Back in 2020, @Raemon gave me some extremely good advice.
@johnswentworth had left some comments on a post of mine that I found extremely frustrating and counterproductive. At the time I had no idea about his body of work, so he was just some annoying guy. Ray, who did know who John was and thought he was doing important work, told me:
You can’t save the world without working with people at least as annoying as John.
Which didn’t mean I had to heal the rift with John in particular, but if I was going to make that a policy then I would need to give up on my goal of having real impact.
John and I did a video call, and it went well. He pointed out a major flaw in my post, I impressed him by immediately updating once he pointed it out. I still think his original comments displayed status dynamics while sneering at them, and find that frustrating, but Ray was right that not all factual corrections will be delivered in pleasing forms.
A manager of mine of, speaking about Silicon Valley start-up ecosystem, advised me that it was a small world and I should relate to anyone I meet/deal with as someone who’d be my friend for ten years. I don’t know whether all her friendships were genuine, but the spirit of the advice was helpful.
Quite likely obvious to you, but to save near-me minds a step: this doesn’t mean you can’t ever tell people they did something annoying unnecessarily. Some minds that produce annoyance in others frequently would in principle like to not do that, but have had trouble updating away from it. If one can identify that the person who replied ~arrogantly is someone who doesn’t think they need to express ~arrogance in order to criticize, they can likely be requested-to-update. But of course that wouldn’t work for some.
You can’t save the world without working with people at least as annoying as John.
This is a great quote, and one that I should keep in mind myself.
My coworkers are pretty amazing in how not annoying they are (they’re low ego, interested in changing their mind when they’re wrong, smart, interested in getting better over time) and I still sometimes feel an urge to quit in a huff.
not all factual corrections will be delivered in pleasing forms
Yep, but I think your example does not go far enough. “Annoying but good-faith LW comments” is one thing, but valuable critique can also come from the mouths of openly sneering bad-faith internet trolls.[1] If you can keep yourself from over-updating on negativity into depression spirals, you may extract some actually useful feedback from your haters’ drivel! (You may want to route it through spite instead of empathy, though. As in, “this fool wants me to fail, but they’ve just brought me useful information, of their own volition!”.)
Back in 2020, @Raemon gave me some extremely good advice.
@johnswentworth had left some comments on a post of mine that I found extremely frustrating and counterproductive. At the time I had no idea about his body of work, so he was just some annoying guy. Ray, who did know who John was and thought he was doing important work, told me:
Which didn’t mean I had to heal the rift with John in particular, but if I was going to make that a policy then I would need to give up on my goal of having real impact.
John and I did a video call, and it went well. He pointed out a major flaw in my post, I impressed him by immediately updating once he pointed it out. I still think his original comments displayed status dynamics while sneering at them, and find that frustrating, but Ray was right that not all factual corrections will be delivered in pleasing forms.
A manager of mine of, speaking about Silicon Valley start-up ecosystem, advised me that it was a small world and I should relate to anyone I meet/deal with as someone who’d be my friend for ten years. I don’t know whether all her friendships were genuine, but the spirit of the advice was helpful.
Quite likely obvious to you, but to save near-me minds a step: this doesn’t mean you can’t ever tell people they did something annoying unnecessarily. Some minds that produce annoyance in others frequently would in principle like to not do that, but have had trouble updating away from it. If one can identify that the person who replied ~arrogantly is someone who doesn’t think they need to express ~arrogance in order to criticize, they can likely be requested-to-update. But of course that wouldn’t work for some.
Your use of hyperlinks is very amusing to me.
This is a great quote, and one that I should keep in mind myself.
My coworkers are pretty amazing in how not annoying they are (they’re low ego, interested in changing their mind when they’re wrong, smart, interested in getting better over time) and I still sometimes feel an urge to quit in a huff.
Yep, but I think your example does not go far enough. “Annoying but good-faith LW comments” is one thing, but valuable critique can also come from the mouths of openly sneering bad-faith internet trolls.[1] If you can keep yourself from over-updating on negativity into depression spirals, you may extract some actually useful feedback from your haters’ drivel! (You may want to route it through spite instead of empathy, though. As in, “this fool wants me to fail, but they’ve just brought me useful information, of their own volition!”.)
You know how that meme goes, “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point”.