15 ms·

The 5% Rule

336 points by jppope 4y ago

tonetheman 4y ago
[dead]
rashidae 4y ago
So true. I take this as an aid towards my customer support approach. I guess it’s a good idea to include a slide on the onboarding process where we mention this and give some tips into how to deal with this in the most respectful, yet decisive way.
ajaimk 4y ago
Only 5%? That gives me hope for humanity.
- someweirdperson 4y ago
  Depends on how much those 5% procreate compared to others.
  - NateEag 4y ago
    Should be quite a lot, evolutionarily speaking. Being a horrible manipulative jerk seems like a great reproduction strategy to me. On average women will see through you and won't give you the time of day. Some will fall for your terrible abusive manipulation, though. They get impregnated and you move on. Your victims will on average have the usual mothering instincts and will do their best to help their kid make it. Eventually, that should result in you generating many offspring. I hope this strategy isn't conscious on anyone's part, but it sounds like one evolution would reward. I hope someone can show me a fatal flaw in my reasoning.
  - tck42 4y ago
    This assumes that it is a heritable trait. My anecdotal experience leads me to doubt that.
- eCa 4y ago
  > That gives me hope for humanity. As long as there are less than nineteen people in the pool...
- pixl97 4y ago
  I'm not exactly sure if that should or not. There have been any number of leaders that have been horrible people and yet the average normal people excuse their behaviors, and some even buy into their behaviors.
- euroderf 4y ago
  Do those 5% vote in each and every primary election ?
  - Kamq 4y ago
    No, they run in them.
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- deleted 4y ago
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flashgordon 4y ago
I wonder if you turn this around, could every body have a tendency to be nasty 5% of the time?
- ronyeh 4y ago
  I think it's possible. I feel like even the most normal people can have an off day when they just want to be assholes to people for whatever reason. (I've personally done this, and later regretted.) So maybe the sales folks or bartenders are seeing those people on their off days.
  - maxerickson 4y ago
    5% of the time though? That's gonna be several regrettable incidents a month.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Yeah. Been there, done that, trying to keep it well under 5%. But that's different. There are people who are nasty more like 50% of the time, or maybe even 95%. It's good to recognize that yes, that's me some of the time, but "quantity has a quality all its own", as Stalin (allegedly?) said. Too much of that attitude and/or behavior puts you in a different category. And even for people in that category, it's also important to realize that they have their 5% - or even 50% - where they aren't like that. That doesn't make you want to hang around them - even 50% jerk is too much for me to want to spend time with them - but still recognize that the other part is there, and appreciate it when you see it.
  - flashgordon 4y ago
    Ah I should have added wilfully nasty. The article I thought mentioned discarding "bad days". But then again are the malicious truly aware and holding themselves accountable for their maliciousness instead l just pointing to external circumstances.
- theamk 4y ago
  I don't think so? 5% is more than half hour of your awake time, every day. Or few hours of "nasty time" every week. If this was a general rule, it would be easily noticeable, and I haven't seen this in people I interact with.
ta988 4y ago
This roughly matches my estimate of evil drivers on the road, people cutting lines violently and not using turning lights, pushing to insert on the right when they used the emergency lane to pass everybody in a slowdown...
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I think it’s way less than that. We just got back from a ~1600 mile round-trip to visit family plus a week’s worth of incidental driving around town to buy groceries and visit other family nearby. On the highway segments, most cars were just trundling along between 2 and 20 mph over the limit, generally keeping reasonably to themselves. When an obstacle appeared on the roadside (stopped motorist, police, other), people flexed to let other cars get left and then returned to normal driving. Sure, I noticed a few people driving aggressively, following too closely, changing lanes excessively to squeak out one or two extra spots, but that was perhaps 50 cars at the very most in 1600 miles of driving. 1 or 2 per hour, not 1 per 20.
  - lullab 4y ago
    Maybe aggressive drivers don't drive aggressively all the time making you mistankenly assume they are good drivers?
    - fbdab103 4y ago
      The aggressive drivers I personally know are always aggressive.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      If they are not detectably different from good drivers, doesn’t that make them good drivers?
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      I think there's more variables to it than that. It's absolutely possible to create aggressive drivers out of thin air if you annoy everyone around you enough. I used to drive commercial equipment that simply couldn't keep up with normal traffic. Needless to say when you are a rolling obstruction you see a ton of "aggressive" drivers because "normal" drivers do aggressive stuff rather than get stuck behind you. I can't imagine how bad it would be if I were driving like that in a vehicle that didn't very visibly have an excuse to be acting that way.
falcolas 4y ago
It's perhaps worth noting that in excess of 5% of the populace have one form of mental disability or another. ADHD alone is estimated to be a disorder present in 5% of the adult population (2% are currently diagnosed; the 5% is based off childhood diagnosis rates and the fact it usually doesn't go away when becoming an adult). And while those with ADHD are unlikely to populate the OP's 5%, those with pathological narcissistic, sociopathic, schizophrenic (and other) disorders very well could.
- frellus 4y ago
  Spot on. It's a shame that we haven't prioritized (and de-stigmatized) mental health, especially at a young age, so horrible children don't grow up to be horrible ego-centric adults.
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    This probably also raises if you incorporate people who were traumatized as children. Someone having a trauma response can definitely look like horrible ego-centric behavior, when actually they're having an internal meltdown where they're emotionally re-experiencing their trauma with no coping mechanisms because we basically never teach adults to recognize when this is happening. A lot of hyper-toxic fiddly freakouts over small things actually turn out to be deeply rooted in some sort of horrible trauma.
    - frellus 4y ago
      Absolutely agreed, and I hate to sound like a Scientologist here, but I think a lot of people's struggles have roots in some trauma in their past. We're all shaped by bad things which happen to us, and for some people -- the ones especially with low Emotional Intelligence -- they can be re-balanced quite a bit in their thinking and patterns but ONLY if they're willing. That's like 80% the battle.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    Arguably these kind of personality disorders aren't really "mental health" issues. Or, certainly not in the same way that something like ADD, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, etc. are. It's basically a nice way of saying "your personality sucks so much that we've decided to label it".
frellus 4y ago
I've found that a lot of people in our industry (higher than 5%, probably much higher the smarter they are) have BPD or are on the spectrum which causes anger issues when things don't fit the pattern or outcome they're expecting. I'm not saying that to disparage these people, but I've learned to be careful in how I interact with certain people, especially as that top tier of brilliant engineer are the ones I want to learn from and respect, technically. They literally don't know they're being awful, but in realizing the deficits here -- even they do not -- it helps in not dismissing certain people or just throwing them into the 'crappy' bucket.
- fbdab103 4y ago
  The House personality - where technical brilliance so outshines their behavior that they can be awful to those around them. I will take an average but nice person over a genius asshole every time.
  - frellus 4y ago
    Agreed, on a personal level, a little less so on a professional level (within reason) in that I want smart co-workers. I don't need to invite them all over to dinner to meet the family. That being said, we try to hire for low ego, high humility and good communication skills plus technical. Very hard in Silicon Valley.
the-anarchist 4y ago
[flagged]
plugin-baby 4y ago
> As an example: one time a lady threw a huge fit about a 2-3 inch smooth brown hair being in her meal when her server was a blond girl and the entire kitchen staff were 35+ year-old Mexicans/ African Americans with completely shaved heads. Now I'm not saying this woman brought the hair into the restaurant and planted it in her meal... but I know for a fact it couldn't have been from any of our staff in the restaurant, so you can make your own decision. Check the author’s photo!
- ipaddr 4y ago
  It could easily be from another customer. Smoking guns are rare.
- hoppla 4y ago
  He said it was a blonde waiter and bald chefs, author probably had nothing to do with the food at all…
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  Whether it's from the kitchen staff or waiter is kind of irrelevant; throwing a "huge fit" is ridiculous regardless. Kitchen staff make mistakes all the time because it's hard work with a lot of pressure. You deal with it by saying "sorry to be a bother, but I'm afraid there's a mistake" and that should solve it. No fits needed. (Of course, we have just one side of the story and it could be that the staff was rude or dismissive after she politely pointed this out, so we'll never be able to judge this specific incident; but people exploding over minor things is something I've experienced as well when I worked in retail).
  - shultays 4y ago
    We don't really know what her tantrum really was. Was she apologized and compensated for her meal or OP told her "we don't have anyone with black straight hair" (and while he has such hair, heh) Maybe it was a hair stuck to someone's clothes and that fell of (or maybe it was OP's hair indeed if even he don't go near the food!). Or that blond person's hair looking darker after being soaked in meal. Or someone with curly hair had sime straight strands or they were less curly after falling off. I would assume any of those before assuming customer intentionally put that hair
shahbaby 4y ago
Always wished I had a name for this. There is a certain "type" of person that thrives on being mean spirited.
kilroy123 4y ago
This has been my experience as well. I, too, have met and talked to thousands of people from every possible background on seven different continents of this world. From the poorest people on Earth to some of the richest. I've seen the same thing. About 5% are nasty and about 1% are truly bad people who commit horrible crimes.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Makes me wonder if the distribution is independent of other personality and socioeconomic factors. Much earlier in life I helped recruit for a cult (much has changed since then). 3% - 5% seems on the high side for people who "just suck" -- perhaps by an order of magnitude. But perhaps the "just sucks" is context dependent. I found early on the FORD bulletpoints makes it pretty simple to start smalltalk (Family, Occupation, Recreation, Dreams/Desires).
- kshacker 4y ago
  Saying this from my personal experience [ workspace related not familial ] : What happens is that some of these bad people have charisma, can make you follow them, for their ulterior motives. So if you get trapped in that circle, because you tolerated for so long, you probably did not get to experience the 5% bad, but maybe 20% bad over your lifetime. So my lesson there is ... walk. You recognize a problem, you walk, rather than try to fix it. Of course you should give a chance, but that is it - just one chance and then none.
- type-r 4y ago
  1% of people commit horrible crimes? feels like an incredibly high percentage
  - jldugger 4y ago
    IDK about "horrible" but https://www.sentencingproject.org/research/ https://www.sentencingproject.org/research/ puts it at 1.5 million peak. Thats not quite 1 percent of the US population but its also not that far off. And we can quibble about US sentencing rules but the BoP has a count[1] of felony categories and drugs make up less than half, and its even less in state prisons. The reason the estimate feels high is likely that the HN crowd is progressively separated from less stable elements of society. The bullies picking on kids at recess don't generally make it onto the gifted / accelerated track, or your 4 year degree granting university. You're going to encounter fewer of them at upmarket shopping centers and corporate offices, if for no other reason, 1.5 million people are in prison. [1]: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
rgrieselhuber 4y ago
My phrase for this is “unreasonable hostility” and it really is sobering to behold every time. I do wonder if there is some correlation between this 5% and the percentage of sociopaths in society.
dataangel 4y ago
[flagged]
- jppope 4y ago
  (OP) I started the blog in ~2009. I'm a fan of OpenAI's work... but I don't use it for my blog.
- NegativeK 4y ago
  I've downvoted you for tossing out insulting feedback without any practical criticism. And for trying to prop up OP's 5% stat.
jpswade 4y ago
Surely it’s more time based too, the ebb and flow of people sucking at different times has to be a factor. Not even 5% suck 100% of the time. There’s no way that 95% of people don’t suck 100% of the time either. Are we saying that 5 in 100 people will suck. If so think that’s an underestimate.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Some people suck all of the time. Most people suck some of the time. But almost nobody sucks none of the time.
Ozzie_osman 4y ago
Many laws, company policies, etc exist to prevent those 5% from causing damage to the rest of the population. So 95% of people have to live with restrictions and bureaucracy that merely exists for those small group.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  "Live with" is a weird framing, isn't it? If we accept the claim for a moment, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the restrictions exist to give the 95% the best chance at a reasonable, unmolested life?
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Yes - at the price of restrictions that apply to all of us, not just to the 5%. The powers that be are trying to tune the restrictions to some kind of global maximum of organizational output. Rules hinder that - they slow you down. But the lack of rules increases the damage that the 5% can cause, which also slows you down. The hard part is, when something causes damage, it's easy to make a rule, but harder to see that the rule will cost more than the damage.
  - Nevermark 4y ago
    Yes, but the balance point of restricted/unmolested has to move further into restriction territory to account for intransigent vs. bad-day molesters A higher level optimality can be achieved wherever truly nasty people can be pre-screened out of situations
  - nine_k 4y ago
    What's weird about daily life? 100 - ɛ percent of the population have to lock their cars and homes so that the ɛ percent of people won't steal or vandalize their property. The ɛ may be small, but while ɛ > 0, they can deal disproportionate damage unless everyone implements restrictions.
- LastTrain 4y ago
  I'm not following. What are some specific sacrifices we have to make for the sake of the five percent?
Animats 4y ago
Maybe there's a market for a list of such people. Maybe Google or Facebook already has such a list for internal use. All that data mining ought to yield one.
- thewebcount 4y ago
  That sounds like a social credit, which sounds dystopian to me.
  - Animats 4y ago
    A privatized social credit system seems to be where the US is headed.
polotics 4y ago
This looks a lot like the stats on prevalence of Borderline Personality Disorder in the general population.
neilv 4y ago
