects on the Formation of First Impressions http://fcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/1/32
First Impressions: Making Up Your Mind After a 100-Ms Exposure to a Face http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118597412/abstrac...
Confirming first impressions in the employment interview: a field study of interviewer behavior http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=3296559
But Im not going to sit and rant angrily at him. Commentors on TechCrunch do plenty of that - but y'know every blog has that. TCC just reacts badly to it sometimes :)
Yes there are angry people - your right. Some probably dont like his abrasiveness (It's never worried me; my family are like that so Im used to it), some probably dont like his ethics and get cross (again, never understood that one). Sadly none of this is will change their minds :)
(Just look at Graywolf angrily hounding Matt Cutts day and night over any conspiracy he can formulate in Google blog posts / press release etc. he wont stop no matter how patient Cutts is with him)
You ask friends you know are nice to read your drafts and warn you if you're being mean.
But that doesn't mean that people would react positively, either. The response would simply be altered: people would likely try to work with him, try to correct his behavior as they saw fit, or dismiss him altogether.
> When people dislike something intensely, the reason is not always what they claim, or even believe themselves.
This is stunningly arrogant, and I'm speaking as someone that's constantly accused of arrogance. If you're going to tell people that you understand their motivations or behaviors better than they do, you should trot out some better evidence than mere conjecture.
This is stunningly arrogant
No it's not. It's an obvious fact of human nature. One way to know this is by self-observation. That may seem oxymoronic (how can I observe something I am denying?) but with a bit of honesty it works well.
One tell-tale sign is when the emotional charge around something is incommensurate with the reason someone is giving. I think this may be going on here. The most common stated criticism of Arrington is that his journalistic standards are poor. But is everyone who says that really so passionate about journalistic standards in general? I kind of doubt it.
They claim that in human behavior, other people can be better judges of certain traits related to behavior -- like whether we come across as friendly, aloof, curt, etc. -- but the individual is more aware of things like motivations than anyone else can be. In any situation where an individual is unaware of their motivations, the best that anyone else can do is make wild guesses. The article called these "dark areas".
I can't say whether there's any actual support in research for the content of that article, but it does agree with most of the other pop-psychology garbage I've read, like "Blink".
Regardless, you and I have absolutely zero information about other people when it comes to guessing their motivations. We don't know their backgrounds, and we usually don't know them well enough to understand their personality. We certainly don't know an entire class of people well enough to tell them what their motivations are.
The best we can do is conclude that their stated motivations don't make sense given some other information about them.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but using yours and pg's justifications for this, I could tell you right now that you're defending pg out of a hidden desire to win recognition from him, since he has influence and resources. (If I were an actual real-life psychologist, I would probably also trot out some lame garbage incorporating "evolutionary psychology", and would conclude that you're behaving this way because ancient peoples who behaved this way had some kind of evolutionary advantage in the imaginary environment I've invented for them.)
You would probably object to that, and then I would grin and say, "Ah, but you don't understand your motivations as well as I do! If only you were more honest in your self-observation, you would see that I was right."
So, yes, while I agree that in some cases the stated motivations don't make sense, I disagree that we can assume that we know what the actual motivations really are -- especially without a shred of supporting evidence.
Hell, why not assume that Arrington draws fire because he's the founder and figurehead for TechCrunch, and people dislike TechCrunch because it sometimes picks on their buddies' startups? That conclusion has exactly as much supporting evidence as the one that pg drew. (None.)
Wait, I know! People actually dislike Arrington because he said he would debut a really awesome tablet PC by now, and where is it? We're all disappointed, and that's why we hate him. That conclusion, too, has exactly as much supporting evidence as yours or pg's. (...None.)
I don't dislike Arrington individually, and I don't even have a very strong opinion of TechCrunch, so I can't explain any motivation for actual hatred on my part. But, I also shouldn't think that I can explain any actual hatred on anyone else's part.
At the very least, let's see some studies of controversial figures, the traits those figures have in common, and the most common reactions to them. Let's see if there's a correlation between mere abruptness in an individual, and widespread long-term dislike of that person.
Or do some social experiments, with actual control and experiment groups.
The point though was less about coming up with the right kind of experiments -- although that could be kind of fun -- and more that it's extremely arrogant to tell people that you understand them better than they do, especially when it's completely unjustified, as it is here.
Whether you consider that kind of arrogance to be a negative trait or not is up to you.
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Yes, it can (and does) make a flawed argument, which to most people would seem to be a defense of Arrington even if not intended as such.
What you take away from an essay is obviously up to you.