FT Person of the Year: Susan Fowler
ft.com
ft.com
> After winning a place at Arizona State University to study philosophy, she then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, earning a degree in physics. In her final year at Penn, she wrote a blog entitled “If Susan can learn physics, so can you”, explaining how she caught up despite having no secondary maths education. By the time she reached Uber at age 24, she was a physicist and computer scientist, and wrote her first book about software architecture while working at the company
Damn. Very impressive.
I homeschooled my sons. Lack of formal education prior to university is not evidence that one is not getting support. There are parents that actively quash the dreams of their kids and insist the kids pursue something the parent feels matters. They push their kids into pursuing a particular path. This is often seen by outsiders as a good thing, but it usually is not. It usually means the kid never got to decide for themselves what they wanted out of life and simply did as they were told.
It’s like people who say “how could America be racist if Obamacare got elected” which I have been hearing a lot lately. You can have a system that’s massively unfair... the existence of a handful of people who succeed despite unfairness is not evidence of anything except that some people are extraordinary.
It's the onus of FT to contextualize Ms. Fowler's comments, if that's what you're getting at, but then again, it is FT not People magazine (take it for what it's worth).
I think Susan is great, and she did amazing work, but she's also clearly top 1-5% brilliant. These stories give people like me false hope. As if I can pick myself up by my intellectual bootstraps and just study hard to be a physics/CS major and I'll just be able to make it into a top university.
In university I was a C physics student and maybe a B CS student. And that wasn't at a school known for academic performance. In fact, when I took calculus (with little secondary (high school education) education because I worked) even with free tutoring and doing hundreds of practice problems I only barely passed with Cs.
I always use to think that Intelligence was a binary black and white thing. Constantly struggling at school, understanding things in the moment but never able to recall and apply the knowledge effectively to get good grades. People would always think I was intelligent by the way I talked and thought, but looking at my grades or ability to manage daily/mundane tasks and you could see something very wrong.
I read book after book, learned about the brain, learning, memory and plethora of things in between. After developing negative feedback loops with everything, I generally accepted that I would be a failure at everything.
One day I came across a book that just explained what was fundamentally wrong. Long story short my brain couldn't focus and never did, it never developed structures necessary for success in anything let alone math, physics, computer science, music. I found a very very special treatment that can change the network in your brain responsible for focus and enhanced it.
Then all those years spending learning about improving abilities was all accessible, like someone flipped a switch and everything I read/experienced was there. Now I spend my days excelling at everything, there is not a single thing that I am not above average at and in some things far far above average. I live the Limitless movie(although its taken a year for it to be really evident) everyday of my life.
My brain has changed so fundamentally, I can't even say I am the same human being anymore. Now I spend my days trying to become a "genius" I always dreamed about and starting to understand that intelligence isn't one thing in particular its many things:
1. Focus 2. Sensory Awareness 3. Reaction time 4. Analytical Ability 5. Working and Long-term Memory 6. Creativity 7. Emotional Intelligence 8. Executive Function/Task Management
There are probably more, but those are the ones I focus my attention on. You have to find ways to improve those things, it might take a year or it might take the rest of your life. I make it my life mission to identify geniuses in any domain and learn from them. Most of my learning has come from a Kung Fu and Dance master and he excels in all these areas.
Just remember that your abilities are heavily dependent on your intellectual/emotional development. If your parents have serious limitations in those areas you will probably have them to because in your core development years you were mirroring their neurons, but that doesn't mean it can't change. The hardest part is identifying the limitations.
The brain is infinitely complex, everything you have perceived/experienced is probably there, its just a matter of how you access it. You have a universe in your brain use it. I have really only scratched the surface, because even knowing all these things is not enough. You actually have to do physically/mentally stimulating activities to develop these abilities. Even then it is luck, but not impossible.
I am not trying to inflate my ego(because that's a weakness), I am not a genius or anything special in my mind. But it is a just the reality I worked tirelessly to create and I like to share that experience.
Edited For Brevity
Email me; I'd love to compare notes and also pick your brain.
Don't you need a degree in computer science to be called computer scientist.
Not sure if i'd call every software programmer a 'computer scientist'.
Merely mentioning this bad apparently. downvotes.
A computer scientist is one who practises and/or studies computer science, which she does. No, that doesn't require a CS degree, though it helps.
