One aspect of this I’ve been thinking about for a long time (partially for intensely personal and complicated reasons!) is honing my criticism/complaint razor. I think I set up the idea pretty well in the last half of this comment.
The difficult thing about separating a critic (someone who helps you find a path through action space that deletes their complaint) from a complainer (someone who’s the opposite of that) is that, while you have to protect your attention from complainers to a nontrivial degree, you may accidentally block a high quality adversary because what seems like a complaint is actually a criticism that’s just really really hard to address, and you don’t know the difference.
So on the one hand the existence of serial complainers (people who are hostile to solving problems) implies that problem solvers should be wary of crab buckets (and may be drawn to them out of humility or interest in soliciting criticism or desire to be actually right), on the other why should you expect to hone a heuristic for sorting them out quickly? It’s deeply tricky.
One aspect of this I’ve been thinking about for a long time (partially for intensely personal and complicated reasons!) is honing my criticism/complaint razor. I think I set up the idea pretty well in the last half of this comment.
So on the one hand the existence of serial complainers (people who are hostile to solving problems) implies that problem solvers should be wary of crab buckets (and may be drawn to them out of humility or interest in soliciting criticism or desire to be actually right), on the other why should you expect to hone a heuristic for sorting them out quickly? It’s deeply tricky.