3 ms·

It's a fine line. There's a world of difference between skeptics and haters, with the latter not deserving comments. Some skepticism may be indeed healthy and

It's a fine line. There's a world of difference between skeptics and haters, with the latter not deserving comments. Some skepticism may be indeed healthy and comes naturally with experience. But it's also easy (particularly for the curious and well educated types, like the HN crowd) to become overly skeptic and jaded with time. The problem with skeptics is that they tend to default to "yeah, saw that before", which makes you more conservative and ready to shut down others' ideas y. That's why innovation is often associated with people with limited experience in the field, as the Steve Jobs no-people-with-phone-experience-on-the-iPhone-team story above. The hard part (for me, at least) is to always balance a healthy dose of skepticism, and still think outside the conventional way, and keep a can-do attitude.

calinet6 13y ago
This is a good nuanced response, recognizing the complexity of what the post is broadly criticizing: the quality evaluation of ideas. You cannot shoot down the (positive or negative) evaluation of all ideas as "hating," for that would be incorrect. Ideas may be evaluated independently, and some people are quite good at it. With that accepted, the argument for what types of evaluations are valid must become more complex and again, nuanced. This blog post does not achieve that, instead trying to argue for the rather extreme position that all negative evaluation is disadvantageous to everyone. It just ain't true. So, yes, as anyone with half a brain knows, jaded "hating" and constant skepticism are poor excuses for intelligent evaluation. Even knowing that, the extreme emotional responses to any idea always get the most attention, and are often amplified out of proportion. A balanced measured evaluation is rarely noteworthy, even if it's right, so it may seem as though the startup community or workplace trends toward the negative. The psychology of crowd mentality is the fascinating angle here, not the end result. Find the source of the problem and change the systems which motivate this sort of behavior and we might have a chance. You're totally right though: as with most worthy pursuits, the extremes are easy pits to fall into, but the balance is both correct and difficult.

calinet6 13y ago

This is a good nuanced response, recognizing the complexity of what the post is broadly criticizing: the quality evaluation of ideas. You cannot shoot down the (positive or negative) evaluation of all ideas as "hating," for that would be incorrect. Ideas may be evaluated independently, and some people are quite good at it. With that accepted, the argument for what types of evaluations are valid must become more complex and again, nuanced. This blog post does not achieve that, instead trying to argue for the rather extreme position that all negative evaluation is disadvantageous to everyone. It just ain't true. So, yes, as anyone with half a brain knows, jaded "hating" and constant skepticism are poor excuses for intelligent evaluation. Even knowing that, the extreme emotional responses to any idea always get the most attention, and are often amplified out of proportion. A balanced measured evaluation is rarely noteworthy, even if it's right, so it may seem as though the startup community or workplace trends toward the negative. The psychology of crowd mentality is the fascinating angle here, not the end result. Find the source of the problem and change the systems which motivate this sort of behavior and we might have a chance. You're totally right though: as with most worthy pursuits, the extremes are easy pits to fall into, but the balance is both correct and difficult.