Good post! That said I personally think engaging with “haters” can be quite valuable. I’ve had positive interactions with many people despite very rocky beginnings—often, the difference between a hater and a supporter is just a few simple misunderstandings.
Of course, there are some who will just go after you for destructive reasons, and it’s good to avoid them. But I think it pays to be careful about writing people off as haters—once you’ve adopted a policy of not engaging with “haters”, it becomes really easy and tempting to write off legitimate critics and thus miss out on relevant information and feedback.
I agree that “often, the difference between a hater and a supporter is just a few simple misunderstandings.” This is the #1 update I made from observing successful salespeople at Palantir; they almost never think of anyone as permanently uncooperative, and almost always leave the door open to an improved relationship.
I resonate with the desire to avoid writing off legitimate critics, but I think there’s some limits to the usefulness of criticism. In particular, criticism of something that you are not going to change regardless is not always worth updating on. For example:
Criticism of immutable characteristics of your person. (Racial slurs, negative stereotypes about your age or gender, etc.) If you can’t change it, why let anyone make you feel bad about it?
Nonspecific negativity about you as a person. There’s just not a lot of information in the mere fact that “so-and-so dislikes me.”
Criticism of irreversible decisions you’ve made in the past. Sometimes that can mean you shouldn’t do similar things in the future; but sometimes it’s basically criticizing you for not having become a totally different person than you are now, and thus has no bearing on your life going forward.
Criticism of decisions you’re not going to change over a given time frame shouldn’t make you worry or feel self-doubt during that time frame. For instance, if you’ve made a decision like “I want to see how many signups we get in three months before deciding whether to go forward with this startup,” don’t cut the experiment short just because somebody doesn’t like your startup idea. For the time being, you can treat your decision as immutable. Or, for a slightly different example, if somebody disapproves of the industry you’ve chosen to work in, you can’t immediately switch industries without some amount of preparation time, so you shouldn’t feel like you have to “obey” the critic right away, or like you have to feel guilty until you’ve totally changed your life.
Another way of looking at this is: criticism is only relevant within the scope of the kind of thing you’re doing for the moment. If you’re trying to solve a scientific problem, you do not need to worry about the opinions of people who think that science itself is bad, for now. You can think about their criticisms during rarer (say, yearly) periods of reflection when you reconsider “what am I doing with my life?”
Nobody is infallible, but it can be really helpful to treat yourself as locally infallible over a short time horizon or high-level frame. For now, I am… {working on this project, subscribing to this belief system, a person with these personality traits, a member of this profession.} For now, I don’t want anybody messing with that or making me feel bad about it. Taking this attitude is normal, I’ve come to believe. Most mentally healthy people do it. Leaving every aspect of yourself and your decisions up for debate at every moment, being malleable at every scale, is a recipe for constant indecision and self-doubt. It doesn’t make you heinously unethical or intellectually dishonest to decide not to worry about certain things for certain time periods. It’s a correct adaptation for beings with limited computational power.
I quite agree that deciding not to worry about certain things (barring very strong warnings/overrides/etc.) across given periods is reasonable. That said, I’ve still had quite favorable interactions that began with that sort of unhelpful criticism and turned into either helpful criticism or more cooperative interaction.
Good post! That said I personally think engaging with “haters” can be quite valuable. I’ve had positive interactions with many people despite very rocky beginnings—often, the difference between a hater and a supporter is just a few simple misunderstandings.
Of course, there are some who will just go after you for destructive reasons, and it’s good to avoid them. But I think it pays to be careful about writing people off as haters—once you’ve adopted a policy of not engaging with “haters”, it becomes really easy and tempting to write off legitimate critics and thus miss out on relevant information and feedback.
I agree that “often, the difference between a hater and a supporter is just a few simple misunderstandings.” This is the #1 update I made from observing successful salespeople at Palantir; they almost never think of anyone as permanently uncooperative, and almost always leave the door open to an improved relationship.
I resonate with the desire to avoid writing off legitimate critics, but I think there’s some limits to the usefulness of criticism. In particular, criticism of something that you are not going to change regardless is not always worth updating on. For example:
Criticism of immutable characteristics of your person. (Racial slurs, negative stereotypes about your age or gender, etc.) If you can’t change it, why let anyone make you feel bad about it?
Nonspecific negativity about you as a person. There’s just not a lot of information in the mere fact that “so-and-so dislikes me.”
Criticism of irreversible decisions you’ve made in the past. Sometimes that can mean you shouldn’t do similar things in the future; but sometimes it’s basically criticizing you for not having become a totally different person than you are now, and thus has no bearing on your life going forward.
Criticism of decisions you’re not going to change over a given time frame shouldn’t make you worry or feel self-doubt during that time frame. For instance, if you’ve made a decision like “I want to see how many signups we get in three months before deciding whether to go forward with this startup,” don’t cut the experiment short just because somebody doesn’t like your startup idea. For the time being, you can treat your decision as immutable. Or, for a slightly different example, if somebody disapproves of the industry you’ve chosen to work in, you can’t immediately switch industries without some amount of preparation time, so you shouldn’t feel like you have to “obey” the critic right away, or like you have to feel guilty until you’ve totally changed your life.
Another way of looking at this is: criticism is only relevant within the scope of the kind of thing you’re doing for the moment. If you’re trying to solve a scientific problem, you do not need to worry about the opinions of people who think that science itself is bad, for now. You can think about their criticisms during rarer (say, yearly) periods of reflection when you reconsider “what am I doing with my life?”
Nobody is infallible, but it can be really helpful to treat yourself as locally infallible over a short time horizon or high-level frame. For now, I am… {working on this project, subscribing to this belief system, a person with these personality traits, a member of this profession.} For now, I don’t want anybody messing with that or making me feel bad about it. Taking this attitude is normal, I’ve come to believe. Most mentally healthy people do it. Leaving every aspect of yourself and your decisions up for debate at every moment, being malleable at every scale, is a recipe for constant indecision and self-doubt. It doesn’t make you heinously unethical or intellectually dishonest to decide not to worry about certain things for certain time periods. It’s a correct adaptation for beings with limited computational power.
I quite agree that deciding not to worry about certain things (barring very strong warnings/overrides/etc.) across given periods is reasonable. That said, I’ve still had quite favorable interactions that began with that sort of unhelpful criticism and turned into either helpful criticism or more cooperative interaction.