I suppose think about it like you’re the captain of a ship. Imagine a captain always complaining about their peers, the ship, their outfit etc. And when giving orders they sound out their whole thinking process about why they are doing x or y. Versus never complaining or explaining in public. Certainly the former would be a less inspiring and weaker leader.
And yet, I feel so validated as a commoner who has (mostly in US politics) felt as though all rational rules of conversation, question and answer, and accountability are suspended.
Naive me joined other commoners to express aghast surprise at how stupid and clueless our leaders were (are!), completely clueless to the idea that perhaps we were (are!) being managed and that our rage burns off energy in a mostly harmless manner.
Apparently, the British royal family came to the realization a couple of decades ago that it was not an adequate way of avoiding drama anymore.
> With a less deferential and increasingly aggressive media landscape, the strategy of "Never complain, never explain" was abandoned by Prince Charles (the future King Charles III) and his wife Diana, Princess of Wales, in the 1990s.
Most people or organisations can just wait until the public get bored of that issue and forget about them, but for the Royals that doesn't work because they are _always_ in the public eye. There's enough demand for Royal news that if nothing else is happening, the press will quite happily rake over old sores. The only way out is to feed the press with constant new material.
It's annoying to the outside observer, but in-general providing specific details risks opening yourself up to more criticism. It's a cynical stance, but understandable.
Only org's truly confident in their handling of an incident can afford to be open.
Obviously key stakeholders get the full details, but Joe Public doesn't get to know.
This maxim doesn't work for government, because they have to justify what they do because they are the ones trying to steer a country though very slack and unconnected reins.
The odd bit about the royals is that they are meant to be largely apolitical. They are supposed to be focused on charitable works, opening infrastructure and generally promoting togetherness.
This kinda worked because it meant that we don't have to pretend to like politicians. Great Britain (yes, not UK because its complex) gets to detach the pomp and circumstance from a political movement, allowing honours, events and occasions to largely be free of politics (despite honours being entirely political) This is why flag shaggers are so weird, its fine to like your country, but getting dressed up in a flag for anything other than sports or getting shitfaced is not the done thing. If you're gonna have a fight, at least do it over something tangible, like which ever football club your dad grew up near.
The bit that worked about the royals is that they were a mystery. We don't know who they really are (you rarely want to know everything about a person, because people are generally messy and ugly close up)
Frankly I don't want to know that harry and william fell out. I have no opinions on kate and megan. I am sure they are nice people, and moreover I couldnt give a fuck about what race one of them is, I'm not american, so why do I fucking care?
I just want posh grandad to say nice words to me at state occasions.
I also want that nonce andrew in jail.
ANYWAY
don't complain don't explain only works if you are only ever trying to bring people together. as soon as you trying to divide and conquer you have to explain.
Secrets shrouded in darkness, it’s certainly convenient when you’re part of a royal family. But major leaks ought to be made public—or, at the very least, the steps taken to address them should be disclosed. It is important to understand the scale of a leak and the specific individuals involved.
That's what I personally call the Huberman strategy: no official statement, barely any acknowledgments of allegations, just carrying on with whatever thing you're doing, the mob will soon enough find its next target. It worked exceptionally well for him, I guess it helps to be a neuroscientist.
Maybe it worked better than trying to address it, but Huberman’s popularity definitely fell off after it was revealed that he was not a great person.
During the peak of his popularity you would find Huberman protocols or Huberman factoids repeated everywhere on the internet, including HN. There was a sharp drop off after the revelations. I can’t recall the last time I saw someone someone repeat a Huberman podcast factoid here, which is remarkable after he was so popular.
In the Huberman case it was compounded by how much he was embracing and repeating non-scientific ideas that sounded good on social media, like reducing everything to being about dopamine or making crazy claims about how you could do things to “raise your dopamine” that were not actually supported by research. When his personal dramas were exposed it became an opening to discuss how bad his podcast had become and I think many listeners woke up to that fact when shaken by the realization that not everything about Huberman was as it seemed.
