MacKenzie Bezos Writes Amazon Review for Jeff Bezos Biography
amazon.com
amazon.com
I wonder whether this book is less accurate than average, or whether this review is finding only the typical level of inaccuracy.
How long before you either () stop being shocked by the stories you understand, or () stop assuming the journalist is telling you the truth in stories you don't? A sentence like this makes more sense in the past tense...
When I was small, my parents taught me that if it appeared on TV, it wasn't true （they were mostly thinking of commercials, but news programs were offenders too). It may be sad, but those seem more and more like words to live by, and extend to other media.
Someone I know calls it 'The Glowing Box of Lies', which seems as good a description as any.
Everything else she says is subjective. She thinks Stone portrayed Amazon as a cutthroat, sinister culture; she tries to re-frame it as an Edenic workplace. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but her version is certainly not a fact.
I am sure most of these thoughts and feelings attributed to Bezos are fictional.
In an archive of the thousands of thank you messages written
to Jeff over the years, a small sampling includes “I just
wanted to thank you for giving my husband the opportunity to
work for your company so many years ago and let you know
that he always spoke kindly and enthusiastically of the
distribution center, the people and you.” “Having finished
my shift I thought I would send you a short email to say
thank you. There is a fantastic team based here and we have
super support. Our mentors are true Amazon angels providing
guidance and showing great patience.” “I cried as I read the
Career Choice announcement on Amazon today. What Amazon is
doing to help its employees is affecting lives in the most
meaningful way I can think of. It restores my faith in
humanity.”
Thousands of thank-yous comes out to around ~100 / year, and Amazon has probably had between 10,000 and 100,000 employees for most of that, so it's around 0.1%-1% of employees choosing to write a thank-you in any given year. I probably don't know 100-1000 people well enough for that to show up in my personal experience.
But it still seems weird.
This block of text does seem weird though - I think it's because she was highly emotional while writing. (Completely a guess.) And this particular portion would have likely been the most emotional for her. It's not as well composed as the rest of the fairly well-formed critique.
I've written my CEO, because I live in a house I bought with money earned from this job, raising a family of three kids, and appreciate that my enterprise is sustainable. I'm grateful for my job, the opportunity to do the work I do, and to the people who make it happen.
However, I write a half-dozen or so such letters per year. Not just professional: personal, community, and so on. This rate is trending up as I get older. I'm getting more and more grateful for how our lives all fit together. There are many people working hard toward good ends and probably not being thanked for the good work they do.
Practicing gratitude on your own is great, but what a gift to light up someone else's day.
In any case, thank-you notes from warehouse workers aren't much good as evidence that Amazon isn't treating them badly.
If the Internet has done anything successfully, it has drastically eroded much of our common courtesy and etiquette.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Sure, being direct might help communication, but most people who think they're "just" being direct end up miscommunicating their point and be rude.
Not long ago, following an interview with a company, I emailed the hiring manager (with whom I had spoken and emailed previously) with a short thank-you for having me in for the day.
Time goes by and I don't hear back from said hiring manager. I follow-up with the HR recruiter a week later, and he'll find out why I haven't heard a reply.
The hiring manager follows up with me a day later, saying among other things that they felt I was trying to "game" their interview process by communicating directly with their team, and was trying to influence their evaluation.
I thanked them for the follow-up and wished them good luck filling their role. The manager then states that they're still considering which candidates to pursue for a final conversation. My reply: I likely wouldn't be a good fit for their culture, but appreciated the consideration.
I'm not sure it ever dawned on the manager why I declined at that point.
Sam Walton, the late founder of Walmart, is revered as something of a demigod by the early Walmart employees (many of whom are still around). This is especially true of early administrative, distribution, and store-level employees. These folks had limited prospects and came for stable employment -- but they were rewarded beyond their wildest expectations when the company grew from a regional general store into a $100B+ business in a little over a decade. Early Walmart employees speak of "Mr. Sam" (as they call him) the way we speak of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson.
I wouldn't be surprised if early Amazon employees have a similar reverence for Jeff Bezos.
