5 ms·

As someone who spent an inordinate amount of time trying very hard to be less angry despite having a lot of good reasons to be, a chunk of which overlap with th

by advael 2y ago

As someone who spent an inordinate amount of time trying very hard to be less angry despite having a lot of good reasons to be, a chunk of which overlap with this piece, I get a lot of dismissal from people who seem to think any expression of any negative emotion, especially anger, deeply discredits a person on its own. It's so pervasive that I find even addressing it to be refreshing, so thank you

zer00eyz 2y ago
Thanks I will get down voted to oblivion for it. Cause getting angry at a problem and spending 2 days coding to completely replace a long standing issue isnt something that happens... People need to be less precious. You cant be happy all the time. In fact you probably should not be (life without contrast is boring). A little anger about the indignities and bullshit in the world is a good thing. As long as you're still rational and receptive, it can be an effective tool for communicating a point.
- advael 2y ago
  Or just communicating the emotion! I think aligning on an emotional layer of perception is important for shaking people out of automated behaviors when it's necessary to, and I dislike this cultural shift toward punishing doing any of that from the standpoint of its mechanism design implications almost as much as I hate it on vibes
xwolfi 2y ago
Be angry more. I work in China but Im French, so people assume (and I nudge them to think), that it's a culture thing for me to express anger publicly at injustice or idiocy. But it's liberating to be angry at bullshit (and God knows China is the bullshit Mecca), and AI is the top bullshit these days. We're not anti innovation because we say chatgpt is not gonna maintain our trading systems or whatever you work on. It's a funny silly statistical text generator that uses hundreds of thousands of video cards to output dead http links. We're far from anything intelligent but it's at least indeed very artificial.
- advael 2y ago
  As someone who was in academia at the right time to really contextualize the seismic shift in the capabilities of automated natural language processing models that came of both attention and the feasible compute scale increase that allowed for them to use long enough context windows to outpace recurrent models in this regard, I really didn't think I'd end up having to roll my eyes at people falling over themselves to exaggerate the implications, but in retrospect it's clear that this was more me being unconscionably naive then than it being that unpredictable
roenxi 2y ago
If you want a theory; a man who isn't in control of his emotions can present anything up to an immediate mortal danger to the people around him (particularly if they are female). Being able to control negative emotions isn't a nice-to-have trait or something that can be handled later. There is an urgent social pressure that men only get angry about things that justify it - a class of issues which includes arguably nothing in tech. Maybe a few topics, but not many. Anger isn't a bad thing in itself (and can be an effective motivator in the short term). But people get very, very uncomfortable around angry people for this obvious reason.
- advael 2y ago
  Okay but we're not talking anger that's expressed by violent behavior or even clear significant loss of control, I'm talking people on the internet can pick up the mildest hint of anger from your tone or even subject matter. As a woman and a pretty scrawny one at that, as well as being, well, obviously very opinionated and belligerent, I have experienced every flavor of the threatening behavior you're invoking and I can assure you this has nothing to do with why people reflexively dismiss people who they think are being "emotional". More and more, the accusation of being angry specifically seems to be all people think they need to say to smugly claim to be speaking from a "rational" high ground, often despite having contributed nothing of substance to the topic at hand. Like pointing out that this person's blog post aimed at no one particular person did not really have to contend with the perception that this person was going to actually become violent at anyone, although actually I could see getting that impression from this post more than most, since it frequently explained the anger as cartoonish threats of hypothetical violence. I'm not exaggerating. When I see this in person and can make better assumptions about the genders of the people involved, this seems disproportionately likely to be leveraged against women, as are most arguments to "obvious" or "apparent" disqualifying irrationality, and this is not a shock because we are within living memory of much of work culture treating it as conventional wisdom that this should be assumed of all women by default. People really be trying to win epistemic pissing contests by posting something that looks like running "u mad" through google translate and back once, unironically, just as surely as you're trying to do that obnoxious thing of trying to invoke the gravity of situations in which people genuinely fear for their safety, hoping that gravity will somehow make it harder to question what you said for fear of seeming chauvanistically oblivious or whatever that's supposed to do I propose the alternate theory that as in-person interaction becomes a smaller portion of most people's social experience, many have gotten worse at handling even mild interpersonal conflict without the kind of impersonal mediating forces that are omnipresent online, and this kneejerk aversion reaction can rationalize itself with the aid of this whole weird gilded age revivalist-ass cartoon notion of "rationality" that's become popular among a certain flavor of influential person of late and, especially in a certain kind of conversation with a certain kind of smug obnoxious person, seems kind of like classic Orwellian doublespeak Also this position that "arguably almost nothing" in tech warrants anger seems super tonedeaf in a context where most of the world has become a panopticon in the name of targeting ads, you need a mobile phone owned by a duopoly to authenticate yourself to your bank, and large swaths of previously functional infrastructure is being privatized and stripmined to function as poorly as the companies that own them can get away with while the ancillary benefit of providing employees with subsistence and purpose wherever possible, while still managing to nickel and dime you for the privilege with all manner of junk fees, and offer poorly-designed phone trees in place of any meaningful documentation or customer service
mns 2y ago
Not only that, but the thing is that it’s all fake in our industry and the companies that we work on. People seem to be very sensitive today to showing any kind of actual emotion or feelings, be it anger or frustration. Everyone puts on the fake american service industry smile, say words like I hear you, we’re a team, we must be constructive. Then in the background all do the most insane political backstabbing, shit talk about other teams, projects, people walk over the careers and the future of others just to advance themselves, but as long as you put a smile on your face in the meetings and in public, none of that matters.
- advael 2y ago
  I mean you make some very good points but you sound like you could be kind of mildly upset if I squint at it right so I think you should really be more mindful and adopt a positive additude before I will even consider listening to anything you have to say
davidgerard 2y ago
it turns out Lucidity has written about this precise phenomenon too - the relentless positivity of toxic environments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39702323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39702323
- ludicity 2y ago
  I know someone that got bullied for taking leave to care for their special needs kids, and the positivity people came pouring out of the woodwork to accuse her of being confrontational when she was understandably upset. Not that the commenters above have indicated that they'd do anything like that, but yeah, it's WILD out there.
xg15 2y ago
There is at least one German comedian who made an entire career solely out of being angry...
- generic92034 2y ago
  https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Joachim_Heist https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Joachim_Heist ? :)
  - xg15 2y ago
    Yup, exactly this guy! Known and beloved in his stage persona Herr Hassknecht...

