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Comment by jgh | Hacker News Reader

I notice none of those options include "admit he was wrong and apologize". I'm sure he doesn't have to work for a top-tier tech company either.

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It sounds like you're suggesting he both lies, and acts with disingenuity. I don't think it's reasonable to ask him to do that.

I would assume that any apology would be backed up by some king of statement about what he has learned since the memo.

At the very least he should have learned how important soft skills are and that his idea of what makes a good engineer was woefully incomplete.

If he hasn't learned anything, then why would anybody hire the guy?

But out of the things he could have learned, which ones would make for a good public apology? If he goes public, and says - "I honestly apologize for my mistake, I never realized you people could so violently overreact to what's essentially politely expressed feasibility comment backed by scientific consensus, and that in the process you'll so maliciously misrepresent me and lie about my intentions and the contents of my memo" - how will that sound to the crowd? Because that's what his mistake really was - not realizing he's not dealing with rational people.

That's not an apology, that's being a passive-aggressive nerd.

That's exactly my point. I can't imagine any way of him saying the truth about the memo situation that wouldn't also sound passive-aggressive at best.

just do what politicians do. apologize as vaguely as possible without calling yourself wrong.

"Mistakes were made, and I want to move on with my life....", no details -- just pandering. He won't necessarily be dishonest if he limits the context of the apology.

(I don't think one should apologize for opinions and ideas that go un-enacted. Knee-jerk reactions to opinions you don't like tend to blow them up, and that's why James Damore is a name we recognize now. Isn't that opposite to everyone's intention of minimizing his point of view? Ironic.)

Does that even work, though? We all comment critically here when we see politicians or company CEOs pulling fake-apologies. But since fake-apologies happen, I guess they must be buying the performers something...

I bet it would work in a smaller setting, like a hiring interview where the scandal came up. It wouldn't be worth doing something like now and in public while there's attention on him.

The key is to be sincere. A fake apology would be a terrible idea.

Well then doesn't he deserve what he gets?

Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.

I guess in that sense, everybody deserves whatever they get.

Well no, if someone went crazy and tried to murder him over this that would be a pretty inappropriate response.

I do get your point though.

Has that worked in the past?

I've never made a fuckup of nearly the same magnitude, but the times I made a mistake in public apologizing always made things worse.

Has what worked in the past? Admitting you were wrong and apologizing? Sure it's a good way of resolving conflicts if you were actually wrong. People grow and change throughout life, I don't think that being a knucklehead in the past necessarily means you're a knucklehead now.

Admitting you were wrong and apologizing in public, specifically.

An individual can be reasoned with, placated. You can make reparations, promises that the other person will believe because of a precedent of mutual trust and forgiveness.

However, you can't do that with an angry mob.

The angry mob is irrelevant. There are more individuals watching quietly than people making their positions public. The mob will chill when their friends ask them to post-apology. I have been on all sides of this phenomenon: the chiller, the chillee, the apology. It works.

The mob is big enough that they are not necessarily even friends with each other. People who ask the mob to chill risk being mobbed in turn. Punishment of non-punishers is how mobs sustain themselves.

The angry mob is the reason people like James Damore get fired while his openly white-male-hating coworkers are free to post their opinions on Twitter with no consequences at all. They are not at all irrelevant.

It doesn't work in the case of moral panics like this.

Apologizing only convinces the people who are called for his head that they were correct. Usually it will lead to further sanctions.

Yes. 100% it has worked. I've fucked up in the past, apologized, and made things much, much better.

Edit: I feel some might be reading this wrong. I'm did not say it works 100% of the time. I said that I'm 100% certain it has worked because it's worked for me.

You’ve apologized to an angry mob. When?

The problem is, in our society, there is NO option to say you were wrong and walk it all back. Once it's out there on the internet, you are crucified for life with it. Its sad because the "crime" doesn't fit the punishment.

Brendan Eich seems to be doing ok now. The furor that severed his relationship with Mozilla doesn't seem to have impacted Brave, and that was just a few years ago.

By doing ok, you mean he is no longer a CEO of company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue that he helped create, but instead he is running a startup that hardly anyone heard about. At what point you’d say he no longer does ok? When he’s homeless?

He's still an executive in tech. When I read news about Brave the controversy over Eich's Proposition 8 support doesn't dominate comments sections the way it did in 2014. That controversy seems to have had limited impact on Eich or Brave in later years. I would have liked to look at the later impact on someone in tech lower-level than Eich who faced the outrage machine, but his was the only name I could remember.

After some more searching, I remembered the blowup over a "big dongles" joke at PyCon in 2013. I found the name of one of the men involved. I don't want to name him here, but it looks like he's still gainfully employed in tech, using Python.

I agree that social media outrage can be overblown and vicious. I don't want to minimize that. But it fades[1]. "Crucified for life" seems inaccurate.

[1] Even justified outrage fades; did #kony2012 even trend through the end of 2012? But the viciousness while every angry person knows your name can be astonishing. That's why I use a nym here and on Ars Technica that has no direct links to my professional or IRL identities, and why I usually skip commenting or reading about the outrage du jour. I must be feeling lucky today to write even this much.

Mozilla isn't exactly in the best state, even before he left, so maybe it's turning out better for him. Not to mention that Brave just launched a ICO.

From Wikipedia:

Some of the activists created an online shaming campaign against Eich, with online dating site OkCupid automatically displaying a message to Firefox users with information about Eich's donation, and suggesting that users switch to a different browser

Never heard of this. This is unbelievably unethical.

why do you think that he is necessarily wrong. After I read his memo, I would say it is debatable, not wrong. In fact you're attitude is a very clear sign of the silence culture being pushed.

Ehh...I was replying to a post that didn't consider the fact that he might actually be wrong, come to terms with his wrongness, and admit it and move on. Whether or not he's wrong is perhaps an unanswered question -- I don't really know enough about the memo to say one way or the other -- but he should consider that what he did was wrong.

Well nobody on the other side did anything close to "considering that what they did was wrong".

Do you actually think that would get him anywhere?

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