3 ms·

I rarely buy the "deeply flawed messenger" argument. Here, he's basically criticizing short-term business thinking, which he also took advantage of as an invest

by tlb 7y ago

I rarely buy the "deeply flawed messenger" argument. Here, he's basically criticizing short-term business thinking, which he also took advantage of as an investor. Should we therefore put him in a hippo crate? Few people in the tech community say "This guy exploited a security bug. Therefore, we shouldn't listen to his bug reports." In fact, you can't really understand a bug except by trying to exploit it. I suspect the same is true in business. Everyone agrees vaguely that there's some kind of short-term thinking problem in big American business. But this guy understood the problem deeply enough to exploit it, while everyone else just is just waving their hands. I think PoC||GTFO applies to business advice too.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
I agree. It seems like this dude is coming to terms with his mortality and is realizing he's spent his life exploiting the system without trying to make it better and is trying to do something to make it better.
word-reader 7y ago
It's demonstrated later in the article that he continued to take advantage of short-term business thinking with probable bad externalities all the while and after he was trying to repair his reputation with his Harvard donations and conciliatory speeches. In particular, the argument is that the critiques offered in conferences like this are insincere and aimed at preserving the insiders' status rather than actually changing any of the things they're talking about: "His career tells us how he would advise those beginning their careers to navigate these challenges: Loudly criticize political dysfunction, but make no effort to explore its structural causes or remedies...[his] prominence conveys that incongruence between words and actions is tolerable, even desired." And further, that it would be "foolish to listen" to said finance people's self-serving political solutions. A closer equivalent in the tech community would be more like "this guy has spent decades running shady adtech and addictive gaming companies, and continues to traffick personal information and addict kids to pay-to-play games, but is now also running an organization dedicated to digital privacy and is building a reputation as an expert in parenting in the digital age and voluntary gaming regulation".
debatem1 7y ago
If someone spent decades exploiting vulnerabilities to the point where they made a billion dollars shuttering hundreds of healthy companies and costing thousands of people their jobs, that person would either be very quiet about it or in jail, most likely the latter. And as a security person, I don't think that's a bad thing. We have laws around these kinds of issues specifically because having the raw technical capability to ruin lives should not be viewed as tantamount to permission to do so. So should it be in the financial realm.

by tlb 7y ago

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

I agree. It seems like this dude is coming to terms with his mortality and is realizing he's spent his life exploiting the system without trying to make it better and is trying to do something to make it better.

word-reader 7y ago

It's demonstrated later in the article that he continued to take advantage of short-term business thinking with probable bad externalities all the while and after he was trying to repair his reputation with his Harvard donations and conciliatory speeches. In particular, the argument is that the critiques offered in conferences like this are insincere and aimed at preserving the insiders' status rather than actually changing any of the things they're talking about: "His career tells us how he would advise those beginning their careers to navigate these challenges: Loudly criticize political dysfunction, but make no effort to explore its structural causes or remedies...[his] prominence conveys that incongruence between words and actions is tolerable, even desired." And further, that it would be "foolish to listen" to said finance people's self-serving political solutions. A closer equivalent in the tech community would be more like "this guy has spent decades running shady adtech and addictive gaming companies, and continues to traffick personal information and addict kids to pay-to-play games, but is now also running an organization dedicated to digital privacy and is building a reputation as an expert in parenting in the digital age and voluntary gaming regulation".

debatem1 7y ago

If someone spent decades exploiting vulnerabilities to the point where they made a billion dollars shuttering hundreds of healthy companies and costing thousands of people their jobs, that person would either be very quiet about it or in jail, most likely the latter. And as a security person, I don't think that's a bad thing. We have laws around these kinds of issues specifically because having the raw technical capability to ruin lives should not be viewed as tantamount to permission to do so. So should it be in the financial realm.