by advael 2y ago

zer00eyz 2y ago

Thanks I will get down voted to oblivion for it. Cause getting angry at a problem and spending 2 days coding to completely replace a long standing issue isnt something that happens... People need to be less precious. You cant be happy all the time. In fact you probably should not be (life without contrast is boring). A little anger about the indignities and bullshit in the world is a good thing. As long as you're still rational and receptive, it can be an effective tool for communicating a point.

advael 2y ago
Or just communicating the emotion! I think aligning on an emotional layer of perception is important for shaking people out of automated behaviors when it's necessary to, and I dislike this cultural shift toward punishing doing any of that from the standpoint of its mechanism design implications almost as much as I hate it on vibes

xwolfi 2y ago

Be angry more. I work in China but Im French, so people assume (and I nudge them to think), that it's a culture thing for me to express anger publicly at injustice or idiocy. But it's liberating to be angry at bullshit (and God knows China is the bullshit Mecca), and AI is the top bullshit these days. We're not anti innovation because we say chatgpt is not gonna maintain our trading systems or whatever you work on. It's a funny silly statistical text generator that uses hundreds of thousands of video cards to output dead http links. We're far from anything intelligent but it's at least indeed very artificial.

advael 2y ago
As someone who was in academia at the right time to really contextualize the seismic shift in the capabilities of automated natural language processing models that came of both attention and the feasible compute scale increase that allowed for them to use long enough context windows to outpace recurrent models in this regard, I really didn't think I'd end up having to roll my eyes at people falling over themselves to exaggerate the implications, but in retrospect it's clear that this was more me being unconscionably naive then than it being that unpredictable

roenxi 2y ago

If you want a theory; a man who isn't in control of his emotions can present anything up to an immediate mortal danger to the people around him (particularly if they are female). Being able to control negative emotions isn't a nice-to-have trait or something that can be handled later. There is an urgent social pressure that men only get angry about things that justify it - a class of issues which includes arguably nothing in tech. Maybe a few topics, but not many. Anger isn't a bad thing in itself (and can be an effective motivator in the short term). But people get very, very uncomfortable around angry people for this obvious reason.

