How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

>>babelf+(OP)
One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors.

He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized to the content and, to one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do that.

I actually spent over an hour writing 750+ words of my takeaways reading this document and shared it privately with a few founder friends of mine and I briefly considered also posting to share with the community but I took a look at the comments and took a look at what I wrote and decided I didn't have the energy to face the endless onslaught of nitpicks and misunderstandings that are driven, at the end of the day, not by a genuine intellectual desire to reach an understanding, but by the need to prove emotionally that others are not taking this seriously so I don't have to either.

All I can do is be vague and say I think this was an enormously valuable piece of writing that is worth engaging seriously for what it is as it might change your worldview in several important ways.

But also my larger meta-point is that there's a now near ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude that's pervaded HN that makes it an extremely unpleasant place to hold a conversation and people reading should be aware of this systematic bias when reading comments here.

>>shalma+Ho

    One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN
    is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview
    becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence,
    excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine
    your priors.

I genuinely do not know what you're trying to say here. For funsies, I tossed this into Claude 3.5 Sonnet with the prompt "Translate this into 7th grade English" (which is roughly Mr Beast's core audience?). Here was its response:

    I've seen something happening more and more on HN that bothers me.
    When someone writes something that goes against what most people
    think, the comments section gets filled with popular replies.
    These replies are basically just reasons why you don't need to
    think about changing your mind on this topic.

Assuming this is a reasonable analog to your original point, I would say that this definitionally what a mainstream response to contrarianism looks like.

>>aaronb+EK
I think OP is saying:

* He thinks most people dislike Mr. Beast, his company, and think he's popular only due to luck.

* He thinks this document makes good points, but that most people won't be able to see them due to what they believe about Mr. Beast prior to reading it.

>>johnfn+kM
Most people find it incredibly annoying when somebody they don't like makes a good point. Often they would rather reject the good point to avoid agreeing with the despicable author if it. They value long-term group identity / loyalty higher than any particular good point [1].

For instance, much of the initial research into the harms of smoking was done in Germany in Nazi times. While the results were largely correct (and later confirmed elsewhere), it was much easier for tobacco proponents to contest or reject them on the grounds of the Nazi Germany origins.

[1]: https://davidsamson.substack.com/p/tribaltheory-002-tribalis...

zlacker