True moral vacuum type people are
a) surprisingly rare at the top
b) typically concentrated in finance or very financialized businesses (PE turnaround cos are snakepits)
c) accumulating a huge psyche toll that blows up at some point like a time bomb
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I make a distinction between generalized criticism and "defense of the little guy" criticism. The latter is a solid place to put a stake in the ground. Liberal democracies only work if enough people prioritize individual rights and welfare as their moral project.
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It's also an excellent way to tell principled moral curiosity at small scale apart from lazy ressentiment. The defenders of the little guy will go after very specific issues in specific ways. The ressentiment driven ones will punch randomly anywhere they sense an opening.
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Tech companies add a third dimension to the money-curiosity/moral-curiosity design space. There is such a thing as raw tech curiosity, which typically is more fundamental where it exists at all, because it tends to subvert existing moral AND financial notions.
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Elon I think is genuinely in this bucket in a way almost no other highly visible leaders are.
The DNA of any top-level leader is some ordering of curiosities. Elon is tech > money > morality.
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Failures happen when you're not smart enough to actually deliver results in your preferred order. If you (costly) signal tech > money > morality, but deliver money > tech > morality, you'll bleed leaderly agency.
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Facebook's existential dilemma is that it costly-signals tech > money > morality, cheap-signals morality > money > tech, but has actually failed to do truly interesting tech in the last decade in proportion with its reputation and costly signals.
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Interesting rant, though I don’t agree with it. I think Facebook is a Hanlon’s razor company. Those who leave believe it is malicious. Those who stay (like me), believe it is incompetent. In a specific way — the product side isn’t strong enough to resist capture by the ads side. twitter.com/doctorow/statu…
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Replying to
in what way does FB "costly signal tech"?
a few years ago I was interviewing at tech companies and got the impression that FB was *not* the place you go if you love the art of programming
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not that I'm a real software engineer myself, I'm not judging from a lofty height here. but FB seemed pretty far on the spectrum of "light on code review, easy to push to prod, lotsa messy PHP" compared to other tech companies
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"few opportunities to do research-y or cutting-edge technical things" (though admittedly FAIR has picked up steam since then)
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Replying to
I think you're conflating signals of R&D priority vs. tech priority. When I say costly signals of tech, I don't mean R&D so much as willingness to pursue business opps that require mastering major new tech stacks. Eg. drone delivery or an EV trucking fleet for Amazon.

