I handle 100% of my indie app's email and telephone (yes, telephone!) support. My app is designing/printing labels. Printers in general, and label printers specifically are awful and inconsiderate robots, unable to perform the simplest printing job when you need it most.
Sure, 2-5% of my users are nasty/mean, but let me tell you a little secret: They are immensely frustrated with their life situation and they know how simple the solution should be. If you can show them the light, if you can "flip" these users, they will become your most loyal customers.
I start by telling them, "Hey, every month I get a call like yours where you are so frustrated you want to scream, and let me tell you a secret, if I got a call every day like this... I'd quit this business, but calls like yours are rare and I want to help you through this."
Boom. They're listening, and they're often listening to advice they don't want to hear. What kind of advice? Oh... like, "you will have to work through this and tweak the measurements until it works, because some printer drivers are mysterious and terrible. But once you get it, you'll be rewarded with it working for a long time until you have to buy a new printer."
Still, 50/1000 seems high to me, I like to think I earn the trust of 90% of my nasty/mean customers. Sometimes I'm lucky and I just paste a URL to a FAQ. After 4 years in business I had my first person hang up on me because they kept demanding a simple answer and I would say, "sorry, it's more complicated than that, I don't have a simple answer... I just have two complex answers that contradict each other until you can choose which one is the lesser of two evils."
It could be a book that no one would read: Zen and the Art of Label Printing
A lot of people contact support half-expecting that they'll get fucked around, and you see a complete 180 in their tone as soon as you offer a decent solution to their problem.
Of course, there are still those people who just want an excuse to be a cunt (maybe 1% or less, from my experience). I don't push them too hard to reach a solution, and just graciously accept the money they've paid me as an admission fee for what they actually wanted - an excuse to feel righteous when they smear shit on the walls.
I did tech support for a few years and probably answered 100k calls or so. I would estimate that less than 1% of people were unreasonable. 2-3% were mean people. 80% were kind. It's a hard job and you have to focus on the good.
> Sure, 2-5% of my users are nasty/mean, but let me tell you a little secret: They are immensely frustrated with their life situation and they know how simple the solution should be.
Yours is a wonderful comment and you must be a very empathetic person.
Sadly, the vast majority of people tend to have just enough empathy to get by (we definitely are outliers!) and have a really hard time understanding that the very mean person most probably just had a terrible, terrible day or week, and lashed out on you. Yeah, it sucks and it is non excusable, but we all go through the worst days of our lives eventually.
In my experience it is wrong to assume that 5% of people are nasty, like the article says. It's a sad view of the world. 5% of people are currently blinded by life that has just shit upon them, and patience and a little selflessness would calm them down, and maybe, make their shitty day even better. And if they are complaining about something, whatever their attitude, there is probably something wrong that needs your attention.
Sociopaths exists but they are very rare, and often they just want to go about their day, not caring much about you to do anything good or bad.
While I’m sure this is a real problem, I’ve been on the other side of this equation where you’ve tried your level best to get a problem resolved, and not only haven’t had it resolved, but have been repeatedly screwed even more.
For example, many years ago, I signed up for a landline phone (when that’s all there was), and signed up for a particular special service that Ameritech was offering that would allow me to have a computer on a modem running 24/7 without getting unreasonable charges. Eventually, I get the first bill and it’s charging me the regular rate. I sigh and call them. They agree it’s their mistake and they’ll fix it to remove the charge and it will be reflected in the next bill. It isn’t. I go around in circles for 6 months, with my bill increasing to thousands of dollars. Finally I call them up and just start screaming at someone, and that is what finally got it fixed.
I’m not proud to have done that, but sometimes it’s the only option. The person I was yelling at wasn’t the one who caused the problem or lied to me, but I didn’t know of any other options at the time. (I was raised by wolves, it turns out.) And, ultimately, it worked.
None of the examples given in the article make me think it would consider screaming at a representative of a company that’s wrongfully cost you thousands of dollars after you’ve spent months trying to rectify it as part of the “5%”. That’s totally reasonable, even if it want directly the representative’s fault. Screaming at a service worker because of a hair in your food isn’t—that’s psychotic.
Yes, this was my question. Are 3-5% of people horrible all the time, or are we all horrible 3-5% of the time? Or more likely at any given time 3-5% of us are horrible, with some of us entering the group more often than others.
