Communication is hard and – importantly – contextual. Most of your readers will be reasonable people
You think this partially because you are not famous or a popular writer.
By the 1% rule of Internet participation, you hear mostly from an extremely self-selected group of critics. You don’t hear from the reasonable people, you hear from the unreasonable people. The more popular you get, the more this is true. And there is a lizardman constant going on: there is a fringe of crazy, stubborn readers who will fail to read the most plain and straightforward writing, misinterpret it in the wackiest way, hate you more the better you write, and amplify the craziest things they can find. (At my level of relative obscurity, it’s petty stuff: sneers, doxing, death/swatting threats, ML researchers trying to get me fired, FBI visits, that sort of thing. Scott seems to have similar issues, just more so. But by the time you reach Tim Ferriss numbers of readers, this will have escalated to ‘attempted kidnappings by organized crime’ levels of risk, and he notes that it escalates still further to attempted murder of popular YouTubers etc.)
Combine this with the asymmetry of loss and reward, where criticism hurts a lot more than praise helps, and the more popular you get, the worse you will feel about everything you write or do, regardless of quality.
...Unless you constantly keep in mind: “haters gonna hate”. If a criticism doesn’t immediately make sense to you or you felt you dealt with it adequately, and it comes from someone you don’t already know or trust, then oh well—haters gonna hate. If you’re genuinely unsure, run a poll or A/B test or something to hear from a less self-selected sample—but do anything other than naively listening to and believing your critics! That’s a luxury permitted only the most obscure or heavily filter-bubbled.
Oh, I definitely agree with “haters gonne hate” as an emotional strategy for dealing with uncharitable criticism after the fact: I might not be famous but I’ve certainly gotten a bunch of that. Yes, a lot of it is entirely unreasonable and one would do best to just ignore it.
The post was talking about whether to put in any effort into optimizing the presentation beforehand, or in response to feedback from someone you know to be reasonable; it didn’t mean to say that you should accept every piece of criticism that your post gathers.
You think this partially because you are not famous or a popular writer.
By the 1% rule of Internet participation, you hear mostly from an extremely self-selected group of critics. You don’t hear from the reasonable people, you hear from the unreasonable people. The more popular you get, the more this is true. And there is a lizardman constant going on: there is a fringe of crazy, stubborn readers who will fail to read the most plain and straightforward writing, misinterpret it in the wackiest way, hate you more the better you write, and amplify the craziest things they can find. (At my level of relative obscurity, it’s petty stuff: sneers, doxing, death/swatting threats, ML researchers trying to get me fired, FBI visits, that sort of thing. Scott seems to have similar issues, just more so. But by the time you reach Tim Ferriss numbers of readers, this will have escalated to ‘attempted kidnappings by organized crime’ levels of risk, and he notes that it escalates still further to attempted murder of popular YouTubers etc.)
Combine this with the asymmetry of loss and reward, where criticism hurts a lot more than praise helps, and the more popular you get, the worse you will feel about everything you write or do, regardless of quality.
...Unless you constantly keep in mind: “haters gonna hate”. If a criticism doesn’t immediately make sense to you or you felt you dealt with it adequately, and it comes from someone you don’t already know or trust, then oh well—haters gonna hate. If you’re genuinely unsure, run a poll or A/B test or something to hear from a less self-selected sample—but do anything other than naively listening to and believing your critics! That’s a luxury permitted only the most obscure or heavily filter-bubbled.
Oh, I definitely agree with “haters gonne hate” as an emotional strategy for dealing with uncharitable criticism after the fact: I might not be famous but I’ve certainly gotten a bunch of that. Yes, a lot of it is entirely unreasonable and one would do best to just ignore it.
The post was talking about whether to put in any effort into optimizing the presentation beforehand, or in response to feedback from someone you know to be reasonable; it didn’t mean to say that you should accept every piece of criticism that your post gathers.