Disregard Haters

I’m always surprisded when I find people being mean to others on the Internet.

I follow Lex Fridman on Twitter and other media. Lex is a researcher scientist on Human-robot interaction and machine learning at MIT. I don’t know him personally, but he seems brilliant, determined, and humble, a combination of qualities that’s not easy to find. He has a podcast where he does long interviews with very interesting people, which I enjoy a lot. By interesting people I mean, for example, John Carmack, Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, Richard Dawkins, Ray Kurzweil, and others.

Some days ago Lex published a list of the books he’s planning to read this year and posted the link on his Twitter account. As usual, his post was non-controversial and polite. What surprised me was the reaction. There were many positive comments, but there were also a lot of negative ones, ranging from hard criticism to pure distilled hatred. Fridman has 2.5+ million followers, so some critical comments are always expected. But he only posted a list of books!

I couldn’t help but remember Charlie Munger’s argument that the world is driven by envy. Then I also remembered Kevin Kelly’s TED talk The Future Will Be Shaped by Optimists. Bad things happen faster than good ones. Bad things can be “louder” that good things. But in the end, the trend is positive.

Whatever your work is, there may be always haters. Disregard them.