Once you reach a certain level of wealth, I suspect relationships are more important for happiness than accumulating even more.
If there was a button you could push that would give you $10M, but also cause many thousands of people to constantly express their hatred for you online, would you push it? Would the average person choose to push it? How would it change their expected happiness?
A great thing about a pseudonym is if I don't like how an argument is going, I can just disengage and pretend it doesn't exist. Internet discussions are like sand on the beach. Pick some up, let it run through your fingers. There's nothing special about that fistful.
I wouldn't like the dilemma of either choosing to have a backbone, and being in constant confrontation, or choosing to disengage and ceding the frame of the discussion to someone else. With a pseudonym you're more free to be wrong or just stop caring.
> If there was a button you could push that would give you $10M, but also cause many thousands of people to constantly express their hatred for you online, would you push it? Would the average person choose to push it? How would it change their expected happiness?
Bring that button over here and let me press it 10 times. I know I haven't hurt anyone physically (i.e. don't give me 10m but 100 people get cancer - I don't want that!).
$10m will buy be a nice small house somewhere remotely (200k-300k), I will stop working, I will spend my life reading books.. let's say $2k-$3k per year (I will also buy a couple expensive ones each year)(hey after all my name IS Henry Bemis!! look it up!).
Food-drink-travel.. let's say another $30k-$40k per year.
Gun & ammo & permit.. I have no idea how much they cost, but let's add 5k for all.
A Honda Accord (or similar inexpensive forever-car) $5k? $10k?
I'm not young.. so by the time I die there will be many millions to spare as well (charity, donations, inheritance, etc.)
Bring that button forward and see you never again :)
> If there was a button you could push that would give you $10M, but also cause many thousands of people to constantly express their hatred for you online, would you push it? Would the average person choose to push it? How would it change their expected happiness?
I see the point, but you'd need to change that "many thousands" to more like "many tens/hundreds of millions" for it to be deterring (assuming these people are randomly picked, and not all people you'd "want" to have relationships with).
It's not about thick skin here. With only a few thousand random people talking bad about you, there is a significant chance that you and your potential relationships will never see a single message from them. Getting into the millions is talking about thick skin, but thousands is just free money.
The original post didn't specify direct messages or other mechanisms that you would be notified about the messages. Just that people are talking about you on the internet.
>The original post didn't specify direct messages or other mechanisms that you would be notified about the messages. Just that people are talking about you on the internet.
It didn't specify a lack of DMs either. What sort of things do haters typically like to do? Note that I wrote the original comment. I was thinking along the lines of people writing hateful replies to your social media content and @mentioning you.
Fair enough. At least in my case it would be an easy decision, as my social media usage stops at hackernews. Or even if I did use something like twitter, I'd just make a new account. How would they know the new account is me?
Though, not all haters go directly after people. I'd even say those are in the minority. Most congregate to one another and form some bond over the shared dislike of said person/thing. Maybe start a subreddit, parody twitter account, or the like. Some just post complaints about the person without ever @mentioning them. I'm positive not every Elon Musk complaint tweet on twitter directly @mentions him.
A thousand people constantly mentioning online how they hate you would ruin most of your chances at establishing new relationships as well, people just have to make a single google search to see everyone hating you and that will put them off getting to know you deeper.
You would be unable to get a job, unable to get investors, unable to find a nice girlfriend etc, you could find a gold digger though. Note that unlike Trump and Musk etc you wouldn't have thousands of people that spouts praise about you in addition to all those haters, just the haters.
“A thousand people constantly mentioning online how they hate you would ruin most of your chances at establishing new relationships as well, people just have to make a single google search to see everyone hating you and that will put them off getting to know you deeper”
Is googling people after you meet them extremely common? I’m not sure that I’ve ever done so in my life, and the stakes that you raise feel wildly disproportionate.
It really depends who those thousand people are. Even with 50,000 random people talking about you, the vast majority of people you interact with will have never see their messages ever. There would need to be significant overlap in the communities of you, the bad talkers, and your relationships. And that's just to see the message, not for it to be convincing.
Even with super celebrities and literally millions of people talking about them, there are tons of celebrities I've never even heard of, let alone know what people think about them. Even the ones I know of, very few do I know the majority opinion of. Probably like 10.
Also, all celebrities have thousands of haters. Yet, I don't see them failing to achieve the things you mention to be hard/impossible in this position. At least due to the haters.
I just typed "Colleen Hoover" (the writer in the article) and the worst I saw in my search results was someone saying she read all of her books and they suck. Sure, maybe the BookTok bubble hates her, but you have to be pretty deep into it. I also typed for comparison the names of several infamous developers, and the only one who would raise an eyebrow among non-tech people is the one who was convicted of murder.
> You would be unable to get a job, unable to get investors, unable to find a nice girlfriend
If I have $10M I don't need the first two, and being rich opens my dating pool to dating other equally-rich people in similar situations.
> You would be unable to get a job, unable to get investors, unable to find a nice girlfriend etc
Idk. The whole thing is a pretty contrived. If the haters have some real issue they can point to then maybe. But otherwise you find someone who looks at you and not the hate spewed and you are groovy.
Also how intense hatered we are talking about? Like "sneaks through your window while you are asleep and stabs you, then goes to prison smiling" level of hate? Even a few of that caliber is pretty life changing. Or more like the "writes mean things in the comment section when your name or face comes up" kind of hater? Because having a few thousand of those is just usual influencer situation.
I'm early 30s actually. I think I would probably take the money myself, not 100% sure though.
Your sentiment seems common in this thread, but it doesn't square well with how worked up people seem to get with online beefs in practice, and how hard people seem to work in order to avoid getting downvoted (cc subreddit echochambers on reddit). I suspect in theory people don't care what others think, in practice things are a little different.
If the online hate doesn't translate into physical violence and security threats - than, at least for me, the answer is a simple 'yes'. I would be surprised to find out if it isn't the case for but a statistically small sample of the population.
>Some people are so poor, all they have is money.
Once you reach a certain level of wealth, I suspect relationships are more important for happiness than accumulating even more.
If there was a button you could push that would give you $10M, but also cause many thousands of people to constantly express their hatred for you online, would you push it? Would the average person choose to push it? How would it change their expected happiness?
A great thing about a pseudonym is if I don't like how an argument is going, I can just disengage and pretend it doesn't exist. Internet discussions are like sand on the beach. Pick some up, let it run through your fingers. There's nothing special about that fistful.
I wouldn't like the dilemma of either choosing to have a backbone, and being in constant confrontation, or choosing to disengage and ceding the frame of the discussion to someone else. With a pseudonym you're more free to be wrong or just stop caring.