It isn't your fault. Support systems are designed to triage and remediate. This means the loudest voices get served the best, or, that the squeaky wheel gets what they need. Of course, there are limits to this. One thing I've noticed is when I am in an automated call tree with voice recognition, speaking loudly (almost yelling), gruffly, and demanding a human will often get you an level 2 or higher support tech. I tend to shut this off when a human gets on the line, but the call does get dispositioned and often white-gloved.
Personality traits like this are on a Bell curve, so he's just talking about the "left hand corner" of that curve. The percentage just depends on your threshold for tolerance.
I know people who are convinced that 50% of people are horrible people, their tolerance stops at "anything left of the median".
My tolerance is the opposite, and I can work with even quite problematic people successfully, so I would estimate that just 1% of people make that unnecessarily difficult.
I agree, and want to also add: If you're in software / tech (if this is an incorrect assumption on my part please say so and I apologize in advance; I've become used to seeing your posts and my sense is this might be your domain), on average you're working with people who are significantly more intelligent than the average adult human being.
In my experience, the rate of nasty / miserable / mentally unstable / "want the world to burn" chaotic people amongst the general public in the United States is pretty close to 1 in 20 (5%).
At my swe jobs it's been more like what you say~ 1% or less who are serious struggles to try and work with.
This has been my experience as well. I, too, have met and talked to thousands of people from every possible background on seven different continents of this world. From the poorest people on Earth to some of the richest.
I've seen the same thing. About 5% are nasty and about 1% are truly bad people who commit horrible crimes.
Saying this from my personal experience [ workspace related not familial ] : What happens is that some of these bad people have charisma, can make you follow them, for their ulterior motives. So if you get trapped in that circle, because you tolerated for so long, you probably did not get to experience the 5% bad, but maybe 20% bad over your lifetime. So my lesson there is ... walk. You recognize a problem, you walk, rather than try to fix it. Of course you should give a chance, but that is it - just one chance and then none.
Makes me wonder if the distribution is independent of other personality and socioeconomic factors.
Much earlier in life I helped recruit for a cult (much has changed since then). 3% - 5% seems on the high side for people who "just suck" -- perhaps by an order of magnitude. But perhaps the "just sucks" is context dependent. I found early on the FORD bulletpoints makes it pretty simple to start smalltalk (Family, Occupation, Recreation, Dreams/Desires).
The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time. When you work sales, some people will enter your store on the day they got dumped, their family member died, they got kicked out of school. You never know why people are acting out. Chances are it's nothing about you.
Other cases, it might not be the person's first time in the store. If they tried several times to fix a problem they are frustrated and and angry. I've had this happen to me multiple times and no matter how patient and nice the representative is, it doesn't change the fact I've wasted way too much time on this problem and you can't make me happy. Even if you solve my problem, it will not make up the lost time and energy.
The only thing I'd recommend is to try and be more empathetic. You never know what the person has been through. If you think they suck and you see them at their worst, they could probably use some empathy.
> The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time. When you work sales, some people will enter your store on the day they got dumped, their family member died, they got kicked out of school. You never know why people are acting out. Chances are it's nothing about you.
As much as I hate to post training material from ChickFilA…one of the videos they required us to watch explained this all so well and really made me stop to think about what others might be dealing with when I’m interacting with them. It’s a bit heavy on the emotional angle, but does it’s job well imo.
It’s been a long time since I’ve worked there, so no clue if it’s still required or not but, here it is in its ~3 minute length.
> The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time.
The post mentions doctors and seems to indicate that they would put a higher percentage of humans in the ‘terrible’ category.
Add stress and people act poorly. There also seems to be a thing where people can’t always articulate what they are feeling (eg a specific phobia they have) and act out in response to the stress.
Once the stress has gone they are different people.
Don’t get me wrong, I also think that more than 5% of people are terrible.
It depends on how you handle a bad day. If you are self aware and explain "I am having a bad day before I got here." any rep with a modicum of empathy will appreciate your grace/effort to not lose your shit, often being extra nice about it.
But that relies on customer 5% not meeting a rep in that 5% too.
I feel like this guy is my therapist and just told me a fantastic insight that's perfect for me at that moment.
As I was reading it, I came to the same conclusion as the writer -
You really have permission to free your mind of those people and just focus on taking care of the people who don't suck. Just expect it and move about your day.
In 20 years of dealing with customers I've had to deal with maybe 3 people who were real jerks. Maybe my experience is unusual, but my customers come from all over the world. Rich countries, poor countries, non-profits, startups to fortune 500. Practically everybody is friendly and respectful.
