5 ms·

This is a common type of HN thread where the linked article is pretty bad, but the headline topic is interesting enough that people want to comment on it from t

This is a common type of HN thread where the linked article is pretty bad, but the headline topic is interesting enough that people want to comment on it from their own experience. In this case, every single comment (100% as of this posting) is a riff on the headline topic and says nothing at all about the content of the article. Well, I will say one thing about the article. It summarily dismisses Stephen Covey's Seven Habits as nothing special, without engaging the content of the book in the slightest, and criticizes Covey for not talking about racism and sexism. If you want this article and its writer in a nutshell, there you go. There are a ton of articles like this out there, even on this exact topic of ridiculing self-help from the compulsive, perfunctory woke standpoint that dominates our elite media culture. This one was very middle-of-the-fairway. The best I can say about it is that it contained a tiny bit of history, and we were spared the usual exhortations to adopt more collectivist politics. (In their prescriptions for America, the writers always talk exclusively about politics, never even thinking about what people could be doing differently in their own families, friendships, neighborhoods and communities. Slaves to individualism in their own way, they would never imagine that anything but the State can save us.) Frankly, these dull, robotically woke articles from legacy media are a much more nauseating aspect of this cultural moment than bad self-help books. And Seven Habits is more worth your time than anything this author will ever say.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago
Agreed. These articles are becoming a formulaic bad trope. 1. Grab some classic American media. 2. Look at it through a perverted lens it wasn't meant to address. 3. Decry this lack of coverage as some evil ploy to suppress an outgroup. Seven habits is a great book that anyone would be better for having read.
- civilized 5y ago
  I'd love a poll of black businessmen to see how many of them think Seven Habits is worthless because it lacks explicit criticism of racism. I bet Covey has given them more of a leg up than a thousand woke hacks.
  - buu700 5y ago
    I haven't read the article or the book in question, but this reminds me of the hullabaloo about git master branches. Never in my life have I associated git or its default branch name with American slavery. I would be shocked if a single black programmer in the world had considered before last year that it might be offensive. I haven't discussed the issue with any black friends or family, but it's just such an odd leap to make even if the claim about its etymology is potentially correct. Of course, if even a minority of black programmers were or are offended, it's not my place as a non-black person to tell them they're wrong. I'll happily rename all my branches, update all my code that references master, rename all "master" test environments/hostnames, and update the gitconfig on all my machines, if credible surveys come out showing that a statistically significant number of black programmers genuinely consider master branches offensive. Until then, I'm not going to do free labor to back up what so far appears to be an ill-conceived PR stunt on GitHub/Microsoft's part. The only arguments I've seen in favor of renaming master have been from white people appealing to technicalities/etymology, as if solving a puzzle to prove whether it should be offensive according to some logic, rather than any kind of appeal to the feelings of actual humans. "Robotic wokeness" is a nice term to describe this phenomenon. I'm all for Black Lives Matter and correcting genuine injustices, but it's harmful to everyone when private interests artificially manufacture outrage and social justice causes solely for their own benefits.
    - samatman 5y ago
      I took the opportunity to rename all my master branches to `trunk`: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_(software) Because y'know, branches? Trunk and branches? It's the older term. I ran into it using Fossil and liked it, now all my git repos have trunks as well. Of course there's nothing wrong with master, that was just histrionic bullying. At best it was people doing something they can do (change variable names) as a substitute for something they can't (meaningfully affect racial injustice). But like I said. I took the opportunity. Way better name than main... or master for that matter.
      - buu700 5y ago
didibus 5y ago
I don't like your generalization, but this particular article was underwhelming I agree. I'm actually not even sure what point it is making.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "I'm actually not even sure what point it is making." It's not making a point. It's just a book review.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
pmoriarty 5y ago
This was definitely a snooze-worthy review of what seems like a dull book, but I don't have a problem with articles pointing out racism and sexism.. especially as there's so much of it in our culture and history.
- civilized 5y ago
  > I don't have a problem with articles pointing out racism and sexism Neither do I. Nothing in my comment says otherwise. But it is silly to criticize a book for not mentioning racism. There are plenty of books on racism. It is not the case that literally every book needs to be about racism.
  - afarrell 5y ago
    Also, Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens definitely trues to tackle sexism. However, it does so by giving advice on interpersonal relationships to people learning to navigate puberty. It doesn’t focus much on teaching how to dismantle the patriarchy as a whole or boil any other oceans.
euske 5y ago
> robotically woke I like this phrase a lot. Woke or not, we all agree that we hate the roboticality. It's just a cheap/shallow conviction, lack of depth and thoughtfulness, etc. is what I consider actually harmful.
