Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

motohagiography

Anecdotally, I met someone who stopped updating their linkedin profile because he found out someone was making anonymous comments and allegations to his employers. He didn't know what they were or who it was because it came second hand from a colleague who told him that an exec had asked about him because of an anonymous message.

Also, whisper networks in tech are very much a thing and they are full of just the quality of people you would expect to find in them. When asked about people I truly can't stand, I say I am sympathetic to the barriers they faced to success and we didn't know each other well. It's not a code, it's the truth. I don't give much weight to the opinions of people who are cruel or have axes to grind either. This is a rare view.

Keep your public social networks well-pruned. Don't talk about plans, the future, or uncertain opportunities, and if you work for crappy people, get out as fast as you can before you give them an unlimited option on causing your reputation harm for the rest of your career.

The real world is crazy. The amount of bullying, stalking and attacks I've gotten after getting a series of promotions in a rotten workplace with a few bad apples is unbelievable.

If I knew better, I'd have paid attention to the above comment.

> The real world is crazy.

It's quite amazing how large the gap is between the way the world is described to us through various mediums, versus the clearly observable reality of it.

FTA:

> I approached the individuals and the institutions concerned about the content of my Subject Access Request. They all refused to discuss the matter with me, so I can only speculate as to what was going on.

Of course, these people were just "avoiding drama" they'd tell us. But then, is avoiding drama that what they were doing when they were trashing this person behind their back in emails?

I think people have a tendency to conceptualize a stark, "real" line between adolescence and adulthood, but the reality of the matter seems to be that many adults are little more than high school kids plus some added expertise in some narrow domains. The adult world, even at the highest levels of authority, largely consists of the same petty cliques, backstabbing, lying, and whatnot that you'd experience in high school.

>The adult world, even at the highest levels of authority, largely consists of the same petty cliques, backstabbing, lying, and whatnot that you'd experience in high school

I'm not a fan of claiming this type of behavior is childish and something we leave behind after high school. Before advances in mass transportation that made it feasible for people to uproot and move to a new community, most people were stuck in the same ingroup for most of their lives.

High school is just a cultural relic that mimics this previous social grouping. It's not necessarily something that kids do that we grow out of - it's the other way around - modern society has broken the existing communities we had in place, but in return gives us the freedom to find new ones anywhere we want.

My point was basically that people tend to have this idea in their mind that for the most part, adults "behave like adults", in that they grow out of the negative social behaviors that are easily observed in a school setting, whereas the reality seems to be that what's actually happening is that this behavior simply becomes more sophisticated and better hidden, or ignored as if it didn't exist.

The leak of Sony emails a while back revealed that high-level Sony execs seemed to emailing at the emotional maturity level of middle-schoolers.

After I had my traumatic experiences, I started thinking of it as more-like childish behavior, not even high school. Even at high school, a lot of people are the same childhood monsters with just a bit of persona, gravitas, connections and expertise. At least, that's what I thought. Some people grow out of it and become enlightened, but most don't and just become phonies.

On the other side of these experiences, when everything is going well it's easy to ignore all that's wrong with people.

Do you have a link?

Or it could be that the individual is as they described and they saw no benefit but a potential of actual harm in further engagement with them.

Whisper networks just mean powerful people who talk among each other and do their research. That will always be the case. In politics isn’t that just the standard form of discourse?

Whisper networks are less-powerful people warning each other about more-powerful people. People with power don't need to hide their communications so much because they are less vulnerable.

Have we learned nothing from Wikileaks? Quite the contrary! People with power rely on private/secret communications. And, without power, what is there to communicate, for what you say likely has no value.

I am reminded of Napoleon's dictum: "the secret of war lies in the communications". Sun Tzu would disagree as well, having well documented the value of secrets and spies.

"(private) knowledge is power."

Sure but I've never heard one of those referred to as a whisper network.

> People with power don't need to hide their communications so much because they are less vulnerable.

That's a dangerously naive way of thinking about communications.

People were shocked when the news about Weinstein "came out" but tons of people already knew about it. It was blatant but he was untouchable.

He is a good man to know in the business, but just be careful around him.

With Weinstein’s prompting, one of the other women attempted to convince Skidmore to participate in sex acts

I told people on the boat. I told people at the dinner I was at. Everybody was like, ‘Oh, that’s just Harvey.’

I had a bad experience with Harvey Weinstein in my youth, and as a result, chose never to work with him again and warn others when they did

Weinstein Company employee Lauren O’Connor later detailed Weinstein’s alleged harassment of Nestor in an internal memo obtained by the Times.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/10/harvey-weinstei...

I want you to know that of all the girls he does this to you are the one I really felt bad about. https://medium.com/bullies-assholes-i-have-known/harvey-wein...

I actually believe the power networks that matter are made up of people who can afford honesty and magnanimity, and that gossips never make it above being minor gatekeepers.

Low stakes players sometimes get to sit at high stakes tables, and sometimes they take out a high stakes player from that round, but they go bust pretty fast.

But a posture of honesty appears too expensive even for the Chinese ruling party; how much more power do you need?

Not a good example, Communism abrogates spirituality. It's intrinsically barren and illegitimate. The CCP, founded on a lie, can never afford the truth. And, indeed, we find them trying to maintain a fabricated history to maintain their power. (The "incident" in the Square, the name of Taiwan, and so on.)

Generally, there is a correlation between personal power and integrity.

Not sure why you got downvoted. It's an honest observation.

Maybe it's worth stating that I consider myself pro-China. I'm anti-communist. If anything I'm a bit of a Sinophile. IMO the Tao Te Ching is one of the greatest books in the world, for example.

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