He has been able to continue podcasting to an audience of die-hard fans, though. These people never totally disappear because a core audience worships them and will ignore everything inconvenient to their worship.
Peter Attia went through a similar downfall after several increasingly bad scandals were revealed, culminating in him getting caught associating deeply with Epstein. He tried to make a public statement about distancing himself from Epstein after discovering Epstein’s crimes, but there are public emails between Attia and Epstein where Attia asks Epstein about how he’s doing after Epstein became national news. That backfired everywhere except the core audience of Attia worshippers who now just get angry whenever anyone brings up the Attia-Epstein connection. It’s wild that Attia was one of the few Epstein associates who continued contacting Epstein so much (which went into court records and became public) after he became publicly known as a trafficker. And yet there are hardcore Attia fans to this day.
>Huberman’s popularity definitely fell off after it was revealed that he was not a great person.
I’m not aware of such revelations, maybe I haven’t kept up on all, I recall a piece where women he was dating would get together and talk about dating him while continuing to choose to date him. But I don’t remember any story that revealed something negative about him.
Interesting that you remember the story existing but got the details incorrect and forgot the real problems in the article.
The bigger revelations in the story were that the “Huberman Lab” existed largely in name only and he wasn't living or working near the University. His career had pivoted to influencer celebrity long ago but he’s been capitalizing on the neuroscientist title and claiming lab associations anyway. They also interviewed associates who revealed his history of leading people on, manipulating them, and being dishonest wherever it might help his career. Then they found that he was cheating on multiple women at the same time, including someone he led to believe he wanted a long term relationship and children with. He was injecting one partner with fertility drugs while cheating.
What’s fascinating is how his fanbase stripped the story of all of the important details (chronic pattern of misleading everyone in his life where it can help his popularity, which extends into his podcast reporting where he misleads listeners) and instead tried to transform it into personal dating drama that was overblown.
Then the second pass of rationalizing it away was to take the relationship drama and transform that into something that could be blamed on the women involved while letting Huberman off the hook. After that final transformation they were free to ignore anything negative about him because the story had been rewritten, in the retelling, to be completely the fault of women. There were even efforts to make it look like a good thing that he was dating multiple women.
In case it wasn’t clear: In the reporting the women did not “continue to choose to date him” as you heard. The reported group discussion was about former partners had been lied to who were discovering each other because the number of them had grown so high that he couldn’t escape it.
That's the one strategy suggested to people when the cancel mob comes for you. If you give them any attention at all they turn their efforts up to 11. If you just ignore them completely they find a new target. (That is of course if they don't go one level above you and have you cancelled that way.)
As Bagehot is quoted saying in the article: "Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it... Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic".
This makes it evident how this strategy exists to maintain the "magic" and fool the masses. It has no place in a progressive society where being duped with propaganda into believing falsehoods should not be something to look up to.
> where being duped with propaganda into believing falsehoods should not be something to look up to.
I agree, but believe we’re now in a regressive society, moving as fast as we can to repeat history, investing vast resources into effortless propaganda machines.
>It has no place in a progressive society where being duped with propaganda into believing falsehoods should not be something to look up to.
I think this really misses the nuance of all of this. To put it bluntly: there's too many dumb people who need to believe in this kind of "magic" to be able to reasonably ignore it on a political strategy level. Just trying to treat everyone as intellectually-capable of being presented facts and making a logical choice clearly doesn't work, and the opposition is perfectly willing to exploit this dynamic.
I feel like bygone royals still left more memorable and positive changes to society (even in the background of all the negatives) that current caste of billionaires ever will.
It's a little Anthony Robbins-ish, but I like to think of something similar:
Anything you put your attention on, grows. So keep your attention on what you're hoping for, not on what you wish would go away. Don't give negative things oxygen.
(Of course this is all well and fine for someone of generally good character doing productive work; but can also be the formula for monsters to use that are "hoping for" things that most would find repugnant).
Related, which I always loved: Winston Churchill "You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks."
