uberino

Talking in absolutes doesn't actually aid the discussion.

Few institutions are purely good or purely evil. They are made of people, who themselves are not purely good or purely evil, who have their own motivations, some altruistic and some selfish.

We live in dynamic systems, in which institutions and individuals play a role. As a general rule all make things better in some ways and worse in others.

Transportation network companies (TNC) have produced economic winners and losers. Many people have access to more job options with less friction. Taxi drivers have seen their income shrink. The laws of supply and demand both with the network of one TNC and between the networks of multiple TNCs in competition with one another drive prices down. Driving the prices down makes transportation accessible to more people (both the more privileged and the less privileged), but it also drives down the income of those driving. Eventually self driving cars will drive down the costs further, democratizing convenient transportation further and eliminating many jobs.

Due to path dependency, humanity is heading down this path one way or another. If one institution doesn't take us in this direction, another will.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/0...

It's not going to be easy. It will be fraught with challenges, technical and social. The human and social problems will likely eclipse the technological problems in both scope and magnitude, but we're going to face them either way. We've been through this before during the industrial revolution. Life is recursive. It was a painful transition, but we came out the other side with a society that was more prosperous and had more opportunities for more people to live a life free of suffering than ever before. We can either claim the sky is falling, or we can put our heads down and work on figuring out how to solve the biggest challenges of our day. No solution we come up with will be perfect. We're going to have to cooperate in the form of institutions to tackle such large problems. No institution we come up with will purely make the world a better place because there are no silver bullets.

I won't comment on your last statement since I think I've adequately addressed the value of active sampling and application of the null hypothesis in determining a statistically valid position on how they likely would be treated instead of taking these articles at face value.

Again, I'm not going to try and present information contrary to what you know (it would likely just be attacked for being biased), but I would encourage you to ask yourself if you're adequately applied the null hypothesis to any institution on which you have formed a position:

https://byrslf.co/the-null-hypothesis-loves-you-and-wants-yo...

I would also encourage you to not consider the ways in which you believe an institution is worse than the status quo, but also consider the ways in which it is better. As an exercise, list out both when considering the relative merit of an institution. How is it better? How is it worse? Eliminate from both lists those aspects that are inevitable (for reasons of path dependency) regardless of which institution is solving the same problem. For those ways in which it is worse than the status quo, consider ways in which those could be corrected.

I won't comment on your last statement because it involves discussion of future growth prospects, which no two people will likely agree on.

In the event the institution fails, everything is reset to zero and the talent and resources are redistributed in the World. Value is destroyed, but undesirable aspects are too. You can judge if that is a net positive or net negative outcome.

The other outcome is that the institution weathers a storm and succeeds either way. Under this scenario, there are two new scenarios: (a) the institution survives with all the good, well meaning people you agree with on board, helping steer it into the future; or (b) those encouraging the good, well-meaning people to abandon the institution, leaving those that remain to steer that institution into the future.

Ignore what you want to happen for a moment. If the likelihood of survival despite current events is sufficiently high, then encouraging those with whom you agree to abandon the institution is contrary to your best interests. This is a game theoretic scenario, which I encourage you to explore on your own.

Remember that the banks survived.

That all said, I'm not discouraging you from challenging institutions that may have aspects to correct. I'm encouraging you to reconsider how you challenge those institutions to determine all the consequences, intended and unintended. Personally, I think it's best to challenge them to be better in the ways I think is better.

An honest inquiry into what things are like anywhere would involve actively taking in a balance of viewpoints through sampling that tries to avoid sampling bias and correct for agendas.

Anecdotally, my personal experience does not at all represent what I've seen reported in the media throughout the entire time I've worked here. Then again, I'm only relying on my own personal experience. It's anecdata and should be treated with skepticism. Based on my past experience at more than a half dozen different jobs, this workplace is better in many ways. It's also worse in some ways.

That said, I and everyone else (inside the company and outside the company) suffer from sampling bias. I'm only relying on my personal experience and if I care about the truth it would be wrong to accept that as a conclusion. It would be wrong to represent to you that my experience is representative for the whole company, because I don't have enough information. I haven't worked on all teams with all managers and all peers.

Since I accept that I suffer from sampling bias, I've started to reach out to colleagues from under-represented groups to ask them in which they believe our culture and workplace is better, equal to and worse than other places that they've worked. I want to understand how we can protect and reinforce those aspects that are better, how we can improve those that are equal and how we can turn around those that are worse and make them into aspects that are better.

My anecdotal experience is that many of my colleagues are trying to do the same to differing degrees. One thing most of us have in common is that we're generally all people who want to do our best and when we discover ways in which we've been coming up short, we we apply ourselves to try and make it better. We've always done that and we're doing this now with all our current challenges as we have with all other challenges we've encountered in the past.

Assuming a degree of truth that likely falls anywhere along the spectrum between position X and position Y stated above, which would be a more positive outcome from current events?

An institution that has created a lot of value in the world in terms of making transportation cheaper, better and more accessible to more and more people every day:

(a) crashes and burns taking down not only itself, but also damaging economic prospects in technology and Silicon Valley for years?

(b) reforms aspects of itself that are undesirable, turning those aspects into strengths and setting a positive example of how to reform oneself for other institutions that also exhibit the same undesirable traits.

Personally, I always choose B in any scenario because B leverages existing value to address problems (it's always easier to fix things when you have resources to work with). Option A is just a path to destruction of anything of value with no guarantee that what follows next is better in any way.

What frustrates me most about people are hell bent on painting a wildly successful company in the worst light possible is that doing so has very serious negative implications for equality and opportunity for women and other groups that are under-represented in tech. Let me explain why.

Spending several years at a unicorn startup opens up so many opportunities. Look at early employees from Fairchild, Paypal, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. These companies minted many many millionaires and gave them tons of valuable experience to go out and start their own companies after they left. When you so aggressively bad mouth the culture of a rising unicorn such that you discourage certain groups from even applying to work there, you have deprived those people of an opportunity to be on a rocket ship. You're perpetuating the very problem you're railing against.

My colleagues in the LadyEng group here at Uber have on many occasions lamented how hard a time they have recruiting other women to join the company because of the reputation in the media. The company culture has been so maligned by those with an agenda that even the women engineers here have a difficult time convincing other women to join.

If you really want people who are under-represented in tech to succeed, you should encourage them and support them in joining every rising unicorn that exists and will ever exist regardless of how that culture is perceived, because four years after joining they will have the money, experience and connections to create their own companies and perpetuate a virtuous cycle.

If you agree with this message please spread it because so few people realize how they are contributing to a self-fulfilling prophecy that hurts the cause they claim to champion.