Haters

Dutch proverb for contemplation: "High trees catch lots of wind."

The CEO of Lambda School is one of the reviewers of this article.

I disagree. The people you refer to did not hate Holmes/Enron/etc unilaterally because of a vague feeling that their talents were overestimated. They had, to use PG's term in the article, a dispute with them over a particular issue that they had picked up on, often as a result of having domain-specific knowledge that allowed them insight into their operations (i.e. that financials did not seem to be adding up for Enron or that Holmes's promised device would require significant breakthroughs in analysis that they thought she did not achieve given her evasiveness on technical questions).

"A hater is obsessive and uncritical. Disliking you becomes part of their identity, and they create an image of you in their own head that is much worse than reality. Everything you do is bad, because you do it. If you do something good, they find a way to see it as bad. And their dislike for you is not, usually, a quiet, private one. They want everyone to know how awful you are."

Note also that not all who disagree with you are haters or trolls.

Core reasons perhaps people are haters?

1) The person who they hate to them (the hater) appears to have more luck than talent. There are others with the same or more talent (maybe even the hater or someone they know) who get no attention at all and toil in obscurity.

Of course luck is a sliding scale (there is always luck) but someone in theory would be less likely to hate someone who ran a race and was the fastest (low on the luck scale high on the skill scale) but more likely to hate a startup founder or a singer or actor who had fame but it didn't appear related as much to talent but to luck. Someone can imagine 'I could do that' but not 'I can beat that person in a marathon' (easy to quantify).

2) There are fanboys and that enhances the annoyance by the hater. So it's the constant attention (which they feel is undeserved and quite frankly it probably is) that drives the hater. Not the person themselves. The media attention the fawning articles the fawning comments.

3) They get attention for things that the same activity would not get attention by a non famous person. Example is PG wrote this essay and everyone here (including me) are feasting on it.

4) They are unapproachable. They wouldn't give you the time of day (because of course they don't have time to give everyone attention). If you wrote to them they might write back a quick reply but they would never engage in a discussion or invite you to go out or be their friend. They would give you some trivial brush off (if they replied at all). You are not important to them and they know that. That bugs people even if they know there is a legit reason for the brush off. People react negatively to lack of courtesy and to have it in their face that they are not important even if rationally they understand why it's happening to them.

So at the core it's not the actual famous person that is hated so much as the attention that is given to the famous person that drives the hate. The hater feels it's undeserved and over the top.

And it is 'over the top' when it just becomes to much in the mind of the hater.