Occasionally people are irritable or upset, but I don't take it at all personally. I just assume they're having a bad day or that they're angry for valid reasons I just don't know. When people figure out you actually want to help them the anger dissipates immediately.
Verizon treats their customers with contempt as a business practice, and when you call their support the phone operators are not authorized to actually resolve your issue anyway. So yeah, that makes people angry. They would leave if they could, but where would they go? AT&T? It's a racket.
> Verizon treats their customers with contempt as a business practice
I agree, but with actual support technicians at Verizon I've actually had pretty decent, even above average interactions. The company itself does things I detest, but I try not to take it out on the people answering the phone.
Personality disorders are very real and surprisingly prevalent, with 3.6% of Americans meeting the diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder and 4.4% for paranoid personality disorder (the two disorders that are most likely to make people difficult and unpleasant to deal with). https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/pn.3...
I wonder if people with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) might be high on the "likely to make people difficult and unpleasant" list as well. A quick search suggests that ~5% of the population has NPD, which surprised me.
Many laws, company policies, etc exist to prevent those 5% from causing damage to the rest of the population. So 95% of people have to live with restrictions and bureaucracy that merely exists for those small group.
That might be the wrong way to look at it, or rather, it doesn't take into consideration the natural minimum.
It may be that just 5% of people will continue to break the rules _despite_ the bureaucracy.
So, how many of the 95% are following the rules _because_ of the bureaucracy? I suspect it's much higher than most people would care to admit.. just look what happens when the system or enforcement mechanisms break down.
"Live with" is a weird framing, isn't it? If we accept the claim for a moment, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the restrictions exist to give the 95% the best chance at a reasonable, unmolested life?
Encountered the same in dating: 20% of women are flakes, 10% are bad people, 5% really bad. 80% are good.
15-20% of women are flakes (non-maliciously unreliable, can't keep commitments), 5-10% (half of those) are actually maliciously bad people--bad/psychotic/abusive/crazy, 1-5% (half again) really bad (like psychopath/sociopath/criminally deranged bad). 80% are good. Stick with the good! Says nothing of actual compatibility in a pair just basic good or not.
That 20% of flakey (including the 10% of bad and 5% really bad) has nothing to do with you, it's not your fault nor your responsibility that they are like that, and their feelings and behavior are not your responsibility no matter how they might try to blame you for that; and there's nothing you can do to "change" them or "help" them or "better" them. And you probably can't "handle" them. If you get involved they're only going to try to hurt you (or in the case of flakes let you down) again and again.
So learn the signs that work for you and filter out the rest as quickly as possible. You don't have to be mean, but you have to be clear and set boundaries. There's no pride or sense or nobility in "handling" or "tolerating" a crazy or bad person. They're just dangerous and unpleasant.
The other possible sampling (which doesn't contradict the author's lived experience!) is that there are is a tiny fraction of uniformly nasty individuals, and a substantially larger (maybe even majority) of individuals who are nasty at individual points in time.
I think this is true, but the way I would put it is:
While you have influence over 95% of what happens to you, you can only really survive the other 5%. Take solace in the fact that, sometimes, when it seems like there's nothing you can do - you are right! That said, often the path to self-improvement is in situations we've misunderstood as "we can't effect" and are actually caused by us.
I've taken MDMA on 4 separate occasions, in the crystal form each time, at a dose of 200mg. Each time, I've watched my friends' eyes pop out of their skulls, sweat like crazy and hug everything in sight. I felt slightly better. Drugs most definitely affect people differently.
I've found that a lot of people in our industry (higher than 5%, probably much higher the smarter they are) have BPD or are on the spectrum which causes anger issues when things don't fit the pattern or outcome they're expecting.
I'm not saying that to disparage these people, but I've learned to be careful in how I interact with certain people, especially as that top tier of brilliant engineer are the ones I want to learn from and respect, technically. They literally don't know they're being awful, but in realizing the deficits here -- even they do not -- it helps in not dismissing certain people or just throwing them into the 'crappy' bucket.
Even though I agree that there is probably a fixed porcentage of bastards in the world's population, I think 5% is a too high number. That's one in twenty and I don't think I will find one in twenty people who are the classical bastard in the groups of people I interact with.
I think it's more like 2-3% in my very subjective experience, of course.