I was actually thinking this morning about a rash of surprisingly bad Covid etiquette I'd seen recently, and one thing might fit this "5% rule"... A minority of the bizarre Covid bad-etiquette incidents I think can't be attributed to accident, grogginess, preoccupation, symptom fatigue, etc. Specifically, I've seen a few incidents in the last week or two, of people who really did seem to go out of their way to intentionally cough on/at someone. It's sad, but I guess I can believe it: some people will be nasty sometimes, and Covid time gives them a weapon (whether they have it, or the victim merely wonders whether they have it), and they can do it with impunity. (I saw something related, earlier in Covid, but it was usually presumed anti-maskers who seemed to do an intentional/faux cough as they passed someone wearing a mask, more like they intended it to be a joke. What I've seen recently seems to have nastier intent.) I have only a handful of anecdotes, but I wonder whether the idea of intentionally spreading Covid (or making people think you did) was introduced in pop-culture recently, and people more inclined to be nasty latched onto it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mbg721 4y ago
  If they really wanted to act nasty and annoy germophobes, they could just use the bathroom and conspicuously not wash their hands--no pandemic required. I would assume these are the same people who are amused by intentionally coughing at others, and the coughing probably does less damage, so the net result is an improvement.
  - euroderf 4y ago
    Clearly it's performative, and when no applause (from any similar assh#les in the immediate vicinity) is forthcoming, they take it as oppression, and the brainwashing of society in the large. Chip on shoulder, but scaled up by orders of magnitude via mass media assist.
thewebcount 4y ago
While I’m sure this is a real problem, I’ve been on the other side of this equation where you’ve tried your level best to get a problem resolved, and not only haven’t had it resolved, but have been repeatedly screwed even more. For example, many years ago, I signed up for a landline phone (when that’s all there was), and signed up for a particular special service that Ameritech was offering that would allow me to have a computer on a modem running 24/7 without getting unreasonable charges. Eventually, I get the first bill and it’s charging me the regular rate. I sigh and call them. They agree it’s their mistake and they’ll fix it to remove the charge and it will be reflected in the next bill. It isn’t. I go around in circles for 6 months, with my bill increasing to thousands of dollars. Finally I call them up and just start screaming at someone, and that is what finally got it fixed. I’m not proud to have done that, but sometimes it’s the only option. The person I was yelling at wasn’t the one who caused the problem or lied to me, but I didn’t know of any other options at the time. (I was raised by wolves, it turns out.) And, ultimately, it worked.
- motoxpro 4y ago
  I think the rule applies in both directions.
  - kshacker 4y ago
    Speaking in colloquial English, basically 5% of time, you have to say : Enough is enough, I have had it with these MF snakes on this MF plane :)
- tobinfekkes 4y ago
  You mentioned Ameritech, which reminded me of Amerispec: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xtgH74hh6pQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xtgH74hh6pQ
  - owenpalmer 4y ago
    Haha! Always a classic!
- galangalalgol 4y ago
el_nahual 4y ago
Implications for parenting: If your kids grade is ~100 people, five parents will be absolute pieces of shit. Figure out who these are and avoid at all costs.
- scrivna 4y ago
  Most kids have 2 parents, so possibly higher!
MBCook 4y ago
This is based on observations up to 2013. We’ve had two big societal changes since then that seemed to make things worse to me, the latest being Covid. I really wonder if that 5% would be noticeably higher today.
trmpacctmd 4y ago
I’ve seen people who are very nice and one context be very not nice in another. As an example, try being a medical doctor on HN. The toxic few are why I stopped posting about medical things here. I’m not saying those responders are generally mean people. I think they’re normal people who for whatever reason feel wronged and are part of my world’s 5%.
WallyFunk 4y ago
The old adage: 'The customer is always right' which means a business should always have the best interests of customers at heart and always assume good faith, has turned on its head. Now customers have weaponized that old adage and presume an air of ugly hubris and are mean spirited because hey, 'The customer is always right'. Eh no, sometimes the customer is an asshole.
- Bjartr 4y ago
  > which means a business should always have the best interests of customers at heart and always assume good faith I thought it meant, at least originally, that a customer's choice to shop, or not, at your store needs to be treated as your failure to attract the customer, not the customer's failure for making the "wrong" choice.
  - WallyFunk 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_not_a_moron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_not_a_moron
    - Bjartr 4y ago
      Looking further into it, there's more nuance to it. Of the several people who popularized the phrase in the early 1900s, one of them was Harry Gordon Selfridge. While he is lumped in with the others, the phrase he used was actually "The customer is always right, in matters of taste." With the idea being that a salesperson shouldn't judge the wants of the customer. If they want an ugly sweater, sell them an ugly sweater, don't try to convince them to get a good looking sweater. Others said slightly different things. Like Cesar Ritz who said "The customer is never wrong", where the idea is that the moment the customer complains, you take action to solve the problem the customer has stated, even if they are incorrect.
- stocknoob 4y ago
  I’ve always took it as “the customer is always right in matters of taste”. If customers keep asking for green shirts with red polka dots, you sell green shirts with red polka dots, even if you don’t like them.
woodruffw 4y ago
The other possible sampling (which doesn't contradict the author's lived experience!) is that there are is a tiny fraction of uniformly nasty individuals, and a substantially larger (maybe even majority) of individuals who are nasty at individual points in time.
jiggawatts 4y ago
Personality traits like this are on a Bell curve, so he's just talking about the "left hand corner" of that curve. The percentage just depends on your threshold for tolerance. I know people who are convinced that 50% of people are horrible people, their tolerance stops at "anything left of the median". My tolerance is the opposite, and I can work with even quite problematic people successfully, so I would estimate that just 1% of people make that unnecessarily difficult.
- metadat 4y ago
  Hey jiggawatts, I agree, and want to also add: If you're in software / tech (if this is an incorrect assumption on my part please say so and I apologize in advance; I've become used to seeing your posts and my sense is this might be your domain), on average you're working with people who are significantly more intelligent than the average adult human being. In my experience, the rate of nasty / miserable / mentally unstable / "want the world to burn" chaotic people amongst the general public in the United States is pretty close to 1 in 20 (5%). At my swe jobs it's been more like what you say~ 1% or less who are serious struggles to try and work with.
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    That's a valid point, there is significant selection bias in different workplaces, locations, and institutions. E.g.: I noticed variance comparable to yours going from a general public school in a poor neighbourhood to a university.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    I have a slightly contrary opinion. In my experience, the smarter someone is, the more entitled/bratty they tend to be (especially to service workers or people they look down on). On the other hand, “dumber” people (or just poorer people without a knowledge job tbh) tend to be more screwed over by society and may be more reactionary. Eg. A swe might talk down to a waiter and be demeaned while they work, but a poor person may resort to yelling at a bank representative on the phone because that mistaken $10 charge affects their ability to buy groceries, and it happens all the time.
osigurdson 4y ago
In my experience, it is more like a 0.5% rule.
killthebuddha 4y ago
In my experience people who express this kind of view (a slightly-sweeping, slightly-cynical take on the prevalence of shitty people) also tend to be epistemically overconfident of their grasp on social situations. For example, my opinion of the following quote is that it sounds contrived (Not contrived for the blog post, but contrived in the sense that the "brought the hair with her" hypothesis is itself contrived). > My experience serving/bartending in restaurants was the same... As an example: one time a lady threw a huge fit about a 2-3 inch smooth brown hair being in her meal when her server was a blond girl and the entire kitchen staff were 35+ year-old Mexicans/ African Americans with completely shaved heads. Now I'm not saying this woman brought the hair into the restaurant and planted it in her meal... but I know for a fact it couldn't have been from any of our staff in the restaurant, so you can make your own decision. My take is that there's less shitty people and more shitty Bayesians :)
- msrenee 4y ago
  So if I found a hair in my meal, I'd let my server know. It's gross, but it happens This woman found a hair in her meal and threw a fit. Whether she planted it or not (which is definitely a thing people do), she was not being reasonable in that situation.
  - killthebuddha 4y ago
    I agree she was being unreasonable. The article claims that 3%-5% of people are "terrible" and "just wanted to be mean, nasty, selfish brutes" and the quote I used was used by the author as evidence for that claim. The author takes a situation where someone was being unreasonable and then throws in a hypothesis based on tenuous reasoning.
    - msrenee 4y ago
      I mentioned it in a comment elsewhere in the discussion, but I've got one coworker who is just a terrible person, another that treats others terribly when he isn't getting his way, and used to have a third who would treat his reports like crap if they didn't worship the ground he walked on. I've got a couple family members who are just unabashedly nasty to everyone. There's a couple more who are just awful to service workers because they think they're lesser for the work they do. Those are just the people I have to directly deal with on a regular basis. The author apparently logged the number of people who were jerks over the course of a given time and and that's how they came up with the numbers they used. Whether those people are awful all of the time, who knows. I know there's a number of people in my life who are just terrible people all of the time. Of course, they think they're the nicest people in the world and are the victims in every situation. The lesson in the article is to be decent to everyone and if someone's nasty in return, ignore it and focus on the people you can help. The numbers aren't necessarily the point, but from my experience, it's a reasonable estimate.
synergy20 4y ago
it's probably 20:80 rule at play though. per 20 80 rule, 20% people are just 'not decent' no matter what, it has nothing to do with you, it's just statistics. now for this small group again, 20% of them are really standing out, I mean really nasty, that makes it 4% of all people, right in the middle of the author claims: 3~5%. it makes math-sense to me. on the other hand, I would assume 4% people are genuinely kind and warm-hearted no matter what. the rest 60%(excluding 20% at both ends), or 92% people(excluding the two 4% at each end) are just regular folks, a mix of selfish and generous day in and day out.
KerryJones 4y ago
I wish I had more data on it, but I've seen many different sources saying the same thing, but the number has more closely approximated 2.5% here, and so I'm wondering if there is discrepancy, or this is within the range of statistical accuracy of one or both.
- jppope 4y ago
  (OP) its hard to have an exact percentage because it's (crude) observation - I could totally go with 2.5%. The number is in the low single digits for sure, but definitely higher than a rounding error (or a null-hypothesis). Whatever the number is, it's high enough to impact the people that have to interact with lots of other people - they feel it, which is really what I was getting at.
dcanelhas 4y ago
Sounds like an independent study on the prevalence of psychopathy in the general adult population (4.5%) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661044/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.6610...
darig 4y ago
[dead]
AndrewDucker 4y ago
Related: 2% of people respond to oxytocin differently and are just "bastards" no matter what. https://www.hugthemonkey.com/2007/03/paul_zak_oxytoc.html https://www.hugthemonkey.com/2007/03/paul_zak_oxytoc.html
- metadat 4y ago
  A very interesting hypothesis! I chose to submit this, hope you don't mind too much :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34201142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34201142
  - AndrewDucker 4y ago
    Delighted to have it discussed more!
- chasebank 4y ago
  I've taken MDMA on 4 separate occasions, in the crystal form each time, at a dose of 200mg. Each time, I've watched my friends' eyes pop out of their skulls, sweat like crazy and hug everything in sight. I felt slightly better. Drugs most definitely affect people differently. Edit: I can't read. Ha. I read oxycodone.
  - SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
    It's all neurotransmitters in the end anyway :)
aeturnum 4y ago
I think this is true, but the way I would put it is: While you have influence over 95% of what happens to you, you can only really survive the other 5%. Take solace in the fact that, sometimes, when it seems like there's nothing you can do - you are right! That said, often the path to self-improvement is in situations we've misunderstood as "we can't effect" and are actually caused by us.
- jppope 4y ago
  well said. great observation. thank you for the comment
- LanceH 4y ago
  My dad phrased it this way, talking about running into this kind of person in the military, "Sometimes you run across an asshole, and there's nothing you can do about it until you or he moves along."
gizmo 4y ago
In 20 years of dealing with customers I've had to deal with maybe 3 people who were real jerks. Maybe my experience is unusual, but my customers come from all over the world. Rich countries, poor countries, non-profits, startups to fortune 500. Practically everybody is friendly and respectful. Occasionally people are irritable or upset, but I don't take it at all personally. I just assume they're having a bad day or that they're angry for valid reasons I just don't know. When people figure out you actually want to help them the anger dissipates immediately. Verizon treats their customers with contempt as a business practice, and when you call their support the phone operators are not authorized to actually resolve your issue anyway. So yeah, that makes people angry. They would leave if they could, but where would they go? AT&T? It's a racket.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > Verizon treats their customers with contempt as a business practice I agree, but with actual support technicians at Verizon I've actually had pretty decent, even above average interactions. The company itself does things I detest, but I try not to take it out on the people answering the phone.
semireg 4y ago
I handle 100% of my indie app's email and telephone (yes, telephone!) support. My app is designing/printing labels. Printers in general, and label printers specifically are awful and inconsiderate robots, unable to perform the simplest printing job when you need it most. Sure, 2-5% of my users are nasty/mean, but let me tell you a little secret: They are immensely frustrated with their life situation and they know how simple the solution should be. If you can show them the light, if you can "flip" these users, they will become your most loyal customers. I start by telling them, "Hey, every month I get a call like yours where you are so frustrated you want to scream, and let me tell you a secret, if I got a call every day like this... I'd quit this business, but calls like yours are rare and I want to help you through this." Boom. They're listening, and they're often listening to advice they don't want to hear. What kind of advice? Oh... like, "you will have to work through this and tweak the measurements until it works, because some printer drivers are mysterious and terrible. But once you get it, you'll be rewarded with it working for a long time until you have to buy a new printer." Still, 50/1000 seems high to me, I like to think I earn the trust of 90% of my nasty/mean customers. Sometimes I'm lucky and I just paste a URL to a FAQ. After 4 years in business I had my first person hang up on me because they kept demanding a simple answer and I would say, "sorry, it's more complicated than that, I don't have a simple answer... I just have two complex answers that contradict each other until you can choose which one is the lesser of two evils." It could be a book that no one would read: Zen and the Art of Label Printing A quick video of my app Label LIVE, narrated by yours truly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnqUP1CZd24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnqUP1CZd24
