Comment by mistercow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mistercow | Hacker News Reader

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Sooner or later, the truth is going to come out. Fowler knows this. There's no room for ambiguity here: either Uber has broken the law extravagantly, or she's lying. If the latter is true, she will be crucified for it. The defamation suit alone would be monumental.

And again, there's no ambiguity. She says she has extensive records of this behavior. That's not something she can really walk back. In a situation where one person's word is pitted against another's, the most reliable way to buy credibility is precommitment. By writing the article that she wrote, she made a massive precommitment. She will be screwed if Uber takes her to court and she can't back up her claims. Uber, meanwhile, has said "We're looking into it." Precommitment is about cutting off your options. Uber has done the opposite.

So we have one side that just cashed out options for credibility, and one side that wants to wait and see. If you're trying to assess the situation rationally, there's only one correct play here.

There's an obvious test of whether your claim that, if she's caught lying, she'll become a massive pariah: Ellen Pao, whose claims fell apart in a court of law thanks to evidence she was lying. Look at how the publications like the New York Times and people in this thread treated that case. Here's some quotes from the NYT article about her losing that is linked from this one:

"One of Silicon Valley’s most famous venture capital firms prevailed on Friday over a former partner in a closely watched suit claiming gender discrimination, but hardly got away unscathed."

'"This case sends a powerful signal to Silicon Valley in general and the venture capital industry in particular,” Ms. Rhode said. “Defendants who win in court sometimes lose in the world outside it."'

Neither the fact that her claims were found not to be true in a court of law nor the evidence contradicting them mattered as far as the press or public opinion were concerned. Just the fact that she made them in the first place was sufficient justification for condemning the company she accused and their entire industry.

First of all, there's a big difference between merely losing a civil case and having been proved to have lied. It just means the jury did not find sufficient evidence of wrongdoing. There are a lot of possible reasons for that. If you want to make the case that she was actually lying, you need to point out specific evidence for that.

The fact that the firm not only didn't counter-sue, but also offered to settle with her in exchange for dropping her appeal, tells me that the evidence that she lied is not very strong. Everyone agrees that they took a reputation hit over this. If they had clear evidence that she committed perjury, wouldn't they be eager to clear their name exhaustively?

But second of all, I don't see nearly the kind of buy-in in Pao's case as in Fowlers. Pao sued. Fowler wrote an extensive indictment of Uber's company culture. IANAL, but it seems from what I've seen that it's hard to sue someone for defamation over a lawsuit. A scathing blog post is another story. In addition, there's inherent ambiguity in merely losing a lawsuit. Fowler's move is far more dangerous to her reputation.

It would be great to see the messages and hearing the other side. How did "definitely he wanted sex with me" message look like? With modern overreaction culture it can be just smiley at the end of message. I've seen women in tech that accused their male-dominated teams in sexism just because they couldn't keep up with the rest of team and/or guys didn't hang up with women for different reasons.

SJWs made a good job, I don't believe anyone without a) seeing the evidence with my own eyes b) listening to both sides of the conflict.

The truth will only come out if a lawsuit is filed and it goes to trial and it's not settled before a verdict.

Otherwise we'll get her side of the story as written and a statement from Uber that's been rubber stamped by lawyers.

If she's lying, it's pretty hard to imagine a scenario where Uber lets her settle this without recanting.

> she will be crucified for it.

She'll be crucified for saying bad things about a man in tech regardless. As we can see from the recently created accounts revving up the accusations of lying to promote her book.

Eh, I think that's a little too reductive. She's getting berated for pattern-matching to the "feminist" outgroup, which is a favorite bogieman for a lot of men in the industry. And given Uber's previous flirtations with "digging up dirt on hostile journalists", I wouldn't put some malicious extralegal bullshit past them either.

But I do want to distinguish that from the crucifixion she'd receive if she were making it up. There's a difference between people being shitty online, and your professional reputation being destroyed. The former will happen regardless. The latter is less likely if she's telling the truth.

But fair point that even if she's being truthful, she's put herself at a lot of risk.

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