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So you've made a mistake and it's public

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Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#301

Post by shirakawasuna »

samatman wrote: post #108

So this one time, our main customer database fell over. The primary key wasn't wide enough, we hit 2 billion rows, and everyone panicked. We had been working unwise hours for several days, and we got the fix together, and I made a mistake: I pushed it directly to production. Man, my boss was really mad; no one had been getting enough sleep and we were all stressed. I apologized profusely and said it would never happe…

Something important about that situation is the power dynamic. You were not in a position of power, your boss was, and you were looking to defuse the situation and take ownership of a mistake. Your point is correct - there was a systematic failure at multiple levels of the operation that led to this being possible and even likely (too many hours, bad practices).

In such a situation, multiple mistakes were made. If that work culture could somehow support honest, open, and humble approaches to understanding the problem, there would be multiple people either apologizing or, better, taking ownership of their contributions and working towards preventing them in the future (the thing you identify that did not happen). Such a culture is, unfortunately, very unlikely due to the incentive structures of company hierarchy.

The role and power of the individual for whom we're setting these expectations is very important and it's very unhelpful that this isn't considered either in that wiki page or in so many comments (not yours, yours is good). Is the person that made a mistake very powerful and do they have a PR team? Their approach will probably be purely cynical. Is it a company? We should stop anthropomorphizing companies. Is it a junior colleague? Was it truly a personal error on their part or higher up or systemic? Was it a manager harming an employee? On a moral and societal level, we have to consider those harms and whether owning a mistake and apologizing is desirable or even sufficient - perhaps they should just be fired or we should consider their actions to be a crime. Or maybe "we" in this scenario is again PR thinking intended to protect the company, in which case the apology is carefully wordsmithed to avoid liability and has no real value.

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#303

Post by shirakawasuna »

ars wrote: post #50
ape4 wrote: post #25

Jeffrey Toobin: "I was fired today by @NewYorker after 27 years as a Staff Writer. I will always love the magazine, will miss my colleagues, and will look forward to reading their work,"

Yah, I don't know anything about Jeffrey, but reading about why he was fired - it's not right. Humans make mistakes. Over and over. People need to forgive.

Just wankin' it in front of your coworkers during a meeting nbd cancel culture run amok! If you aren't okay with me wankin' it in front of you, sweetie, you're not cut out for this business.

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#304

Post by anthuswilliams »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #238
textgel wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A common tactic seen by progressives during attacks on their victims is to hype up the crime by either making vague claims such as that they "are pretty messed up" and hoping that regular people apply their reasonable measure of "pretty messed up"; to outright lies where they equate the commited heresy with an actual real world wrong. One charming example is this one of Morgan Freeman during the metoo saga where he w…

...and then what happened to Morgan Freeman? I don't know anything about the alleged situation, but pretty sure he moved on with his life and is still wealthy and largely beloved.

He did lose his role as a spokesman for Visa, though it's impossible to say to what degree this episode was a contributing factor.

Somewhat interestingly, given the topic at hand, in the immediate aftermath of those accusations, Morgan Freeman issued an "I'm sorry if I made anyone uncomfortable" apology, which CNN used in their defense of the news clip the GP has linked. I don't really have any experience in, or opinion on, public apologies, but I thought that was an interesting thing to share.

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#305

Post by austincheney »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #172

I don't know. Years ago, I was on an email list and I did a lot of sincere public apologizing, in part because the internet was younger, so we didn't have a lot of stuff worked out. We were just stumbling our way forward as best we could. And the end result was that I became everyone's bitch. People would intentionally pick on me and be ugly to me and when it went sideways, the group as a whole would go "There she go…

I am in no way discounting your description. The behaviors you described are incredibly immature and possibly misogynistic. I am not clear on the social context in which those communications occurred but not anything I would want to be involved with. That level of immaturity and poor empathy has nothing to do with any mistake or apology.

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#306

Post by cjhveal »

api_or_ipa wrote: post #241
nfoz wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Canadian, I was quick to realize that the mere word "sorry" has a different meaning to some people down south. In Canada I'll just say it casually to mean a polite "hope I'm not troubling you" or "sorry that happened to you", and never thought of it as immediately declaring responsibility let alone fragility. But in the US, I've been pounced on for a casual use of that word, as if I'd announced failure and that…

As a Canadian in a happy relationship with an American, we quickly realised the difference that you've pointed out. We also realised that I had a tinge of the stereotypical Canadian "sooorry" sound, so we ran with it. If it's a situation where one of us intends to express remorse for a situation occurring, we slightly intonate towards the "o" sound, and for situations where we're accepting blame, we edge towards the…

As (yet another) Canadian, I've used the same phonological distinction in my close relationships with Americans to great success. It's been surprising to me how much tension is eased by disambiguating the two senses!

