Mastodawn

Laina Apr 30, 2023

I think it is interesting and says something about tech in general that even Elon understood he had to hire rocket scientists and car manufacturing engineers and neuroscientists for those projects but he doesn't appear to have hired a single expert in communication or social dynamics when taking over Twitter, the same appears to be true for every other newly founded social network where I have taken a look at the leadership.

Vrimj Apr 29, 2023

There is a very specific sort of thing here that I don't have language for but I have noticed. People who work with things respect other people with expertise in how to work on things.

Often they do not see skills with people as real unless they are deeply abstracted and not really about people anymore but the things that make up people, eg neuroscience.

Vrimj Apr 29, 2023

I notice this in my role because it is between law and people so I get a variety of reactions from this group depending on if they see my job as being about law or about people, and sometimes that shifts as their understanding shifts.

Aphrodite (recharging)Apr 30, 2023

It sounds like the parallel of a concept that I have expressed of the difference between making driver’s licenses and helping others with theirs.

One is about stuff. One is about people.

Jon (now at neuromatch.social)Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj agreed (and I also don't have the language for it). Also people who work in tech often devalue skills of working on non-tech things *and* skills of working with people. After all at the end of the day it's all just 1s and 0s right? 😂

Vrimj Apr 29, 2023

Ohh digitalist is a decent working label, I have heard the ones and zeros thing too.

It is like they think the idea that you can apply your discipline's norms and models to the world in a really broad way is somehow unique or uniquely productive in computer science.

Jon (now at neuromatch.social)Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj digitalist is a good label, thanks! Although I realize you were originally talking about something that's more ... physicalist, I guess.

Vrimj Apr 29, 2023

Yeah, but Objectivist is already taken :)

Jon (now at neuromatch.social)Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj if the randian shoe fits ...

Vrimj Apr 29, 2023

Ironic that this is an architect and novelist that gets respect isn't it.

Jeremy Kahn Apr 29, 2023

@jdp23 @Vrimj https://xkcd.com/793 and https://xkcd.com/1831 both relevant here

Physicists

xkcd

Vrimj Apr 29, 2023

@trochee @jdp23

Yep that!

Like someone who is a wood worker showing up in a metal shop and wondering why they don't just screw things together.

Jon (now at neuromatch.social)Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj @trochee 💯 If you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail, if you've got an algorithm everything looks like a perfectly and unbiased data set with no second-order complications

Vrimj Apr 29, 2023

@jdp23 @trochee

It is hard sometimes for people to understand what an incredible short cut not having to make machines care or want to really is.

This is one reason I support tech workspaces that allow dogs, it gives you real experience of a task where just asking properly isn't always enough.

Jeremy Kahn Apr 29, 2023

@jdp23 @Vrimj oof

just yesterday i ran into a problem at work where the AI teams had conveniently forgotten that the events recorded from the fleet of devices are not i.i.d.

-- at the very least, events drawn from the same user have confounds based on that user's experience

David Mankins Apr 29, 2023

There’s an element of hyper-rationalism, too. “It’s logic and reason all the way down”, without realizing that *judgment* doesn’t fit so well into an axiomatic system, if only because one must weigh one’s choice of axioms using one’s judgment

Vrimj Apr 30, 2023

This isn't really about being rational, it is about mistaking internal feelings of competence for an objective evaluation of your capabilities.

But my expectation is that generally I am going to be dealing with feelings that have been mistaken for facts when someone invokes rationality.

David Mankins Apr 30, 2023

@Vrimj @jdp23 Maybe that's a better way of putting it. "Mistaking feelings for facts" is another way of putting what I was trying to say with my remarks on "judgment". "Judgment" is what makes one choose to emphasize (sometimes even to perceive) the facts one chooses to emphasize.

Along the way some people choose to couch their choice in a raiment they want to call "being rational".

Gaëtan Perrault Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj I worked for nearly 7 years at Roblox. One of the key elements of their success is community management. Especially when the community is comprised primarily of children who are still developing.

The people who led those teams are/were some of the longest tenured employees and highly respected. Without those humans in place, Roblox is likely just another club penguin.

Vrimj Apr 29, 2023

It shows, this is the only online community outside the classroom sandbox we let our kindergartener interact with.

Vrimj Apr 29, 2023

But it is amazing how much Roblox is able to really own that space.

Vrimj Apr 29, 2023

Hum just looked:
Board Engineers, MBAs, and and accountant

C levels- Engineers, MBA, JDs

Didn't see any social scientists in leadership at all even at the place that I agree does it best.

Gaëtan Perrault Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj Roblox came at it a different way. We had a bunch of really good people, often from minority groups, running the moderation and text filtering teams. They didn't want to be VPs but they did get to pick their VPs.

You're right, it's not driven by social scientists. But it is driven by people with the singular focus on protecting kids, backed by a company that assumes it is important. There are features we did not implement until we knew how to moderate them.

Gaëtan Perrault Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj that stated, it would be nice to see somebody with that expertise on the board. There's an annual meeting coming up, I have some research to do.

William Pietri Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj Great points. For me this is of a piece with the people who start restaurants never having worked in a restaurant. They think their experience as a restaurant-goer and food-eater is enough. The "how hard can it be" fallacy, we might call it.

William Pietri Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj And like you, I noticed the same thing about a prominent new social network: https://sfba.social/@williampietri/110277753471261078

William Pietri (@[email protected])

How did this happen? Well, you could look at their initial team announcement: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/2-31-2022-initial-bluesky-team Or their jobs page (the history of which you can see on the Wayback machine): https://blueskyweb.xyz/join Or who LinkedIn thinks is working there: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?currentCompany=%5B%2279571598%22%5D&origin=COMPANY_PAGE_CANNED_SEARCH&sid=8VD I don't see anybody there with expertise in these problems. There's definitely nobody whose job it is to think about this. So we have the classic approach of "build for the comfortable, worry about anybody else later if at all".