I also think that the setting matters a lot. If you are in a very competitive environment, like the author in the article, maybe the circumstances push the number to 5%, but if you are in a relaxed, friendly setting, I think the percentage might lower to 1-2%.
In my experience people who express this kind of view (a slightly-sweeping, slightly-cynical take on the prevalence of shitty people) also tend to be epistemically overconfident of their grasp on social situations. For example, my opinion of the following quote is that it sounds contrived (Not contrived for the blog post, but contrived in the sense that the "brought the hair with her" hypothesis is itself contrived).
> My experience serving/bartending in restaurants was the same... As an example: one time a lady threw a huge fit about a 2-3 inch smooth brown hair being in her meal when her server was a blond girl and the entire kitchen staff were 35+ year-old Mexicans/ African Americans with completely shaved heads. Now I'm not saying this woman brought the hair into the restaurant and planted it in her meal... but I know for a fact it couldn't have been from any of our staff in the restaurant, so you can make your own decision.
My take is that there's less shitty people and more shitty Bayesians :)
> As an example: one time a lady threw a huge fit about a 2-3 inch smooth brown hair being in her meal when her server was a blond girl and the entire kitchen staff were 35+ year-old Mexicans/ African Americans with completely shaved heads. Now I'm not saying this woman brought the hair into the restaurant and planted it in her meal... but I know for a fact it couldn't have been from any of our staff in the restaurant, so you can make your own decision.
So true. I take this as an aid towards my customer support approach. I guess it’s a good idea to include a slide on the onboarding process where we mention this and give some tips into how to deal with this in the most respectful, yet decisive way.
5% of encounters != 5% of people. In fact, even if the poster tried marketing to the same people at different times, he might well have gotten a different 5%. Some correlation, for sure, but still. Not to mention how encounters are a binary thing - another person might get a different 5%.
Also, the samples he's talking about are not really uniformly distributed over the world's population (i.e. "people"), nor even people in the USA.
[+] [-] semireg|3 years ago|reply
Sure, 2-5% of my users are nasty/mean, but let me tell you a little secret: They are immensely frustrated with their life situation and they know how simple the solution should be. If you can show them the light, if you can "flip" these users, they will become your most loyal customers.
I start by telling them, "Hey, every month I get a call like yours where you are so frustrated you want to scream, and let me tell you a secret, if I got a call every day like this... I'd quit this business, but calls like yours are rare and I want to help you through this."
Boom. They're listening, and they're often listening to advice they don't want to hear. What kind of advice? Oh... like, "you will have to work through this and tweak the measurements until it works, because some printer drivers are mysterious and terrible. But once you get it, you'll be rewarded with it working for a long time until you have to buy a new printer."
Still, 50/1000 seems high to me, I like to think I earn the trust of 90% of my nasty/mean customers. Sometimes I'm lucky and I just paste a URL to a FAQ. After 4 years in business I had my first person hang up on me because they kept demanding a simple answer and I would say, "sorry, it's more complicated than that, I don't have a simple answer... I just have two complex answers that contradict each other until you can choose which one is the lesser of two evils."
It could be a book that no one would read: Zen and the Art of Label Printing
A quick video of my app Label LIVE, narrated by yours truly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnqUP1CZd24
[+] [-] AussieWog93|3 years ago|reply
A lot of people contact support half-expecting that they'll get fucked around, and you see a complete 180 in their tone as soon as you offer a decent solution to their problem.
Of course, there are still those people who just want an excuse to be a cunt (maybe 1% or less, from my experience). I don't push them too hard to reach a solution, and just graciously accept the money they've paid me as an admission fee for what they actually wanted - an excuse to feel righteous when they smear shit on the walls.
[+] [-] roflyear|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sph|3 years ago|reply
Yours is a wonderful comment and you must be a very empathetic person.
Sadly, the vast majority of people tend to have just enough empathy to get by (we definitely are outliers!) and have a really hard time understanding that the very mean person most probably just had a terrible, terrible day or week, and lashed out on you. Yeah, it sucks and it is non excusable, but we all go through the worst days of our lives eventually.
In my experience it is wrong to assume that 5% of people are nasty, like the article says. It's a sad view of the world. 5% of people are currently blinded by life that has just shit upon them, and patience and a little selflessness would calm them down, and maybe, make their shitty day even better. And if they are complaining about something, whatever their attitude, there is probably something wrong that needs your attention.
Sociopaths exists but they are very rare, and often they just want to go about their day, not caring much about you to do anything good or bad.
