There have been several instances where I felt anger at someone for being successful immediately before reading their stuff, but then performing a perfect turnaround and deciding they’re high status and deserve even more success. I distinctly remember this happening with Scott Alexander and SSC.
I’ve been amused to notice this happening with me too, particularly as Said Achmiz steadily upgrades gwern.net’s appearance & features and I integrate them into my writing. While most people have nothing but praise for the design and things like the popup annotations, it seems like there are a handful of people who the better it gets the angrier they get.
An example from a week or two ago (or from later): my “Ordinary Life Improvements” essay was linked on Reddit. It’s not a complex or intimidating article: there’s no math or self-experiments or statistics—it is just a list of uncontroversial ordinary things that anyone my age or older knows from personal experience if they take a moment to think about it (and if they are doubtful they can find lots of citations for, and I provide a bunch anyway). You do not need to be any kind of credentialed expert to make a list of items like “you can now buy preserved guacamole”, and it requires zero special expertise to verify most of the items as I did not select exotic items, so the usual good reasons for credentialism don’t apply. It is just a fun thought-provoking read which is also rather nicely formatted & pretty.
But nevertheless, the reaction of the respondent in their reply was to be extremely angry! They seem to have not read it at all, since they didn’t criticize any of the specific points, but instead they apparently went straight to the sidebar and about-me page (for character assassination?), and got angry when they couldn’t find anything about what college degrees I have (apparently they assume I have none, since I didn’t specify it) or what prestigious institutions I am affiliated with, and got even angrier when they read the section about what sort of software/computers I used. (They weren’t angry about me using an AMD CPU instead of an Intel one or anything, just that the section was there at all. You’re not allowed to talk about it, apparently; it would have been helpful if he had specified what I needed before I’m allowed to discuss the computer I built—do I need a Pulitzer Prize or a Harvard degree, or would merely publishing an op-ed in Wired or Ars Technica have sufficed to make it no longer a violation of status norms?)
I’ve been amused to notice this happening with me too, particularly as Said Achmiz steadily upgrades gwern.net’s appearance & features and I integrate them into my writing. While most people have nothing but praise for the design and things like the popup annotations, it seems like there are a handful of people who the better it gets the angrier they get.
An example from a week or two ago (or from later): my “Ordinary Life Improvements” essay was linked on Reddit. It’s not a complex or intimidating article: there’s no math or self-experiments or statistics—it is just a list of uncontroversial ordinary things that anyone my age or older knows from personal experience if they take a moment to think about it (and if they are doubtful they can find lots of citations for, and I provide a bunch anyway). You do not need to be any kind of credentialed expert to make a list of items like “you can now buy preserved guacamole”, and it requires zero special expertise to verify most of the items as I did not select exotic items, so the usual good reasons for credentialism don’t apply. It is just a fun thought-provoking read which is also rather nicely formatted & pretty.
But nevertheless, the reaction of the respondent in their reply was to be extremely angry! They seem to have not read it at all, since they didn’t criticize any of the specific points, but instead they apparently went straight to the sidebar and about-me page (for character assassination?), and got angry when they couldn’t find anything about what college degrees I have (apparently they assume I have none, since I didn’t specify it) or what prestigious institutions I am affiliated with, and got even angrier when they read the section about what sort of software/computers I used. (They weren’t angry about me using an AMD CPU instead of an Intel one or anything, just that the section was there at all. You’re not allowed to talk about it, apparently; it would have been helpful if he had specified what I needed before I’m allowed to discuss the computer I built—do I need a Pulitzer Prize or a Harvard degree, or would merely publishing an op-ed in Wired or Ars Technica have sufficed to make it no longer a violation of status norms?)
So, that’s a thing.