SFBA.social

Vrimj Apr 29, 2023

@williampietri Oh yeah, the "hate switch" is just asking to become the new home of the abusive fruit site.

Richard Reich Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj
When I was young it was "hard science/soft science." Hard was (of course) better than soft.

Don't hear that much anymore. Progress?

Steven Savage Apr 30, 2023

@Vrimj I get this. They figure "people" work like they think. But they don't realize how limited their knowledge is- or assume they can force behavior

🌸🌹2ck 🌱🐇Apr 30, 2023

@Vrimj not exclusively! at least some well-respected leaders in my organization are unfailingly focused on the people. we value the technical, but we do more than pay lip service to the interpersonal skills needed to actually make an engineering firm work

Oblomov Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj FWIW, he apparently had the galls to overrule his engineers in the other businesses too. The SpaceX launchpad fsckup is an example of this. And if he so arrogant to think he can do better his engineers there, it's easy to imagine how entitled he feels about an Internet company.

Scott Knowles Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj After firing about half Twitter staff, and more later, he brought over Tesla engineers. Yeah, the engineers who bring you self-driving cars that can't drive better than a 16-year old learning to drive,, are applying that same experience with Twittet. Musk wans the self-driving social media platform. What could possibly go wrong? Like whwt Twitter is today, the worst POS platform. It's trying to be another Truth Social. It will be get worse in 2024 going to election.

can't remember where I heard the line, but someone said that Silicon Valley is looking for technical solutions to social problems.

Vrimj Apr 29, 2023

That is a wonderful summation.

"On the whole the ones and zeros were not unhappy"

RAK Apr 29, 2023

@nosaj @Vrimj: And I can't even say that they manage the technical solutions properly much of the time.

Ted Han ★ 韓聖安 Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj There's a premise of this thread that I'd poke at.

Elon didn't start Tesla. It was founded by other people. They're the ones who established it's car and engineering culture. SpaceX has a strong COO who pulled in other folks to make it successful.

Twitter is now an Elon business and this may just be what Elon business look like.

Vrimj Apr 29, 2023

I haven't seen a single social media company with a social scientist on the board or in a C level position, so even if you put the weirdness of Musk aside the idea that even if your business is people talking to each other you don't need experts in people talking to each other seems to be pretty common in a way that would be unacceptable if your business was Satellites talking to each other.

WideEyedCurious 🇺🇸 💙 🇺🇦 & 🇨🇦Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj Because those things are “easy” because they’re not a science…no expertise needed! (Or some BS like that.)

Futurist Jim Carroll Apr 29, 2023

I did a study on 40 years of leadership failure. He ticks ALL the boxes. It's all at https://hubris.jimcarroll.com

Understanding Hubris: What Drives CEO Arrogance – and Why Does it Never End Well?

CodeByJeff Apr 29, 2023

This 👆

Last company was a 2-year disaster as our "really brilliant" lead programmer found out that:

- sales is hard
- marketing is hard
- UX design is hard
- management soft skills are hard
- building a product with only 3 years experience is hard

The trend among young tech men to think they are the smartest people in the room because what they do is the "most difficult"

without understanding what others do

is one of the REAL reasons so many small start-ups fail

Craig Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj My take on Musk is that he’s really quite good at grasping *complicated* systems but doesn’t even understand the concept of *complex* ones. You can pull apart a (complicated) electric car, tinker with it, and put it back together, but do that with a complex sociotechnical system and you destroy the thing you’re trying to fix. Couple that with low-EQ narcissism and the billionaire bubble and you get birdsite hell.

edgeoforever 🍎Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj you failed to consider the fact that the quite obvious design for Twitter was to disable it.🤷‍♀️

Danatheone Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj I am not surprised… work in festival biz
Everyone thinks they can layout an event when in fact the few I know that actually have the talent possess a level of emotional intelligence that is as rare a skill as I have known

Kerim Friedman 傅可恩 Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj as a linguistic anthropologist, it is a pretty common experience. Everyone thinks they are an expert on language and so devalues the work of people who actually study communication…

PirateRo Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj those experts were already working at twitter and the fool fired them. He jettisoned the very reason Twitter existed - the people.

MrAlanCooper Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj The soft skills are always the hardest.

BeeCycling has moved Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj Social media networks join the list of "businesses people think they could make a go of despite having no relevant knowledge or experience", alongside bars, restaurants, bed & breakfast places and bookshops.

Mark Apr 29, 2023

@Vrimj I wouldn’t really know what to look for. Which other networks have you investigated?

Robrab Apr 30, 2023

@Vrimj "technical projects fail for sociological reasons" Lister and deMarco's Peopleware. A book more people in IT should be aware of.

It's Just Jenn 🏳️‍⚧️Apr 30, 2023

@Vrimj No respect for the social sciences from Tech Bros, that's the problem. Also, from the BS he spouts he thinks he's a far greater programmer and network engineer than he is on either front.

Mark W. Gabby-Li 🐌Apr 30, 2023

@Vrimj
"Even Elon," ouch, burn.

Tracy Hall - Dreams and Logic Apr 30, 2023

@Vrimj Elon doesn't understand squat. Everything you attribute to him was done by the people he bought.

Strypey May 1, 2023

@Vrimj
> he doesn't appear to have hired a single expert in communication or social dynamics when taking over Twitter

Not only that but the ones that already worked the were among the first people he started firing. Pure hubris.