For years, I was simply fascinated by Mission: Organization
Know your audience.-- common advice for crafting an effective message
A lot of years ago, when actual televisions were still a part of my life, I saw a piece that talked about a two-member stage act in historical America when racism was a much bigger thing. They were both Black men but one had "good hair" and one had relatively pale skin.
At the end of the act, the guy with good hair took his hat off when he bowed to the audience and the guy with pale skin lifted his arm so you could see the bare skin on the inside of his upper arm. Given their heavy makeup and costumes, flashing the audience with this much evidence made them White-passing for their purposes.
I'm not very good at things like that. When people say something that sounds odd to me and implies certain assumptions about me, I'm prone to ASKING them about the implied information.
At some point, I largely stopped asking people "How old do you think I am?" because I found that unproductive. People frequently aren't aware why, in specific, they use a particular phrasing and then they wonder what you WANT to hear from them. Asking people uncomfortable questions isn't any better than inferring their assumptions and now it introduces weird social elements that I don't want to deal with.
Gathering accurate social data is challenging. People participating in a study or pilot program know it's not real life and don't behave like they would in real life, so I don't think pilot programs for UBI that routinely claim it doesn't impact employment figures are useful.
Participants know the money will end, so they don't quit their job. This doesn't necessarily mean they wouldn't quit their job if they genuinely thought it was for life.
When I was younger, I had this brain glitch where I was going to accumulate my way to a more spartan lifestyle. It took me a long time to come to grips with the fact that living a more spartan life would involve getting rid of mountains of stuff.
After I had gotten rid of most of my possessions but before I really got my brain wrapped around the whole thing, for some months I obsessively watched an HGTV show called Mission: Organization.
I was extremely fascinated by the show and I assumed it was a form of therapy helping me consolidate this new pattern of thinking but I remained fascinated for years afterwards. I relatively recently concluded it's because they were dealing with brain damaged Americans like me and they embraced the idiotic message "We shall help you accumulate your way to a more spartan life!" and tricked them into getting rid of stuff.
The show always started with them having people make THREE piles of their belongings:
1. Keep
2. Trash
3. Sell or give away
Notice how two of the three categories are effectively "NOT keeping it." Simply making the get rid of pile into TWO categories helps people feel like they are keeping more of their stuff. If the three piles are all equal in size, they mentally are more comfortable getting rid of two thirds of their stuff than if you have two piles, and the keep pile is half the size of the get rid of pile.
At the END, after getting rid of tons of stuff, they went SHOPPING and BOUGHT shelves or various types of organizers and organized the space, then chatted up what they ADDED to ORGANIZE it all and downplayed the fact that FIRST we made you get rid of a mountain of crap.
I value the truth and I always feel like it's important to educate people and change minds and I'm inherently not comfortable with the above con job. It worked in the short run and made for a great TV show but I can't help but wonder how many of those people eventually found themselves drowning in a mountain of North American Affluenza again over time because their takeaway was likely "Buy more shelves and organizers" and not "Get rid of stuff you aren't really using."
At one time, a fair number of people on Hacker News were fairly kind to me. One guy gifted me a membership to Metafilter hoping that would help me sort my problems and once said something to me like "Maybe you can become a well paid blogger via popularity on HN like Patrick McKenzie."
Yeah, no. I WISH.
1. I don't have the right bits between my legs.
2. I'm not Catholic.
3. I'm not a con artist and if I were, see 1 above. HN would NEVER let that fly for a woman.
Patrick had a job of some sort and ended up using intellectual property developed on the job to launch his first paid "business" which is more rightly characterized as a side gig. He used to publicly admit that and claimed he was in the clear legally, but at some point changed what his personal blog said about that, so I'm not sure if that's actually true.
He probably spent something like five hours a week on it and made enough to pay his rent and support himself as a single guy. This allowed him to leave his job and become "a consultant."
If a WOMAN worked very part-time on a project that made money that barely supported her and then characterized herself as a business woman, I'm pretty sure all of HN would roundly drag her and constantly remind her that it's not like she's a REAL business founder involving VC money and employees and making millions. They would loudly congratulate her on getting freedom from working at a low paid day job with her SIDE GIG and harp on that until she shut up or stopped talking about herself like a SERIOUS business person and used more accurate phrasing for her activities.
