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You might be surprised how often the tail wags the dog in these situations. Lawyers shrug and defer to the policy doomers because they ultimately don’t understa

You might be surprised how often the tail wags the dog in these situations. Lawyers shrug and defer to the policy doomers because they ultimately don’t understand the tech.

pardoned_turkey 3y ago
I don't think it's about understanding. Lawyers are pretty smart. But there's no upside to you as a corporate lawyer if you advocate for taking risks. Even if you think you're on solid legal footing, you're going to miscalculate sooner or later, or run into a hostile regulator. And then, it's on you. Conversely, there's no real downside to being too conservative, especially if engineers and leadership are entirely deferential to you because they don't understand your field (or are too afraid to speak up.) Although this is also somewhat true for security, privacy, and safety organizations, their remit tends to include "enabling business." A safety team that defaults to "you shouldn't be doing this" is not going to have much sway. A legal department might.
- zooq_ai 3y ago
  This is exactly how Elon Musk crushes competition. His entire team including legal/hr/finance and not just engineering, has the culture of risk taking. Elon Musk is no genius, but his Material Science Engineering, risk taking and first-principle efficiency is unparalleled. By focusing on Musk's shitty personality, his critics always gets wrong about why he can still be successful despite Musk being a douchebag
  - mufti_menk 3y ago
    People equate likeability with how deserving someone is for their success, so they always say that Musk got lucky
- DannyBee 3y ago
  "But there's no upside to you as a corporate lawyer if you advocate for taking risks. " This is a great trope, but as anyone who ever worked with me or plenty of others would tell you, this is both totally wrong, and most good corporate lawyers don't operate like this. Effective corporations have legal departments who see their goal as enabling business as well, and that requires taking risks at times. because the legal world is not a particularly certain one either. There are certainly plenty of ineffective corporate legal departments out there, but there are plenty of ineffective engineering, security, privacy, product managmenent, etc orgs out there too.
daxfohl 3y ago
Or, moreover, legal safety policies are essentially written by the companies that produce the product, by their own definition of safety, and pushed by their own lobbyists to codify into law, effectively giving them monopoly power. Safety is just a vehicle to those ends.

You might be surprised how often the tail wags the dog in these situations. Lawyers shrug and defer to the policy doomers because they ultimately don’t understand the tech.

pardoned_turkey 3y ago

I don't think it's about understanding. Lawyers are pretty smart. But there's no upside to you as a corporate lawyer if you advocate for taking risks. Even if you think you're on solid legal footing, you're going to miscalculate sooner or later, or run into a hostile regulator. And then, it's on you. Conversely, there's no real downside to being too conservative, especially if engineers and leadership are entirely deferential to you because they don't understand your field (or are too afraid to speak up.) Although this is also somewhat true for security, privacy, and safety organizations, their remit tends to include "enabling business." A safety team that defaults to "you shouldn't be doing this" is not going to have much sway. A legal department might.

zooq_ai 3y ago
This is exactly how Elon Musk crushes competition. His entire team including legal/hr/finance and not just engineering, has the culture of risk taking. Elon Musk is no genius, but his Material Science Engineering, risk taking and first-principle efficiency is unparalleled. By focusing on Musk's shitty personality, his critics always gets wrong about why he can still be successful despite Musk being a douchebag
- mufti_menk 3y ago
  People equate likeability with how deserving someone is for their success, so they always say that Musk got lucky
DannyBee 3y ago
"But there's no upside to you as a corporate lawyer if you advocate for taking risks. " This is a great trope, but as anyone who ever worked with me or plenty of others would tell you, this is both totally wrong, and most good corporate lawyers don't operate like this. Effective corporations have legal departments who see their goal as enabling business as well, and that requires taking risks at times. because the legal world is not a particularly certain one either. There are certainly plenty of ineffective corporate legal departments out there, but there are plenty of ineffective engineering, security, privacy, product managmenent, etc orgs out there too.

daxfohl 3y ago

Or, moreover, legal safety policies are essentially written by the companies that produce the product, by their own definition of safety, and pushed by their own lobbyists to codify into law, effectively giving them monopoly power. Safety is just a vehicle to those ends.