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My Biggest Critic Sounds Off: Two Angry Responses

I once wrote that writers like me need our critics to keep honest. This post is a tribute to my biggest critic: fellow infosec professional Dave Marcus.

Mood music:

A few things about Dave:

  • Despite everything that follows, we’re good friends with similar musical tastes.
  • He owns some of the coolest guitars on the market, but he doesn’t play. The guitars hang on a wall like Han Solo frozen in carbonite.
  • He’s an avid weight lifter.
  • His critiques have forced me to do more gut checks than anyone else’s.
  • As critical as he is, he does agree with some of what I write.

Here are two of his most colorful critiques.

Critique 1: “This post is escapism and blame.”

When I wrote a post suggesting that all parents have their flaws, Dave went nuttier than Charles Manson on a hot summer night.

Not all of us were raised by lousy parents. Not all of us ARE lousy parents. No matter how one was raised at a certain point your life becomes your own responsibility. Not your parents’. Not your genes’. Not your phobias’. This post, to me, is escapism and blame. I choose to fix the problem and not the blame.

Critique 2: “Are you trying to superimpose your issues on the rest of us?”

After I wrote that there’s a burnout problem in the infosec industry, fueling cases of depression, Dave was particularly incensed. He wasn’t the only one to disagree, but he expressed himself eloquently in a private Facebook exchange he later gave me permission to share.

The scene: I’m working when a Facebook chat box alarm sounds. 

Dave: Your last few OCD articles seem to really try to pigeonhole the whole community as obsessed and mentally ill. Are you trying to superimpose your issues on the rest of us? Your last article really annoys me. Do you feel that depression runs deep in the community? My issue is that you and the greater InfoSec Burnout movement sounds more and more like its an InfoSec problem or job/workplace-centric problem rather than a mental health problem that the individual brings with them originally. Granted, you may be getting lost in their greater noise. You are more balanced usually.

Me, trying to be diplomatic: I agree with your last statement and have written a gazillion posts making the point that it starts with the individual. But because we are trying to address burnout in our industry as one of many byproducts/triggers, some see it as us painting everyone with the same brush. There are aspects of this we are simply never going to agree on. It is also my observation — and I do not mean this as an insult — that if you are personally not affected by something, you don’t see is as legitimate. My experience is that there is no one-size-fits-all path.

Dave: Without research and study all you are left with is opinion.

So you see, Dave is one tough critic. He makes powerful points, and sometimes he goes off his rocker. But I love the guy.

Dave Marcus and the words Doesn't even attribute
Meme courtesy of Michael Schearer
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We Need Our Critics

A friend sent me a graphic that hits home, given that one of the realities of being a writer is that people will regularly disagree with you.

Mood music:

The Disagreement Pyramid, a play on the Food Pyramid, puts the most constructive criticism at the top of the pyramid, illustrating its rarity. The most common type of comments fall to the the bottom of the pyramid — the destructive, useless comments. Created by Loudacris, the pyramid is based on an article by Paul Graham.

disagreement hierarchy

To make sense of this masterpiece, I turned to Dave Marcus — a friend from the security industry who tends to disagree with more than half of what I write in this blog.

I’ve always viewed my friendship with Dave as an example of how you can disagree and debate in gentlemanly fashion. We don’t call each other names or accuse each other of attacks, except for when we’re kidding around. But it’s not always easy. Dave once condemned one of my posts as “escapism and blame.”

More recently, he expressed frustration with my posts about burnout in our industry and suggested I was simply projecting my issues onto everyone else.

So I asked him which category we fall under on this Disagreement Pyramid.

“All of them, actually,” he said.

People often hate to be criticized. We like to think we’re special and that our words are gold. But, really, we’re usually expressing ourselves in a moment of time — which means we don’t always have all the necessary evidence at the time we’re making an argument.

I’m certainly guilty of that, though not as much as Dave might think.

That’s why we writers need our critics: They keep us honest and make us better.

I’m less likely to listen to people who use the tactics at the bottom of the pyramid, but I’ll always have an ear for folks like Dave.

And when we’re old men and I’m wearing a hearing aid from all those years of loud music, I’ll simply switch it off when I think he’s going too far.

I’d like to think he’d do the same to me.