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by Evolved 3300 days ago
I agree and furthermore I think that excessive praise even when someone is just doing what's expected of them can be harmful.

Anecdotal: My boss used to go around praising people in general for just doing their jobs. I was even on the receiving end of so many "have I told you how awesome you are" or "I hope you realize how valuable you are to the operation" canned responses that, although it was nice to hear, it lost its luster eventually. I ended up replying every time he'd do this with a motion of opening a beer can accompanied with a verbal "psshtt" sound and adding in a "thanks for the can of praise." It was meant in jest and he took it in stride and understood it wasn't meant with any malice. I was just poking a little fun at the observations he was making.

The point is, when you do it to too many people, too often, and for doing nothing but what's expected of them, it starts to ring hollow eventually.

Anecdotal: I observed something about myself which I found peculiar. A friend of a friend on Facebook, whom I observe to have quite intelligent DH4+ responses to comments even if the masses usually come back with a DH0 or DH1 response. I found myself observing his responses to other folks' comments and throwing in my own $.02. I discovered that the quality of my responses was greatly elevated when replying to him, clearly attempting to engage him at his level. This was sometimes rewarded with a 'like' from him, and sometimes not. When receiving a 'like' it resulted in a physiological response from me akin to a very light drug high.

2 comments

What does DH stand for?
Apparently "disagreement hierarchy".

Took me quite some time to find the magic combination of search terms. Of course HN assumes intimate knowledge with PG's works. ;)

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

My apologies. Yes, that's the correct reference. I learned about Paul Graham via several HN posts years ago and his explanation isn't unnecessarily complicated so I figured his work was widely known/understood.

P.S. when I put "dh0 response" into Google, the first link is Paul Graham's How to Disagree

Your Google-fu is better than mine. I tried "DH0", then "DH0 DH1", "dh disagreement", "dh levels", and it wasn't until "dh0 dh1 levels" that I got my answer. :)