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Careless People

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Re: Careless People

#551

Post by ajuc »

sokoloff wrote: post #190
lordnacho wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success. So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.

> to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.

Depends on what you define as talent.

For example there're studies that intelligence over 120 is negatively correlated with success as a leader.

Re: Careless People

#552

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

armandososa wrote: post #526
erikpukinskis wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why would a good person stay at the company after all she has witnessed? Wait, is the angle of the book that she’s a good person? That can’t possibly be right… it’s a book about all the horrible things she tried to help Facebook do . The title of the book doesn’t suggest she was disappointed in their morals. It suggests she was disappointed in their ability to do their jobs.

> Wait, is the angle of the book that she’s a good person? That can’t possibly be right… Well, she paints herself as an idealist who believes Facebook can be an agent of [presumably positive] change, so at least she thinks of herself as good in some sense of the word. That’s what I found intriguing about that shark attack prologue. If it had been written by a third person or if this were a novelization, it would feel…

Well can you please spoil the shark attack thing? With a bit SPOILERS tag at the top if you like?

Re: Careless People

#553

Post by jrvieira »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #9

> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet). Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have th…

they know deep down that they don't deserve their status which makes them insecure and needing to constantly defend the narrative that they are in fact better.

you'll see this behavior fade in the presence of someone who they themselves perceive as superior by whichever metric

Re: Careless People

#554

Post by selkin »

mistrial9 wrote: post #501
gr__or wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does her attempt to change things from the inside, by confronting their higher ups, who constantly put her down for it and collectivizing with other insiders, still lead you to such a harsh judgment of her character?

a crucial weighting is -- how much was this person implementing the things being decried, versus "change from the inside". Without having read this book, I will personally take away the benefit of doubt on "change from inside" given that this person is an attorney by trade, and has been hired for real money by this company.

I'd contrast Wynn-Williams with Susan Fowler: Fowler was only a few years out of school when she took a software engineer position at Uber, didn't had managerial position, yet actually stood up when things happened and made a change.

Re: Careless People

#555

Post by azemetre »

pixelatedindex wrote: post #544
aredox wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you assume full responsability for all the dependencies of all the software you write and use?

That’s neither here nor there. This a very specific situation where someone comes to my website/company, takes an action they believe is safe, and gets a bunch of spam. That would absolutely be my responsibility - it’s where the buck stops.

It’s similar to how I follow my Congressional Representative but they also added me on various donor lists now.

Just because people do it doesn’t mean it’s not shitty.

Re: Careless People

#556

Post by va1a »

selkin wrote: post #403

This review is as naive as Wynn-Williams portrays herself in her memoir (which I enjoyed!) In the book, Wynn-Williams described herself as a wide-eyed, almost helpless person, which doesn't align with her pre-Facebook career as a lawyer in the a diplomatic corps. And when at FB, she was in the rooms where it happened, and had a job enabling some of it. She could've quit, but did not. She was one of the titular carele…

It's interesting, this concept of "just following orders" recurs so much in almost all contexts. War behavior really seems to be the baseline of human interaction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

Re: Careless People

#557

Post by UltraSane »

daseiner1 wrote: post #523
camdenreslink wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard work and talent are related to success. But when the outcome is "become the richest person in the world", hard work and talent are a rounding error compared to luck. Does anybody really think Zuckerberg is even in the top 5% hardest working or talented people in the world? A decision as inconsequential as rewriting Facebook to a different language in the early days could have derailed the entire enterprise. Ther…

Yes, I would absolutely consider Zuckerberg as one of the top 5% most talented people in the world. Frankly, that isn’t a particularly high bar whatsoever. Haven't you ever been amongst the general populace? You’ve committed the typical sin on this site of overrating technical prowess and underrating business acumen. There’s a reason so many founder CEOs from his era ended up getting sacked while he’s maintained cont…

What if Zuckerberg fell in love with playing the flute as a kid and became one of the best flute players in the world instead of starting Facebook?

Re: Careless People

#558

Post by tpoacher »

sokoloff wrote: post #472
tpoacher wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To throw some controversy onto the mix, they are related, but in the same way that [some race] is correlated to [some behaviour] in the extremes of the probability distribution, but mostly makes no difference at the overwhelming core of it. And therefore when people say [some race] makes no difference in [some behaviour], and other people say "Why is it always [some race] when we see [some behaviour]", and others say…

In the case of talent and hard work, I think it works the other way: the vast majority of people will see better results in their “normal/broad-middle” lives from increases in hard work or, said otherwise, suffer negative outcomes from lapses in effort [getting fired for lack of attendance or having worse health outcomes from a lack of exercise being concrete examples]. It’s not that interesting or relevant to me whe…

This is true, but you are conflating two very different definitions of success.

If anything, your definition is rather tautological: success is the expected outcome of hard work, which cannot be obtained without it.

Whereas in the case of the ultraworthy, the whole point is that hard work cannot reasonably be expected to lead to astronomical wealth in the absence of other factors, and, in the presence of those factors astronomical wealth might even occur without any hard work. So if ultrawealth is one's definition of success, then no hard work is little more than a red herring.

Re: Careless People

#559

Post by bix6 »

miiiiiike wrote: post #540
bix6 wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand why people try and justify or defend these tech villains. What has Mark done to defend you? Besides harvest and sell your data.

I don't care about Mark Zuckerberg. I don't use Facebook, Instagram, or anything else Meta. I avoid it all, actually. I'll turn around on you: Why defend people who will distort every utterance just to score points on whatever is in the public's cross-hairs at the moment? Why support it? Why defend it? Saying that a statement isn't accurate isn't the same as defending or holding water for the subject of the statement…

This is a tell all memoir from someone who was abused and witnessed abuse at Meta and it seems your response is to call one portion hyperbole instead of focusing on the broader issue. You clearly know Meta is a bad actor since you intentionally avoid their products, yet you go out of your way to stick up for a claim that you also don’t know the truth about?

Re: Careless People

#560

Post by miiiiiike »

bix6 wrote: post #559
miiiiiike wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care about Mark Zuckerberg. I don't use Facebook, Instagram, or anything else Meta. I avoid it all, actually. I'll turn around on you: Why defend people who will distort every utterance just to score points on whatever is in the public's cross-hairs at the moment? Why support it? Why defend it? Saying that a statement isn't accurate isn't the same as defending or holding water for the subject of the statement…

This is a tell all memoir from someone who was abused and witnessed abuse at Meta and it seems your response is to call one portion hyperbole instead of focusing on the broader issue. You clearly know Meta is a bad actor since you intentionally avoid their products, yet you go out of your way to stick up for a claim that you also don’t know the truth about?

I didn't give a reason for avoiding the sites and apps that I listed.

My last two comments sum up my thoughts. I don't have anything more to add.

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