Cognitively I know it's better to just focus on the future and what I'm doing but I really struggle to walk by stuff without engaging. It's a flaw I'm aware of and am trying to work on, but it feels impossible to get where I want to be
It does not help that I am nearing 40 and the past "things I am hoping for" have never really worked out how I wanted. I think it becomes harder and harder to hope when your hopes have been squashed frequently in your life
It's a real privilege to have a life where things actually work out close to how you want them. Hard work alone does not get you there
I think this is part of the problem. You think it’s a temperament, but it’s actually a skill, and skills can be developed.
Like all skills, developing it will be often difficult, frustrating, and uncomfortable, so when it’s like that you have to recognise that as part of the process. You’ll think you’re going against your nature when, in reality, you’re simply experiencing the tribulations of learning a new skill.
Source: 50 year old man who used to throw many stones at dogs on a much more regular basis.
Sure, but like all skills different people will have different aptitude and ability to actually learn and adapt it
That doesn't mean I don't try, but I'm just aware that certain things get under my skin and set me from 0 to 100 faster than I can take a deep breath and keep my cool
I think this "temperament" (or whatever you want to call it) _is_ actually a privilege, to be honest. If you have a family and you depend on things to go a certain way to keep your family from being out on the street, you _must_ consider the bads or possible bads of the world. You must allow yourself to be distracted by distractions so you can keep an eye on everything that affects you. To not do so is irresponsible and you put your family and your livelihood at risk.
If I'm sitting pretty on more income than I need with very few obligations, sure, I can just "focus on the path" and "ignore the distractions". But how many people have that luxury?
There are things one can call negative that are really realism trying to save you from very bad decisions. See the negativity of telling the boss at Theranos that the tests don't work. I've seen many a startup fail in large part because they spent their runway unwisely, as cheap tests that showed that the existing direction had structural problems were just seen as negativity speaking.
There is such thing as negativity that will ruin your mental health, but the other side is just embracing delusion. We can see examples of successful people that keep embracing the delusion and succeed. But there are many that end up in unrecoverable positions after they burn themselves to the ground in said delusion. Around me, there's far more of the latter than the former.
> See the negativity of telling the boss at Theranos that the tests don't work.
That's not a typical definition of negative things. I'm not disagreeing with your ultimate point but it already feels like a mental stretch to include that in the set of negative things.
It could be that your boss is a negative entity, but the act of disclosure isn't in my world view.
In some sense, my interpretation is to basically focus on what matters personally and in that, try to focus on the positive and to not worry about the societal issues which are out of your hand.
Even logically, most likely these societal issues are coming for everybody and what you can do is to be best prepared for them which inevitably means to focus on yourself (which is a good advice as ever at any point of time).
So why worry about societal issues and instead not just focus on what matters personally and something which you can take an action on and improve upon (Similar to Stoic philosophy maybe)
(I struggle to live by these words, Hopefully I improve, I am trying to watch negative news less nowadays and would like to focus more on hope and personal growth)
You're right, and there's a nuance. You absolutely have to deal with tactical threats, but be careful not to go from threat to threat, because there'll always be
I've seen businesses, especially software, do this where 99% of the company's effort was in "doing the right thing" by supporting their last product so much they were never able to put any effort into a better product. Getting out of this is where the right CEO earns their pay.
Reminds me of a lesson from my motorcycle instructor: “When you see an obstacle in the road that you have to dodge, keep your eyes on the place you want to end up, not on the obstacle as you steer away from it, lest your body unconsciously steers you right back into it.”
It’s not a perfect metaphor, but I think of it often to remind myself not to focus on the outcome I desperately want to avoid.
> but can also be the formula for monsters to use that are "hoping for" things that most would find repugnant
As an American, we don't like kings and queens because they are always monsters. Just as the very recent attempt to make a king has illustrated. And frankly, the wiki article even downplays Diana.
The problem is they are explicitly saying to do things in the shadows.
| Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it... Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic
Without that daylight you can't differentiate monsters from men. They claim it's because you can't differentiate saints from men, but I'd make the claim that any man who wishes to be seen as a saint is more monster than saint.
