Comment by jonathankoren | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonathankoren | Hacker News Reader

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I love how people always try to run unpaid damage control for a documented shitstorm of ethical and professional misconduct.

Have we forgotten how Uber's casual abuse of "god view" was revealed when the then head of Uber New York met the reported he was scheduled to talk to by causally admitting, "I was tracking you." And then it came out that Uber employees were using it track exgirlfriends, journalists and celebrities?

How Uber instituted a vast program to specifically track government law enforcement agents to aid in their wholesale blatantly illegal operations.

How Uber's HR actively protected textbook sexual harassment. Specifically, a manager explicitly and in writing soliciting sex from a direct report?

How Uber's ATG was founded on the theft of Google's (now Waymo's) LIDAR technology.

How Uber execs famously complained that they weren't "killing enough people" with their self-driving tests.

How Uber routinely ignored and denied documented safety concerns in many markets, particularly in India?

But yeah. Anyone that exposes these actions trash, and not the demigods that oversaw and encouraged them.

What unpaid damage control? The shitstorms are well documented at this point. You forgot the security breach cover up, the espionage, and probably a bunch of other stuff.

What I "love" is people talking as if they are subject matter experts on shit they only read about in the news and have no first hand experience with. Gell-mann amnesia and all that.

What unpaid damage control? Implying that all the stories are made up or at least highly exaggerated by claiming that they’re all from people motivated to lie.

That’s the unpaid damage control.

And now the very guy that said “take [the documented and admitted gross misconduct] with a grain of salt” is shocked — “shocked”, I say — to be called out on his very actions, ignoring the very words written here visible to everyone?

Amazing!

That's a pretty uncharitable interpretation and goes to show you're just here to inject your own biases into stuff you read online and make strawman/ad hominem arguments to make you feel good about yourself.

Nobody is implying any of the scandals were fake, but there was one other comment in the thread wondering about whether superpumped is sensationalized, and these are my two cents wrt where the source material for that book / TV series comes from.

Nobody is implying anyone was lying either. Plenty of people were disgruntled because yeah hearing there's multiple cases of sexual harassment going on in your company sucks. Doesn't mean people are gonna go around lying about stuff, in fact a number of people built up the guts to come forward w/ their own horror stories after Fowler. But you are only going to hear those stories, not the ones about the board member that got kicked out for sexist remarks or the people that got fired after HR investigations, because those aren't outrage-bait. That's what I mean by taking it w/ grain of salt when consuming media.

Also, whatever damage there may be was already done years ago, so there's nothing to "damage control" at this point anymore. As GP implied, people tend to hold on to weak opinions strongly for stuff that frankly they don't even have any reason to be emotionally invested in, and I sure as hell am not interested in trying to "convince" you of anything.

Uncharitable? Please. We both know what the idiom means. Now you may think there you’re being even handed or something, but you’re not. It’s a tactic that’s used to dismiss criticism. Whether you intended to do it or not, that’s exactly what you did. It’s a baseless accusation that only serves to protect the abuser and discredit the victims.

It’s no different than saying that regular health screenings for preventable diseases are encouraged by doctors, but doctors have a profit motive, so maybe you shouldn’t, but definitely don’t talk to any doctors, because they might be lying to you for money. Or that the idea that smoke detectors should be placed outside of every bedroom is a plot by Big Smoke Detector to sell more smoke detectors.

Oh, so you just object to the specific idiom I happened to use? Ok then. Just assume I meant to use one that doesn't trigger you but still conveys the intention I explained above. I believe I was crystal clear that I don't approve of the decision/actions that led to the various scandals and that I sympathize with the victims, and I'll reiterate that I'm cautioning specifically against falling prey to gell-mann amnesia and then ending up getting all worked up in dumb flaming arguments w/ randos online on stuff that is inconsequential to your life and off-topic here to boot.

If you want to insist on thinking that I'm trying to gaslight you or whatever, you're ignoring the forum guidelines ("assume good faith") to the detriment of your HN experience and that's your problem, not mine. I'm going to go touch some grass now, I hope you do too. Cheers.

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