All that said, I do not agree with many of the decisions the company has made sense Sam Walton's departure. I find many of the companies current philosophies to be in direct opposition to those that Sam Walton espoused in his own autobiography.
Consider this possibility: maybe Jeff Bezos sends personal replies to the letters. If word got around, it wouldn't be that weird for 1-2% of the workforce to write a thank you note hoping for a personal reply.
I think Jeff Bezos and Amazon have changed the world of commerce (online and offline). Imagine what kind of world it would be without such efficient online e-commerce as an option.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-05/responding-t...
(I've no opinion here on who is right or wrong, haven't even read the book)
Brad Stone: Mrs. Bezos also suggests that there are a handful of factual errors in my account.
There is something slippery about the way Brad Stone writes.
She says: "Readers should remember that Jeff was never interviewed for this book."
She conveniently elides the fact that Brad Stone has interviewed Bezos several times for previous articles, and has written about Amazon for a decade or more.
It is certainly tricky, however, for an author to suggest he/she knows what a subject was thinking/feeling in the past.
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1pwh3z/what_small...
"I'm certainly less biased than Jeff's wife."
http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-wife-reviews-book-...
I quoted that line because I think it usefully reframes the conversation. Journalists certainly can be biased, but the good ones try very hard not to be. Spouses by definition are biased.
Stone's comment was defensively knocking over a strawman and I wonder if it is indicative of his overall seriousness as a writer.
Not the same term, but the right effect.
That makes me less inclined to read it.
Since the subject of the book is still alive, I guess it's an unauthorized biography?
Basically, biography claims he is a Lizard Man. Wikipedia is updated "Jeff Bezos, noted reptilian[1] ..."
[1]This book
And then no one argues with it.
Is there a reason for not doing so? I agree it seems really unprofessional.
E.g. this paragraph, in the middle of like stuff, is devastating:
"In light of the focus in many of the reviews here and elsewhere on what the book “reveals” about Jeff’s motives, I will also point out that the passage about what was on his mind when he decided to start Amazon is far from the only place where the book passes off speculation about his thoughts and intentions as fact. “Bezos felt…” “Bezos believed….” “Bezos wanted….” “Bezos fixated…” “Bezos worried….” “Bezos was frustrated…” “Bezos was consumed…” “In the circuitry of Bezos’s brain, something flipped…” When reading phrases like these, which are used in the book routinely, readers should remember that Jeff was never interviewed for this book, and should also take note of how seldom these guesses about his feelings and motives are marked with a footnote indicating there is any other source to substantiate them."
http://jimromenesko.com/2013/08/11/i-interviewed-jeff-bezos-...
If the subject does not want to do an interview, than it is not unprofessional to not have interviewed the person. In fact, I can't imagine why even a dishonest reporter would not interview their subject given the chance, as that reporter is still in control of the transcribed material and can use it dishonestly, even moreso than if they didn't have the interview, because they can claim their biography has extra weight, due to the exclusive interview, even if they then end up twisting to their purposes.
(which is why very famous people often do not talk to reporters in the first place)
The "writearound", the kind of biography in which you do extensive research to fill in the gaps and talk to everyone else you can find, is actually a pretty well-honored form of biography, and one that can be very illuminating.
(I'm not defending the author in the Bezos case as I don't know the particulars. Just disputing your argument that not having a direct interview destroys the legitimacy of a biography)
Reporting on a subject without interviewing them is so common, and so necessary, that journalists have a term to describe it. It's called a "write-around."
Full disclosure: I worked with Brad Stone for two years.
Presumably Mr. Stone had evidence and reason to put Bezos's mind in a certain frame from circumstance, action, or interviews and if he did, he should have laid out that evidence to show us his probably mental state and not simply told us.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R2RXH1XQAP8AAA/ref=cm_cr_rdp_pe...
This one appears to be better, but I think that until one of these guys manages to spend more time with Bezos, we won't really get the definitive story of the company's early years.
I would really like to see such a book, as Amazon, out of all the big tech companies, is probably the one I know the least about.
We need to be careful, as a society, that "everyone has a bias" isn't used as an excuse to discard verifiable information.