ggm 5y ago
> woke please. Dang should be down on this word, its designed to elict bad responses. It adds nothing. Self help has a very interesting consequence on the politics of social service delivery to people. I've had this conversation a LOT with US voters, and they resent their tax dollars funding type-2 diabetes intervention precisely because its perceived as a self-acquired voluntary disease. Never mind the horrific health economics outcome of ignoring it, some wierd, quasi-moralistic "I shouldn't HAVE TO" enters the room. I believe quite strongly this is a consequential corollary of the self-help movement. Which btw, has deep roots in the American political landscape, from well before the obsession with Dale Carnegie. You could argue the whole "go west" and invitation to land-pegging which fuelled the expansion of the states into the territories depended on it. Samuel Smiles wrote histories of great men which fuelled a sense of ability to become what you wish to be, and was part of the victorian british self-help movement too. If I looked for a word to describe the other point of view I get to "collectivist" but within seconds Its descended into name calling around socialism. Europe and Asia have a different sense of what is, and is not worth funding and managing collectively. US Americans in particular are driven to self-reliance in all things, including things which demonstrably are counter productive. Self-Help and Self-Advancement, and simple self-managed self-actualisation are all a part of this. There aren't seven habits of highly effective people: There's the benefit of money, and not reading pop-sci and thats about it. Wokists make jokes about Ayn Rand because she died poor, lonely and deprived, dependent on the state. The ultimate payback, no? Asocial is, as Asocial does. For humour value, consider Gurdjieff. Where would you put Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti on the 'woke' agenda, given they believed strongly in ... self-help?
- EvilEy3 5y ago
  > Wokists make jokes about Ayn Rand because she died poor, lonely and deprived, dependent on the state. The ultimate payback, no? Asocial is, as Asocial does. Wokists make jokes about Ayn Rand because it makes them feel better and they don't know or choose to ignore that this is false. She didn't die poor, lonely and deprived. She still made a lot of money by the time she died and the amount she collected from state was 2k or something like that.
  - 5y ago
hedberg10 5y ago
People who fix themselves are a danger to the cathedral.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
The article is a book review. The book is reviewing Seven Habits. The article is reviewing - criticising, in the sense of expanding and commenting on, if you read the details - the book. So that section is a mix of opinion. It's unfortunate you missed this rather relevant fact, and chose instead to write a diatribe about how "woke" is very bad and people on HN only ever comment on articles without really reading them. Of course if you believe that public criticism of books like Seven Habits in obscure journals is somehow corrosively 'un-American' you're going to need to explain why you have that rather exotic view.
- civilized 5y ago
  I didn't miss anything. The gratuitous complaints about lack of racism and sexism discourse come from Lehmann, not McHugh. And Lehmann spends plenty of time holding forth about Seven Habits from his own point of view, saying that he doesn't even see the spark of good in it that McHugh does. Feel free to reread the relevant section of the article and my comment if you "missed" any of this. The rest of your comment is just sloppy, incorrect description and speculation about what I wrote and what you assume I think, so I won't bother responding to that. However, I did note that others were able to grasp that I didn't attack wokeness per se, only articles written from a mindless, robotically woke viewpoint. So you might ask yourself why you didn't grasp this and instead chose to immediately draw tribal lines by speculating about what I think is "un-American".
johnchristopher 5y ago
Your comment got me to read the article. But. 1. First, the style is atrocious. I am not a native speaker but the style is circumvoluted, jumping from details to details. I believe the main idea could have been summarized and exposed clearly in fewer paragraphs ("process of cultural homogenization for its own sake in/through historical American self-help literature" or something). 2. > Well, I will say one thing about the article. It summarily dismisses Stephen Covey's Seven Habits as nothing special, without engaging the content of the book in the slightest, and criticizes Covey for not talking about racism and sexism. If you want this article and its writer in a nutshell, there you go. Isn't that a stretch ? > Although Covey’s tract pays no more attention to the harms of racism and sexism than the other works McHugh examines, she finds its controlling agenda tempered by a soft-focus emphasis on “principles,” “proactivity,” and “interdependence.” Such qualities, she asserts, are in short supply in similar works of success literature, introducing a critical element of vulnerability into the usual morale-raising, virtue-forming proceedings: “In interdependence,” she writes, “there was a recognition of individual limitations, even fallibility, in a way that rarely happens in this type of literature.” It's less a critic of Covey for not talking about racism and sexism than a general observation than all those work of literature are ignoring racism and sexism issues. Most probably because there were fewer outlets to express these issues than there is today. > And Seven Habits is more worth your time than anything this author will ever say. You make a bit point out of what is said about Covey's book in the article but seven habits and its relevance for entrepreneurs/businessmen is not the author's subject and its dismissal is more anecdote than central to the point.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago

Agreed. These articles are becoming a formulaic bad trope. 1. Grab some classic American media. 2. Look at it through a perverted lens it wasn't meant to address. 3. Decry this lack of coverage as some evil ploy to suppress an outgroup. Seven habits is a great book that anyone would be better for having read.

civilized 5y ago
I'd love a poll of black businessmen to see how many of them think Seven Habits is worthless because it lacks explicit criticism of racism. I bet Covey has given them more of a leg up than a thousand woke hacks.
- buu700 5y ago
  I haven't read the article or the book in question, but this reminds me of the hullabaloo about git master branches. Never in my life have I associated git or its default branch name with American slavery. I would be shocked if a single black programmer in the world had considered before last year that it might be offensive. I haven't discussed the issue with any black friends or family, but it's just such an odd leap to make even if the claim about its etymology is potentially correct. Of course, if even a minority of black programmers were or are offended, it's not my place as a non-black person to tell them they're wrong. I'll happily rename all my branches, update all my code that references master, rename all "master" test environments/hostnames, and update the gitconfig on all my machines, if credible surveys come out showing that a statistically significant number of black programmers genuinely consider master branches offensive. Until then, I'm not going to do free labor to back up what so far appears to be an ill-conceived PR stunt on GitHub/Microsoft's part. The only arguments I've seen in favor of renaming master have been from white people appealing to technicalities/etymology, as if solving a puzzle to prove whether it should be offensive according to some logic, rather than any kind of appeal to the feelings of actual humans. "Robotic wokeness" is a nice term to describe this phenomenon. I'm all for Black Lives Matter and correcting genuine injustices, but it's harmful to everyone when private interests artificially manufacture outrage and social justice causes solely for their own benefits.
  - samatman 5y ago
    I took the opportunity to rename all my master branches to `trunk`: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_(software) Because y'know, branches? Trunk and branches? It's the older term. I ran into it using Fossil and liked it, now all my git repos have trunks as well. Of course there's nothing wrong with master, that was just histrionic bullying. At best it was people doing something they can do (change variable names) as a substitute for something they can't (meaningfully affect racial injustice). But like I said. I took the opportunity. Way better name than main... or master for that matter.
    - buu700 5y ago

didibus 5y ago

I don't like your generalization, but this particular article was underwhelming I agree. I'm actually not even sure what point it is making.

pmoriarty 5y ago
"I'm actually not even sure what point it is making." It's not making a point. It's just a book review.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

pmoriarty 5y ago

This was definitely a snooze-worthy review of what seems like a dull book, but I don't have a problem with articles pointing out racism and sexism.. especially as there's so much of it in our culture and history.

civilized 5y ago
> I don't have a problem with articles pointing out racism and sexism Neither do I. Nothing in my comment says otherwise. But it is silly to criticize a book for not mentioning racism. There are plenty of books on racism. It is not the case that literally every book needs to be about racism.
- afarrell 5y ago
  Also, Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens definitely trues to tackle sexism. However, it does so by giving advice on interpersonal relationships to people learning to navigate puberty. It doesn’t focus much on teaching how to dismantle the patriarchy as a whole or boil any other oceans.

euske 5y ago

> robotically woke I like this phrase a lot. Woke or not, we all agree that we hate the roboticality. It's just a cheap/shallow conviction, lack of depth and thoughtfulness, etc. is what I consider actually harmful.