- roflyear 4y ago
  I did tech support for a few years and probably answered 100k calls or so. I would estimate that less than 1% of people were unreasonable. 2-3% were mean people. 80% were kind. It's a hard job and you have to focus on the good.
  - anodari 4y ago
    Yes, tech support can be difficult and it seems like your statistics are similar to ours. We receive around 5,000 support tickets per day and we simply cannot satisfy everyone. Sometimes we have to "fire" a customer who becomes disrespectful towards one of our attendants.
andreyk 4y ago
"between the years of 2009 and 2013, I talked to something like 13,000 to 15,000 people while I was doing retail and SMB sales for Verizon. I learned a lot from that period, but one of the things I learned that I did not expect was what I now call my "5% rule." No matter how kind, warm, thoughtful, amazing, cheerful, consistent, and perfect I treated people roughly 5% of them would just be terrible (yes, I have the numbers to back this) ... this number has held up in other parts of my life too (dating, restaurant customers, etc). ... the take here - 3% to 5% of people for whatever reason just plain suck." Sounds easy enough to believe. Of course, social conventions and so on influence such things, these people are not always terrible - I am not sure I buy the latter part of the thesis. I certainly haven't had this experience dating or in grad school. But, there is a reason "karen" is now a commonly used noun.
mustafabisic1 4y ago
I feel like this guy is my therapist and just told me a fantastic insight that's perfect for me at that moment. As I was reading it, I came to the same conclusion as the writer - You really have permission to free your mind of those people and just focus on taking care of the people who don't suck. Just expect it and move about your day. That's freeing for me.
einpoklum 4y ago
5% of encounters != 5% of people. In fact, even if the poster tried marketing to the same people at different times, he might well have gotten a different 5%. Some correlation, for sure, but still. Not to mention how encounters are a binary thing - another person might get a different 5%. Also, the samples he's talking about are not really uniformly distributed over the world's population (i.e. "people"), nor even people in the USA.
lp4vn 4y ago
Even though I agree that there is probably a fixed porcentage of bastards in the world's population, I think 5% is a too high number. That's one in twenty and I don't think I will find one in twenty people who are the classical bastard in the groups of people I interact with. I think it's more like 2-3% in my very subjective experience, of course. I also think that the setting matters a lot. If you are in a very competitive environment, like the author in the article, maybe the circumstances push the number to 5%, but if you are in a relaxed, friendly setting, I think the percentage might lower to 1-2%.
gist 4y ago
My experience confirms the general concept here (the number at 5% is arbitrary I'd place it higher than that). The point is (and I have found this to be true) if you deal with enough people you will hit on people who have let's say issues and do not think clearly or even close to rationally and there is simply no pleasing them. So for business the idea that you need all of your customers to be happy is simply not going to work. That is what I have found in actual practice over many many years. Separate point when you are starting out in some business the easiest and first customers you get are the ones that nobody else wants or gives bad service to because they are irrational and unreasonable. (Keep that point in mind..) There is an example with Zappos of someone being able to spend an entire day pleasing one customer. That is entirely unreasonable and except for the story and publicity value of that event makes no sense at all since anyone who wants to spend that much of your time is not going to be a customer that you (probably) want long term. At a certain point you simply have to (in business or life) walk away. https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2016/07/118020/zappos-customer-service-call https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2016/07/118020/zappos-custo...
dejj 4y ago
10-80-10 are the numbers I assume: 10% are terrible, 80% regular, and 10% excellent. I have no empirical data to back it up. Does anyone have?
z3t4 4y ago
Normal distribution (probability theory) 5% of anything will be outliers.
Zanni 4y ago
Related, from Scott Alexander: Lizardman's Constant is 4%: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
magic_hamster 4y ago
The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time. When you work sales, some people will enter your store on the day they got dumped, their family member died, they got kicked out of school. You never know why people are acting out. Chances are it's nothing about you. Other cases, it might not be the person's first time in the store. If they tried several times to fix a problem they are frustrated and and angry. I've had this happen to me multiple times and no matter how patient and nice the representative is, it doesn't change the fact I've wasted way too much time on this problem and you can't make me happy. Even if you solve my problem, it will not make up the lost time and energy. The only thing I'd recommend is to try and be more empathetic. You never know what the person has been through. If you think they suck and you see them at their worst, they could probably use some empathy.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  > The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time. The post mentions doctors and seems to indicate that they would put a higher percentage of humans in the ‘terrible’ category. Add stress and people act poorly. There also seems to be a thing where people can’t always articulate what they are feeling (eg a specific phobia they have) and act out in response to the stress. Once the stress has gone they are different people. Don’t get me wrong, I also think that more than 5% of people are terrible. I work in healthcare as a radiographer.
- _carbyau_ 4y ago
  A few thoughts on your "bad day" idea though. It depends on how you handle a bad day. If you are self aware and explain "I am having a bad day before I got here." any rep with a modicum of empathy will appreciate your grace/effort to not lose your shit, often being extra nice about it. But that relies on customer 5% not meeting a rep in that 5% too.
- flutas 4y ago
  > The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time. When you work sales, some people will enter your store on the day they got dumped, their family member died, they got kicked out of school. You never know why people are acting out. Chances are it's nothing about you. As much as I hate to post training material from ChickFilA…one of the videos they required us to watch explained this all so well and really made me stop to think about what others might be dealing with when I’m interacting with them. It’s a bit heavy on the emotional angle, but does it’s job well imo. It’s been a long time since I’ve worked there, so no clue if it’s still required or not but, here it is in its ~3 minute length. https://youtu.be/2v0RhvZ3lvY https://youtu.be/2v0RhvZ3lvY
adapteva 4y ago
From personal experience it's at least 1%. I had a Kickstarter project 10 years ago that had approx 6,000 supporters and 50 were simply awful human beings. Everyone else was ok. Anonymity brings out the worst in some people.
jamesliudotcc 4y ago
I used to work in food service. I didn't keep track, but I don't think it was 3-5%. More like a tenth that. Maybe it's just coffee, and so even a great majority of the really terrible people could manage to pay and leave without exposing their terribleness.
ransom1538 4y ago
Growing up my friend's dad was a prison guard. He mentioned once that 95% of the people in jail shouldn't be there. They did something stupid, or did a bunch of dumb things, but were not evil. He wouldn't talk about the remaining 5%.
lowbloodsugar 4y ago
Comeuppence
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Your uppance will come!
  - lowbloodsugar 4y ago
    If it happens twice is it tuppence?
beautifulfreak 4y ago
Personality disorders are very real and surprisingly prevalent, with 3.6% of Americans meeting the diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder and 4.4% for paranoid personality disorder (the two disorders that are most likely to make people difficult and unpleasant to deal with). https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/pn.39.17.0390012 https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/pn.3...
- CharlesW 4y ago
  I wonder if people with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) might be high on the "likely to make people difficult and unpleasant" list as well. A quick search suggests that ~5% of the population has NPD, which surprised me.
barbariangrunge 4y ago
My experience from retail: I often went months without a single nasty customer. I don’t know if I’m good with people or not but it was pretty rare to have an issue. Most of the bad customers were blatant shoplifters too, and not nasty at all (even these were uncommon)
nemo44x 4y ago
Is it the same 5% for everyone or is everyone part of a 5% for some small group of people?
dannyeei 4y ago
When I was younger I worked at a local supermarket and later at a sports store - turns out customers at the sports store were almost exclusively nice. Not a huge sample size as I only worked at the one store but from talking to others seems like the number of degenerates is waaaay lower when people play sports
- cookie_monsta 4y ago
  Could it be that grocery shopping and buying things related to your hobby elicit different emotions?
  - dannyeei 4y ago
    It’s possible but I’ve talked to friends who work at gyms and various other sport related areas and they all agree. Sample size is very small still.
quags 4y ago
I deal with technical issues for users and have for over 20 years all around the world. In my experience 5% is too high. There are certainly problem customer, some from frustration for things not working, some more a language barriers and then the jack asses - I’d say that 80% of the work is on 10% of customers which skews the results further. I can only think of a handful, less than 10 customers I wanted to fire and only one who was such an asshole I did in those 20 years. If you are able to solve the problem of the user they normally turn around.
smir 4y ago
Another take, one to be sure s/he is not one of the 5%
Havoc 4y ago
Also seems to apply to % that is completely inconsiderate of others
sgustard 4y ago
The corollary: if 95% of the people you meet suck, you're one of the toxic 5%.
cfors 4y ago
I trust you have the numbers for this. And we can debate them until the world ends, but I think having a mental fallback that “yeah, some people suck” is valuable for your mental well being. Life’s too short to let the few negative people out there bring you down. 1% or 5% whatever lets you realize that and move on
absentmoon 4y ago
I'm inclined to agree with the premise of this article but I'm skeptical of the numbers.
graderjs 4y ago
Encountered the same in dating: 20% of women are flakes, 10% are bad people, 5% really bad. 80% are good. 15-20% of women are flakes (non-maliciously unreliable, can't keep commitments), 5-10% (half of those) are actually maliciously bad people--bad/psychotic/abusive/crazy, 1-5% (half again) really bad (like psychopath/sociopath/criminally deranged bad). 80% are good. Stick with the good! Says nothing of actual compatibility in a pair just basic good or not. That 20% of flakey (including the 10% of bad and 5% really bad) has nothing to do with you, it's not your fault nor your responsibility that they are like that, and their feelings and behavior are not your responsibility no matter how they might try to blame you for that; and there's nothing you can do to "change" them or "help" them or "better" them. And you probably can't "handle" them. If you get involved they're only going to try to hurt you (or in the case of flakes let you down) again and again. So learn the signs that work for you and filter out the rest as quickly as possible. You don't have to be mean, but you have to be clear and set boundaries. There's no pride or sense or nobility in "handling" or "tolerating" a crazy or bad person. They're just dangerous and unpleasant.
tapanjk 4y ago
> ... and let that moment go - it has NOTHING to do with you. This applies not only to bad behavior of others, but sometimes even to your own bad behavior. We are 'moist robots' as one cartoonist puts it, and the sane thing is to not beat yourself up for something stupid you did or say, but evaluate the whole stituation later when you are in a better state of mind, learn from your mistake, make amends, and move on.
tanbog6 4y ago
Is this person describing objectively horrible people, of just people who are incompatible with him? I reckon about 5% of folks rub me completely the wrong way and I likely do the same for a similar number. I don't know that I agree that makes them inherently bad/the worst.
mnemotronic 4y ago
My brother and his wife are like that. They hate everyone because everyone is always trying to cheat them and take advantage of them. Total victimhood mind-set. Obviously he's a Trump supporter.
memming 4y ago
Game theoretic analysis might reveal this as a typical equilibrium.
Joel_Mckay 4y ago
The general population contains sociopaths at a rate of 3% of males, and 1% of females. Additionally, roughly 70% of these people grew up in single parent homes without a father, and roughly 30% were from unwed mothers. While these facts may reflect on a civilization's cultural values, it does not cover the roughly 1% of the general population that are born psychopaths. Psychopaths are generally not treatable, and a subset of these individuals should be considered dangerous. Part of designing a Marketing/Sales campaign, is accounting for these folks too. One needs to realize some individuals are hostile if they feel you owe them something, and can attempt to do something nasty. Have a wonderful New Year, and remember some jobs are just not worth the drama... there are hundreds of less traumatic jobs around that also pay well. =)
IYasha 4y ago
Yeah, maybe it's just that "Thay Live" is a documentary.
lebaux 4y ago
i likked this rule as one as the 80/20 and tested it with all the other possible tests
importantbrian 4y ago
The problem with generalizations like this is I think it can cause you to miss real issues in your business. For example, I'm always incredibly nice to customer service folks. It's always served me pretty well, but one time I got so fed up with Comcast that I rage quit and switched to Direct TV. It's the only time in my life I've ever done anything like that. At the point where I got mad and started to quit they finally started offering to actually fix my problem. But by that point I was too fed up for them to save my business. If you just go into an interaction like that assuming I'm one of the 5% of consistently awful people you would miss that there is actually a huge problem with one of your business processes that you need to fix, because it's so bad it's driven an otherwise reasonable person mad.
nsainaney 4y ago
Corollary...if you're experiencing >5% nastiness, you're in the wrong room or its you, not them
hadcoffee 4y ago
Just wondering what has happened to this blog writer, no context none specific post… I mean how can you state a statistics without defining scope and scenarios. By writing this article, he might have been mean to those who has challenge in life that he didn’t even aware of or appreciate. Does this count him/her as those 5% as well? Surely this can’t be a black and white discussion.

