YouSaid · the spoken record

Jennifer Aaker

lines on the record: 68
first: 2018-11-28
most recent: 2018-11-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I mean, I think that that's right, but I think we can see what happens when places get too extreme, like Tesla, like Uber, and we can start thinking, okay, we do need some structure in that looseness, and that's good for innovation. In laboratory studies of creativity, the groups that have some structure, but also a lot of freedom do the best. The ones that have total freedom don't do as well. So I think that, you know, the psychology literature could be really informative.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, again, this is a balance of creative loose mindsets while also realizing that we need some rules. Like, I don't think it's impossible to have the kind of balance. I think that people start stereotyping if we have any tightness, then we're going to be so restricted we'll never, you know, be able to be creative. But that's just not true. The best context have some kind of balance.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we didn't expect that this would be the case, but I think this is now why we have to cooperate across Silicon Valley in Washington. I know there's a lot of conflict over this, but I believe that it's time just to make that happen.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that they have to, first of all, understand the psychology of unaccountability and step back and see now they understand why this is happening. Because I think without understanding why they won't be able to really be committed to solutions. So they have to understand why this normalist environment has evolved in the first place. I think the second thing is they need to take action to create more rules. And I think getting rid of that guy was a great idea. I think having encouraging forum online to be more regulated and to kick people out is something that's going to be really healthy for all of us, for our kids, for us, everyone. And I think they need to work closer with the government. We're all sort of confused about what's going on because it happens so fast. But now is the time we have to decide, do we need more regulations? Like probably yes, I would say.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As if we're going to go down this slippery slope. I think this is why Goldilocks is really important. I think in our research we can see that cultures that are either wildly loose or wildly tight have higher suicide rates, less happiness, more instability. Like the extremes are really bad in the internet is a context that has gotten extreme. So we have to give up some of that freedom for some order. And it's a principle that we have to negotiate and both bottom up and top down.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What was interesting about the recent debates over, say, Alex Jones, and I took the stance like throw him off. He broke broken. You know what I mean? Which was interesting. And all the internet people is like, no, we should promote. I'm like, no, no, no. He can talk. He just can't be on the widely available on your platform if you have those rules. Like, what's wrong with some rules? Yeah, this is the American.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's got to be both. I mean, in the book, I talk about it's got to be bottom up. We are living in this world. We have to, as individuals, create a new normative system, just like we did over the course of our human history, as we had to navigate different contexts as a new world. And individuals should be accountable. There should be kind of a one of these, a driver's type test. Like content should be unregulated, but the way that we speak to each other, the rules that we abide by have to be stricter.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think most of us, it's a threatening context, want everything to be tight. But then you're like, wait a second, maybe we can negotiate this. Like, what domains in that house have to be tight or loose? Of course, it's complicated when your spouse has a different opinion about this. But I tell my kids, I'm like, you could be slobs around the house. That's a loose domain. But you better be nice to your sister.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they're also, the best ones are also tight because they're able to come up with great ideas. In a sense, it's a sequencing. Okay, we have to have a loose mindset here, but then we have to have a type mindset as we're trying to implement. In any household, it's the same Goldilocks thing. When I'm raising two teenagers, I'm like, okay, what domains need to be tight?”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Understanding the context Actually, so Like a plumber's van. So Why we need more rules? Well, people, it also promotes the situation of doing anything because it's part of your creativity. Because I think they worry about innovation being squelched. And innovative cultures are looser. They're more tolerant.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. You're not a normal. That's like the fish in the water. They don't understand. They're like totally not understanding the context. And I think that's a very interesting way to wiggle out of accountability, actually. So that's one thing is to say, like, this is what power produces in people. In laboratory studies, people who are even thought to think about that they're powerful over people will steal the last cookie. They'll do all sorts of things that are anti-normative. There's studies out at Berkeley that showed that nicer cars, people who have Mercedes and other nice cars, they'll be much more like a cut off pedestrians than like a plumber's van. So it's about being mindful about how power affects our behavior, but also about why we need accountability on the internet, why we need more rules.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say the book. Rulemakers rule breakfast. I know I got that, but you see. Yeah, I mean, I think some of the psychology literature on what online behavior looks like, Sarah Kessler, I can actually provide some references to put online for you guys just about what lack of accountability does to people. I would say some of Adam Golinski's work is a Columbia that focuses on how power leads people to do all sorts of weird things. Like, you know, you think that people, for example, who are in power positions would be more responsible, but they're not because they live in a looser world. And I think that they have to understand the psychology of power better as well.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I definitely think they're accountable. I don't want blameless. I want blame. I like blameless. First place, I understand that. And I think that they have to be made accountable. They have to be tightening up their shops. There's no question, just like we talked about with Tesla or the Uber. They were loose and it was really helpful for a lot of things, just like the internet has produced a lot of positive things, but it got excessively loose and now they got to backtrack. And they have to be accountable. I took a gold line.