Others are speaking up about discrimination at Tesla

>Tesla fired the female engineer who earlier this year publicly made claims about “unwanted and pervasive harassment” at the electric carmaker, according to The Guardian. Tesla says it was justified in firing the engineer, AJ Vandermeyden, because her accusations were false, but Vandermeyden’s lawyers allege that it amounts to retaliation.

I don't mean this to sound callous. Vandermeyden very well may have a case, or she may not. But from a game theory perspective, regardless of the merit of her case, it makes the most sense to allege some kind of harassment if you feel you are underperforming in your job and wish to get ahead, and you're in a protected class. The pros vastly outweigh the cons: cannot be fired, will be given special opportunities, potential payout if you are terminated, and you get social credit as a victim. The cons being you are fired (which probably would have happened anyways) or you are outed as a false accuser (very hard to prove in the realm of public opinion).

Now I'm not saying she was underperforming, or that harassment didn't happen, but looking at this from the perspective of someone looking to exploit and abuse a system, this system has serious flaws that should be considered.

And probably never getting hired again, at least by any reasonably rational male hiring manager. Too much risk.

Betamax vs. VHS is often cited as an example of the market rewarding an inferior technical solution. Betamax's picture quality was better, but the key VHS feature was you could fit a 90-100 minute feature film on a single tape (Betamax tapes were 1 hour). The market valued the ability to watch a single movie without changing tapes more than picture quality (and still does - look at all the YouTube videos that do horrible things to picture quality to get a full movie up while evading copyright detection).

Intel x86 is often cited as a terrible instruction architecture. The mistake here is thinking that "ease of learning for newcomers" is the key value in an ISA. Most programmers are using compilers to generate assembly code anyway, and the key value that consumers want is "runs all my existing software, reasonably quickly". Intel correctly preferences backwards compatibility over elegance.

Here's one from biology. Sickle-cell anemia is a terrible disease, leading to extremely painful episodes and often loss of limbs to gangrene. However, it confers increased resistance to malaria. In many of the areas where sickle-cell anemia is endemic, malaria is a bigger killer than gangrene. This is nature optimizing for the actual threat rather than the obvious threat.

I'd be wary of drawing conclusions from a few headlines - often press cycles blow over. But if it turns out that this spate of sexual harassment headlines is the new normal rather than just momentary opportunism, it's possible that old models of who the critical constituency to please is are obsolete, and that women collectively now hold more economic power than the old boy's network. If you build a culture assuming that the old boy's network is the critical constituency, and then it turns out that assumption is invalid, then all of your evolutionary adaptations to that environment go out the window.