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The Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lot Less Impressive Than the Movie Version
- tyingq 7y agoPopups, tiny font, etc. https://outline.com/kFKtF3 https://outline.com/kFKtF3
- raister 7y agoReality != Movies People are boring, bias and sometimes, really dumb (or playing dumb to avoid further persecution).
- patio11 7y agoMovie dialogue is scored on being interesting but there are a lot of interesting responses to Congressional inquiry, including interesting and true responses, which pessimize for your tactical or strategic goals. They also plausibly pessimize for Congress' goals. If you wanted to learn when Zuckerberg learned of a topic, you could send him a letter, and he would check his notes and send you a letter, and then you would know a thing you don't care about in the least. The point of grilling Zuckerberg in person about it is not to ascertain the truth, it is to grill Zuckerberg on television.
- ohduran 7y agoCongressional inquiries haven't been about finding truth since TV was invented. They are a platform for the parties involved to signal their positions. MZ is talking to his investors, AOC to her constituents. My point is: there is no conversation going on. Just people talking.
- signal11 7y agoThis is very true -- there are also echoes of how politicians prepare talking points in response to journalists' questions these days. The person being quizzed isn't actually prepared to answer questions, they come prepared with a set of themes to talk about and will seek to massage their answer to almost any question to one of those prepared themes. The other interesting thing specifically about televised Congressional hearings is that Congresspeople have very little time -- AOC had 5 minutes, if I recollect correctly. This gives the person being grilled an advantage -- by simply taking his time with his answers he can run down the clock and be done with AOC's questions.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoThe whole "grilling" format is just publicity for politicians. If they were really interested in answers, they would send an email and get a response back, and if they didn't they'd send a subpoena or start court proceedings. And if they really wanted to do something, they would pass legislation. But of course, you can't do that and get paid by lobbyists and/or get favors from businesses at the same time. This grilling format solves all interests. Politicians get to look like they're doing something, many gullible voters think the politicians are doing something, and the businesses being looked into get to look like there is something being done about them.
- cipher_system 7y agoJust enough time to accuse someone of having ties to white supremacy but not enough to hear an answer.
- lonelappde 7y agoIt's not symmetric, though. The congresspeople are there to stir trouble, and the CEO is there to dodge it. For all of Zuck's misdeeds (or those of anyone dragged in), at a congressional hearing, the participant is a victim of a punishment, not an agent of their agenda.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chrisweekly 7y ago"pessimize"?
- StavrosK 7y agoThe opposite of "optimize", e.g. "the writer pessimized for understandability while optimizing for sounding smart".
- chopin 7y agoIs that really a thing in (American) English? I wasn't able to dig up anything (I am not a native speaker).
- StavrosK 7y agoIt's rarely used, I'm not aware of a specific definition for it. This question defines it somewhat: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/312003/what-is-the-most-ridiculous-pessimization-youve-seen/687309 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/312003/what-is-the-most-... It's still kind of tongue-in-cheek because it hasn't caught on enough. I think it's used more widely in ML but I may be way off the mark on this.
- mortehu 7y agoEdward Tufte, one of the people who coined the word, explains: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003uY https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
- Intermernet 7y agoEven better, both "pessimal" and "pessimum" are legitimate. They are the opposites of optimize, optimal and optimum.
- chrisweekly 7y agoPerhaps you'll politely permit a pedantic impossibly pessimal lexical parallel, animal parable? Ostrich and Possum have no awesome options for optimal animal posture, a literal posthumous aspect or optical pessimum.
- specialist 7y agoPublic meetings are performance art. Town halls, hearings, Q&As, etc. Good ones are scripted, controlled. All the discovery, negotiation happens beforehand. The testimony and whatever votes occur are kabuki. As a citizen with a little bit of experience, I now enthusiastically support how the game works. How else could it work? I've seen what happens when yahoos or saboteurs are allowed to take the dialog off script. As an activist, I was once allowed to speak unscripted. The body suspended the rules to allow my testimony. What harm could be done? I revealed evidence that spiked the appropriation under consideration. (Vendor receiving the contract was actually out of business.) Whoops! Made the local news. Neither side made that mistake again. I now have a much greater appreciation for lobbying, engaging sympathetic representatives (or more likely, their staff) face-to-face, long before any decisions are made. I'm by no means an expert in these things. So don't base your actions on my experiences. FWIW, A similar exchange, Feynman's revelation about the O-rings failing leading to the lose of the Challenger and it's crew, is related in Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr Feynman.
- davidhyde 7y agoPreparing and asking a bunch of interview questions is a lot easier than being on the receiving end and having to think though the legal ramifications about what you’re about to answer. Contrasting the slickness of the interviewer with the interviewee and drawing conclusions based on that is not accurate.
- jmcgough 7y agoAt the same time, he should be able to clearly state the policies of his company. He seemed completely unprepared for some basic questions that he should have been prepared to answer.