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#307

Post by OJFord »

StavrosK wrote: post #285
OJFord wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I apologizing? Hardly! The full sentence is, "Sorry, did you just actually step on my foot, what the hell?" At least in the UK, that's not the full sentence, or it could be, but only with a change in tone ('SOrrY?!') - to me it's more like 'Oops my foot was in your way I think, so sorry'. (Said of course before you have a chance to think 'no hang on, I wasn't in the way, you weren't looking, this isn't my fault'…

So basically an "excuse me what the fuck"?

No, an instinctive apology as though you were at fault, even though you (to a bystander, or in hindsight) obviously weren't. It's not sarcastic.

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#308

Post by shirakawasuna »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #29

It's funny to see this just now. I've started contributing quite a bit to Wikidata as part of some work that uses it as a data source, and it's really the first time in more than a decade that I work in an environment where my work gets public scrutiny. Shame is a really strong emotion for me, and I feel terrible when anyone spots a mistake. At one point, I left the site and didn't return for three days because I saw…

It's all about context.

If you make an honest mistake on, say, WikiData, nobody should jump down your throat. That's not productive and the context is one where some degree of empathy should be expected. It's a commons. And trust me, I know how internet nerds can be on a commons - internet nerds that often get things very wrong in their criticisms but will swear and yell at you while leveling them.

That context is important. The goal that I hope we all want to push for a data commons is a productive shared environment. But when it becomes narrative or editorials, now there are very serious political and scholarly issues at work and popular narratives are frequently self-sustaining via institutional norms. You can cite hundreds of documents and publications for a popular liberal (like lib dem) narrative even if it's no better supported than a position published by an esoteric scholar in Maine and win any arguments about which should be included in the definitive encyclopedia entry on the topic and which should be quietly shoved aside. Even disagreements listed in these pages tend to be relatively popular narratives that are not particularly disagreeable to those in power, or have become popular enough despite that opposition and are the exception.

Turkish nationalists denying the Armenian genocide on Wikipedia will be drowned out by process: the dominant media and scholarly narratives (which are roughly correct). But what would we see on a page about Evo Morales back in October 2019? Would we not see the repeated dishonest narratives and headlines of the New York Times? In fact, we would: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Evo_Morales&oldid.... No contextualization, just the implication that the NYT narratives are a good resource. And here is the closest snapshot in time to that wiki page: https://web.archive.org/web/20191112031842/https://www.nytim...

In short, mistakes should always be contextualized by the roles of those involved, the goals sought (and hopefully shared), and a desire to get at the truth even if it's uncomfortable.

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#309

Post by PTOB »

ethbr0 wrote: post #187
DoreenMichele wrote: post #172

I don't know. Years ago, I was on an email list and I did a lot of sincere public apologizing, in part because the internet was younger, so we didn't have a lot of stuff worked out. We were just stumbling our way forward as best we could. And the end result was that I became everyone's bitch. People would intentionally pick on me and be ugly to me and when it went sideways, the group as a whole would go "There she go…

To preface, we're talking about people with jackasses-tendencies here. Normal, well-adjusted people don't like to make their colleagues feel bad. But as you say, it's also been my experience that apology and... "ownership"(?) are two very different things in American (Southern) culture. "I'm sorry I did X" seems to signal weakness and invite criticism, if people are already so inclined. "I did X. It wasn't the best a…

As a former Southerner, I can confirm. The Southern United States is the most British in its social constructs.

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#310

Post by gjs278 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #235
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who are what santoshalper described as "high ego" are usually charismatic, and that makes a difference with everything.

The probably not obvious at this point context is the comment I replied to was an early reply (the first one?) and is probably assuming "The issue is you are a woman and it must have been a male dominant environment -- just like here on HN where DoreenMichele is a woman in a predominantly male environment." In spite of me promptly replying to say "no, that wasn't the issue," there has been at least one other comment…

good lord. apologize for not being able to sum it up.
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