The Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lot Less Impressive Than the Movie Version • Hacker News Board

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lot Less Impressive Than the Movie Version

#31

Post by jacques_chester » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 11:52 AM UTC

iagovar wrote: post #24

carloswilson wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate that answering questions in a grilling interview is more difficult than asking questions, but ... > “You don’t know? This was the largest data scandal with respect to your company, that had catastrophic impacts on the 2016 election. You don’t know?” ... but at the same time, I would certainly expect the chairman and CEO of a company to be more prepared to answer these difficult questions than what is rep…

I've worked in marketing for an Agency. If Facebook had to check everything we did, they'd really had a hard time. We had multiple clients with multiple banners with multiple landing pages and all of this with a software rotating stuff with A/B tests and regressions. If a political party came to hire us, I'm sure we'll do it. This was in Spain, so I guess that there will be a lot more companies doing this in the US.…

If it's hard, then it's hard. That no perfect, complete solution is possible just means we accept the imperfect, incomplete solution if it is an improvement on the status quo.

I really don't have a lot of sympathy for the woes of the advertising industry, considering the consequences.

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lot Less Impressive Than the Movie Version

#32

Post by fatjokes » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 11:53 AM UTC

Is this the state of journalism in this day and age? Is there any surprise that a real life CEO carefully coached by PR and lawyers is less interesting than his doppelganger in a multi-million dollar Oscar-targeted movie backed by a team of professional writers?

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lot Less Impressive Than the Movie Version

#33

Post by StavrosK » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 11:57 AM UTC

chrisweekly wrote: post #23

patio11 wrote: post #4

Movie dialogue is scored on being interesting but there are a lot of interesting responses to Congressional inquiry, including interesting and true responses, which pessimize for your tactical or strategic goals. They also plausibly pessimize for Congress' goals. If you wanted to learn when Zuckerberg learned of a topic, you could send him a letter, and he would check his notes and send you a letter, and then you wou…

"pessimize"?

The opposite of "optimize", e.g. "the writer pessimized for understandability while optimizing for sounding smart".

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lot Less Impressive Than the Movie Version

#34

Post by chopin » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 12:02 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #33

chrisweekly wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"pessimize"?

The opposite of "optimize", e.g. "the writer pessimized for understandability while optimizing for sounding smart".

Is that really a thing in (American) English? I wasn't able to dig up anything (I am not a native speaker).

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lot Less Impressive Than the Movie Version

#35

Post by Intermernet » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 12:04 PM UTC

chrisweekly wrote: post #23

patio11 wrote: post #4

Movie dialogue is scored on being interesting but there are a lot of interesting responses to Congressional inquiry, including interesting and true responses, which pessimize for your tactical or strategic goals. They also plausibly pessimize for Congress' goals. If you wanted to learn when Zuckerberg learned of a topic, you could send him a letter, and he would check his notes and send you a letter, and then you wou…

"pessimize"?

Even better, both "pessimal" and "pessimum" are legitimate. They are the opposites of optimize, optimal and optimum.

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lot Less Impressive Than the Movie Version

#36

Post by stared » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 12:05 PM UTC

Is it only me, or for anyone else, articles written in one-sentence paragraphs are unreadable?

I try, and it is hard for me to focus after a few such sentence-paragraphs. (No matter what is the topic.)

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lot Less Impressive Than the Movie Version

#37

Post by StavrosK » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 12:07 PM UTC

chopin wrote: post #34

StavrosK wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite of "optimize", e.g. "the writer pessimized for understandability while optimizing for sounding smart".

Is that really a thing in (American) English? I wasn't able to dig up anything (I am not a native speaker).

It's rarely used, I'm not aware of a specific definition for it. This question defines it somewhat:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/312003/what-is-the-most-...

It's still kind of tongue-in-cheek because it hasn't caught on enough. I think it's used more widely in ML but I may be way off the mark on this.

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lot Less Impressive Than the Movie Version

#38

Post by DrScientist » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 12:13 PM UTC

orbifold wrote: post #20

dimitar wrote: post #6

Slightly off-topic - why doesn't FB just ban all political ads? Is it really worth continuing to display them? Either have a coherent policy that the CEO can explain or just don't do it.

In Germany every political party gets a fixed number of slots for TV-Spots basically free of charge ahead of an election. There is no other political advertisement allowed (only the parties themselves are allowed to advertise). Unfortunately neither newspapers nor internet advertisement is as strictly regulated, but I feel like it should be eventually as well.

Similar in the UK - set up that way to stop money being able to buy elections.

Overall, election spending has been very strictly controlled.

One of the problems is recently people have being getting around this with hard to trace online campaigns - using "national funding" and effectively locally targeted online campaigns.

I'd like to see people being properly sanctioned for breaking the rules. In my view there are few things more serious than trying to subvert democracy. It shouldn't be normalized like it is in the US.

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lot Less Impressive Than the Movie Version

#39

Post by cipher_system » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 12:13 PM UTC

signal11 wrote: post #21

ohduran wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congressional inquiries haven't been about finding truth since TV was invented. They are a platform for the parties involved to signal their positions. MZ is talking to his investors, AOC to her constituents. My point is: there is no conversation going on. Just people talking.

This is very true -- there are also echoes of how politicians prepare talking points in response to journalists' questions these days. The person being quizzed isn't actually prepared to answer questions, they come prepared with a set of themes to talk about and will seek to massage their answer to almost any question to one of those prepared themes. The other interesting thing specifically about televised Congressio…

Just enough time to accuse someone of having ties to white supremacy but not enough to hear an answer.

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lot Less Impressive Than the Movie Version

#40

Post by C1sc0cat » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 12:14 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #9

The congressional hearings are a hostile environment. The only reason to have Zuckerberg there is to get camera footage of him looking shifty and to pressure him to do whatever the politicians want him to do. His tactical and strategic goal is not to deliver 'zingers', it is ideally for the situation to go quiet and be forgotten by everyone. Failing that, an acceptable fallback is for any anti-Facebook action by gove…

Yes I suspect the less televised select committees the UK have is a better solution.

I recall seeing George Galloway (Uk MP) who was called to one of These and he used his experience in the HOC to rip the good old boy asking the questions to pieces.