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Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

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Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#391

Post by metaphor »

dekhn wrote: post #389
metaphor wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still not quite making the link between "feudal lord" and "pettiness" (both seem equally subjective/vague). By "total control", do you mean well beyond the boundaries of labor law? In my mind, I'm admittedly inclined to interpret this color as a consequence of the music stopping at an unprofitable creative house with an internal culture of unabashed freedom on someone else's dime. Maybe I just need to read the books…

Here let me explain it with concrete examples. Let's say you're a smart engineer, you know how to write code and make things happen and you have pretty good idea of what users seem to want or need. You have a boss and you have a meeting with your boss to make a decision about including a new feature you've coded up a prototype for, into a product that is going to be released in a year. You demo it, and it goes mostly…

Thanks for all that.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#392

Post by justinjlynn »

keneda7 wrote: post #334
justinjlynn wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the argument is essentially one of "sure, he may have been completely awful, but it all worked out so, if we assume that's the reason things worked out (ignoring the myriad other factors and pure luck) then we suppose that, however they had acted or the damage caused, they were right to do so. The ends justify the means - even if we can't tell for sure or not that by those awful means we arrived at those desi…

Not the person you responded to but I find it an interesting situation. I agree with you that jobs (from what I've read) seems to be awful but at the same time I don't believe theft is okay. If I pay someone to do a job and they choose not to do the job after taking my money they have stolen my money. I am not okay with that. In this case jobs invested in them. It was clearly enough money to give him power over them.…

Jobs paid that money for the business as it was at the time of sale - not for what he wanted it to be in some theoretical future - and he got precisely that. The theft analogy doesn't hold because the deal was completed upon transfer of the organisation. There could be no theft, only the inability to meet the expectations Jobs placed on their employees - for which I'm sure many were fired. That's the only prerogative Jobs purchased when they purchased - and were delivered - ownership of the organisation. That is to say, they bought - and were given - the decision making power over who to hire or fire and for what reasons. Nothing more, nothing less.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#393

Post by simondotau »

SyzygistSix wrote: post #378
simondotau wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stupid is the word I would use for discovering that you have pancreatic cancer and then believing the best course of action is to reject effective medical treatment and "cure" it with an all-carrot diet. Stupid is the word I would use to posthumously describe the interests of Isaac Newton. I admit that it would have been difficult to recognise the stupidity of occult studies in 18th century England, but we can certai…

>Stupid is the word I would use to posthumously describe the interests of Isaac Newton. I admit that it would have been difficult to recognise the stupidity of occult studies in 18th century England, but we can certainly apply that label with the benefit of a modern perspective. It seemed to work for Jack Parsons. And many other very creative people.

Correlation is not causation. There are many very creative people and uncreative people with many diverse quantities and qualities of stupidity.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#394

Post by Beltalowda »

archon810 wrote: post #380
jdmark wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that fact could be reflected in his use of coffee enemas to treat his pancreatic cancer that was easily treatable with chemotherapy which the coffee enemas ultimately resulted in his own death.

"easily treatable" Let's not get carried away here. "According to the American Cancer Society, for all stages of pancreatic cancer combined, the one-year relative survival rate is 20%, and the five-year rate is 9%." And don't forget, Steve Jobs died in 2011, which means treatment was being received for years prior. That's 12+ years ago.

"Easily treatable" is indeed a bit of a stretch, but the cancer variant Jobs suffered from (pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor) seems to have a ~61% five-year survival rate, so that's significantly better. If you're going to get pancreatic cancer, that's the variant you want to choose.

Did his choices hasten his death? At least one oncologist thinks that "the end result would probably have been the same"[1]:

"Had he been operated on then, would most likely would have happened is that Jobs’ apparent survival would have been nine months longer but the end result would probably have been the same. None of this absolves the alternative medicine that Jobs tried or suggests that waiting to undergo surgery wasn’t harmful, only that in hindsight we can conclude that it probably didn’t make a difference. At the time of his diagnosis and during the nine months afterward during which he tried woo instead of medicine, it was entirely reasonable to be concerned that the delay was endangering his life, because it might have been. It was impossible to know until later—and, quite frankly, not even then—whether Jobs’ delaying surgery contributed to his death. Even though what I have learned suggests that this delay probably didn’t contribute to Jobs’ death, it might have. Even though I’m more sure than I was before, I can never be 100% sure. Trust me when I say yet again that I really, really wish I could join with the skeptics and doctors proclaiming that “alternative medicine killed Steve Jobs,” but I can’t, at least not based on the facts as I have been able to learn them."

[1]: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/one-more-thing/

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#395

Post by SyzygistSix »

simondotau wrote: post #393
SyzygistSix wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Stupid is the word I would use to posthumously describe the interests of Isaac Newton. I admit that it would have been difficult to recognise the stupidity of occult studies in 18th century England, but we can certainly apply that label with the benefit of a modern perspective. It seemed to work for Jack Parsons. And many other very creative people.

Correlation is not causation. There are many very creative people and uncreative people with many diverse quantities and qualities of stupidity.

Or maybe our conscious and unconscious brains don't work in linear fashion like factories. Inspiration matters. It doesn't matter if what it takes to inspire one, consciously or subconsciously, is weird and doesn't make logical sense but is more poetic.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#396

Post by simondotau »

SyzygistSix wrote: post #395
simondotau wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correlation is not causation. There are many very creative people and uncreative people with many diverse quantities and qualities of stupidity.

Or maybe our conscious and unconscious brains don't work in linear fashion like factories. Inspiration matters. It doesn't matter if what it takes to inspire one, consciously or subconsciously, is weird and doesn't make logical sense but is more poetic.

Maybe. Maybe not. Regardless, correlation is not causation.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#397

Post by blitzar »

camgunz wrote: post #382
blitzar wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not, lets harvest someone elses organs to make me healthy.

I mean, I could be healthier and I'm a high income individual. Let's harvest the organs of someone else who's unproven to make me healthy.

You + me the many ... some poor schmuck that few.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#398

Post by fractallyte »

ggm wrote: post #218
fractallyte wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It worked with Daffy Duck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Yeggs In the cartoon, a gun was pointed at Daffy's head - and he managed to lay a golden egg. Can a miracle be justified?

We're talking about life limitating life, not life imitating art. The thing about daffy is.. he wasn't real

The joke was that under extreme duress, and individual (or a team) might produce a miracle.

The ethical question is: if it's a genuine miracle (say, a discovery or invention that breaks new ground or was previously thought to be impossible), can the duress be justified?

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