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A while back where I work we had a serious mess up with our phone system and to cut a long story short, a number of people had requested a callback through an a
by DharmaPolice 4y ago
A while back where I work we had a serious mess up with our phone system and to cut a long story short, a number of people had requested a callback through an automated system and those call backs never happened. It was a lot easier to say "A small number of customers - less than 5% were affected" vs "We seriously let down more than a thousand people many of whom are vulnerable."
Once you get to Google's scale it becomes more ridiculous. There was some feature that was being removed from YouTube at one point and the talk was about "only 5% of users" - but that could translate into millions of people.
Percentages are obviously useful to get a feeling for certain things but too often they're used to minimise the impact of something.
- talkingtab 4y agoA very good point. Thank you.
- mejutoco 4y agoExactly. Whenever a corporation is fined the news make sure to shows x millions of dollars. I have never seen it in percentage of revenue in that context.
- vlovich123 4y agoEveryone seems to be overlooking that a total count + percentage gives you the number of active users. That’s generally not something broken down at a product level. So you can give percentage or absolute. If you only ever give percentage then you don’t have a problem and it gives you a sense of scale. If you give absolute numbers it doesn’t + you might accidentally give percentage out in a different venue allowing competitors to have a sense of how well your product is doing. At least, that’s my generous interpretation of the incentives at play. I don’t think it’s as simple as “those engineers are dumb” / “corporations are evil”
- flangola7 4y agoCorporations can safely be assumed to be evil until proven otherwise.
- vlovich123 4y agoInnocent until proven guilty is a bedrock of American justice, no?
- mrguyorama 4y agoCorporations aren't people.
- Out_of_Characte 4y agoGroups of people aren't people by that logic
- vlovich123 4y agoThat’s right, the group itself isn’t. It s a collective action. Ultimately, the legal fiction was created to avoid having to create new rules but it creates all sorts of problems because corporations and groups in general are more like political parties and governments where they’re made up of subgroups with their own agendas and those subgroups have their own individuals with their agendas. For example, if a corporation mass poisons people, no one typically goes to jail and instead the corporation pays a fine, very similar to what would happen if the government did that (see Flint and what PG&E did in Hinkley). You can put people in jail. You can’t put a corporation in jail and the corporate veil is insanely strong against getting pierced which causes all kinds of moral hazards.
- vlovich123 4y agoNo they’re not. Which means you’re willing to color a group of people as guilty by default. Is that better?
- 4y ago