The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation”

> The less powerful have to see things in the dominant world view and in their own world view of how to stay safe and get their needs met in the skewed system

Very much reminds of me "Seeing Like a State".

> I'd argue that is true universally in all countries and not just in US.

The phrase "In the US at least" doesn't mean it doesn't happen in other countries. It just means that the US is OP's only frame of reference when making the claim.

There's something about writing like this that gets at me. It's angry, for a good reason, it has lots of good points, but in trying to get across its main point, which is signaling dissatisfaction with the tech industry, attacks lots of groups, hits lots of unrelated points, and when it gets into historical tidbits overrates single events in order to build a narrative.

For example, please stop using terms like cishet. I know what that means. I know it is important to marginalized communities, but know your audience. There is nobody, nobody in today's environment that could get away with saying "a bunch of (blacks|indians|mexicans|asians|gays|women)" but you say cishet white guys and you can group up a whole lot of people without thinking much about them as individuals. Do you believe this is constructive language that bridges the divide that's part of these issues? Do you know where my abuelita was from just because you can see the color of my skin?

Second, I don't think the Slack example is really about inclusion. We all can be stalked and spammed, of course marginalized people more than others. However, Slack's slowness about this isn't nefarious, it's almost certainly they were making so much money recreating IRC that they didn't have time to worry about "minor" issues like that, the same way Hulu can ship a UI that works correctly on a phone but can't be bothered to fix bugs in the TV version that ships to 10 million people. It's not hatred or marginalization, it's just laziness and apathy, it's how our corporations work because they turn into these battlegrounds.

> Steve Jobs wasn’t some kind of genius visionary who independently thought that thing up.

Jobs was infamous about taking credit, but he never would have made claims like this. That product like all of his products at the time was built by a small team, guided by Steve, that bought up and used lots of existing ideas. There's a reason we like to quote "great artists steal". Hell, the Newton existed 10 years earlier and they had Tony Faddell from an even earlier time that tried similar tech. (Steve Jobs, Becoming Steve Jobs, General Magic)

Some of us are sympathetic to many of your points but outsiders don't only come in races or genders and the only way we get out of this collective stagnation is to stop tearing each other down with various narratives about what's wrong with them.

Interesting read. I found it racist and sexist. Yet, it attacks racism and sexism.

How the author portrays the Timnit-Gebru drama is unjust. It was Gebru who withheld her paper for internal review, trying to throw a monkey-wrench in the process by submitting too late.

> Jeff Dean’s subsequent decision to terminate her rather than discuss the improvements she proposed.

She proposed/demanded that the internal reviewers were de-anonymized. She told her underlings that they should stop working towards KPI diversity & inclusion goals, because it did not work, and that Google was marginalizing Black women like her before she got too powerful.

Diversity & inclusion for a commercial business are decisions where profit matters. Data matters. D&I at Google was hijacked by a political movement. Activists got so much leeway, because the topic is taboo, it can be very damaging, and society seems still ok with bashing "exclusively cishet white guys" and accusing them of racism or privilege. D&I got abused. By elevating these (social-media) vocal marginals.

I don't really understand the iPhone example. I doubt that the touch UI was the only thing that made it work, and it's followed by "In fact, most of the things you love about your smartphone started as accessibility features." without ever backing that up. And then there's "3. Orgs can achieve momentous victories by prioritizing marginal business cases." which isn't really backed up too. You could probably make an argument that anyone that has a problem that can be solved by a product that would make a successful startup (so a big pain point) is marginalized, but that sounds like a circular definition to me.

I feel like the whole post is playing a bit of a motte-and-bailey about the definition of marginalized people. A marginalized person could be "a formerly incarcerated black parent", that's the bailey. It could also be a small business owner that'd like a tool to see his cash flow, that's the motte. " We gotta get over this idea that we’re being mensches by handing over our stolen power to unworthy or inexperienced charity cases." is another example of the bailey.

Edit: corrected "It could also be a small business owner that'd like a tool to see his cash flow, that's the bailey." to "It could also be a small business owner that'd like a tool to see his cash flow, that's the motte."