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There's a simple hack toward being more positive: When you make a joke, ensure that you're the victim, not someone else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngwOuLz

• agumonkey 8y ago
  Like most things, don't do it too often or people might think you have a problem or will consider you as the clown. It can backfire.
  • ryanx435 8y ago
    why do i even bother with HN comments? OP: "gives an anecdote about how the article is wrong or incomplete" REPLY: "gives an anecdote about how the OP is wrong or incomplete" REPLY-REPLY: "gives an anecdote about how the REPLY is wrong or incomplete" repeat adnauseum on every comment chain for ever and ever.
    • agumonkey 8y ago
      well I'm sorry
    • CompelTechnic 8y ago
      Nerds like to divide reality into finer and finer resolution.
      • some_account 8y ago
        Ego.
    • coldtea 8y ago
      That's what's called a discussion. People make arguments, corrections to other's arguments, and counter-arguments.
      • some_account 8y ago
        I can absolutely understand why people don't like discussions. Usually people don't have them to learn - they have them to teach. If two people like that are having a discussion, it's truly an pointless activity.
        • agumonkey 8y ago
          Am guilty of this quite often.
        • coldtea 8y ago
          >Usually people don't have them to learn - they have them to teach. Doesn't matter IMO. Both sides are still getting something out of it. Even if they just try to "teach" and think they already know everything, they also get to hear the argument of the other side, and think counterarguments -- thus improving their argument too. In other words, even if they stick to their a priori beliefs no matter what, they at least learn to defend and define them better, because of having to deal with the other side. Besides, a discussion is not just something to "learn" from. It's also entertaining on its own, a way to express yourself, hone your thoughts and so on. Learning from the discussion is not required for those things. Not everything has to have an end goal, or "improve" us.
        • Bjartr 8y ago
          > If two people like that are having a discussion, it's truly an pointless activity. Some points I can see and am able to articulate: 1. Being exposed to opposing viewpoints is valuable even if your goals don't consciously include learning from them. Pointless to the individual because rationally they won't further their goal? Perhaps. Pointless to society as a whole? I would argue no. 2. Non-participants exposed to such a discussion can learn from all sides, even if the individuals actually doing the discussion gain absolutely nothing, and there are orders of magnitude more non-participants than participants. So even a small impact can be far-reaching.
        • reificator 8y ago
          I try to teach when I'm in a discussion, and I learn a lot from them. Both from trying to teach and from hearing other viewpoints. In fact I tend to actively try to seek out and befriend people who disagree with me, specifically to learn more. It's easy enough for me at least to make friends with a bunch of clones of myself, and while that's not a bad thing I think perspective is important. And you get that from discussing things with people who disagree. I don't think that teaching vs learning is mutually exclusive, and while intent matters I don't believe you can have a (non-repeat) discussion without learning something. It kind of frightens me how much emphasis has been put into creating social bubbles where no one disagrees. Especially online where it's so easy to do. (I want to emphasize that I am not criticizing having people around to support you.)
    • reificator 8y ago
      I think that the post you replied to was perfectly reasonable in its tone, and amazingly tame by HN standards. Could you clarify on what you took issue with?
    • bomberFighter 8y ago
      I've noticed this about HN's "substantive comment" policy, regarding always "adding to the conversation" somehow. By and large, it mostly encourages reproaches, much in the same way that vote ranking often encourages baseless downvotes that the community uses to drive preferred opinions to the top of any thread, and onto the main page. The result is a very dry humorless community, preserving all the downsides of an echo chamber, but deceptively without all the back slapping, inside jokes, voices of encouragement and memetic kidding around that other echo chambers demonstrate. You'll see what success on HN looks like, if you look at the karma scores of some of the most active users, whose tone is most reinforced by the incentive system, and then browse their participation artifacts, and reflect on what kind of a person might naturally play into this feedback system. Is that the kind of person you would have this site transform you into? The power of positive people, indeed.
• fsloth 8y ago
  Why would you need to tell jokes that victimize anyone? Sounds like a very narrow sense of humor...
  • wizardforhire 8y ago
    If you study humor you find that nothing is funny and every joke is actually mean. I’ll look for these laughter studies but iirc the conclusions are that people laugh as a form of group identification. Laughter serves as a social signal in the same way affirmative or roger does over a radio. As in, I have received the information you have transmitted and correctly understand the intended message. As social groups become more specialized or valuable, it becomes more important to the groups survival to weed out those who are not of the proper pre-requisites. Academia is a perfect example of this, and what I find most fascinating is the etymology of the word barbarian. The word coming from an onomatopoeia of what athians thought foreignors sounded like when attempting to speak greek. I can just imagine eletist Greeks making fun of people behind their back as a form of social solidarity.
    • abenedic 8y ago
      > every joke is actually mean What is a cow's favorite form of entertainment? Going to the moo-vies.
      • gburdell3 8y ago
        This is perpetuating a harmful stereotype of bovine culture. You should be ashamed.
        • lucas_membrane 8y ago
          You miss the real problem: The cow is a placeholder for whichever category of persons the listener most fears.