[+] [-] EMM_386|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cookie_monsta|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcurve|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] franga2000|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptonector|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omgwtf1000|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lapcat|3 years ago|reply
Same.
> Still, 50/1000 seems high to me
Same.
[+] [-] thewebcount|3 years ago|reply
For example, many years ago, I signed up for a landline phone (when that’s all there was), and signed up for a particular special service that Ameritech was offering that would allow me to have a computer on a modem running 24/7 without getting unreasonable charges. Eventually, I get the first bill and it’s charging me the regular rate. I sigh and call them. They agree it’s their mistake and they’ll fix it to remove the charge and it will be reflected in the next bill. It isn’t. I go around in circles for 6 months, with my bill increasing to thousands of dollars. Finally I call them up and just start screaming at someone, and that is what finally got it fixed.
I’m not proud to have done that, but sometimes it’s the only option. The person I was yelling at wasn’t the one who caused the problem or lied to me, but I didn’t know of any other options at the time. (I was raised by wolves, it turns out.) And, ultimately, it worked.
[+] [-] sodapopcan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] galangalalgol|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomrod|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] galaxyLogic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tobinfekkes|3 years ago|reply
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xtgH74hh6pQ
[+] [-] motoxpro|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggawatts|3 years ago|reply
I know people who are convinced that 50% of people are horrible people, their tolerance stops at "anything left of the median".
My tolerance is the opposite, and I can work with even quite problematic people successfully, so I would estimate that just 1% of people make that unnecessarily difficult.
[+] [-] metadat|3 years ago|reply
I agree, and want to also add: If you're in software / tech (if this is an incorrect assumption on my part please say so and I apologize in advance; I've become used to seeing your posts and my sense is this might be your domain), on average you're working with people who are significantly more intelligent than the average adult human being.
In my experience, the rate of nasty / miserable / mentally unstable / "want the world to burn" chaotic people amongst the general public in the United States is pretty close to 1 in 20 (5%).
At my swe jobs it's been more like what you say~ 1% or less who are serious struggles to try and work with.
[+] [-] kilroy123|3 years ago|reply
I've seen the same thing. About 5% are nasty and about 1% are truly bad people who commit horrible crimes.
[+] [-] kshacker|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomrod|3 years ago|reply
Much earlier in life I helped recruit for a cult (much has changed since then). 3% - 5% seems on the high side for people who "just suck" -- perhaps by an order of magnitude. But perhaps the "just sucks" is context dependent. I found early on the FORD bulletpoints makes it pretty simple to start smalltalk (Family, Occupation, Recreation, Dreams/Desires).
[+] [-] magic_hamster|3 years ago|reply
Other cases, it might not be the person's first time in the store. If they tried several times to fix a problem they are frustrated and and angry. I've had this happen to me multiple times and no matter how patient and nice the representative is, it doesn't change the fact I've wasted way too much time on this problem and you can't make me happy. Even if you solve my problem, it will not make up the lost time and energy.
The only thing I'd recommend is to try and be more empathetic. You never know what the person has been through. If you think they suck and you see them at their worst, they could probably use some empathy.
[+] [-] flutas|3 years ago|reply
As much as I hate to post training material from ChickFilA…one of the videos they required us to watch explained this all so well and really made me stop to think about what others might be dealing with when I’m interacting with them. It’s a bit heavy on the emotional angle, but does it’s job well imo.
It’s been a long time since I’ve worked there, so no clue if it’s still required or not but, here it is in its ~3 minute length.
https://youtu.be/2v0RhvZ3lvY
[+] [-] lostlogin|3 years ago|reply
The post mentions doctors and seems to indicate that they would put a higher percentage of humans in the ‘terrible’ category.
Add stress and people act poorly. There also seems to be a thing where people can’t always articulate what they are feeling (eg a specific phobia they have) and act out in response to the stress.
Once the stress has gone they are different people.
Don’t get me wrong, I also think that more than 5% of people are terrible.
I work in healthcare as a radiographer.
[+] [-] _carbyau_|3 years ago|reply
It depends on how you handle a bad day. If you are self aware and explain "I am having a bad day before I got here." any rep with a modicum of empathy will appreciate your grace/effort to not lose your shit, often being extra nice about it.
But that relies on customer 5% not meeting a rep in that 5% too.
[+] [-] mustafabisic1|3 years ago|reply
As I was reading it, I came to the same conclusion as the writer -
You really have permission to free your mind of those people and just focus on taking care of the people who don't suck. Just expect it and move about your day.