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We Let's figure out how we're going. We got all the money. Yeah. They took all the money. They can't know. They just have to fix the friggin. Yeah, I definitely think they're accountable to it. I don't want blameless. I want blame. I like blameless because I think it gives you a context of, you know, they always want to move to solution without discussing how it got there in the first place.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, balance that we need to have a balance. We need to live in a world where we have freedom and constraint at the same time. We need to create a culture of the internet where we feel safe and we feel accountable at the same time. Now, I'm not saying that's going to be easy, but I think with dialogue and with discussions on this and not the blaming people, really, to just say, let's start over now. Let's figure out how we're going to create, well, maybe that's a little optimistic.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They change. They don't think it matters. They don't even think. Which should they? Finishing up, what should they think about? Talk about some of the things they should read, as you know. I want Mark to read more in humanities. I want them all to read it.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was like, welcome, welcome. Going on, you know, I guess I have a little more of a different view on this because I think that psychology is ignored all the time. When people send people abroad, for example, big companies who are smart, they change. They don't send people who are culturally intelligent. They don't think it matters. They don't even think about the cultural element, the psychological element of the fit of these people, these cultures. It's the same with this context. People underestimated how normless this context was going to be and what kind of problems that was going to have downstream. They just don't think about psychology. I think that's my interpretation.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Why didn't these companies put it in in the first place? I know why they, well, I think it's because they never felt under threat themselves and therefore they never, you know, one internet pretty big executive, if you said his name, you'd know him. He's like, I had no idea. He just recently got attacked a lot. And he's like, I had no idea. And I'm like, welcome to the world of women, people of color, gay people, older people. I was like, welcome, welcome. And everyone has their levels, you know, going on down.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Physical time. Not easy. So But how do you do that in a highly digitized culture of people addicted to these things? Wow. Because the internet, the original problem is the internet is that we would learn about each other. This would bring the world together. And I interviewed Jaron Lanier, who I love this interview that he did where he talked about this is the biggest human experiment on humanity that they're talking to each other, but it's not working. Like maybe it's too much for people to be able to have access to everything because then you get access to nothing. They're not equipped emotionally to see everything.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think we have, or is it impossible? I don't think so. I think that we have examples of people who are sitting across the table from each other. I wrote about in the book, in Texas, people that were really against immigrants who sat across from immigrants who said, you know what? I really like America. I want to also maintain my own culture. But I'm here and I have the same desires. They spent a lot of time together in this example. Physical time. Physical time. It's also challenging each other. It's not easy. You also have people speaking out against these stereotypes. Molly Tippet's father was a really good example were making it out making this extreme event of this non-documented immigrant. This was a tragic situation. But then there was all this generalization to all immigrants. And her father said, guys, that's bullshit. This is not about an immigrant. This is about a crazy person, just like we wouldn't look at a neo-Nazi and say they reflect white people. So there are people that are”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How did you get that? Because I've written this many times it's weaponizing. It weaponizes everything. There's nothing that doesn't get amplified or weaponized in some fashion, whether it's the First Amendment, whether it's differences, cultural differences, whether it's anything. And then it repeats and repeats and repeats itself. So how do you get to that concept of commonality? Well, I think we have, or is it impossible? Is it a system designed to separate?”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. I think it's, and again, psychological element that we miss that people are going to want to be around people who agree with them. It helps them to feel like they are valid, their opinions are valid. And, you know, I think we need that kind of direction.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we can easily within a week, the bad, big, bad wolf. We basically gave them for a week time in Pakistan, daily diaries of Americans. They were not edited. So people were still waking up with their girlfriends and still drinking more. Americans saw Daily Diaries of Pakistanis. They were still in the mosques more, but they saw so much broader range of situations they were in. By the end of the study, the cultural distance that they perceived between each other was dramatically reduced. The stereotypes that they had of each other was dramatically reduced.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If they know where it is. And if they think of it in any way. Yeah, that's right. That's right, because we're really separate. They're Indians. Yeah. I mean, there was a question of like, where is that? But they don't think of a Pakistanis as playing sports or reading poetry. They think about them as excessively tight. So what we did is a very simple intervention to get them out of those echo chambers because they just meet in the media. They don't see each other for their daily lives.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, because you said Virks before. Homophilia. Homopholy. It's like, you know, basically birds like a feather plock together. We're in our own echo chambers all the time and that makes us to stereotype people that are different. And I'll just give an example. We did this very simple technique where we collected daily diaries from people in the United States and people in Pakistan. And they have really extreme stereotypes of each other. Pakistanis think Americans half naked all the time. They don't just think we're loose. They think we're exceedingly loose. Americans think Pakistanis.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's something that is dynamic, but what we have now is a situation where we have a lot of problem deciphering what's real and what's illusory in terms of threat. Because threat, when we have threat, we want stronger rules and we want stronger leaders. It makes a lot of sense. But right now we're in a situation because of our own leaders, but also because of the internet, because we really can't discern what's real and what's illusory. And in our research, we can see clearly that when people feel threatened, they want tightness. And we see that in the United States, when we measured before the Trump election, we measured how threatened people felt. And that predicted how much they wanted Trump to be elected. And the same thing in France. They wanted tighter cultures. And so it's a really pretty common principle. So I think we are tightening up and we're trying to now have a conversation about how much threat do we really have.