381–390 of 403 posts
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Apologizing is a good leadership strategy regardless of standing IMO. It shows that you are human which can help one gain and maintain report with fellow workers. Refusing to apologize has the opposite effect.
Strong disagree. I want to follow someone who knows when not to apologize: when it’s _not_ their/our mistake, when assigning blame doesn’t help, and when they’re fighting for us.
> What should I do when I see someone else is making a mistake? > When you see others making mistakes, first help them see their mistakes and deal with them (e.g. by recycling this text, or by independently offering your analysis and answers to Steps 1 and 2 above). > Remember you make mistakes too, and be tolerant of the time it may take people to accept that they have made a mistake. (But you don't need to allow th…
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I think the crux of the issue is how powerful and unrelenting the internet mob has become. If there was a way to neuter this power, or better ensure the punishment enacted by the mob fits the crime, less people would advocate for denial. As it stands, public shaming often goes way overboard. For those interested in hearing more stories of this: https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_ronson_when_online_shaming_goe...
What is wrong with the public raising its expectations on public figures, companies, politicians, etc? This is what I read every time someone refers to the "internet mob". It's a bunch of normal people being loud on the internet over a perceived injustice with nothing particularly toxic compared to the injustices themselves or the way speech is curtailed in other contexts (you can't be frank with your boss most of th…
The problem is when this same internet mob protocol gets applied to average citizens. The internet mob deals massive amounts of damage to a person's reputation and psyche. And, there's no way to temper the punishment to meet the crime. For your average wrong-doer, it's extreme overkill.
Take, for example, the woman who recently got called out for making racist comments to a black man in the park. She was clearly in the wrong, but her entire life is ruined now due to the internet mob. The punishment did not fit the crime.
I made such a mistake over 3 years ago. Only found about it 2 years ago. Mostly, I was acting on insufficient information, and a bit of intuition. I identified the kind of error I made, noted what I had to do to avoid a repeat —which never happened since. I fixed then admitted the mistake, a couple days after finding it. It's standard procedure. I could have swept it under the rug, though I never considered it. There…
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You have to keep in mind that the way tax collection worked in that area at the time is that it was contracted out by the state. The contractor needed to deliver some amount of money to the state, and empowered to gather money from people; the difference between what they gathered and what they delivered to the state was their profit. Tax collectors operating within this incentive structure were not likely to be very…
And just to drive the point home, the tax policy that this caused was occasionally literally genocidal, in the most strict meaning of the word. This was possible because it was a slave society, and it was possible for the tax collector to collect your children into slavery in lieu of unpaid taxes. In some areas in Anatolia, which were close to the border of the empire and thus had a significant military presence that…
I'm not sure apologizing publicly has made anything better for any individual, especially in the current moral panic climate. Mobs don't accept apologies. Public apologies stamp official guilt on the individual and therefore serve as a license for the mob to further punish them because now they have admitted their fault and therefore are 'officially' guilty of the crime. Public apologies, therefore, are the metaphori…
I'm not sure apologizing publicly has made anything better for any individual Sure it has, for example Dan Harmon's public apology to Megan Ganz: https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/1/11/16879702/dan-harmon-ap... Public apologies, therefore, are the metaphorical equivalent of blood in the water for attracting sharks. What are some examples of public apologies that met all 5 of these criteria [1], but made things worse r…
The power advantage that young women have on men; due to evolutionary pressures. Harmon didn't mean to be attracted to her. It happened.
I know biology isn't important in 2020. But I listened to his apology and realized that the human nature discussion is never part of this situation.
Ted Chiang's "liking what you see a documentary" is a good case study of a world where attraction's turned off. As a woman, I sometimes think we aren't empathic enough about how attraction works in men. It doesn't mean they are excused for sexual harassment. I just think evolutionary pressures should be part of the discussion.
Neither person should be setup to fail.
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Did it ever happen? Did anybody actually get out of being cancelled by mobs by apologizing?
Dan Harmon https://www.thisamericanlife.org/674/transcript
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> If you're only looking at racism or sexism or whatever, you're ignoring the bigger and more insidious social problems that are individual and pervade small groups and families everywhere. Oh, I'm not, that's what I meant by an extra level of problems , not that it explains everything, but it may exacerbate it by giving more things for people to key off of that aren't based on rational measures. What I meant is alon…
Yes, but that's something overhyped in social media and probably hardly even exists. It's very easy to incorrectly attribute mistreatment to something visible like sex or race. I used to have a workmate who complained everybody hated him at his previous job because he was the only American there. But then most people ended up hating him at his new job too, which was majority American staffed. People might use the obv…
As someone who has noticed their own knee-jerk reactions based on sex at times (due to a number of factors that mostly boil down to very little exposure to women in my specific field over the decades I've been in it based on small company sizes outside of major markets), I think you're either just entirely unaware of it, lucky enough to not be around it much, or oblivious to it.
To be absolutely clear, I have a bias on on initial interpretation of capability of women before there it information otherwise. This rears its head when I read something about a women in tech having a technical problem and assume it's because of their skill level before knowing anything about them, and it's done in a way that is beyond what I would assume about a man. It's ingrained, but I have noticed it, and try to specifically correct for it now. I would like to think it's made little or no difference in my interactions with women in tech because a) they have been extremely infrequent, and b) I try to not let my assessment of someone's skill affect how I treat them. That's probably optimistic of me though. I don't exactly feel shame about this, it's a natural part of being human. We have biases, we can either try to find them and acknowledge and/or try to work on them, or just live with them.
So what you have here is a very specific counter-example, of someone on the other side saying concretely it has happened at least for once. I doubt I'm unique in this. Most people have biases about all sorts of groups, that come out in large and small ways. Maybe you don't, or your biases are so small it's hard to note them. Forgive me if I think that's unlikely, and you have many biases for many different types of people, as everyone does, and as I do for in many other ways I'm not aware of, I'm sure.
I imagine the other side of this probably feels like people judging you for being underdressed ata group function at all times, no matter how much effort you put into it. People are going to make assumptions if you're the only person in jeans and a t-shirt at a group function of people in suits, and you'll have to prove yourself all the time to overcome people's initial assumptions. My guess is that for women in tech, life is like a bunch of that happening over and over again, unless they get a reputation that proceeds them. That doesn't seem overhyped to me at all, it seems pretty likely to me and a shitty thing to go through life dealing with.
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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 Briton, I sympathise. It's easy to say and then feel foolish by the reaction of the counter-party - that you've made something bigger of it than it is, or that you've inadvertently (been considered to having had) admitted guilt to something serious! 'Sorry' to me ranges from 'Excuse me', through 'ha-ha we both reached for that/side-stepped in the same direction at the same time', all the way of course to the ser…
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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…