You're the only one doing this. The article omits any justification for the terms, sure. And it could be a baseless claim. But I don't really see any reason to assume that's the case.
Elected First female Chancellor of Germany vs wrote a book about microservices.
Yes hurting for credentials in this context. Most people have no idea who she is, her only claim to fame is writing that blogpost.
Good see another woman on the list.
> Donald Trump
Well, that certainly takes a lot of the prestige out of her winning...
(I realize the irony in my typing this, that I appear to be saying Weinstein was responsible for something a number of people would argue a woman started, but hey. That's not what I'm saying, and you get my point and what I'm trying to say.)
Put another way, Susan didn't go after a high-profile leader directly. She went after systemic issues in a company. Weinstein, on the other hand, showed a lot of people that high-profile leaders are vulnerable to public attention, and that became a slightly different species of snowball. Both are cultural contributions.
Edit: The reason I find Fowler somewhat unique is that her background, credentials, writing skills, etc, made her hard to dismiss. It was very believable, perhaps to some that might have tended to challenge similar stories.
So it seemed to open a door for women that had similar stories, but not the same level of gravitas. It also primed the media to pay attention to this area.
That, to me, indicates that something else shifted culturally to allow the Uber thing to help contribute to that environment. What is that? Was it the scale of Uber? Was it something about Fowler? Was it that the same power dynamics that suppressed revelations about Weinstein were starting to degrade within insular tech? I'm personally curious about it, and I don't think Fowler's blog post was solely responsible and folks should start making conclusions about cultural shifts, is my only point.
Edit to your edit: Careful; you're lightly claiming that accusers before Fowler were unbelievable and easily dismissed.
Heh. Hopefully I'm given the benefit of the doubt on that. She bordered on unassailable, which is difficult to do when recounting anything.
Edit: Ugh, really? You're reading something that isn't there.
Travis' mother died. He thought he could mourn and be CEO at the same time, but he decided he couldn't handle both
I'm curious about the phenomenon. We had mass acceptance of horrifying behaviour. Switches flipped and what was dirty but tolerable became unacceptable. If we wish to replicate this process in other domains, it would be helpful to understand what happened.
Also, of course, it was not exactly advertised that this was going on.
"When we were looking for funding or a home for our VR group, we were warned in private conversations against SO MANY funders and leaders within companies, by their equally powerful white dude colleagues. Often several separate warnings against the same dude. I KNOW YOU KNOW."
Sounds to me like the upper echelons know and don't care.
[1]: https://twitter.com/vihartvihart/status/938212942356537345
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-ove...
I don't mean to diminish Fowler at all. But the moment we have arrived at is a huge collection of interconnected events, not a straight line from A, through B, to C.
I know that's not your main point, it's just important to point out culpable people like the Clintons were instead of seeing them (or the campaign) as victims.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/05/us/harvey-wei...
In late September, emails show, he was discussing a documentary television show he was working on with Hillary Clinton. He had long raised campaign cash for her, and her feminist credentials helped burnish his image — even though Tina Brown, the magazine editor, and Lena Dunham, the writer and actress, each say they had cautioned Mrs. Clinton’s aides about his treatment of women. Now, Mr. Weinstein exchanged questions about distribution rights for the show. “I am hopeful we can get a good price for this,” Robert Barnett, Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer, replied.
Two days later, Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon, interrupted a vacation in Hawaii to field advice from Mr. Weinstein, according to the emails. The Wall Street Journal was reporting on turmoil at Amazon Studios, one of Mr. Weinstein’s business partners. He recommended an aggressive response that involved hiring some of his own team, including a libel lawyer who “makes sure everyone sticks to the right narrative,” Mr. Weinstein wrote. He added, “I’m happy to coordinate with whoever you’d like, as a friend of the court.” Mr. Bezos declined to comment.
That said, it's a fascinating thought exercise to wonder where President Clinton would be today, if the same sexual assault revelations happened. As the first female President married to someone accused of various sexual improprieties I suspect it would be a very difficult needle to thread.
Not to be dramatic, but I think this example is very timely and appropriate for showing the impact of an uncensored internet. We can only guess whether impact like this will still be possible without net neutrality.
https://www.ft.com/content/7ab21e44-de85-11e7-8f9f-de1c2175f...
The other people have a extraordinary larger impact on global economics and politics.