    • fergatmuhacct 8y ago
      Your understanding of jokes reads like it's literally insane, as if an alien was trying to understand humor. How could you possibly believe this? These unknown "studies" you refer to are clearly bunk. Anyone can disprove it in 10 seconds of looking at a list of jokes. This idea of jokes is not a fact by any stretch of the imagination. Your retelling of "barbarian" etymology is also wrong. Apparently ancient greeks thought other people's languages sounded like "bar bar" to them. It's not what foreigners sounded like trying to speak their own language, which wouldn't really even make sense. "The Greeks used the term barbarian for all non-Greek-speaking peoples, including the Egyptians, Persians, Medes and Phoenicians, emphasizing their otherness, because the language they spoke sounded to Greeks like gibberish represented by the sounds "bar..bar..;" this is how they came to the word βάρβαρος" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian#Etymology
• coldtea 8y ago
  >There's a simple hack toward being more positive: When you make a joke, ensure that you're the victim, not someone else. Doesn't that just make you less offensive to others? Still doesn't say anything about you being more positive - in fact, making yourself the butt of your jokes could mean you're self-deprecating or depressive.
  • AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    > Doesn't that just make you less offensive to others? No. Where I work we talk a lot of smack to each other. This doesn't go on behind peoples' backs - we prefer that the victim be there to hear it. But about 20% of the time, the "victim" is also the speaker - it's self-directed smack. When we were interviewing this guy to join our team, I mentioned this behavior, and asked if he was going to be able to put up with that environment. The thought for a moment, and then said "It sounds like you trust each other." He was exactly right. It's because we trust each other that we can tease each other - knowing that the sender wasn't speaking in malice, and knowing that the receiver won't take it the wrong way.
    • ams6110 8y ago
      it's all fun until somebody says the wrong thing to the wrong person and HR gets involved and hashtags go viral and then there's a huge blow up about why all of this behavior was tolerated for so long and who was responsible for tolerating it.
      • coldtea 8y ago
        >it's all fun until somebody says the wrong thing to the wrong person The message from this onwards though is "fuck that person".
    • Infernal 8y ago
      So much of a well-functioning team depends on trust.
• Reedx 8y ago
  You don't have to go that far. Consider this insight from Chris Rock, who said: Joke about what people do, not what they are. That came up in this discussion where he, Jerry Seinfeld, Ricky Gervais and Louis CK talk about comedy and their techniques, etc. It's really interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKY6BGcx37k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKY6BGcx37k
  • zackmorris 8y ago
    A slightly off-topic insight I came upon recently was from the civil rights movement: don't call people racist, because it backs them into a corner they can't get out of. It's better to debate them on their choices so they can find their own way towards a more enlightened and equitable worldview. I've also come to realize that this may partially explain why conservatives I know have been reluctant to engage in political discussion in these times. They're being backed into having to defend fundamentally indefensible positions. Rather than forcing them to opt out, maybe it would be more productive to provide them an avenue out by engaging them in a more positive way. I'm still trying to figure out what that is, however.
    • DoreenMichele 8y ago
      People aren't monoliths. Instead of getting all het up about the pieces they are doing wrong, it helps to engage the pieces they are doing right and encourage more of that while occasionally raising an eyebrow at the more questionable stuff. Of course, this works best over time, assumes that it isn't a downright abusive situation where you can't really afford to not take a stand, etc.
    • tbrownaw 8y ago
      I've also come to realize that this may partially explain why conservatives I know have been reluctant to engage in political discussion in these times. They're being backed into having to defend fundamentally indefensible positions. Something I saw happen recently, was a conservative making positive ("the way things are") statements, and being treated as if he'd made normative ("the way things should be") statements. And being attacked for things he hadn't said, and pressured to defend positions he didn't hold, and effectively called a liar for trying to point out the miscommunication.
• watwut 8y ago
  The dangerous part of it is when people start to think that you are what you joke about and when you start to sort-of-believe your own jokes. You may know you don't mean it, but they dont and may end up believing it anyway. And if you repeat variations of "I am stupid" often enough, your confidence may go down. Is likely, even. At some point, is it not humility nor positive anymore, it is just negative. Yes, people like it when you insult yourself. Still, if the relationship requires you to take down and insult yourself regularly, it is not worth it. I mean it. I had that verbal tick where you automatically take down yourself or underplay own achievement and in retrospective, it costed me a lot. It took a lot of effort to get rid of it and I am still not fully there yet. People like it, they laugh and are friendlier and nicer to you. But they do end up believing you are less capable, then you are, respect you less, your word matters less in things that matter. Dont do it as a habit.
• barking 8y ago
  Was listening to Barry Humphries (dame edna everidge etc) the other week on some radio programme. One of his lines was that he'd been lucky to have been born with the gift of being able to laugh at other people's misfortunes.
• DoreenMichele 8y ago
  My experience with self deprecating humor is that it only works well when the audience has sufficient context to get why it is funny. Otherwise it just comes across as poor self esteem and signals that you really are the loser you are claiming to be. I like the suggestion someone else made to basically joke about life, not about people. (my words, not theirs, but that's what it sounded like to me)
  • ant6n 8y ago
    Also, sometimes making fun of yourself seems to signal to other people that they should also make fun of you.