advael 2y ago
Okay but we're not talking anger that's expressed by violent behavior or even clear significant loss of control, I'm talking people on the internet can pick up the mildest hint of anger from your tone or even subject matter. As a woman and a pretty scrawny one at that, as well as being, well, obviously very opinionated and belligerent, I have experienced every flavor of the threatening behavior you're invoking and I can assure you this has nothing to do with why people reflexively dismiss people who they think are being "emotional". More and more, the accusation of being angry specifically seems to be all people think they need to say to smugly claim to be speaking from a "rational" high ground, often despite having contributed nothing of substance to the topic at hand. Like pointing out that this person's blog post aimed at no one particular person did not really have to contend with the perception that this person was going to actually become violent at anyone, although actually I could see getting that impression from this post more than most, since it frequently explained the anger as cartoonish threats of hypothetical violence. I'm not exaggerating. When I see this in person and can make better assumptions about the genders of the people involved, this seems disproportionately likely to be leveraged against women, as are most arguments to "obvious" or "apparent" disqualifying irrationality, and this is not a shock because we are within living memory of much of work culture treating it as conventional wisdom that this should be assumed of all women by default. People really be trying to win epistemic pissing contests by posting something that looks like running "u mad" through google translate and back once, unironically, just as surely as you're trying to do that obnoxious thing of trying to invoke the gravity of situations in which people genuinely fear for their safety, hoping that gravity will somehow make it harder to question what you said for fear of seeming chauvanistically oblivious or whatever that's supposed to do I propose the alternate theory that as in-person interaction becomes a smaller portion of most people's social experience, many have gotten worse at handling even mild interpersonal conflict without the kind of impersonal mediating forces that are omnipresent online, and this kneejerk aversion reaction can rationalize itself with the aid of this whole weird gilded age revivalist-ass cartoon notion of "rationality" that's become popular among a certain flavor of influential person of late and, especially in a certain kind of conversation with a certain kind of smug obnoxious person, seems kind of like classic Orwellian doublespeak Also this position that "arguably almost nothing" in tech warrants anger seems super tonedeaf in a context where most of the world has become a panopticon in the name of targeting ads, you need a mobile phone owned by a duopoly to authenticate yourself to your bank, and large swaths of previously functional infrastructure is being privatized and stripmined to function as poorly as the companies that own them can get away with while the ancillary benefit of providing employees with subsistence and purpose wherever possible, while still managing to nickel and dime you for the privilege with all manner of junk fees, and offer poorly-designed phone trees in place of any meaningful documentation or customer service

mns 2y ago

Not only that, but the thing is that it’s all fake in our industry and the companies that we work on. People seem to be very sensitive today to showing any kind of actual emotion or feelings, be it anger or frustration. Everyone puts on the fake american service industry smile, say words like I hear you, we’re a team, we must be constructive. Then in the background all do the most insane political backstabbing, shit talk about other teams, projects, people walk over the careers and the future of others just to advance themselves, but as long as you put a smile on your face in the meetings and in public, none of that matters.

advael 2y ago
I mean you make some very good points but you sound like you could be kind of mildly upset if I squint at it right so I think you should really be more mindful and adopt a positive additude before I will even consider listening to anything you have to say

davidgerard 2y ago

it turns out Lucidity has written about this precise phenomenon too - the relentless positivity of toxic environments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39702323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39702323

ludicity 2y ago
I know someone that got bullied for taking leave to care for their special needs kids, and the positivity people came pouring out of the woodwork to accuse her of being confrontational when she was understandably upset. Not that the commenters above have indicated that they'd do anything like that, but yeah, it's WILD out there.

xg15 2y ago

There is at least one German comedian who made an entire career solely out of being angry...

generic92034 2y ago
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Joachim_Heist https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Joachim_Heist ? :)
- xg15 2y ago
  Yup, exactly this guy! Known and beloved in his stage persona Herr Hassknecht...