Amazon doesn't operate on a tab system. I'm struggling to imagine how you thought using them worked.
Of course you will get locked out of updating your iDevices if you have an outstanding balance.
"In this theory I treat the historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse. Histories (and philosophies of history as well) combine a certain amount of 'data,' theoretical concepts for 'explaining' these data, and a narrative structure for their presentation as an icon of sets of events presumed to have occurred in times past. In addition, I maintain, they contain a deep structural content which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic, in nature, and which serves as the precritically accepted paradigm of what a distinctively 'historical' explanation should be." (Hayden White, Metahistory, p. IX)
What MacKenzie Bezos points out, albeit in a localised fashion, is what the Humanities have come to regard as the "linguistic turn" during the course of the 20th century. As Hayden White states above (in his concern with historical writing), historical writing takes a certain set of data that is then fitted into a wider narrative, alongside some underlying meta-narrative, which marks a certain interpretive paradigm (e.g. a progress-narrative). This, in turn, means that no account can desribe "historical truth". It also means that every account is fundamentally literary (or, as he formulates it, at least linguistic). It is no surprise, then, that the Bezos biography does not describe "historical fact". However, it also means that a biography written by Bezos's wive or even his autobiography cannot describe "historical truth" either. Every account remains a narrative, and thus fictional, even if based "on real events", as Hollywood so neatly calls it.
Hayden White continues: The chosen (or, in this case, criticised) writers' "status as possible models of historical representation or conceptualization does not depend upon the nature of the 'data' they used to support their generalizations or the theories they invoked to explain them; it depends rather upon the consistency, coherence, and illuminative power of their respective visions of the historical field." (Hayden White, Metahistory, p. 4)
So her final claim is dubious, at best: "Ideally, authors are careful to ensure people know whether what they are reading is history or an entertaining fictionalization. Hollywood often uses a more honest label: 'a story based on true events.' If authors won’t admit they’ve crossed this important line, their characters can do it for them."
While the "character" may certainly give you their version of the story, what they present is far from being "historical truth". They also choose examples, omit others, pick and make decisions, depending on their very own narrative. This is less a clash of "fiction" versus "historical truth", but instead a clash of two narratives. The character's narrative (in this case, Bezos's) might carry more authority (he is the character in question, after all), but the account remains nevertheless a narrative, which can also be criticised.
This is the same reflex as can be observed sometimes with old guest listeners at universities who torpedo (especially) historical lectures with a simple claim: "But I was there in 19xx, and I didn't know about or notice any of that." And while that might be a true data point, it doesn't mean that it somehow invalidates the wider narrative.
Edit: The author can thus certainly criticise the overall narrative or narrative thrust in the biography, but pointing out singular data points that simply oppose a given data point do not serve the same function.
> He has argued that historical writing mirrors literary writing in many ways, sharing the strong reliance on narrative for meaning, therefore ruling out the possibility for objective or truly scientific history. White has also argued, however, that history is most successful when it embraces this "narrativity", since it is what allows history to be meaningful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_White
This is relevant considering most non-fiction writing today is influence by "new journalism" and adopts a fiction/literary form. Often using a narrative structure similar to screenwriting (beginning/middle/end) which is antithetical to scientific history.
No one who was there is necessarily reliable. Absent a time machine, no narrative is going to be right on all facts.
Perhaps the critic is is self-serving. But perhaps if the author gave competing versions instead of using the device of an nonexistent omniscient narrator, that would be more defensible.
Maybe, as you say, all narratives are fictional, but some are more fictional than others. Serious historians and journalists don't go out of their way to make the narrative more dramatic at the expense of accuracy.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R3J863C5ZP53BA/ref=cm_cr_dp_tit...
When you purport to be writing a factual account, there are certain standards that you can be held accountable to.
Take, for instance, "A Million Little Pieces". It was a memoir written by James Frey in 2003 that absolutely imploded when people found out that he made up large chunks of the material (wikipedia now lists it as "semi-fictional"). There's a difference between the two categories, and the difference is in exactly the type of anecdotal evidence that you don't think is important.
