People who are telling the truth about themselves do not insist on being ‘off the record’ | Hacker News Reader

People who are telling the truth about themselves do not insist on being ‘off the record’

realdanlyons.com

15 pointsnickb23 comments

That is false. I tell reporters stuff off the record all the time, and if anything what I tell them that way is truer, in the sense that I'm willing to tell them more.

I suspect if you asked reporters they'd say it was this way with most of the people they talk to. In fact, I have some evidence already that it is. Steven Levy told me that he hated it when people told him stuff off the record, because he couldn't use it. If it wasn't the truth, he wouldn't care.

You tell reporters stuff about yourself off the record?

Because that, not off the record generally which Dan spends a whole paragraph defending, is the relevant bit.

You know, I was just guilty of doing what I always make fun of trolls for doing: commenting based on the title without reading the article first. But I've just read it and I see that I've also done the second thing I make fun of trolls for doing: attacking something other than what the author said. So I take back what I said. It's true, but beside the point.

I do still disagree with him slightly. It's not hard to imagine things one might want to tell about themselves only off the record. Especially about one's health: there are lots of medical conditions someone might be embarrassed to have other people know about.

But I was wrong to suggest that he distrusted off the record statements generally. It should have set off warning signals that I was accusing an experienced reporter of making such an elementary mistake.

One reason I didn't read the article was that it was so long. That's probably one reason people so often do this to me.

> That's probably one reason people so often do this to me.

You're probably the only author that gets them to read at all.

"That's probably one reason people so often do this to me."

It seems like a lot of the time when people do this to you it's because they've skipped over one of the qualifiers to your argument, especially when the qualifier comes a couple paragraphs before the actual anecdote or metaphor.

I think the most disturbing thing is that your original post was immediately modded up very high in spite of the reality of the article.

Yeah, I'd really need an undo-upmod feature right now. When you upmod something the down arrow could stay and become very pale.

It's PG, on PG's site, being voted on by PG fans who probably also didn't read the article. Disturbing, perhaps, but not shocking.

Well, this happens with the sort of troll posts I mentioned too.

"One of the many ironies and contradictions about Apple is that while the company presents this hip, open, cool image to the world"

Really? I'll give you hip and cool, but open? There's nothing open at all about Apple. Their OS has to be hacked to work on hardware they didn't sell. They've done more to advance DRM than anyone. They've taken tremendous advantage of open source communities while giving nearly nothing back. They've sued people for blogging about upcoming products ahead of time. They hid Jobs's cancer (and nutjob idea of fighting it by eating carrots) until it was over.

Open is the last word that any literate human would ever associate with Apple.

Most people couldn't tell you what DRM is, or what, exactly, an operating system does. The author said Apple presents an image of being open, not the actuality of it. And to most people, that's probably what they see.

Anyone who doesn't know what DRM is doesn't even know to think about open vs. closed. They don't know what proprietary is either. They still might know about Apple's zealously guarded secrecy.

Also, if they buy an iPod and start using iTunes, they find out what DRM is the hard way.

We're talking past each other.

The author said that Apple presents an image of being open, and in the same sentence, said this is ironic, since they are not open. So what are you objecting to?

I object to the idea that they project an image of being open at all. They don't. They project an image of guarded secrecy. There's no irony in them not being open, it's just them doing what they've always done.

When I say (and, I think, the author) "image the company projects," I mean by marketing. If their marketing said the company was run by angry iguanas, then it would be accurate to say they project an image of being run by angry iguanas, regardless of the truth.

Does their marketing project open? I've never seen that. I have seen millions of people wondering what product was going to ship at the next wwdc, and all of the crazy (sometimes legally enforced) silence around that.

Apple is starting to sound like bose. Bose used to be a tech company, but then the marketers got a hold of it (they spend more on marketing then on engineering). Bose has an obsession about not giving customers configurable choices - for example none of their machines have bass/treble controls. Apple does exactly the same thing.

At least Apple still makes good computers; the regular Macbook is even price competitive.

All of Bose's systems and headphones are incredibly overpriced if you care about sound quality in a sound system. This (http://www.hsuresearch.com/products/ultra1.html) would blow away any Bose system and this one (http://www.hsuresearch.com/products/performance1.html) would compare favorably to a much more expensive Bose system. Bose has done one of the most brilliant marketing jobs in the history of marketing by convincing the public that their inferior products are in fact the best made.

> At least Apple still makes good computers

Today..... and there was a time that bose made good stuff too.

Apple needs to fire some of their marketers, but companies get addicted to the money they bring in. And it works - in the short term.

> How many times do you think Jobs rehearsed that opening line before he dialed (or had Katie Cotton dial for him)? I’d say he practiced it one hundred times.

I'd say he didn't practice it at all. I don't think SJ is the kind of guy who has to practice a line like that--that's who he is.

I thought the same thing... telling someone off doesn't take a lot of practice.

Exactly, SJ knows he's "an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law" and he definitely thinks some reporter is "a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong".

From pg: "The trouble with lying is that you have to remember everything you've said in the past to make sure you don't contradict yourself. If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything"

http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html

I think there are legitimate reasons for privacy and keeping things off the record. Not implying anything about Steve Job's condition, but I can imagine a hypothetical situation in which a CEO has just been diagnosed HIV positive and want it kept off the record. This is not necessarily a life threatening condition anymore, but yet still comes with a strong negative connotations and horrible social stigmas.

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