A Love Letter to People Who Believe in People

> It feels socially safe, easy, and destructive to be a critic. I'd rather be a fan.

Trotting out absolute statements does no one any good. I could just as easily spin this on its head and say that it feels socially safe to always show blind enthusiasm for the latest trend lest you be labelled a "hater".

It feels like we're just redefining critic to be synonymous with cynic. There's no reason that you can't simultaneously be both fan and a critic of X.

I always liked Brendan Behan's quote:

“Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.”

That's an amazing quote. I recently just started going to some LA Kings hockey games with my family for the first time, so this hits close to home.

I played high school sports (with a three day hospital stay for a serious concussion to show for it - thanks, football), but I've never been a fan of watching sportsball on TV unless it's a social gathering like Superbowl parties. I've generally had a low opinion of people who cared about their city's teams and all the useless competitiveness that goes along with it.

But being there, in the stadium around all the other fans? Fucking electrifying. I celebrated, I jeered, I cried, I booed Edmonton, I cursed the refs, I complained about the stadium food and the line for the men's bathroom, and I was probably the loudest person in the 318 section of the Staples center. I almost fell over the glass boards onto the ESPN newscasters during Wednesday's game on the fourth goal. Too much overpriced beer plus standing up to wave the "Built for This" towels too fast.

I still don't give a flying fuck about the Kings or Lakers or Clippers or whatever, but I am definitely going to enjoy going to their games and feeling the energy. The exact words my mom used were "I've never seen this side of you."

WE WANT SKINNER!!!

Yes, but .. there is no worse critic than a scorned fan. There's a lot of fandoms all around the world, and while they're mostly harmless fun the edges can get weird and dangerous. Or when fandoms collide.

I agree but, doesn’t the world need critics?

I think of a company where young inspired engineers want to build new things all the time.

Their heart is in the right place but they need someone(s) to be respectfully critical since their efforts and time spent have very real impacts on the company.

A top-of-thread subthread complaining about critics on the topic of believing in people.

We didn’t last long.

Feeling good about shit all the time isn’t practical and it indicates a lack of individual, refined taste. Its ok to like things that you like and dislike things others like and one should be able to hold their own opinions without influence from the crowd.

There's a healthy way to be a critic, which is helping people find and enjoy works they didn't notice.

There are also unhealthy ways of being a fan, for example if you admire someone there's probably someone else you despise. It's much better to follow the title of the post and believe in people in general.

> But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether

Chesterton is just giving clever voice to the eternal prediction that the decline of traditional morals will produce a fundamental degeneration of humanity. T.H. Huxley, who had been dead for over ten years when Chesterton wrote this, was a wildly successful person, an eminent scientist, prolific author, and public figure. But these predictions are eternally about a coming collapse. It didn't matter that Chesterton's exemplar of the "new humility" had been one of the most shining examples of ambition and fruitful labor of the 19th century. He could still predict that Huxley's ideas would reduce the next generation to helpless ineffectualness. And even after three of Huxley's grandchildren became eminent public figures in the 20th century, there will be people who read this and find it a compelling prediction about the 21st century.

This seems like Chesterton to me. Good writer, but I take exception to his world view. We should simply doubt that which is warranted to doubt and be confident in that which warrants confidence. If modern people doubt truths more than people used to, perhaps its because those so-called truths aren't so obvious as some people would have you believe.

"But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."

This just fundamentally misunderstands what aims are. They can neither be doubted or correct. I can doubt empirically, or epistemologically, but 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. It's a waste of time and energy to doubt these things, although I can try to line up all my desires and figure out how they stack up with one another when I try to make plans, the efficacy of which is in the realm of the believable. I can look at other people's actions, try to determine their desires, and decide whether to assist them or interfere with them or fight them, but when I do this its not a cosmic battle about truths. Its just two people acting out on their desires in a shared world.

I stand with Houle

I like people like that too, but surely the world and more narrowly the human experience also benefit from having people that are competitive or even disagreeable?

I had too, and it was the only reason I was with that company.

This is a trick for event planning btw. Put up a “hey anyone wanna go to x?” Crickets. Quietly one on one find two or three people and then say “hey the four of us are doing x anyone else want in?” works a lot better. Most people want to know something is gonna succeed and avoid the risk of failure.

Me too! I was like, what a weird timeline - wonder what a hot chocolate company leadership has to say in these “interesting” times.

Good read though, thanks to OP for sharing!

You can be a fan of that too if you want

I think it's the curse of being online. Most IRL based social groups in every culture I've been in subconsciously filter out cynics. These folks often feel disenfranchised IRL and congregate online instead. Their presence crowds out non-cynics, who then leave. These online communities then reorganize around cynical baselines.

Apparently Threads had made a decision earlier on to deprioritize negative and charged political topics because of Meta's belief in this negative flywheel.

(I'd rather not go into a discussion about Meta itself in replies here because I find those discussions on HN to be highly unproductive, and I won't respond to comments regarding them.)

They often seem to me to be two sides of the same coin: fanaticism becomes curmudgeonly with what does not coincide with your fanaticism.

We've become jaded by phony enthusiasm or people hijacking it for their own purposes. I agree it's bad, but this industry does seem to run on the enthusiasm of naive 20-40 year olds, the end result of that is many jaded 40+ year old curmudgeons.

Sometimes that comes with most of the things you were enthusiastic for ending up far from fulfilling their promise.