336 points by jppope 4y ago

[dead]

So true. I take this as an aid towards my customer support approach. I guess it’s a good idea to include a slide on the onboarding process where we mention this and give some tips into how to deal with this in the most respectful, yet decisive way.

ajaimk 4y ago

Only 5%? That gives me hope for humanity.

someweirdperson 4y ago
Depends on how much those 5% procreate compared to others.
- NateEag 4y ago
  Should be quite a lot, evolutionarily speaking. Being a horrible manipulative jerk seems like a great reproduction strategy to me. On average women will see through you and won't give you the time of day. Some will fall for your terrible abusive manipulation, though. They get impregnated and you move on. Your victims will on average have the usual mothering instincts and will do their best to help their kid make it. Eventually, that should result in you generating many offspring. I hope this strategy isn't conscious on anyone's part, but it sounds like one evolution would reward. I hope someone can show me a fatal flaw in my reasoning.
- tck42 4y ago
  This assumes that it is a heritable trait. My anecdotal experience leads me to doubt that.
eCa 4y ago
> That gives me hope for humanity. As long as there are less than nineteen people in the pool...
pixl97 4y ago
I'm not exactly sure if that should or not. There have been any number of leaders that have been horrible people and yet the average normal people excuse their behaviors, and some even buy into their behaviors.
euroderf 4y ago
Do those 5% vote in each and every primary election ?
- Kamq 4y ago
  No, they run in them.

