Cynicism
Cynicism going down yet another rabbit hole on a popular website’s commenting thread. The topic was Google’s new Material design and the use of box-shadows to give Material buttons dimensionality (example above). Pretty engaging stuff, I know. The post had generated hundreds of votes and comments. It made sense because Google is kinda a big deal, ☺, but srsly a raised vs. flat button?
Commenting threads are, of course, now ubiquitous. We, yes WE, spend endlessly hours engaging each across the web for mythical internet points. Somehow it’s become cool or at least acceptable to be perpetually on the high school debate team.
Getting back to cynicism, a common purpose for commenting threads is to flesh out your ideas and discover others’. Cynicism happens when you don’t think there couldn’t possibly be room for either of these things to happen. When a thread seems SO obvious to defy further explanation, you might think there are only two responses: 1) respond critically, e.g., “duh!” 2) downvote. In my example you might get both, “Google sucks up more of the internet because they are now outlining their buttons???” DOWNVOTE!!!
What this category of response really means is “I am doing _insert_earth_shattering_thing_ and no one gives a crap?” People care enough to comment cynically about something that doesn’t involve them when their own ideas aren’t getting noticed. There are two reasons to care about your own ideas. Money and power. There are some differences in cynicism when money vs. power is involved, so let’s examine each.
Cynicism when money is involved.
When I think about cynicism on ideas when money is involved I think entrepreneurship. What I think I’m starting to notice is that cynicism isn’t in the wheelhouse of successful/influential money makers. They may not agree with someone, but I don’t see them delivering beatdowns on the regular. On the other hand, take a look the cynicism-to-impartiality ratio on espn.com’s Facebook commenting threads. Sports are a physical debate. Don’t let the sports side notes confuse you, though. This is ground-zero for the fiscally disenfranchised. “$10M/year for this bozo who catches a ball and can’t speak english???” -Top commentator who self-identifies as a student at _insert_not_prestigious_school.
Cynicism when power or social status is involved.
The prototype for cynicism on ideas when social status is involved is in academia. I’m familiar with academic cynicism because I’ve worked in biomedical research at well-known institutions for >10 years (all on the east coast, the part of the US where cynicism seems to make particularly good sense to people). Cynicism truly is the wheelhouse of the ivory tower. A very common way cynicism plays out in my world is after someone publishes their research in a “good” journal or receives almost any award or grant. Despite all these accolades directly or indirectly lining one’s pockets, money is rarely the important thing. Nobody ever has enough money for their research. What happens is the claws come out over the perceived power the recipient now has. Yet, considering how smart academics are, the truly bizarre part about this is how much power is actually to be gained. Wallace Stanley Sayre’s law says it all, “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.”
Conclusions
Perhaps cynicism simply comes with those who lose more than they win. Elon musk would be a good case study. He has both made tremendous money and pursued deeply intellectual work. Yet we need to take time points because now is a lot different from 2008, when he was getting divorced, Tesla didn’t exist, and SpaceX crashed its first three missions.
