RSA ANIMATE: Smile or Die

What people said

alecco · 2014-12 · Strong recommendation

As a writer of critical comments of "hacker" school, I think this is typical of the times. If you call out somebody you are dismissed as a debbie-downer, cynical asshat, or other things like that. This comes from a culture now dominated by PR/marketing/sales, getting crazier by the growing viral marketing and astroturfing craze. I strongly recommend you to watch Smile or Die, a talk by Barbara Ehrenreich. [VIDEO] The parallel with that is a delusion SOLD to the community. In the case of "hacker" school I criticize it as I did with the "MBA" program by Seth Godin. And I consider that I might be _completely_ wrong in both cases, but what is telling is how aggressive people got with me for speaking up my opinion.

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ak39 · 2012-12 · Recommendation

I disagree. The reason why we are often too eager to dismiss is because kindness takes effort. Empathy, and certainly sympathy, is hard work. We get lazy, we become exhausted and our reactions become snappy. Almost always the "dry your eyes" advice is inappropriate and insensitive. And it never really achieves its intended objective. I'm not saying we should all participate in crying orgies whenever someone shows signs of weakness (though, as I've aged, I think that is better than showing a cold shoulder) or that we readily invest in "idiot compassion". What I'm saying is: we are all trapped in this existential reality together and we all need to show kindness with all forms of suffering. Being cruel to be kind as a philanthropic philosophy has never worked (for me). Watch this: [VIDEO] (RSA Animate on "Smile or Die" a talk by Barbara Ehrenreich)

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MostAwesomeDude · 2011-07 · Recommendation

My issue wasn't with the "retarded" line, actually; I was more concerned by this: "If someone says something negative about your project in an unreasonable way, don’t take it to heart. There’s something good in every project (it’s open source, it already has one thing going for it), no single project is complete crap, keep the good things and learn from the criticism. All this boils down to basically 'surround yourself with good people.'" This is the kind of thinking that lets people write bad code. "Unreasonable" is subjective here and lets people be very thin-skinned and defensive about their code. There is code which is complete crap and serves only as a warning to others to pay heed, lest they write code just as bad. (Feel free to consider that hyperbolic and point out that "complete" and "serves only as" are contradictory.) It's fine to surround yourself with "good people," who I presume are people that are Good-aligned, but that's never going to reveal systemic weaknesses or flaws in your code; you're just going to end up as another group of people that relies on black hats to point out where your code was flawed. In other words, this entire post feels like thinly veiled positive thinking in excess. See [VIDEO] for a much better summary of the problem.

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