And we've seen what these people do in the shadows. The disgraced Andrew was far from the only Royal in the Epstein files. We saw what they did to Diana, who tried to shed some light. We've seen it over and over.
I'll take the light, because I'd rather live in a world where we make things better than live in a world with the appearance of magic. The only magic is what we create
The never complain part has a status dimension. Complaints from people seen as privileged land badly. Tech in most world is learning this recently. Engineers fears of AI are legitimate, but for years the industry automated other people work, sold headcount reduction as a feature, and told laid off workers to learn to code. I remember how some european aviation insurance company employees were bragging how many lawyers their company laid off thanks to their automation. Now that it's our turn, people outside the bubble aren't in a mood to sympathize. The automation would have happened anyway and the smugness is what we are paying for.
LoganDark | 7 hours ago
conception | 7 hours ago
gwynplaine | 6 hours ago
small_model | 6 hours ago
"No comment"
LoganDark | 5 hours ago
tkdb | 7 hours ago
Naive me joined other commoners to express aghast surprise at how stupid and clueless our leaders were (are!), completely clueless to the idea that perhaps we were (are!) being managed and that our rage burns off energy in a mostly harmless manner.
ljm | 6 hours ago
smugglerFlynn | 5 hours ago
hmokiguess | 7 hours ago
Ectiseethe | 7 hours ago
> With a less deferential and increasingly aggressive media landscape, the strategy of "Never complain, never explain" was abandoned by Prince Charles (the future King Charles III) and his wife Diana, Princess of Wales, in the 1990s.
juujian | 6 hours ago
simonh | 6 hours ago
ricardobeat | 4 hours ago
Lapalux | 7 hours ago
Only org's truly confident in their handling of an incident can afford to be open.
Obviously key stakeholders get the full details, but Joe Public doesn't get to know.
KaiserPro | 7 hours ago
This maxim doesn't work for government, because they have to justify what they do because they are the ones trying to steer a country though very slack and unconnected reins.
The odd bit about the royals is that they are meant to be largely apolitical. They are supposed to be focused on charitable works, opening infrastructure and generally promoting togetherness.
This kinda worked because it meant that we don't have to pretend to like politicians. Great Britain (yes, not UK because its complex) gets to detach the pomp and circumstance from a political movement, allowing honours, events and occasions to largely be free of politics (despite honours being entirely political) This is why flag shaggers are so weird, its fine to like your country, but getting dressed up in a flag for anything other than sports or getting shitfaced is not the done thing. If you're gonna have a fight, at least do it over something tangible, like which ever football club your dad grew up near.
The bit that worked about the royals is that they were a mystery. We don't know who they really are (you rarely want to know everything about a person, because people are generally messy and ugly close up)
Frankly I don't want to know that harry and william fell out. I have no opinions on kate and megan. I am sure they are nice people, and moreover I couldnt give a fuck about what race one of them is, I'm not american, so why do I fucking care?
I just want posh grandad to say nice words to me at state occasions.
I also want that nonce andrew in jail.
ANYWAY
don't complain don't explain only works if you are only ever trying to bring people together. as soon as you trying to divide and conquer you have to explain.
fefaOd | 6 hours ago
Zealotux | 6 hours ago
watwut | 6 hours ago
And generally other wrongdoing by powerful.
Aurornis | 6 hours ago
During the peak of his popularity you would find Huberman protocols or Huberman factoids repeated everywhere on the internet, including HN. There was a sharp drop off after the revelations. I can’t recall the last time I saw someone someone repeat a Huberman podcast factoid here, which is remarkable after he was so popular.
In the Huberman case it was compounded by how much he was embracing and repeating non-scientific ideas that sounded good on social media, like reducing everything to being about dopamine or making crazy claims about how you could do things to “raise your dopamine” that were not actually supported by research. When his personal dramas were exposed it became an opening to discuss how bad his podcast had become and I think many listeners woke up to that fact when shaken by the realization that not everything about Huberman was as it seemed.