ggm 5y ago

> woke please. Dang should be down on this word, its designed to elict bad responses. It adds nothing. Self help has a very interesting consequence on the politics of social service delivery to people. I've had this conversation a LOT with US voters, and they resent their tax dollars funding type-2 diabetes intervention precisely because its perceived as a self-acquired voluntary disease. Never mind the horrific health economics outcome of ignoring it, some wierd, quasi-moralistic "I shouldn't HAVE TO" enters the room. I believe quite strongly this is a consequential corollary of the self-help movement. Which btw, has deep roots in the American political landscape, from well before the obsession with Dale Carnegie. You could argue the whole "go west" and invitation to land-pegging which fuelled the expansion of the states into the territories depended on it. Samuel Smiles wrote histories of great men which fuelled a sense of ability to become what you wish to be, and was part of the victorian british self-help movement too. If I looked for a word to describe the other point of view I get to "collectivist" but within seconds Its descended into name calling around socialism. Europe and Asia have a different sense of what is, and is not worth funding and managing collectively. US Americans in particular are driven to self-reliance in all things, including things which demonstrably are counter productive. Self-Help and Self-Advancement, and simple self-managed self-actualisation are all a part of this. There aren't seven habits of highly effective people: There's the benefit of money, and not reading pop-sci and thats about it. Wokists make jokes about Ayn Rand because she died poor, lonely and deprived, dependent on the state. The ultimate payback, no? Asocial is, as Asocial does. For humour value, consider Gurdjieff. Where would you put Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti on the 'woke' agenda, given they believed strongly in ... self-help?

EvilEy3 5y ago
> Wokists make jokes about Ayn Rand because she died poor, lonely and deprived, dependent on the state. The ultimate payback, no? Asocial is, as Asocial does. Wokists make jokes about Ayn Rand because it makes them feel better and they don't know or choose to ignore that this is false. She didn't die poor, lonely and deprived. She still made a lot of money by the time she died and the amount she collected from state was 2k or something like that.
- 5y ago

hedberg10 5y ago

People who fix themselves are a danger to the cathedral.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

The article is a book review. The book is reviewing Seven Habits. The article is reviewing - criticising, in the sense of expanding and commenting on, if you read the details - the book. So that section is a mix of opinion. It's unfortunate you missed this rather relevant fact, and chose instead to write a diatribe about how "woke" is very bad and people on HN only ever comment on articles without really reading them. Of course if you believe that public criticism of books like Seven Habits in obscure journals is somehow corrosively 'un-American' you're going to need to explain why you have that rather exotic view.

civilized 5y ago
I didn't miss anything. The gratuitous complaints about lack of racism and sexism discourse come from Lehmann, not McHugh. And Lehmann spends plenty of time holding forth about Seven Habits from his own point of view, saying that he doesn't even see the spark of good in it that McHugh does. Feel free to reread the relevant section of the article and my comment if you "missed" any of this. The rest of your comment is just sloppy, incorrect description and speculation about what I wrote and what you assume I think, so I won't bother responding to that. However, I did note that others were able to grasp that I didn't attack wokeness per se, only articles written from a mindless, robotically woke viewpoint. So you might ask yourself why you didn't grasp this and instead chose to immediately draw tribal lines by speculating about what I think is "un-American".

johnchristopher 5y ago

Your comment got me to read the article. But. 1. First, the style is atrocious. I am not a native speaker but the style is circumvoluted, jumping from details to details. I believe the main idea could have been summarized and exposed clearly in fewer paragraphs ("process of cultural homogenization for its own sake in/through historical American self-help literature" or something). 2. > Well, I will say one thing about the article. It summarily dismisses Stephen Covey's Seven Habits as nothing special, without engaging the content of the book in the slightest, and criticizes Covey for not talking about racism and sexism. If you want this article and its writer in a nutshell, there you go. Isn't that a stretch ? > Although Covey’s tract pays no more attention to the harms of racism and sexism than the other works McHugh examines, she finds its controlling agenda tempered by a soft-focus emphasis on “principles,” “proactivity,” and “interdependence.” Such qualities, she asserts, are in short supply in similar works of success literature, introducing a critical element of vulnerability into the usual morale-raising, virtue-forming proceedings: “In interdependence,” she writes, “there was a recognition of individual limitations, even fallibility, in a way that rarely happens in this type of literature.” It's less a critic of Covey for not talking about racism and sexism than a general observation than all those work of literature are ignoring racism and sexism issues. Most probably because there were fewer outlets to express these issues than there is today. > And Seven Habits is more worth your time than anything this author will ever say. You make a bit point out of what is said about Covey's book in the article but seven habits and its relevance for entrepreneurs/businessmen is not the author's subject and its dismissal is more anecdote than central to the point.