- carloswilson 7y agoI appreciate that answering questions in a grilling interview is more difficult than asking questions, but ... > “You don’t know? This was the largest data scandal with respect to your company, that had catastrophic impacts on the 2016 election. You don’t know?” ... but at the same time, I would certainly expect the chairman and CEO of a company to be more prepared to answer these difficult questions than what is reported in the original article. This was one of the biggest scams related to Facebook. I understand that Zukerberg's legal team may have advised him to be vague during the interview and he probably answered what is best for his company. But as citizens of the world, we should never find such vague answers acceptable. The way Cambridge Analytica has upset the process of democracy and how Facebook data was used while doing so requires Facebook to be subject to such grilling. It should be made clear to Facebook in no uncertain terms that it needs to present answers and concrete answers.
- dimitar 7y agoSlightly off-topic - why doesn't FB just ban all political ads? Is it really worth continuing to display them? Either have a coherent policy that the CEO can explain or just don't do it.
- shaftoe 7y agoThere's a gray area that makes defining what is political complex when it comes to subjects that become politicized.
- bertil 7y agoThere’s no clear separation of “political ads”: - candidates can be serious or not so much, but it’s unclear where the line is between the GOP and Vermin Supreme. - PACs represent the bulk of “political” spending: it’s also unclear where you set the line there; clear attack ads are not the same as a more generic charity defending the environment and supporting a candidate; you can’t ban one without banning the other, or you have to define clear rules that allow “Vote for a candidate that supports your values” but not anything more specific, where using the same symbol, colour, font, as a specific campaign becomes a problem. - If you ban any communications about the environment, gender equality, etc. commercial companies who bolster their ecological credential or empower women are becoming liminal and problematic when they really shouldn’t. - None of those questions can accept a US-centric answer: Facebook hosts political ads from 190 countries, where all of the above is slightly different. What counts as controversial in other countries would definitely surprise you. What counts as true, another argument in that debate isn’t clear: a lot of political promises like “we have the budget to pass that reform” can seem… “very bold and optimistic” to some fact-checkers. Facebook has struggled with fact-checkers in the past and felt it was preferable to downplay their role, given that previous scandal.
- Traster 7y ago>- PACs represent the bulk of “political” spending: it’s also unclear where you set the line there; clear attack ads are not the same as a more generic charity defending the environment and supporting a candidate; you can’t ban one without banning the other, or you have to define clear rules that allow “Vote for a candidate that supports your values” but not anything more specific, where using the same symbol, colour, font, as a specific campaign becomes a problem. Well, they're PACs. Political Action Committees. So if you're banning political ads it would be trivial to ban organisations that are registered as a 527 organisation. That seems like a screaming flashing bright red line there.
- roenxi 7y agoThe congressional hearings are a hostile environment. The only reason to have Zuckerberg there is to get camera footage of him looking shifty and to pressure him to do whatever the politicians want him to do. His tactical and strategic goal is not to deliver 'zingers', it is ideally for the situation to go quiet and be forgotten by everyone. Failing that, an acceptable fallback is for any anti-Facebook action by government to get mired in endless committee investigations that are boring, neverending and unproductive to slow down any hostile regulation that might eventuate. Failing that, regulation that is onerous but favours Facebook by locking out any competition from the American markets. None of these will be achieved by interesting public exchanges with Congresspeople. Public government hearings are not where the serious moves are made. It is more a show-and-tell for the politicians to communicate to their voters what is being negotiated in the backrooms where real work happens.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoYes I suspect the less televised select committees the UK have is a better solution. I recall seeing George Galloway (Uk MP) who was called to one of These and he used his experience in the HOC to rip the good old boy asking the questions to pieces.
- supercanuck 7y agoOnly one of these parties to the negotiation works on behalf of the American people. Zuckerberg said he has 3B customers. You seems bored with the process but I would argue the job politicians are doing is equally important if not more so than the construction of an Online Ad Delivering Skinner Box, the “real work” you allude to. (Current top most on HackerNews explains how much people despise ads and pay money to avoid them) Holding powerful people accountable, publicly, creating laws and regulations and governing the rules of our society is very important to operating this country.
- objektif 7y agoOnly if the said lawyers were doing those for the benefit of the people. Many of those lawyers would kiss Zucks ass for a million. Hearings are just theaters until we get money out of politics.
- FredrikMeyer 7y agoThere's a missing "real" in the title of the submission: "The Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lot Less Impressive Than the Movie Version"
- ar7hur 7y agoI had at few meetings with Zuck at Facebook after Wit.ai was acquired in 2015. To me, the real version is at least as impressive as the movie version. Then, of course, maybe was I biased by the movie and everything else I already heard about him? I'm sill wondering.
- allie1 7y agoCare to share an anecdote?
- bertil 7y agoThere was a very inspiring response from the original founding Facebook team about Sorkin’s movie (right around the time they had the entire company go and see it): like most people here know, starting a company isn’t glamorous, at all, certainly in 2004-2006. Servers going down, impossible hiring; they remember a blur of incessant crisis. They thought romanticised version of that story where they look good, say witty things and kick ass was surprising but inspiring for them. Zuckerberg has gone through media training and can be very good when he’s prepared for specific questions (see his public Q&A). He’s also notoriously focused and happy to delegate. Asking him to come talk about Libra and ask questions about Cambridge Analytica is an easy way to get vague answers.