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flashgordon 4y ago

I wonder if you turn this around, could every body have a tendency to be nasty 5% of the time?

ronyeh 4y ago
I think it's possible. I feel like even the most normal people can have an off day when they just want to be assholes to people for whatever reason. (I've personally done this, and later regretted.) So maybe the sales folks or bartenders are seeing those people on their off days.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  5% of the time though? That's gonna be several regrettable incidents a month.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Yeah. Been there, done that, trying to keep it well under 5%. But that's different. There are people who are nasty more like 50% of the time, or maybe even 95%. It's good to recognize that yes, that's me some of the time, but "quantity has a quality all its own", as Stalin (allegedly?) said. Too much of that attitude and/or behavior puts you in a different category. And even for people in that category, it's also important to realize that they have their 5% - or even 50% - where they aren't like that. That doesn't make you want to hang around them - even 50% jerk is too much for me to want to spend time with them - but still recognize that the other part is there, and appreciate it when you see it.
- flashgordon 4y ago
  Ah I should have added wilfully nasty. The article I thought mentioned discarding "bad days". But then again are the malicious truly aware and holding themselves accountable for their maliciousness instead l just pointing to external circumstances.
theamk 4y ago
I don't think so? 5% is more than half hour of your awake time, every day. Or few hours of "nasty time" every week. If this was a general rule, it would be easily noticeable, and I haven't seen this in people I interact with.

ta988 4y ago

This roughly matches my estimate of evil drivers on the road, people cutting lines violently and not using turning lights, pushing to insert on the right when they used the emergency lane to pass everybody in a slowdown...

sokoloff 4y ago
I think it’s way less than that. We just got back from a ~1600 mile round-trip to visit family plus a week’s worth of incidental driving around town to buy groceries and visit other family nearby. On the highway segments, most cars were just trundling along between 2 and 20 mph over the limit, generally keeping reasonably to themselves. When an obstacle appeared on the roadside (stopped motorist, police, other), people flexed to let other cars get left and then returned to normal driving. Sure, I noticed a few people driving aggressively, following too closely, changing lanes excessively to squeak out one or two extra spots, but that was perhaps 50 cars at the very most in 1600 miles of driving. 1 or 2 per hour, not 1 per 20.
- lullab 4y ago
  Maybe aggressive drivers don't drive aggressively all the time making you mistankenly assume they are good drivers?
  - fbdab103 4y ago
    The aggressive drivers I personally know are always aggressive.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    If they are not detectably different from good drivers, doesn’t that make them good drivers?
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    I think there's more variables to it than that. It's absolutely possible to create aggressive drivers out of thin air if you annoy everyone around you enough. I used to drive commercial equipment that simply couldn't keep up with normal traffic. Needless to say when you are a rolling obstruction you see a ton of "aggressive" drivers because "normal" drivers do aggressive stuff rather than get stuck behind you. I can't imagine how bad it would be if I were driving like that in a vehicle that didn't very visibly have an excuse to be acting that way.

falcolas 4y ago

It's perhaps worth noting that in excess of 5% of the populace have one form of mental disability or another. ADHD alone is estimated to be a disorder present in 5% of the adult population (2% are currently diagnosed; the 5% is based off childhood diagnosis rates and the fact it usually doesn't go away when becoming an adult). And while those with ADHD are unlikely to populate the OP's 5%, those with pathological narcissistic, sociopathic, schizophrenic (and other) disorders very well could.

frellus 4y ago
Spot on. It's a shame that we haven't prioritized (and de-stigmatized) mental health, especially at a young age, so horrible children don't grow up to be horrible ego-centric adults.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  This probably also raises if you incorporate people who were traumatized as children. Someone having a trauma response can definitely look like horrible ego-centric behavior, when actually they're having an internal meltdown where they're emotionally re-experiencing their trauma with no coping mechanisms because we basically never teach adults to recognize when this is happening. A lot of hyper-toxic fiddly freakouts over small things actually turn out to be deeply rooted in some sort of horrible trauma.
  - frellus 4y ago
    Absolutely agreed, and I hate to sound like a Scientologist here, but I think a lot of people's struggles have roots in some trauma in their past. We're all shaped by bad things which happen to us, and for some people -- the ones especially with low Emotional Intelligence -- they can be re-balanced quite a bit in their thinking and patterns but ONLY if they're willing. That's like 80% the battle.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  Arguably these kind of personality disorders aren't really "mental health" issues. Or, certainly not in the same way that something like ADD, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, etc. are. It's basically a nice way of saying "your personality sucks so much that we've decided to label it".

frellus 4y ago

I've found that a lot of people in our industry (higher than 5%, probably much higher the smarter they are) have BPD or are on the spectrum which causes anger issues when things don't fit the pattern or outcome they're expecting. I'm not saying that to disparage these people, but I've learned to be careful in how I interact with certain people, especially as that top tier of brilliant engineer are the ones I want to learn from and respect, technically. They literally don't know they're being awful, but in realizing the deficits here -- even they do not -- it helps in not dismissing certain people or just throwing them into the 'crappy' bucket.

fbdab103 4y ago
The House personality - where technical brilliance so outshines their behavior that they can be awful to those around them. I will take an average but nice person over a genius asshole every time.
- frellus 4y ago
  Agreed, on a personal level, a little less so on a professional level (within reason) in that I want smart co-workers. I don't need to invite them all over to dinner to meet the family. That being said, we try to hire for low ego, high humility and good communication skills plus technical. Very hard in Silicon Valley.

the-anarchist 4y ago

[flagged]

plugin-baby 4y ago

> As an example: one time a lady threw a huge fit about a 2-3 inch smooth brown hair being in her meal when her server was a blond girl and the entire kitchen staff were 35+ year-old Mexicans/ African Americans with completely shaved heads. Now I'm not saying this woman brought the hair into the restaurant and planted it in her meal... but I know for a fact it couldn't have been from any of our staff in the restaurant, so you can make your own decision. Check the author’s photo!

ipaddr 4y ago
It could easily be from another customer. Smoking guns are rare.
hoppla 4y ago
He said it was a blonde waiter and bald chefs, author probably had nothing to do with the food at all…
Beltalowda 4y ago
Whether it's from the kitchen staff or waiter is kind of irrelevant; throwing a "huge fit" is ridiculous regardless. Kitchen staff make mistakes all the time because it's hard work with a lot of pressure. You deal with it by saying "sorry to be a bother, but I'm afraid there's a mistake" and that should solve it. No fits needed. (Of course, we have just one side of the story and it could be that the staff was rude or dismissive after she politely pointed this out, so we'll never be able to judge this specific incident; but people exploding over minor things is something I've experienced as well when I worked in retail).
- shultays 4y ago
  We don't really know what her tantrum really was. Was she apologized and compensated for her meal or OP told her "we don't have anyone with black straight hair" (and while he has such hair, heh) Maybe it was a hair stuck to someone's clothes and that fell of (or maybe it was OP's hair indeed if even he don't go near the food!). Or that blond person's hair looking darker after being soaked in meal. Or someone with curly hair had sime straight strands or they were less curly after falling off. I would assume any of those before assuming customer intentionally put that hair

shahbaby 4y ago

Always wished I had a name for this. There is a certain "type" of person that thrives on being mean spirited.

kilroy123 4y ago

This has been my experience as well. I, too, have met and talked to thousands of people from every possible background on seven different continents of this world. From the poorest people on Earth to some of the richest. I've seen the same thing. About 5% are nasty and about 1% are truly bad people who commit horrible crimes.

tomrod 4y ago
Makes me wonder if the distribution is independent of other personality and socioeconomic factors. Much earlier in life I helped recruit for a cult (much has changed since then). 3% - 5% seems on the high side for people who "just suck" -- perhaps by an order of magnitude. But perhaps the "just sucks" is context dependent. I found early on the FORD bulletpoints makes it pretty simple to start smalltalk (Family, Occupation, Recreation, Dreams/Desires).
kshacker 4y ago
Saying this from my personal experience [ workspace related not familial ] : What happens is that some of these bad people have charisma, can make you follow them, for their ulterior motives. So if you get trapped in that circle, because you tolerated for so long, you probably did not get to experience the 5% bad, but maybe 20% bad over your lifetime. So my lesson there is ... walk. You recognize a problem, you walk, rather than try to fix it. Of course you should give a chance, but that is it - just one chance and then none.
type-r 4y ago
1% of people commit horrible crimes? feels like an incredibly high percentage
- jldugger 4y ago
  IDK about "horrible" but https://www.sentencingproject.org/research/ https://www.sentencingproject.org/research/ puts it at 1.5 million peak. Thats not quite 1 percent of the US population but its also not that far off. And we can quibble about US sentencing rules but the BoP has a count[1] of felony categories and drugs make up less than half, and its even less in state prisons. The reason the estimate feels high is likely that the HN crowd is progressively separated from less stable elements of society. The bullies picking on kids at recess don't generally make it onto the gifted / accelerated track, or your 4 year degree granting university. You're going to encounter fewer of them at upmarket shopping centers and corporate offices, if for no other reason, 1.5 million people are in prison. [1]: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...

rgrieselhuber 4y ago

My phrase for this is “unreasonable hostility” and it really is sobering to behold every time. I do wonder if there is some correlation between this 5% and the percentage of sociopaths in society.

dataangel 4y ago

[flagged]

jppope 4y ago
(OP) I started the blog in ~2009. I'm a fan of OpenAI's work... but I don't use it for my blog.
NegativeK 4y ago
I've downvoted you for tossing out insulting feedback without any practical criticism. And for trying to prop up OP's 5% stat.

jpswade 4y ago

Surely it’s more time based too, the ebb and flow of people sucking at different times has to be a factor. Not even 5% suck 100% of the time. There’s no way that 95% of people don’t suck 100% of the time either. Are we saying that 5 in 100 people will suck. If so think that’s an underestimate.

pixl97 4y ago
Some people suck all of the time. Most people suck some of the time. But almost nobody sucks none of the time.