That's freeing for me.
[+] [-] gizmo|3 years ago|reply
Occasionally people are irritable or upset, but I don't take it at all personally. I just assume they're having a bad day or that they're angry for valid reasons I just don't know. When people figure out you actually want to help them the anger dissipates immediately.
Verizon treats their customers with contempt as a business practice, and when you call their support the phone operators are not authorized to actually resolve your issue anyway. So yeah, that makes people angry. They would leave if they could, but where would they go? AT&T? It's a racket.
[+] [-] rootusrootus|3 years ago|reply
I agree, but with actual support technicians at Verizon I've actually had pretty decent, even above average interactions. The company itself does things I detest, but I try not to take it out on the people answering the phone.
[+] [-] beautifulfreak|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CharlesW|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ozzie_osman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akira2501|3 years ago|reply
It may be that just 5% of people will continue to break the rules _despite_ the bureaucracy.
So, how many of the 95% are following the rules _because_ of the bureaucracy? I suspect it's much higher than most people would care to admit.. just look what happens when the system or enforcement mechanisms break down.
[+] [-] woodruffw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LastTrain|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graderjs|3 years ago|reply
15-20% of women are flakes (non-maliciously unreliable, can't keep commitments), 5-10% (half of those) are actually maliciously bad people--bad/psychotic/abusive/crazy, 1-5% (half again) really bad (like psychopath/sociopath/criminally deranged bad). 80% are good. Stick with the good! Says nothing of actual compatibility in a pair just basic good or not.
That 20% of flakey (including the 10% of bad and 5% really bad) has nothing to do with you, it's not your fault nor your responsibility that they are like that, and their feelings and behavior are not your responsibility no matter how they might try to blame you for that; and there's nothing you can do to "change" them or "help" them or "better" them. And you probably can't "handle" them. If you get involved they're only going to try to hurt you (or in the case of flakes let you down) again and again.
So learn the signs that work for you and filter out the rest as quickly as possible. You don't have to be mean, but you have to be clear and set boundaries. There's no pride or sense or nobility in "handling" or "tolerating" a crazy or bad person. They're just dangerous and unpleasant.
[+] [-] woodruffw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aeturnum|3 years ago|reply
While you have influence over 95% of what happens to you, you can only really survive the other 5%. Take solace in the fact that, sometimes, when it seems like there's nothing you can do - you are right! That said, often the path to self-improvement is in situations we've misunderstood as "we can't effect" and are actually caused by us.
[+] [-] AndrewDucker|3 years ago|reply
https://www.hugthemonkey.com/2007/03/paul_zak_oxytoc.html
[+] [-] metadat|3 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34201142
[+] [-] chasebank|3 years ago|reply
Edit: I can't read. Ha. I read oxycodone.
[+] [-] frellus|3 years ago|reply
I'm not saying that to disparage these people, but I've learned to be careful in how I interact with certain people, especially as that top tier of brilliant engineer are the ones I want to learn from and respect, technically. They literally don't know they're being awful, but in realizing the deficits here -- even they do not -- it helps in not dismissing certain people or just throwing them into the 'crappy' bucket.
[+] [-] fbdab103|3 years ago|reply
I will take an average but nice person over a genius asshole every time.
[+] [-] lp4vn|3 years ago|reply
I think it's more like 2-3% in my very subjective experience, of course.
I also think that the setting matters a lot. If you are in a very competitive environment, like the author in the article, maybe the circumstances push the number to 5%, but if you are in a relaxed, friendly setting, I think the percentage might lower to 1-2%.
[+] [-] killthebuddha|3 years ago|reply
> My experience serving/bartending in restaurants was the same... As an example: one time a lady threw a huge fit about a 2-3 inch smooth brown hair being in her meal when her server was a blond girl and the entire kitchen staff were 35+ year-old Mexicans/ African Americans with completely shaved heads. Now I'm not saying this woman brought the hair into the restaurant and planted it in her meal... but I know for a fact it couldn't have been from any of our staff in the restaurant, so you can make your own decision.
My take is that there's less shitty people and more shitty Bayesians :)
[+] [-] flashgordon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plugin-baby|3 years ago|reply
Check the author’s photo!
[+] [-] rashidae|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] einpoklum|3 years ago|reply
Also, the samples he's talking about are not really uniformly distributed over the world's population (i.e. "people"), nor even people in the USA.