Edited to add: I agree that maybe the overall narrative of the book--the feeling and reportage of Amazon's culture--may still be accurate. I'd like to see more examples of inaccuracies before drawing any conclusions. It's also important to bear in mind just how much of a vested interest MacKenzie Bezos has in debunking this, because presumably the book makes Jeff Bezos and Amazon look bad (haven't read it yet though).
My whole point is that both sites spin a narrative a certain way because they both would like history to look a certain way. The reason why I "extensively quote" an external source is to show that there are other elements involved in the perception of truth than just the given data points.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with pointing out inaccurate data. However, there seems to be a general propensity to then discount a whole narrative in favour of the seemingly corrected narrative of the person doing the corrections. The whole point of bringing up the underlying bias of any historical account, however, is to just keep in mind that all correction is capable of doing is to erect another narrative. Which one you find more convincing is entirely yours to decide. I merely (or, perhaps, "merely") contest that what happens in the review is an opposition of (semi-)fiction on one hand and "historical truth" on the other.
- Robert Evans
Either way doesn't allow us to qualify what kind of effort we have at hand without grounding said qualification on our own biases. If we believe that the account is fundamentally flawed, we are free to assume that a hollywood narrative has been deliberately crafted to misrepresent "historical truth" (which would be the Bezos side). If we believe that the account is fundamentally correct, regardless of bias and some factual flaws, then we have to assume that the intent behind it was to give an accurate account of history.
My whole point is that neither authorial intention nor pure reception can offer us a definitive assessment of a given accounts "truthfulness" or overall expressed content. Consequently, this lets me regard both sides as biased. Both have an agenda, and both represent things a certain way, thus necessarily misrepresenting others in the process. Who I think is more believable in their account is then a question of my own choice, depending on my own inclinations, biases and presuppositions.
P.S.: I do not regard any of the quoted bits as a theory that is to be applied. Instead, they introduce two distinct elements: reflexion and self-reflexion. Theory thus introduces a mode of thought, not a structural base for analysis. White's own categories are certainly structural (and structuralist) and to be applied, but they are crafted for his own analysis of the history of historiography (and therefore notably absentin my quotations. They, however, are not the transferable meaning that is valid in for more contexts than just his intended analyses.
Overall, there is confirmation bias. We see what we want to see.
This is as true for Ms. Bezos's review as it is for the author's biography. As is usually the case, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle area of consensus -- which we now know is anathemic territory for Mr. Bezos.
EDIT: would appreciate a reply to understand why this was downvoted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6674569
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6675042
Some things are actually verifiable. Or a weaker statement: if something could be easily verified, the fact that someone with an opinion on the matter hasn't bothered to research it indicates laziness. For people like journalists and writers, it may indicate misconduct.
As a society, we need to fight the idea that everyone is biased therefore if your facts weaken my argument let's just agree to disagree, m'kay.
While on a social level, this is a good idea, in the public sphere it allows bad actors to just shrug off contradicting evidence.
I think it's more important we consider the fact that someone can raise valid points while also holding a natural bias, as opposed to the all-or-nothing state that it's become (which is what I believe you're referencing.)
Probably because neither of these statements is necessarily true:
>As is usually the case, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle area of consensus -- which we now know is anathemic territory for Mr. Bezos.
Also because bias is irrelevant to whether something is a verifiable fact or not. Thinking otherwise is like a reverse appeal to authority fallacy. Characteristics of the source have no bearing on the assertion, the latter must be evaluated on its own merits and verifiability alone, and nothing else. Lots of comments here about bias, none are relevant.
Also, asking for explanations for downvotes is against HN ettiquette (see FAQ and Guidelines) and usually downvoted.
As for downvote explanation, I wasn't aware of the HN etiquette. Duly noted.
The authors are entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to "their own facts"."Ken Mitnick" btw, not Kevin. Just in case anyone wondered. Like I did-
The reality of it is that being biased doesn't mean you cannot make factual statements. It does mean you may highlight facts you want and ignore facts you find inconvenient. It also means you can lie.
In this case she is saying the author made statements of fact that were not true and is trying to point that out. As the book is an unofficial biography, you have to assume the likelihood of factual error is increased.