As "a consultant" with a very part-time side gig that kept a roof over his head and food on the table, he was free to NOT work at all at anything else.
So his BATNA -- Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement -- was "I'll work five hours this week and barely scrape by." He didn't NEED an income as a consultant. Negotiating consultant contracts was a GAME to him.
So he began raising his weekly price for his consulting work to see just how much people would pay him. If I recall correctly, his highest pay was $30,000 for a week of his time and THEN he raised it to $50,000 got told "NOPE" and tried to start another business, a tale I will get to shortly.
But WHILE he was playing brinksmanship of this sort, he blogged about it. And serious programmers with real programming careers working for The Man who were underpaid took his advice to "Just ASK for more money!" to heart and got pay increases or better paying jobs.
These guys became his biggest fans and spread the word about what a GENIUS he was and this made him. Other people promoted his work, subscribed to his paid emails and etc.
No one stopped and went "Wait a minute, the people trying his advice and getting fabulous results aren't remotely in the same situation as him. They are competent, hard working people who are underpaid and undervalued but if that's not you and you also aren't positioned like Patrick McKenzie, this game of salary brinksmanship could really bite you in the butt and leave you unemployed."
It ultimately left Patrick McKenzie unemployed but he ended up a millionaire when he sold his side gig based on stolen IP and then went and got a virtual job working for a YC funded company because he has boy bits between his legs. Everyone on HN knows I desperately need more earned income but most people only talk to me hoping to get laid and no one is offering to rescue me from poverty via a well-paid virtual job as my reward for being a con artist and failed "business person."
And I'm seriously handicapped, so I have better reasons than greed plus zero ethics for my failure to cut it as a freelancer trying to make money online while all of HN openly mocked the idea that anyone uses HN to make money online.
Silly me. No clue where I got this ridiculous idea people did that.
/S
Anyway, when he got told "NOPE, we aren't paying $50k/week." he then started a new business with another Catholic guy similarly high on the leaderboard who had been a founder of a REAL business named Thomas Ptacek.
But Thomas Ptacek's business success was rooted in his programmer WIFE having a real job that provided health insurance for the family in the early days and I imagine Thomas Ptacek didn't realize what a loser he actually was much less that Patrick McKenzie was a much bigger loser whose reputation as a brilliant businessman was effectively con artistry rooted in part in other people running his advice through their minds and life experiences and failing to see that the demographic this stunt ACTUALLY worked for to create a well-paid serious career was a completely different demographic than Patrick McKenzie.
I think their business died in something like eighteen months and then Patrick McKenzie got a virtual job for a YC funded company and still talks online like he knows his shit when he really doesn't. Why HN tolerates this nonsense, I absolutely cannot fathom but I'm CERTAIN if a WOMAN -- aka ME -- tried something similar, no one on HN would buy this BULLSHIT.
I wouldn't be comfortable having success based on something like that to begin with so I haven't spent a lot of time whining and crying about HN being so happy to kiss his butt, line his pockets, say wonderful things about him and buy his BS. But I'm also absolutely certain I have the wrong bits between my legs to be allowed to get away with something like that on HN.
I don't know if Patrick McKenzie is some genius at figuring out how to sell your audience on the message they WANT to hear, like Mission: Organization was, or if he's a bumbling idiot who stumbled into "This garbage works!" without ever realizing he didn't really have the business chops he thought he had and he just kind of got lucky and had the right demographic details for HN to go "Oh, sure, that passes the sniff test." without REALLY investigating it in earnest.
I don't have any of those signifiers. They probably all are concerned that I'm what Patrick McKenzie actually is -- someone looking to milk members of HN for money without REALLY having anything of substance to add -- and don't care that it's left me in poverty to not be taken seriously by anyone because in their world and values, people like that deserve to die on the streets of poverty.
I can't say that I fundamentally disagree with them either but that's not what I'm doing, so it sucks to be me I guess.