He has been able to continue podcasting to an audience of die-hard fans, though. These people never totally disappear because a core audience worships them and will ignore everything inconvenient to their worship.
Peter Attia went through a similar downfall after several increasingly bad scandals were revealed, culminating in him getting caught associating deeply with Epstein. He tried to make a public statement about distancing himself from Epstein after discovering Epstein’s crimes, but there are public emails between Attia and Epstein where Attia asks Epstein about how he’s doing after Epstein became national news. That backfired everywhere except the core audience of Attia worshippers who now just get angry whenever anyone brings up the Attia-Epstein connection. It’s wild that Attia was one of the few Epstein associates who continued contacting Epstein so much (which went into court records and became public) after he became publicly known as a trafficker. And yet there are hardcore Attia fans to this day.
ricksunny | 4 hours ago
I’m not aware of such revelations, maybe I haven’t kept up on all, I recall a piece where women he was dating would get together and talk about dating him while continuing to choose to date him. But I don’t remember any story that revealed something negative about him.
Aurornis | 4 hours ago
The bigger revelations in the story were that the “Huberman Lab” existed largely in name only and he wasn't living or working near the University. His career had pivoted to influencer celebrity long ago but he’s been capitalizing on the neuroscientist title and claiming lab associations anyway. They also interviewed associates who revealed his history of leading people on, manipulating them, and being dishonest wherever it might help his career. Then they found that he was cheating on multiple women at the same time, including someone he led to believe he wanted a long term relationship and children with. He was injecting one partner with fertility drugs while cheating.
What’s fascinating is how his fanbase stripped the story of all of the important details (chronic pattern of misleading everyone in his life where it can help his popularity, which extends into his podcast reporting where he misleads listeners) and instead tried to transform it into personal dating drama that was overblown.
Then the second pass of rationalizing it away was to take the relationship drama and transform that into something that could be blamed on the women involved while letting Huberman off the hook. After that final transformation they were free to ignore anything negative about him because the story had been rewritten, in the retelling, to be completely the fault of women. There were even efforts to make it look like a good thing that he was dating multiple women.
In case it wasn’t clear: In the reporting the women did not “continue to choose to date him” as you heard. The reported group discussion was about former partners had been lied to who were discovering each other because the number of them had grown so high that he couldn’t escape it.
dizhn | 56 minutes ago
Almondsetat | 6 hours ago
This makes it evident how this strategy exists to maintain the "magic" and fool the masses. It has no place in a progressive society where being duped with propaganda into believing falsehoods should not be something to look up to.
Scubabear68 | 6 hours ago
The royal family has obviously fallen apart entirely as its human foibles have become evident, and in modern society it is almost impossible to hide.
actionfromafar | 5 hours ago
iAMkenough | 6 hours ago
I agree, but believe we’re now in a regressive society, moving as fast as we can to repeat history, investing vast resources into effortless propaganda machines.
nater5000 | 5 hours ago
I think this really misses the nuance of all of this. To put it bluntly: there's too many dumb people who need to believe in this kind of "magic" to be able to reasonably ignore it on a political strategy level. Just trying to treat everyone as intellectually-capable of being presented facts and making a logical choice clearly doesn't work, and the opposition is perfectly willing to exploit this dynamic.
DrScientist | 4 hours ago
( especially when the truth is being intentionally hidden behind a wall of propaganda ).
Also is a strategy of being part of the crowd ( even if it's an astroturfed one ) a dumb or smart survival strategy?
speedbird | 4 hours ago
InsidiousWombat | 3 hours ago
WhyComboNadir | 6 hours ago
Anything you put your attention on, grows. So keep your attention on what you're hoping for, not on what you wish would go away. Don't give negative things oxygen.
(Of course this is all well and fine for someone of generally good character doing productive work; but can also be the formula for monsters to use that are "hoping for" things that most would find repugnant).
