by ericbarrett
2 subcomments
- > After it’s over, they’ll like you a little more or a little less. They’ll be more or less likely to bring you problems. They’ll be more or less likely to recommend you or avoid you. And just as important, you’re training them on the type of problems to bring you.
Indeed. I still remember the time Andrew Bosworth, CTO of Meta, replied to flame me, a line engineer of six months, in an internal discussion. It must have been, what, 15 years ago? The topic is long faded from my memory. Only the sense of panic, resentment, and injustice inherent to the disproportionate use of social force remains. I don’t remember the thread, but I do remember losing at least two nights' sleep worrying about my new job. Truly, it is sage advice.
- Slight tangent but I've had my own Pavlovian moment when I taught a loud neighbor how to keep the volume down [0]. It all started when our RF tv remote interfered. He probably thought there was a ghost that turned off the tv whenever his volume went above 15.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/teaching-my-neighbor-to-keep-the-vo...
- > People often treat interactions as one-off events.
> You’re going to see these people again
> But your tone, timing, and consistency create the feedback loop
He asked people to look for work elsewhere if they do not agree to Meta’s new policies. Pretty shameful and incredibly inhumane and demoralizing.
- Some people need the opposite advice: Sometimes an interaction is just a one off event. No need to teach a lesson.
- Pavlov experminted and confirmed about the shortcuts taken by animal instincts via correlations, avoiding the hardwork of reasoning every time. This optimization is natural for all life forms including humans. And that's how evolution happens.
But, you don't need to game it by being specifically aware of what's going on. When you fabricate your responses in order to give false correlations to people around you, it causes distrust and alienation, purely because of your inconsistent responses over time. So the optimal option is just being what you are.
- Judging from the comments Boz and the rest of the careless people he works with did a great job at training a good part of us to really dislike them and the company they work for
- I don't like the comparison at all. Behaviorism has been long discredited in favour of more complex representations of our cognitive process [1].
Please don't treat people around you like experiments.
[1] https://personal.utdallas.edu/~tres/spatial/tolman.pdf
by dan-robertson
0 subcomment
- It’s a funny way of describing things but it seems like sensible advice. Probably lots of people don’t need this lesson explained to them this way, but it probably does click for some people, and getting them to see the bigger picture of what they’re communicating seems good for them and the people they interact with.
by cat-whisperer
0 subcomment
- Adding to this: socially awkward people shouldn't feel pressured to mute themselves.
> Everything being a repeat game and people on the sideline taking notes
This isn't an excuse to play small. The universe rewards courage.
- The author misunderstands basic human behavior here. And there are enough literal-minded people on HN that everyone ought to just avoid this advice entirely.
Just one example-- some narcissists will take the author's strategy personally, and they will fuck with him relentlessly for their own amusement. Worse, it won't be clear to onlookers who is the victim and who is the aggressor. It will appear as one low-empathy individual trying to "train" others while another, intransigent individual actively resists the training. There's even a good chance onlookers will see the narcissist as the good guy, successfully fighting back against the author's snobbery and condescension. If you can't think of a citation for this pattern then you don't currently live in the U.S.
And that's ignoring the fact that inconsistencies in other people's reactions over time often don't have anything to do with the author's behavior. Someone who comes away from interactions "feeling small" may in fact be consumed with their own crippling anxiety. Interpreting that as a failure of the author's Pavlovian strategy is a recipe for codependency that helps no one. The whole metaphor is a fool's errand.
by Peteragain
0 subcomment
- Nice. I was once accused of having Tourette's Syndrome for "speaking my mind". I was young then and think I am better now but this is the advice I needed :-)
- Eloquent and insightful article. I can confirm the method works.
- What happened to just being honest, communicating respectfully, and doing the right thing?
by camillomiller
0 subcomment
- Banal and superficial mechanistic take on human behavior.
Which is exactly what I would expect from Meta’s CTO
by GinsengJar
0 subcomment
- I've absolutely measured people in this way time and time again. From the POV of owning delivery, you very quickly learn, from the little details, who you should put on your go-to list.
by mentalgear
1 subcomments
- I reviewed the mini-blog post and initially thought: "Okay, this doesn't seem unreasonable". Then I clicked over to the "About" section, only to find out the author is the CTO of Meta (and proudly at Facebook for two decades).
Then took a closer look at the latest post, "Love what you do." Really? If "loving what you do" means contributing to Facebook/Meta’s legacy of facilitating genocides, exploiting users, running unethical social experiments, and overall polarizing societies to the brink of destruction just for profit - then your "life advice" is just hollow, superficial nonsense. Screw you, "Boz" - we don’t need that kind of hypocrisy at HN.
- "This doesn’t mean everything should be ... [this] ... or ... [that]."
This is a typical LLM sentence typically as first sentence of the conclusion. Just sayin.
by SirensOfTitan
4 subcomments
- What an impoverished way of looking at relationship. I’m not surprised Boz wrote this one—someone with a reputation of being high friction and being hard to work with.
I couldn’t imagine thinking of relationships so transactionally, like every moment I spend with someone is just increasing or decreasing my score with them. There is very little room in this tersely communicated philosophy for intimacy and vulnerability, and in fact, the “hard feedback” he mentions can only be delivered successfully within the context of a trustful relationship.
by lifetimerubyist
1 subcomments
- > Andrew "Boz" Bosworth (born January 7, 1982)[1] is an American business executive and U.S. Army Reserve officer who has been chief technology officer at Meta since January 2022.
Yeah, my advice would be to take whatever this guy says and…do the opposite.
- That name rings a bell.
by VoodooJuJu
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by booleandilemma
0 subcomment
- Good job, Andrew! Nice article!
by integraldragon
0 subcomment
- Excellent short read! This also applies to yourself. The way you talk to yourself matters and is a repeatable game.
The Third Patriarch of Zen wrote: The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
It’s a fun game to notice all the little preferences we introduce in our self talk and be intentional in our responses.
Hacker News