- lifestyleguru 7y agoI have to admit that there was something surreal in the short videos of hearing I saw on the internet. Congressmen/women, people of power, whom we stereotype as poker-faced, cynical, and manipulative, having people-like problems - e.g. "my granddaughter played with a mobile phone and then some creepily relevant ads started to appear", against a youngster without any formal power who cuts them off with laconic responses.
- christophilus 7y agoI've only seen a few clips from the interview-- clips that were supposed to show Zuckerberg getting owned by some politician or other. To be honest, the politicians seemed really childish to me. Their questions were uninformed, hostile, and off topic. I thought Zuckerberg handled himself just fine, given the circumstances. I say this as someone who thinks the world would be better off without Facebook. I don't use it. I don't invest in it.
- toddmorey 7y ago“No one had any doubts who the adult in the room was Wednesday,” ends the article. Right before the promoted content “This deadly sex habit is killing seniors!” I know that’s a bit off topic, but does speak towards the current environment of not just Facebook, but the entire internet.
- bigred100 7y agoNot sure how much the idea makes sense, but these days I feel that rather than education, looks, status, etc. being the rare and difficult-to-attain markers or benefits of being of a higher class, being a generally sane person with a coherent worldview and some degree of emotional control is.
- eli_gottlieb 7y agoThe Forward's finances have been suffering for a couple of decades now, so yeah, their promotions are utter clickbait garbage.
- fatjokes 7y agoIs this the state of journalism in this day and age? Is there any surprise that a real life CEO carefully coached by PR and lawyers is less interesting than his doppelganger in a multi-million dollar Oscar-targeted movie backed by a team of professional writers?
- jayess 7y agoYes. It's all a show. The "journalist" pretends that congressional hearings are serious events rather than the entertainment clown shows that they are. Then said "journalist" compares the performance at such a show-trial light to dialogue in a fictional movie. People click on it. Ads are shown. Comments fly. Money is made.
- sailfast 7y agoNo, I would not use this particular publication as a good indicator of the state of journalism. There are almost more quotes from the movie than from the hearing, and the premise was a joke, taken seriously.
- Pigo 7y agoAre you not entertained?!?
- stared 7y agoIs it only me, or for anyone else, articles written in one-sentence paragraphs are unreadable? I try, and it is hard for me to focus after a few such sentence-paragraphs. (No matter what is the topic.)
- coldtea 7y agoLooks just like a guy who did something ho-hum, at the right time and with the right connections, and thanks to lots of in-between people, got 1000000000x more value that he'd ought to get. Facebook was neither impressive technology, nor original conceptually. It just was there at the right time and had the right funding. Not even for a moment did he strike as a computer genius, a business genius, or anything in between.
- julienreszka 7y agoDoes anybody here consider this piece standard journalism?
- justusthane 7y agoI hope not. It's an essay.
- RichardHeart 7y agoThe title is missing the word "real" Title on site: "The Real Mark Zuckerberg Is A Lot Less Impressive Than The Movie Version"
- seanwilson 7y agoI agree his answers about why political ads shouldn't be fact checked weren't good, but I found some of these "zinger" clips on Twitter really silly. > Mr. Zuckerberg, what year and month did you personally first become aware of Cambridge Analytica?” Unless I missed that the hearing was highly related to this, why would he remember this exact date offhand? You'd be better declining to answer this question than guess and get it wrong which seems like what he did. Asking if he became aware of them before or after a specific event would have been much more reasonable. There's tons of important events in my life where I don't know the month it happened because it's not important to remember. I think he's right to say "I don't know" when he can't be completely sure. That's not a zinger. Likewise, it's not a zinger when you ask a really long question that contains several factual claims that you require clarification on, or try to force a yes/no answer to a loaded question (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_question#Complex_question_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_question#Complex_quest...).
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago> Unless I missed that the hearing was highly related to this, why would he remember this exact date offhand? Because it is one of the biggest scandals affecting Facebook in probably its entire history, and he's been grilled about it before? You'd think that once they found out his staff and advisors would make sure to tell him every single detail about it. Likewise, it should be the thing that occupies him for months on end. It's inexcusable for him to not seem to know some basic factoids about the whole thing.
- fungicide 7y agoFun fact: The "oid" suffix in factoid means "like", or "resembling". So a factoid is not a true fact, but a statement resembling a fact. The word "factoid" was coined by Norman Mailer to mean "an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print." So it is a source of great irony that the meaning of the word has been inverted by the press to mean a trivial but true fact. Historians of the future may have a fun time trying to figure out if our factoids are a true fact that we consider trivial, or a fact that we know is false but is believed to be true.
- chooseaname 7y agoMaybe if there was dramatic background music to manipulate your emotions?
- aeortiz 7y agoDrop the "the". Just "Mark Zuckerberg". It's cleaner that way.