Is it long-term good to make a something no one wants to make well?
Remember what happened to Star Wars? Lucas pumped out a prequel trilogy that made a ton of short-term money, but then put a 15 year delay to wash away the filthy taste, before Disney took over and started self-perpetuation engine pumping out enjoyable and massively profitable movies
How is it possible to get a remake done by deadline? How did the original have so much extra time padded into its schedule?
> Steve Jobs's rallying cry that we could in fact get it done by the deadline later that year
There interesting but here is that Jobs didn't know if his cry was true. But he needed it to be true, so it was. Jobs was a member of the "action-based community", not the "reality-based community" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
They got it done by killing everyone, working multiple shifts, 24/7, no days off, etc. Some people left after it was over, due to burn out. Surviving TS2 was a test of Pixar's resilience that they passed, but at a cost.
That's awful. So they train people to never ask for clarification or refresh if they misunderstand or forget, so instead they go on to make a far worse mistake acting on incorrect information.
> Doesn't Google do this? If you leak something to press, you're fired, then a company email goes out "Hey we canned dude for running his mouth..."
I've never heard of this happening. I've heard of people fired for taking photographs (or stealing prototypes!) of confidential products and handing them to journalists.
Open source is a red herring, as you say. Closed binary is the problem.
I need a way to verify that binary I am installing is the same as the binary that has been thoroughly vetted by security researches. In the modern mobile app ecosystem, on a major OS, running a major app, I can't carefully pick and choose which binary version to install. I get whatever the OS company's server pushes to me, and I can't downgrade to a known good version.
There's a difference between " shouting down contrarian or critical viewpoints when a discussion could be initiated" and "shouting down people who are rehashing tired old arguments that looks exactly the same as the arguments put forth by people who are already known to be operating in bad faith"
I would counter that a) perhaps some parties don't know that they're using "tired old arguments" (if it is new to them) and b) the "bad faith" may be assumed, rather than known.
If you're being shouted down, regardless of why one party thinks you should be shouted down, your worldview and opinion of the opposite party will be strongly affected.
* A small subset of the startup ecosystem is implicitly/explicitly biased.
* A larger subset of the startup ecosystem recognizes that fact, and won't invest in diverse founders (all things being equal) because of the additional hurdles we have to clear.
* Everyone else knows that some people are cautious about funding diversity because some people are biased.
That first tiny percentage has the devil's own leverage.
I have also heard roughly the opposite model, namely:
1. A small subset of the startup ecosystem wants to fund diverse founders, and is willing to compromise on startup quality to do so.
2. A larger subset of the startup ecosystem recognizes that fact, and won't invest in diverse founders (all things being equal) because they are worse due to group #1 funding worse companies.
3. Everyone else knows about #1 and #2, and so are cautious about funding diversity.
I'm curious if you have considered this way of looking at the world, and know of any data that would let me conclude it was less accurate than the version you outlined above.
There are other conclusions and interpretations you can draw from the two lines of reasoning. Much of the effectiveness of dog-whistle politics is that most of what's said remain non-explicit, so let me pop that:
The reasoning that there is a small group who would refuse to fund nonwhites/women, and that has an knock-on effect on everybody else suggests:
-that there is a 'culture of racism/mysogyny'
-that we need more diversity training
-that we need to move the overton window to exclude those people with the unacceptable views (and we should do so via diversity training)
-that we need to spend money to fund the people to make the above happen.
OTOH, the reasoning that many startups lead by nonwhites and/or women got seed-funding via affirmative action despite not being strong enough to get funded on a level playground, leading to lower average quality, leading to warier investors and difficulty attracting further funding suggests:
- that there is no 'culture of racism/mysogyny', just people being rational with their money.
- that we need to wind back the irrational AA money that is distorting the market and wasting its investors' money
- that 'diversity training' is not the answer and possibly counterproductive.
-that the overton window is either fine where it is, or could be moved a bit the other way.
It is unfortunate that there is so much attached here, and I'm fairly sure most of those things are not the intended interpretations by the posters, but you can see how this is a very baggage laiden discussion. Partially it's because it echoes many, many similar discussions elsewhere, and many of those previous discussions made many people very angry at each other.
The business case for diversity is not that "it would be nice to have it", it's the McKinsey study that diverse companies consistently outperform homogenous ones.
So in the end investors who resist diversity miss out on some runaway successes.
> Google's motto — "Don't be evil" — is in part a branding play, but it's also characteristic of a kind of business that's successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence.
> Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can't. In perfect competition, a business is so focused on today's margins that it can't possibly plan for a long-term future. Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits.
The McKinsey study (at least to my reading[1]) establishes correlation, not causation. It could well be the other way around, ie: basically everyone agrees that diversity is an ethically good thing... so perhaps profitable companies are more diverse because they can afford to be, rather than being more profitable because they're diverse.
This seems falsifiable btw... we could brainstorm perks that companies offer when they're doing well, and see how closely the correlation there matches McKinsey's observed 35% overperformance.
You make a very good point, and my problem with McKinsey study was its bundling of various industries without subsequent breakdown by field. While it seems natural that customer-facing enterprises benefit from diversity (sales people, nurses, customer support), where a customer might seek out a familiar face, the analogy seems to stretch when you stretch it to other areas (tractor manufacturing, winemaking, etc.)
P.S. The McKinsey article is behind a wall, not paywall, just a registered account with mckinsey.com
I'm not a native speaker. What does "devil's own leverage" mean in this context? I don't think it's an idiom. Do you mean that their behaviour is what drives everybody else's?
In this context, it just means "very strong". The idea is that biased investors have a lot of leverage, despite being a minority, because of the environment they're in. So yes, it's that their behavior is driving everyone else's.
That can be seen as a positive thing - it's hard to make money as an investor in this ecosystem by just following the groupthink, therefore the contrarians stand to make the most money.