This always bugs me, damn grammar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_subjunctive
Unless I completely missed your point and you felt that the correct grammar clashed with your intuition, in which case I apologise, and I suppose it depends on your linguistic surroundings when you learn the language.
To me using 'were' in the incorrect mood feels wrong. I'm not a strict grammarian (I had to look that reference up to double-check before posting), and my feel for grammar is intuitive rather than learned from verb tables. Obviously the verb-tables (or fragments of them) are encoded in that haze of language in some latent form, but it's entirely down to the environment in which I learned to speak.
Acquisition of grammar is a fascinating topic. Can anyone can recommend any books on the subject?
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood#English
That said, I don't think I would've ever been aware of the difference between "were" and "was" in the singular had I never studied a foreign language in high school, in which the subjunctive was explicitly defined.
The english subjunctive can be observed in e.g. "I ask that you be there on time".
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3809
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001192.h...
The first link is by one of the authors of CGOTEL, and comes out strongly against calling that were-form subjunctive; the second link is by another syntactician, and is a little more ambivalent.
What follows is a mixture of (a) my understanding of some terminology and facts, and (b) my interpretation of the arguments:
"Subjunctive" is a label for a type of sentence mood, where "mood" has to do with the relationship between the sentence and reality. Subjunctive mood is usually, like indicative and imperative moods, marked on the verb. (In my mind, interrogative is also a mood, but it is usually marked on the sentence, not on the verb.) Indicative and imperative moods have fairly narrow commonly-agreed semantics, but subjunctive is more of a catchall (my second link above will warn of the danger of confusing syntactic terminology with semantics, but while they don't correspond perfectly, they are related). We can quickly note that "if I were a rich man", a counterfactual clause, easily fits into area that can be covered by a "subjunctive" mood in various languages.
It's widely agreed that the following construction in English should be called "subjunctive":
I ask that you be polite to him.
The subjunctive form of "be" is so distinct from any other finite form that it makes for good examples. Any time a finite verb can be realized as "be", we're comfortable calling it subjunctive ("be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread").
That construction is productive today and nicely applies to any english verb:
I'm going to have to ask that your son return my necklace.
The argument against calling "if I were a rich man" subjunctive makes the following points:
- It doesn't use the subjunctive form.
- It is not obviously related to any construction that does use a subjunctive form.
- Though it is obviously a special form, it only applies to a single verb, and even there it's not required (Zwicky, my second link, talks about this some more). This can raise questions about how much it's a "real phenomenon", vs how much it's basically just an archaism.
- In the past, subjunctive forms could appear in English conditionals, but they no longer do.
Zwicky will tell you (and this is a point that follows my own inclinations well) that as long as you've described the rules correctly, the names that you give to the rules ("subjunctive") are irrelevant. So in that sense, you can call any form you want "subjunctive", as long as you're willing to extend the description to every instance of an analogous form, which is easy with "if I were a rich man", as it is the only form of its kind.
- However, as the generally-agreed subjunctive is a living and useful phenomenon, and is unrelated to the were-form, it might be nice to give the were-form a name that won't confuse people.
So, in Latin (and other languages, but I know Latin), there's a verb form called future tense:
laudo -> present 1sg active indicative, "I praise"
laudabo -> future 1sg active indicative, "I will praise"
English has nothing analogous. To achieve the same semantics (referring to the future), you need some combination of explicit time reference and periphrasis ("I will praise him tomorrow"). So we usually say that English has two tenses, which you might refer to as present and preterite, or past and non-past, or A and B, or any combination thereof (though I don't recommend "preterite and B"). Referring to a "future tense" in English is buying into the idea that every structure in every language has not only a conventional way of being expressed in every other language, but an analogous structure there as well.
On a totally unrelated note, the 1sg Latin subjunctive forms of esse [to be] are sim (present), essem (imperfect), fuerim （perfect), and fuissem (pluperfect). The Italian form "fossi" appears closely related to fuissem, so I'm a little surprised to see that it's called "imperfect". How many tenses of subjunctive does Italian have? Are there obvious analogs to any of the other three Latin forms?