

Google Employee No. 59 on Google+, Privacy and Why He Left - thurgoodx
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/07/12/google-employee-no-59-on-google-privacy-and-why-he-left/

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barrybe
Great quote:

 _I came to think of it this way: Google doesn’t have enough irrational people
working there, and the rest of the world doesn’t have enough rational people
occupying it._

~~~
loup-vaillant
I'm not sure what this quote mean, because
<http://lesswrong.com/lw/31/what_do_we_mean_by_rationality/>
<http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Hollywood_rationality>
<http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawVulcan>

The way I see it, the whole world, including Google, would fare better if
people where _actually_ more rational. And one Spock (calculating and mistaken
most of the time) is already one too many. So, unless "irrational" and
"rational" didn't refer to the same concept, I cannot help but dismiss the
quote as not well thought out.

Either I missed something (besides the obvious aura of Deep Wisdom), or this
quote actually is quite terrible.

~~~
gjm11
I'm not keen on the quote either, but I think you did miss one way in which it
(or something like it) could be right.

Consider statements like these: "X would do better if it had more colour-blind
people working there", "Y would do better if it had more deaf people working
there", "Z would do better if it had more depressed people working there". At
first sight, these are obviously wrong: being colour-blind, or deaf, or
depressed, is a disadvantage, right? But that's waaaay too simple. A colour-
blind person has the ability to _see what something looks like to other
colour-blind people_ , and someone with normal vision doesn't. They may also
have better perception of some kinds of detail than normal trichromats.
Similarly (but more so) for deaf or depressed people. The point here: "person
with disability X" does not, by a long way, equal "'normal' person with such-
and-such capabilities simply removed".

So, rationality. Let's stipulate that perfect rationality, if it could be
achieved, would bring with it the ability to do any cognitive task at least as
well as a less-rational person could; and that rationality doesn't imply
autism, social awkwardness, lack of emotions, and all the other tiresome
tropes you find in movies and books and TV. Even so: if you take a sample of
"rational people" and a sample of "irrational people" by any realistic means,
you will find other differences between them other than their level of
rationality -- and it is not at all obvious that those differences will all be
to the advantage of the "rational people".

Obvious example: you want to know how people will react to an advertisement, a
web page, a dialog box, or whatever. In principle, someone sufficiently smart
could work that out, given enough information about the population that's
going to see the ad/page/dbox. But if you just get a sample of people
representative of that population -- and, let's face it, many of those people
will not be very rational -- you can just show them whatever-it-is and _see_
how they react.

So, a company that's entirely filled with rational people is in practice
liable to be missing some viewpoints that might be useful to know about. Sure,
if those were infinitely intelligent perfectly rational people with complete
information about everything, they could work it all out. But back in the real
world, that's not going to happen.

I think that's probably what he was getting at. Only he said it in one
sentence instead of four paragraphs. Draw from that whatever conclusions about
"rational people" (like me) versus "irrational people" (like Edwards?) you
find appropriate :-).

~~~
loup-vaillant
OK, I did miss something. Your explanation sounds probable, I should have
thought about it. Now this quote doesn't sound so bad any more.

------
franze
just posted my review of the book here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2758179> (hint: i recommend it, as a
matter of fact it's the only book about google worth reading (well, up to now
- and yeah, i have read them all, i'm a freak)

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ladon86
I've managed to get an advance copy of the book - I was skeptical at first
(the back cover blurb on the review copy was pretty bad), and I'm only about
80 pages in. So far though, it's pretty interesting.

The biggest insight is exactly how much marketing were sidelined by the
leadership and engineers in the early days, and the flat structure of the
organisation.

I guess a lot has changed since then.

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brianbreslin
I particularly liked his comment on the privacy issues of facts vs perceptions
dictating reality for consumers.

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irahul
Too lazy to find the link but the article which popped up a day or 2 back(the
one which mentioned Larry Page - If we can't win on quality, we shouldn't win)
said he was laid off.

~~~
ma2rten
this is it <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2749467>

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robk
This guy takes way too much credit for his time at Google. It leaves me with a
really bad taste in my mouth reading all his claims of things he did.

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drivebyacct2
Kinda fluffy. I'd like more insight as to what topics are covered in the book,
it could be interesting or really predictable.