Ozzie_osman 4y ago

Many laws, company policies, etc exist to prevent those 5% from causing damage to the rest of the population. So 95% of people have to live with restrictions and bureaucracy that merely exists for those small group.

woodruffw 4y ago
"Live with" is a weird framing, isn't it? If we accept the claim for a moment, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the restrictions exist to give the 95% the best chance at a reasonable, unmolested life?
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Yes - at the price of restrictions that apply to all of us, not just to the 5%. The powers that be are trying to tune the restrictions to some kind of global maximum of organizational output. Rules hinder that - they slow you down. But the lack of rules increases the damage that the 5% can cause, which also slows you down. The hard part is, when something causes damage, it's easy to make a rule, but harder to see that the rule will cost more than the damage.
- Nevermark 4y ago
  Yes, but the balance point of restricted/unmolested has to move further into restriction territory to account for intransigent vs. bad-day molesters A higher level optimality can be achieved wherever truly nasty people can be pre-screened out of situations
- nine_k 4y ago
  What's weird about daily life? 100 - ɛ percent of the population have to lock their cars and homes so that the ɛ percent of people won't steal or vandalize their property. The ɛ may be small, but while ɛ > 0, they can deal disproportionate damage unless everyone implements restrictions.
LastTrain 4y ago
I'm not following. What are some specific sacrifices we have to make for the sake of the five percent?

Animats 4y ago

Maybe there's a market for a list of such people. Maybe Google or Facebook already has such a list for internal use. All that data mining ought to yield one.

thewebcount 4y ago
That sounds like a social credit, which sounds dystopian to me.
- Animats 4y ago
  A privatized social credit system seems to be where the US is headed.

polotics 4y ago

This looks a lot like the stats on prevalence of Borderline Personality Disorder in the general population.

neilv 4y ago

I was actually thinking this morning about a rash of surprisingly bad Covid etiquette I'd seen recently, and one thing might fit this "5% rule"... A minority of the bizarre Covid bad-etiquette incidents I think can't be attributed to accident, grogginess, preoccupation, symptom fatigue, etc. Specifically, I've seen a few incidents in the last week or two, of people who really did seem to go out of their way to intentionally cough on/at someone. It's sad, but I guess I can believe it: some people will be nasty sometimes, and Covid time gives them a weapon (whether they have it, or the victim merely wonders whether they have it), and they can do it with impunity. (I saw something related, earlier in Covid, but it was usually presumed anti-maskers who seemed to do an intentional/faux cough as they passed someone wearing a mask, more like they intended it to be a joke. What I've seen recently seems to have nastier intent.) I have only a handful of anecdotes, but I wonder whether the idea of intentionally spreading Covid (or making people think you did) was introduced in pop-culture recently, and people more inclined to be nasty latched onto it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mbg721 4y ago
If they really wanted to act nasty and annoy germophobes, they could just use the bathroom and conspicuously not wash their hands--no pandemic required. I would assume these are the same people who are amused by intentionally coughing at others, and the coughing probably does less damage, so the net result is an improvement.
- euroderf 4y ago
  Clearly it's performative, and when no applause (from any similar assh#les in the immediate vicinity) is forthcoming, they take it as oppression, and the brainwashing of society in the large. Chip on shoulder, but scaled up by orders of magnitude via mass media assist.

thewebcount 4y ago

While I’m sure this is a real problem, I’ve been on the other side of this equation where you’ve tried your level best to get a problem resolved, and not only haven’t had it resolved, but have been repeatedly screwed even more. For example, many years ago, I signed up for a landline phone (when that’s all there was), and signed up for a particular special service that Ameritech was offering that would allow me to have a computer on a modem running 24/7 without getting unreasonable charges. Eventually, I get the first bill and it’s charging me the regular rate. I sigh and call them. They agree it’s their mistake and they’ll fix it to remove the charge and it will be reflected in the next bill. It isn’t. I go around in circles for 6 months, with my bill increasing to thousands of dollars. Finally I call them up and just start screaming at someone, and that is what finally got it fixed. I’m not proud to have done that, but sometimes it’s the only option. The person I was yelling at wasn’t the one who caused the problem or lied to me, but I didn’t know of any other options at the time. (I was raised by wolves, it turns out.) And, ultimately, it worked.

motoxpro 4y ago
I think the rule applies in both directions.
- kshacker 4y ago
  Speaking in colloquial English, basically 5% of time, you have to say : Enough is enough, I have had it with these MF snakes on this MF plane :)
tobinfekkes 4y ago
You mentioned Ameritech, which reminded me of Amerispec: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xtgH74hh6pQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xtgH74hh6pQ
- owenpalmer 4y ago
  Haha! Always a classic!
galangalalgol 4y ago

el_nahual 4y ago

Implications for parenting: If your kids grade is ~100 people, five parents will be absolute pieces of shit. Figure out who these are and avoid at all costs.

scrivna 4y ago
Most kids have 2 parents, so possibly higher!

MBCook 4y ago

This is based on observations up to 2013. We’ve had two big societal changes since then that seemed to make things worse to me, the latest being Covid. I really wonder if that 5% would be noticeably higher today.

trmpacctmd 4y ago

I’ve seen people who are very nice and one context be very not nice in another. As an example, try being a medical doctor on HN. The toxic few are why I stopped posting about medical things here. I’m not saying those responders are generally mean people. I think they’re normal people who for whatever reason feel wronged and are part of my world’s 5%.

WallyFunk 4y ago

The old adage: 'The customer is always right' which means a business should always have the best interests of customers at heart and always assume good faith, has turned on its head. Now customers have weaponized that old adage and presume an air of ugly hubris and are mean spirited because hey, 'The customer is always right'. Eh no, sometimes the customer is an asshole.

Bjartr 4y ago
> which means a business should always have the best interests of customers at heart and always assume good faith I thought it meant, at least originally, that a customer's choice to shop, or not, at your store needs to be treated as your failure to attract the customer, not the customer's failure for making the "wrong" choice.
- WallyFunk 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_not_a_moron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_not_a_moron
  - Bjartr 4y ago
    Looking further into it, there's more nuance to it. Of the several people who popularized the phrase in the early 1900s, one of them was Harry Gordon Selfridge. While he is lumped in with the others, the phrase he used was actually "The customer is always right, in matters of taste." With the idea being that a salesperson shouldn't judge the wants of the customer. If they want an ugly sweater, sell them an ugly sweater, don't try to convince them to get a good looking sweater. Others said slightly different things. Like Cesar Ritz who said "The customer is never wrong", where the idea is that the moment the customer complains, you take action to solve the problem the customer has stated, even if they are incorrect.
stocknoob 4y ago
I’ve always took it as “the customer is always right in matters of taste”. If customers keep asking for green shirts with red polka dots, you sell green shirts with red polka dots, even if you don’t like them.

woodruffw 4y ago

The other possible sampling (which doesn't contradict the author's lived experience!) is that there are is a tiny fraction of uniformly nasty individuals, and a substantially larger (maybe even majority) of individuals who are nasty at individual points in time.

jiggawatts 4y ago

Personality traits like this are on a Bell curve, so he's just talking about the "left hand corner" of that curve. The percentage just depends on your threshold for tolerance. I know people who are convinced that 50% of people are horrible people, their tolerance stops at "anything left of the median". My tolerance is the opposite, and I can work with even quite problematic people successfully, so I would estimate that just 1% of people make that unnecessarily difficult.

metadat 4y ago
Hey jiggawatts, I agree, and want to also add: If you're in software / tech (if this is an incorrect assumption on my part please say so and I apologize in advance; I've become used to seeing your posts and my sense is this might be your domain), on average you're working with people who are significantly more intelligent than the average adult human being. In my experience, the rate of nasty / miserable / mentally unstable / "want the world to burn" chaotic people amongst the general public in the United States is pretty close to 1 in 20 (5%). At my swe jobs it's been more like what you say~ 1% or less who are serious struggles to try and work with.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  That's a valid point, there is significant selection bias in different workplaces, locations, and institutions. E.g.: I noticed variance comparable to yours going from a general public school in a poor neighbourhood to a university.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  I have a slightly contrary opinion. In my experience, the smarter someone is, the more entitled/bratty they tend to be (especially to service workers or people they look down on). On the other hand, “dumber” people (or just poorer people without a knowledge job tbh) tend to be more screwed over by society and may be more reactionary. Eg. A swe might talk down to a waiter and be demeaned while they work, but a poor person may resort to yelling at a bank representative on the phone because that mistaken $10 charge affects their ability to buy groceries, and it happens all the time.

