Shallow Feedback Hollows You Out | Hacker News Reader

Shallow Feedback Hollows You Out

nothinghuman.substack.com

33 pointsivee18 comments

Totally by chance I decided to read this post, first thing in the morning (in other words, also first thing in 2025).

I must say that despite the rather negative or snarky comments here I have found more depth in this text than what I expected to find. Went to read a couple of other texts from this young engineer, and it filled me with some optimism for the year to come.

honored to be your first read of 2025!

I don't agree. You know recently I read this post critiquing my article saying how I have so many followers and it's probably because of my clickbait titles. No, that's just who I am. I don't think popularity changes writers that much. Humans tend to write about the same things over and over. So when you initially follow someone it feels new but after a while it gets predictable. Plus there's probably a bit of nostalgia in there too.

yeah I'm worried it could be me getting bored instead of the writers getting boring, but nobody could look at the writing in The Black Swan vs Skin in the Game and not be able to tell the huge difference in fluency, coherence, and beauty.

I like this article. I got several interesting ideas to think about now, for example

>In order to do good work, scientists must retain a separate status hierarchy where prestige flows to the most innovative ideas, not the most popular ones. In order to defend this separate status hierarchy

I also liked contrasting 4chan with 1-to-1 correspondence

Ironic how most of the comments here just cement the author’s position. Hollow feedback about his views on hollow feedback.

here's some feedback on your feedback on the feedback about feedback: I like it

Boy does this author know how to segment me out of his readership.

> writers who for a time seemed to be The Writer In the World Most In Touch With The Truth - Noam Chomsky, Sam Harris, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Curtis Yarvin, and Jordan Peterson.

Curtis Yarvin? Excuse me?

Jordan Peterson too. Putting Chomsky in the same sentence as those two is just insulting

I've heard similar things, but I'm not familiar enough with Peterson to say for myself. I've read enough Yarvin.

> Excuse me?

Really thoughtful comment, that shows us the core of your objection: nothing.

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-dawkins...

Curtis Yarvin, IIRC in that same avatar of Moldbug, has actively advocated for the morality of slavery. There is no point in reasoning with that, there is literally only war.

Which is kind of a shame, because the top-level article does have some interesting ideas. I hope the author is just young and undiscerning and doesn't actually support the kind of things Yarvin stands for. But also, being a monster doesn't stop anyone from having the occasional interesting idea, so who knows.

While “write to the single smartest person you know who cares a lot about your topic of interest” is a good advice, if you publish what you write this approach requires a healthy-to-unhealthy degree of sociopathy that becomes less common or tenable with age, by my subjective estimation.

wait why would this require sociopathy?

If you publish something, you by definition intend people you do not know, the wider public, to read it (if you really wanted to share your thought with that one person, publishing is not required).

Choosing to do something that affects someone else while being unaffected by how they react is not normal and indicates sociopathy.

People paying attention to how they affect others, how others react, and changing as a result of their feedback is basically how society exists. Most people are wired for this. People who are not wired for this… There is nothing stopping them from hurting someone for personal benefit, for example.

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