Related, which I always loved: Winston Churchill "You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks."
bluefirebrand | 5 hours ago
Cognitively I know it's better to just focus on the future and what I'm doing but I really struggle to walk by stuff without engaging. It's a flaw I'm aware of and am trying to work on, but it feels impossible to get where I want to be
It does not help that I am nearing 40 and the past "things I am hoping for" have never really worked out how I wanted. I think it becomes harder and harder to hope when your hopes have been squashed frequently in your life
It's a real privilege to have a life where things actually work out close to how you want them. Hard work alone does not get you there
bartread | 5 hours ago
I think this is part of the problem. You think it’s a temperament, but it’s actually a skill, and skills can be developed.
Like all skills, developing it will be often difficult, frustrating, and uncomfortable, so when it’s like that you have to recognise that as part of the process. You’ll think you’re going against your nature when, in reality, you’re simply experiencing the tribulations of learning a new skill.
Source: 50 year old man who used to throw many stones at dogs on a much more regular basis.
bluefirebrand | 5 hours ago
That doesn't mean I don't try, but I'm just aware that certain things get under my skin and set me from 0 to 100 faster than I can take a deep breath and keep my cool
SoftTalker | 5 hours ago
This is almost nobody, by the way. It's another one of the illusions that has gotten worse with social media.
bluefirebrand | 5 hours ago
dclowd9901 | 3 hours ago
If I'm sitting pretty on more income than I need with very few obligations, sure, I can just "focus on the path" and "ignore the distractions". But how many people have that luxury?
tehnoban | 5 hours ago
words to live by, if you can.
hibikir | 4 hours ago
There is such thing as negativity that will ruin your mental health, but the other side is just embracing delusion. We can see examples of successful people that keep embracing the delusion and succeed. But there are many that end up in unrecoverable positions after they burn themselves to the ground in said delusion. Around me, there's far more of the latter than the former.
ramblerman | 3 hours ago
That's not a typical definition of negative things. I'm not disagreeing with your ultimate point but it already feels like a mental stretch to include that in the set of negative things.
It could be that your boss is a negative entity, but the act of disclosure isn't in my world view.
InsidiousWombat | 3 hours ago
Unless you literally mean "don't give oxygen", then yes, people generally die off that so the problem would be solved.
Imustaskforhelp | 3 hours ago
Even logically, most likely these societal issues are coming for everybody and what you can do is to be best prepared for them which inevitably means to focus on yourself (which is a good advice as ever at any point of time).
So why worry about societal issues and instead not just focus on what matters personally and something which you can take an action on and improve upon (Similar to Stoic philosophy maybe)
(I struggle to live by these words, Hopefully I improve, I am trying to watch negative news less nowadays and would like to focus more on hope and personal growth)
WhyComboNadir | an hour ago
I've seen businesses, especially software, do this where 99% of the company's effort was in "doing the right thing" by supporting their last product so much they were never able to put any effort into a better product. Getting out of this is where the right CEO earns their pay.
Slow_Hand | 2 hours ago
It’s not a perfect metaphor, but I think of it often to remind myself not to focus on the outcome I desperately want to avoid.
godelski | 2 hours ago
The problem is they are explicitly saying to do things in the shadows.
Without that daylight you can't differentiate monsters from men. They claim it's because you can't differentiate saints from men, but I'd make the claim that any man who wishes to be seen as a saint is more monster than saint.And we've seen what these people do in the shadows. The disgraced Andrew was far from the only Royal in the Epstein files. We saw what they did to Diana, who tried to shed some light. We've seen it over and over.
I'll take the light, because I'd rather live in a world where we make things better than live in a world with the appearance of magic. The only magic is what we create
1-more | 2 hours ago
This seems to be a rewording of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_dogs_bark,_but_the_carava...
tombert | 5 hours ago
robotuprising | 2 hours ago
chistev | an hour ago
__natty__ | 5 hours ago
robotresearcher | 4 hours ago
Any objective merit his efficiency argument had, the sentiment against him was overwhelming for complaining from such a privileged position.
dfedbeef | 5 hours ago
chistev | 4 hours ago