osigurdson 4y ago

In my experience, it is more like a 0.5% rule.

killthebuddha 4y ago

In my experience people who express this kind of view (a slightly-sweeping, slightly-cynical take on the prevalence of shitty people) also tend to be epistemically overconfident of their grasp on social situations. For example, my opinion of the following quote is that it sounds contrived (Not contrived for the blog post, but contrived in the sense that the "brought the hair with her" hypothesis is itself contrived). > My experience serving/bartending in restaurants was the same... As an example: one time a lady threw a huge fit about a 2-3 inch smooth brown hair being in her meal when her server was a blond girl and the entire kitchen staff were 35+ year-old Mexicans/ African Americans with completely shaved heads. Now I'm not saying this woman brought the hair into the restaurant and planted it in her meal... but I know for a fact it couldn't have been from any of our staff in the restaurant, so you can make your own decision. My take is that there's less shitty people and more shitty Bayesians :)

msrenee 4y ago
So if I found a hair in my meal, I'd let my server know. It's gross, but it happens This woman found a hair in her meal and threw a fit. Whether she planted it or not (which is definitely a thing people do), she was not being reasonable in that situation.
- killthebuddha 4y ago
  I agree she was being unreasonable. The article claims that 3%-5% of people are "terrible" and "just wanted to be mean, nasty, selfish brutes" and the quote I used was used by the author as evidence for that claim. The author takes a situation where someone was being unreasonable and then throws in a hypothesis based on tenuous reasoning.
  - msrenee 4y ago
    I mentioned it in a comment elsewhere in the discussion, but I've got one coworker who is just a terrible person, another that treats others terribly when he isn't getting his way, and used to have a third who would treat his reports like crap if they didn't worship the ground he walked on. I've got a couple family members who are just unabashedly nasty to everyone. There's a couple more who are just awful to service workers because they think they're lesser for the work they do. Those are just the people I have to directly deal with on a regular basis. The author apparently logged the number of people who were jerks over the course of a given time and and that's how they came up with the numbers they used. Whether those people are awful all of the time, who knows. I know there's a number of people in my life who are just terrible people all of the time. Of course, they think they're the nicest people in the world and are the victims in every situation. The lesson in the article is to be decent to everyone and if someone's nasty in return, ignore it and focus on the people you can help. The numbers aren't necessarily the point, but from my experience, it's a reasonable estimate.

synergy20 4y ago

it's probably 20:80 rule at play though. per 20 80 rule, 20% people are just 'not decent' no matter what, it has nothing to do with you, it's just statistics. now for this small group again, 20% of them are really standing out, I mean really nasty, that makes it 4% of all people, right in the middle of the author claims: 3~5%. it makes math-sense to me. on the other hand, I would assume 4% people are genuinely kind and warm-hearted no matter what. the rest 60%(excluding 20% at both ends), or 92% people(excluding the two 4% at each end) are just regular folks, a mix of selfish and generous day in and day out.

KerryJones 4y ago

I wish I had more data on it, but I've seen many different sources saying the same thing, but the number has more closely approximated 2.5% here, and so I'm wondering if there is discrepancy, or this is within the range of statistical accuracy of one or both.

jppope 4y ago
(OP) its hard to have an exact percentage because it's (crude) observation - I could totally go with 2.5%. The number is in the low single digits for sure, but definitely higher than a rounding error (or a null-hypothesis). Whatever the number is, it's high enough to impact the people that have to interact with lots of other people - they feel it, which is really what I was getting at.

dcanelhas 4y ago

Sounds like an independent study on the prevalence of psychopathy in the general adult population (4.5%) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661044/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.6610...

darig 4y ago

[dead]

AndrewDucker 4y ago

Related: 2% of people respond to oxytocin differently and are just "bastards" no matter what. https://www.hugthemonkey.com/2007/03/paul_zak_oxytoc.html https://www.hugthemonkey.com/2007/03/paul_zak_oxytoc.html

metadat 4y ago
A very interesting hypothesis! I chose to submit this, hope you don't mind too much :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34201142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34201142
- AndrewDucker 4y ago
  Delighted to have it discussed more!
chasebank 4y ago
I've taken MDMA on 4 separate occasions, in the crystal form each time, at a dose of 200mg. Each time, I've watched my friends' eyes pop out of their skulls, sweat like crazy and hug everything in sight. I felt slightly better. Drugs most definitely affect people differently. Edit: I can't read. Ha. I read oxycodone.
- SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
  It's all neurotransmitters in the end anyway :)

aeturnum 4y ago

I think this is true, but the way I would put it is: While you have influence over 95% of what happens to you, you can only really survive the other 5%. Take solace in the fact that, sometimes, when it seems like there's nothing you can do - you are right! That said, often the path to self-improvement is in situations we've misunderstood as "we can't effect" and are actually caused by us.

jppope 4y ago
well said. great observation. thank you for the comment
LanceH 4y ago
My dad phrased it this way, talking about running into this kind of person in the military, "Sometimes you run across an asshole, and there's nothing you can do about it until you or he moves along."

gizmo 4y ago

In 20 years of dealing with customers I've had to deal with maybe 3 people who were real jerks. Maybe my experience is unusual, but my customers come from all over the world. Rich countries, poor countries, non-profits, startups to fortune 500. Practically everybody is friendly and respectful. Occasionally people are irritable or upset, but I don't take it at all personally. I just assume they're having a bad day or that they're angry for valid reasons I just don't know. When people figure out you actually want to help them the anger dissipates immediately. Verizon treats their customers with contempt as a business practice, and when you call their support the phone operators are not authorized to actually resolve your issue anyway. So yeah, that makes people angry. They would leave if they could, but where would they go? AT&T? It's a racket.

rootusrootus 4y ago
> Verizon treats their customers with contempt as a business practice I agree, but with actual support technicians at Verizon I've actually had pretty decent, even above average interactions. The company itself does things I detest, but I try not to take it out on the people answering the phone.

semireg 4y ago

I handle 100% of my indie app's email and telephone (yes, telephone!) support. My app is designing/printing labels. Printers in general, and label printers specifically are awful and inconsiderate robots, unable to perform the simplest printing job when you need it most. Sure, 2-5% of my users are nasty/mean, but let me tell you a little secret: They are immensely frustrated with their life situation and they know how simple the solution should be. If you can show them the light, if you can "flip" these users, they will become your most loyal customers. I start by telling them, "Hey, every month I get a call like yours where you are so frustrated you want to scream, and let me tell you a secret, if I got a call every day like this... I'd quit this business, but calls like yours are rare and I want to help you through this." Boom. They're listening, and they're often listening to advice they don't want to hear. What kind of advice? Oh... like, "you will have to work through this and tweak the measurements until it works, because some printer drivers are mysterious and terrible. But once you get it, you'll be rewarded with it working for a long time until you have to buy a new printer." Still, 50/1000 seems high to me, I like to think I earn the trust of 90% of my nasty/mean customers. Sometimes I'm lucky and I just paste a URL to a FAQ. After 4 years in business I had my first person hang up on me because they kept demanding a simple answer and I would say, "sorry, it's more complicated than that, I don't have a simple answer... I just have two complex answers that contradict each other until you can choose which one is the lesser of two evils." It could be a book that no one would read: Zen and the Art of Label Printing A quick video of my app Label LIVE, narrated by yours truly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnqUP1CZd24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnqUP1CZd24

roflyear 4y ago
I did tech support for a few years and probably answered 100k calls or so. I would estimate that less than 1% of people were unreasonable. 2-3% were mean people. 80% were kind. It's a hard job and you have to focus on the good.
- anodari 4y ago
  Yes, tech support can be difficult and it seems like your statistics are similar to ours. We receive around 5,000 support tickets per day and we simply cannot satisfy everyone. Sometimes we have to "fire" a customer who becomes disrespectful towards one of our attendants.

andreyk 4y ago

"between the years of 2009 and 2013, I talked to something like 13,000 to 15,000 people while I was doing retail and SMB sales for Verizon. I learned a lot from that period, but one of the things I learned that I did not expect was what I now call my "5% rule." No matter how kind, warm, thoughtful, amazing, cheerful, consistent, and perfect I treated people roughly 5% of them would just be terrible (yes, I have the numbers to back this) ... this number has held up in other parts of my life too (dating, restaurant customers, etc). ... the take here - 3% to 5% of people for whatever reason just plain suck." Sounds easy enough to believe. Of course, social conventions and so on influence such things, these people are not always terrible - I am not sure I buy the latter part of the thesis. I certainly haven't had this experience dating or in grad school. But, there is a reason "karen" is now a commonly used noun.

mustafabisic1 4y ago

I feel like this guy is my therapist and just told me a fantastic insight that's perfect for me at that moment. As I was reading it, I came to the same conclusion as the writer - You really have permission to free your mind of those people and just focus on taking care of the people who don't suck. Just expect it and move about your day. That's freeing for me.

einpoklum 4y ago

5% of encounters != 5% of people. In fact, even if the poster tried marketing to the same people at different times, he might well have gotten a different 5%. Some correlation, for sure, but still. Not to mention how encounters are a binary thing - another person might get a different 5%. Also, the samples he's talking about are not really uniformly distributed over the world's population (i.e. "people"), nor even people in the USA.

lp4vn 4y ago

Even though I agree that there is probably a fixed porcentage of bastards in the world's population, I think 5% is a too high number. That's one in twenty and I don't think I will find one in twenty people who are the classical bastard in the groups of people I interact with. I think it's more like 2-3% in my very subjective experience, of course. I also think that the setting matters a lot. If you are in a very competitive environment, like the author in the article, maybe the circumstances push the number to 5%, but if you are in a relaxed, friendly setting, I think the percentage might lower to 1-2%.

gist 4y ago

My experience confirms the general concept here (the number at 5% is arbitrary I'd place it higher than that). The point is (and I have found this to be true) if you deal with enough people you will hit on people who have let's say issues and do not think clearly or even close to rationally and there is simply no pleasing them. So for business the idea that you need all of your customers to be happy is simply not going to work. That is what I have found in actual practice over many many years. Separate point when you are starting out in some business the easiest and first customers you get are the ones that nobody else wants or gives bad service to because they are irrational and unreasonable. (Keep that point in mind..) There is an example with Zappos of someone being able to spend an entire day pleasing one customer. That is entirely unreasonable and except for the story and publicity value of that event makes no sense at all since anyone who wants to spend that much of your time is not going to be a customer that you (probably) want long term. At a certain point you simply have to (in business or life) walk away. https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2016/07/118020/zappos-customer-service-call https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2016/07/118020/zappos-custo...

dejj 4y ago

10-80-10 are the numbers I assume: 10% are terrible, 80% regular, and 10% excellent. I have no empirical data to back it up. Does anyone have?

z3t4 4y ago

Normal distribution (probability theory) 5% of anything will be outliers.