Another way to look at it: while Bezos has done plenty with Amazon in 2017, it's a continuation of what he was doing in 2016. And I suspect 2018 will continue this year. It's not that his achievements aren't notable, it's that they didn't dramatically change the course of this year's events, or inspire a dramatic change of direction. By comparison, 2017's awakening to sexual assault/discrimination claims is an absolutely huge deviation from existing patterns.
That would only make sense if the primary criterion for selection were raw power. I don't know FT's criteria or the MO behind their Person of the Year designation. My hunch, however, is that it might be more nuanced, and they might be interested in people who stand up against established power, especially given the current sociopolitical climate.
There is no rhyme or reason for the basis for selecting a Person of the year. None what so ever. They are primarily focused in a specific part of the world. Forget Asia, Africa and other so called Third World.
Selecting a person of the year is not more substantive than sitting in a drum circle and passing the beer and talking stick. Especially since the newspaper business is now shadow of itself.
Honestly, I really do not know who the person of the year should be. The world does not revolve around a person, 10 years from now when one would have to think about 2017, Susan Folwer's Uber takedown will be very unlikely thing many would remember.
She is important but Xi, Bezos,and Musk are radically changing the face of the world in a much much greater capacity.
EDIT:
Musk has the hyperloop, tesla, spacex. These are what I consider revolutionary technologies that could change the face of our global civilization.
Bezos is eating the world with amazon, whole foods, and washington post. Amazon is leading so many new industries drone deliveries, cloud, and so many are cities are competing for hq2. What isn't amazon doing lately ?
Xi is changing the face of silicon valley by making SV more like china which has huge global implications.
I think Fowler is great, but she isn't on the same level.
New rockets and computer products come every year and have been since 1969. Wholesale cultural shifts in business are more rare, more impactful, and more complex.
Another example would be the horrible way Denise Young Smith was fired from Apple, and James Damore from Google.
This pick signals more of the wagons circling, fanning the flames by the Financial Times.
do you really think that shining the light on the fucked-up situation in tech world is something people do for fun and profit?
Rape and sexual harassments are most under-reported crimes. Everyone who faced these issues should talk about it. And HN being mostly men's place, it's obvious they don't like it.
(A very cynical person might mention the FT's recent trouble with gender pay gap, but I'd say Fowler's impact remains clear.)
If you accept the premise that Susan Fowler has opened (or helped open) a door for women across the world to be more successful and freer of sexual harrassment, you could absolutely make the case that will have as big of an impact as whatever Bezos is doing with Amazon - women are quite a large portion of the population after all!
Fowler's post created ripples, at least in tech. It was a brilliant exposition of how not to run a company. Bullying happens in every company, what makes a company special is how you deal with it.
Uber dealt with bullying by pampering its odious alpha-shits and creating a structure around them that legitimised and encouraged it, in the guise of "culture".
Musk, Bezos xi et al, are uber rich engineers. Most moderatly intelligent people with >60 billion can change the world. Getting there in the first place is the hard part.
writing honestly about an abuse of power, knowing that it will most likley end your career and result in more persecution, takes a fuck tonne more courage than ordering a bunch of top people in thier fields to build a rocket/shopping empire.
in terms of impact, a nobody unseated Kalanick, something the US legal system never managed to do, despite his companies many legal transgressions.
If you grow up with little to lose it's hard to un-learn that.
African Americans have a particularly eloquent way of describing that behavior but it isn't appropriate to repeat here.
You don't notice most of the time when someone rage-quits their job for moral/ethics reasons because usually it doesn't lead so something like this.
Has it, though? I see giant names in Hollywood go down. Senators in DC. I'm not seeing tech figures, though.
I saw Uber do the very definition of a classic ass-covering report.
Is silicon valley really cleaning house?
So yeah, I think tech is changing for the better.
Xi has been around for ages, as has Bezos. It's not really their year. Musk has done very little to impact anyone's life; maybe some of his stuff might in the future (though I would argue probably not), but at most it's unrealised potential. Save it until there's an impact. The change in culture around sexual assault and harassment in the US and more broadly the west in general is already having a large impact, and going forward its impact may be dramatic.
You could certainly argue to what extent Fowler was involved in that, but if you take the position that she was key, and there's certainly an argument to do so, then it makes sense.
Downvotes should be reserved for offtopic comments not disagreement.