> You’re going to see these people again
> But your tone, timing, and consistency create the feedback loop
He asked people to look for work elsewhere if they do not agree to Meta’s new policies. Pretty shameful and incredibly inhumane and demoralizing.
The Third Patriarch of Zen wrote: The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.
It’s a fun game to notice all the little preferences we introduce in our self talk and be intentional in our responses.
I guess what I am saying is that it is harder to assume it is not the type of event where we don't have to 'condition' people.
But, you don't need to game it by being specifically aware of what's going on. When you fabricate your responses in order to give false correlations to people around you, it causes distrust and alienation, purely because of your inconsistent responses over time. So the optimal option is just being what you are.
Please don't treat people around you like experiments.
Isn't it fitting that the guy who wrote the blog is the CTO of Meta/Facebook, who are quasi experimenting for-profit on people for over 20 years.
Then took a closer look at the latest post, "Love what you do." Really? If "loving what you do" means contributing to Facebook/Meta’s legacy of facilitating genocides, exploiting users, running unethical social experiments, and overall polarizing societies to the brink of destruction just for profit - then your "life advice" is just hollow, superficial nonsense. Screw you, "Boz" - we don’t need that kind of hypocrisy at HN.
I get not everyone can leave a company if their life depends on it and they have to support a family, especially in this market.
But this guy is probably a millionaire already. He's got the luxury of working for more world positive companies or projects.
But him choosing to continue to work for Zuck sends a clear signal what his values are.
I couldn’t imagine thinking of relationships so transactionally, like every moment I spend with someone is just increasing or decreasing my score with them. There is very little room in this tersely communicated philosophy for intimacy and vulnerability, and in fact, the “hard feedback” he mentions can only be delivered successfully within the context of a trustful relationship.
In day to interactions with people in modern industrial society, 99% of the interaction is transactional by default. However if you look around you’ll notice that again the plurality of relationships are transactional at their root.
This is in contrast to transcendental relationships, like the achievable ideal relationship between parent and child, between siblings or romantic partners.
This is especially true for people who got into a position of power via “climbing the ladder”
The ladder in this case is made up of other people that you step on in order to get to the next rung in the ladder.
Transactionalism is ultimately the foundational basis for capitalism and our existing social order globally, and unfortunately also the root of all evil.
This is more of a statement about the other person, especially if true, than the person trying to estimate the score, who is just trying to model their world as accurately as possible.
If you don't like it, the only thing you can do is try to be more complicated than a single score yourself. If it is in fact a good model of most human, then there is nothing you can do to change it, and being angry at the person who made you aware of the model doesn't help either.
> someone comes with a question and leaves feeling small, they’ll stop asking. If they bring you a hard problem and you meet it with curiosity, you’ll get more of those. If you always solve things for people, they’ll outsource their judgment. If you always critique, they’ll start hiding the work.
I take this as a reminder that my off-hand remarks to people can really make a difference. I don’t think that is “impoverished” at all.
Just one example-- some narcissists will take the author's strategy personally, and they will fuck with him relentlessly for their own amusement. Worse, it won't be clear to onlookers who is the victim and who is the aggressor. It will appear as one low-empathy individual trying to "train" others while another, intransigent individual actively resists the training. There's even a good chance onlookers will see the narcissist as the good guy, successfully fighting back against the author's snobbery and condescension. If you can't think of a citation for this pattern then you don't currently live in the U.S.
And that's ignoring the fact that inconsistencies in other people's reactions over time often don't have anything to do with the author's behavior. Someone who comes away from interactions "feeling small" may in fact be consumed with their own crippling anxiety. Interpreting that as a failure of the author's Pavlovian strategy is a recipe for codependency that helps no one. The whole metaphor is a fool's errand.
Yeah, my advice would be to take whatever this guy says and…do the opposite.
Indeed. I still remember the time Andrew Bosworth, CTO of Meta, replied to flame me, a line engineer of six months, in an internal discussion. It must have been, what, 15 years ago? The topic is long faded from my memory. Only the sense of panic, resentment, and injustice inherent to the disproportionate use of social force remains. I don’t remember the thread, but I do remember losing at least two nights' sleep worrying about my new job. Truly, it is sage advice.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/teaching-my-neighbor-to-keep-the-vo...
> Everything being a repeat game and people on the sideline taking notes
This isn't an excuse to play small. The universe rewards courage.
eimrine•7h ago
jraby3•6h ago
eimrine•1h ago