Zanni 4y ago

Related, from Scott Alexander: Lizardman's Constant is 4%: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

magic_hamster 4y ago

The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time. When you work sales, some people will enter your store on the day they got dumped, their family member died, they got kicked out of school. You never know why people are acting out. Chances are it's nothing about you. Other cases, it might not be the person's first time in the store. If they tried several times to fix a problem they are frustrated and and angry. I've had this happen to me multiple times and no matter how patient and nice the representative is, it doesn't change the fact I've wasted way too much time on this problem and you can't make me happy. Even if you solve my problem, it will not make up the lost time and energy. The only thing I'd recommend is to try and be more empathetic. You never know what the person has been through. If you think they suck and you see them at their worst, they could probably use some empathy.

lostlogin 4y ago
> The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time. The post mentions doctors and seems to indicate that they would put a higher percentage of humans in the ‘terrible’ category. Add stress and people act poorly. There also seems to be a thing where people can’t always articulate what they are feeling (eg a specific phobia they have) and act out in response to the stress. Once the stress has gone they are different people. Don’t get me wrong, I also think that more than 5% of people are terrible. I work in healthcare as a radiographer.
_carbyau_ 4y ago
A few thoughts on your "bad day" idea though. It depends on how you handle a bad day. If you are self aware and explain "I am having a bad day before I got here." any rep with a modicum of empathy will appreciate your grace/effort to not lose your shit, often being extra nice about it. But that relies on customer 5% not meeting a rep in that 5% too.
flutas 4y ago
> The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time. When you work sales, some people will enter your store on the day they got dumped, their family member died, they got kicked out of school. You never know why people are acting out. Chances are it's nothing about you. As much as I hate to post training material from ChickFilA…one of the videos they required us to watch explained this all so well and really made me stop to think about what others might be dealing with when I’m interacting with them. It’s a bit heavy on the emotional angle, but does it’s job well imo. It’s been a long time since I’ve worked there, so no clue if it’s still required or not but, here it is in its ~3 minute length. https://youtu.be/2v0RhvZ3lvY https://youtu.be/2v0RhvZ3lvY

adapteva 4y ago

From personal experience it's at least 1%. I had a Kickstarter project 10 years ago that had approx 6,000 supporters and 50 were simply awful human beings. Everyone else was ok. Anonymity brings out the worst in some people.

jamesliudotcc 4y ago

I used to work in food service. I didn't keep track, but I don't think it was 3-5%. More like a tenth that. Maybe it's just coffee, and so even a great majority of the really terrible people could manage to pay and leave without exposing their terribleness.

ransom1538 4y ago

Growing up my friend's dad was a prison guard. He mentioned once that 95% of the people in jail shouldn't be there. They did something stupid, or did a bunch of dumb things, but were not evil. He wouldn't talk about the remaining 5%.

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

Comeuppence

SoftTalker 4y ago
Your uppance will come!
- lowbloodsugar 4y ago
  If it happens twice is it tuppence?

beautifulfreak 4y ago

Personality disorders are very real and surprisingly prevalent, with 3.6% of Americans meeting the diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder and 4.4% for paranoid personality disorder (the two disorders that are most likely to make people difficult and unpleasant to deal with). https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/pn.39.17.0390012 https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/pn.3...

CharlesW 4y ago
I wonder if people with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) might be high on the "likely to make people difficult and unpleasant" list as well. A quick search suggests that ~5% of the population has NPD, which surprised me.

barbariangrunge 4y ago

My experience from retail: I often went months without a single nasty customer. I don’t know if I’m good with people or not but it was pretty rare to have an issue. Most of the bad customers were blatant shoplifters too, and not nasty at all (even these were uncommon)

nemo44x 4y ago

Is it the same 5% for everyone or is everyone part of a 5% for some small group of people?

dannyeei 4y ago

When I was younger I worked at a local supermarket and later at a sports store - turns out customers at the sports store were almost exclusively nice. Not a huge sample size as I only worked at the one store but from talking to others seems like the number of degenerates is waaaay lower when people play sports

cookie_monsta 4y ago
Could it be that grocery shopping and buying things related to your hobby elicit different emotions?
- dannyeei 4y ago
  It’s possible but I’ve talked to friends who work at gyms and various other sport related areas and they all agree. Sample size is very small still.

quags 4y ago

I deal with technical issues for users and have for over 20 years all around the world. In my experience 5% is too high. There are certainly problem customer, some from frustration for things not working, some more a language barriers and then the jack asses - I’d say that 80% of the work is on 10% of customers which skews the results further. I can only think of a handful, less than 10 customers I wanted to fire and only one who was such an asshole I did in those 20 years. If you are able to solve the problem of the user they normally turn around.

smir 4y ago

Another take, one to be sure s/he is not one of the 5%

Havoc 4y ago

Also seems to apply to % that is completely inconsiderate of others

sgustard 4y ago

The corollary: if 95% of the people you meet suck, you're one of the toxic 5%.

cfors 4y ago

I trust you have the numbers for this. And we can debate them until the world ends, but I think having a mental fallback that “yeah, some people suck” is valuable for your mental well being. Life’s too short to let the few negative people out there bring you down. 1% or 5% whatever lets you realize that and move on

absentmoon 4y ago

I'm inclined to agree with the premise of this article but I'm skeptical of the numbers.

graderjs 4y ago

Encountered the same in dating: 20% of women are flakes, 10% are bad people, 5% really bad. 80% are good. 15-20% of women are flakes (non-maliciously unreliable, can't keep commitments), 5-10% (half of those) are actually maliciously bad people--bad/psychotic/abusive/crazy, 1-5% (half again) really bad (like psychopath/sociopath/criminally deranged bad). 80% are good. Stick with the good! Says nothing of actual compatibility in a pair just basic good or not. That 20% of flakey (including the 10% of bad and 5% really bad) has nothing to do with you, it's not your fault nor your responsibility that they are like that, and their feelings and behavior are not your responsibility no matter how they might try to blame you for that; and there's nothing you can do to "change" them or "help" them or "better" them. And you probably can't "handle" them. If you get involved they're only going to try to hurt you (or in the case of flakes let you down) again and again. So learn the signs that work for you and filter out the rest as quickly as possible. You don't have to be mean, but you have to be clear and set boundaries. There's no pride or sense or nobility in "handling" or "tolerating" a crazy or bad person. They're just dangerous and unpleasant.

tapanjk 4y ago

> ... and let that moment go - it has NOTHING to do with you. This applies not only to bad behavior of others, but sometimes even to your own bad behavior. We are 'moist robots' as one cartoonist puts it, and the sane thing is to not beat yourself up for something stupid you did or say, but evaluate the whole stituation later when you are in a better state of mind, learn from your mistake, make amends, and move on.

tanbog6 4y ago

Is this person describing objectively horrible people, of just people who are incompatible with him? I reckon about 5% of folks rub me completely the wrong way and I likely do the same for a similar number. I don't know that I agree that makes them inherently bad/the worst.

mnemotronic 4y ago

My brother and his wife are like that. They hate everyone because everyone is always trying to cheat them and take advantage of them. Total victimhood mind-set. Obviously he's a Trump supporter.

memming 4y ago

Game theoretic analysis might reveal this as a typical equilibrium.

Joel_Mckay 4y ago

The general population contains sociopaths at a rate of 3% of males, and 1% of females. Additionally, roughly 70% of these people grew up in single parent homes without a father, and roughly 30% were from unwed mothers. While these facts may reflect on a civilization's cultural values, it does not cover the roughly 1% of the general population that are born psychopaths. Psychopaths are generally not treatable, and a subset of these individuals should be considered dangerous. Part of designing a Marketing/Sales campaign, is accounting for these folks too. One needs to realize some individuals are hostile if they feel you owe them something, and can attempt to do something nasty. Have a wonderful New Year, and remember some jobs are just not worth the drama... there are hundreds of less traumatic jobs around that also pay well. =)

IYasha 4y ago

Yeah, maybe it's just that "Thay Live" is a documentary.

lebaux 4y ago

i likked this rule as one as the 80/20 and tested it with all the other possible tests

importantbrian 4y ago

The problem with generalizations like this is I think it can cause you to miss real issues in your business. For example, I'm always incredibly nice to customer service folks. It's always served me pretty well, but one time I got so fed up with Comcast that I rage quit and switched to Direct TV. It's the only time in my life I've ever done anything like that. At the point where I got mad and started to quit they finally started offering to actually fix my problem. But by that point I was too fed up for them to save my business. If you just go into an interaction like that assuming I'm one of the 5% of consistently awful people you would miss that there is actually a huge problem with one of your business processes that you need to fix, because it's so bad it's driven an otherwise reasonable person mad.

nsainaney 4y ago

Corollary...if you're experiencing >5% nastiness, you're in the wrong room or its you, not them

hadcoffee 4y ago

Just wondering what has happened to this blog writer, no context none specific post… I mean how can you state a statistics without defining scope and scenarios. By writing this article, he might have been mean to those who has challenge in life that he didn’t even aware of or appreciate. Does this count him/her as those 5% as well? Surely this can’t be a black and white discussion.