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they want, it's evolutionary. This is the problem it's an evolutionary principle. When you're under threat, you want strong rules and you want strong leaders. It's something very healthy. We've done computer science models. I partner with evolutionary game theorists. We can see that when threat is increasing, groups evolve to have stronger rules and punishments because they couldn't survive without them. The problem is when we are having fake threat that is being targeted to people who are already very threatened. And we know in our own experiments, if I brought you into my laboratory and started talking about terrorism threats or natural disasters, that you would tighten up. And we've seen that within minutes, we can make this happen. Now, it doesn't mean that people will stay that way, but we have right now a big threat machine happening in our country and in many other places.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like things like structure and order. When you're in a context where you can fall into poverty very easily, when you go into a dangerous job and you can get hurt, rules matter in that case. We did a really interesting experiment. We brought three-year-olds into the lab, like working-class middle class kids. And you can't really ask them about rules, but you can have them interacting with a puppet. This guy called Max the Puppet, and he's playing with them and he's abiding by the rules, but all of a sudden, Max the Puppet becomes a violator. He starts violating all the rules of the game. And he's announcing like, oh, I'm playing the game. And they're just called Daxing. And then we simply observe the kids. We videotape them and look at how they react. And then working class kids by three-year-old, they are disturbed by these rule violations. Their parents are thinking about what kind of life does this kid going to have and how can I help them to survive that kind of contact? So the big picture point is some groups are definitely threatened, but these leaders also activate threat and they are doing threat experiments on us and they're making it out that the world”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and that complexity is just totally overwhelming for some people, and they want a tight social order. It's what's explaining what's happening in Brexit, in Hungary. I mean, what we have is a situation where these leaders are not only capitalizing on real threats that people perceive, like the working class, we have research on the working class. They're definitely tight because they have a lot of threat. The rules matter to them. When we ask the working class to give us five words, five words associations for the word rules, they come up with positive words. Whereas the upper class comes up with, you know, these are nuisance, like goody two shoes. When we bring in”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's right. I mean, it's unbelievable to see how it is possible that someone like President Trump is like, he's a crazy norm violator. I mean, it's really interesting. We take norms so for granted that we just can't believe the norms he's violating because we've taken them for granted in every other presidency. I think that it's because of his perceived power and because he's not kept accountable by his own party accountability makes people behave themselves more. Watch people accountable people are more norm about it. But also I think that even his supporters, my hypothesis would be that they're willing to overlook these kinds of norm violations because they're expecting him to return them to a tight, safe order. So it's kind of hierarchy of needs. Like, yeah, you can do all that weird stuff, but that's not really why I'm rooting you on, because I'm looking to get back to a safe place. I mean, you got to, it's amazing to think about the complexity of the world these days compared to like when I grew up in the 70s and 80s as a kid.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we do, and at the national level, in our research, we can see that places that get incredibly normless invite tight forces because it's unsustainable to feel like this is so anxiety-provoking. Eric Fromm talked about it, like, you know, in the 40s. It's why people even right now are interested and supportive of populist leaders because they feel so much threat and they want a return to the social order. So there's that kind of, you know, extreme looseness, however people feel it, whether it's exaggerated or not. And threat invites tightness.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of Right. When you think about those rules, in the next section, I want to talk about some of the things people in tech and power should be reading in terms of shifting that. But when you talk about this Goldilocks issue, is there an ability to do that? Because it seems to me we just veer from one to the other back and forth over and over again. Yeah.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like that, you don't care about the On these things. Yeah, and I think now that's happening, that accountability that says, look, you have power with that comes responsibility. Actually, in the book, I talk about power and looseness. And it's no question that people...”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tight, but we're at the Maybe Maybe he should learn about it. I think it's part of your. See, I have an opposite thing. I think it's part of your risk. If you have that much power, you have the responsibility. If you really care, unless then you're just a despot of some sort, like that you don't care about the impact. So if you actually purport and say you care about the impact, then you should be highly educated on these things. Yeah.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They want the rules. I think the balance is, you know, we don't want to become, in my view, like China, like where, you know, there's millions of people monitoring the internet and swelching dissent. I mean, it's clearly excessively tight, but we're at the opposite end of this continuum with the extreme looseness. And it's unsustainable. And so that's why these conversations here in Washington, I don't blame people like Zuckerberg. I think they're not psychologists. They didn't understand what this freedom is going to do to people. Maybe Plato and Hobbs and people would have. Right. So maybe he should also read some of that stuff.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right Year, y Yeah, that's right. I mean, that kind of looseness thrives on that kind of lack of rules and having less accountability. It produces so many great things. But I think it's catching up with us. We're starting to realize, wow, change happens so quickly that now we're just really at a loss of, okay, we got to step back and figure out how we're going to regulate the internet. I think the problem often is that Americans really have a hard time with constraint. You know, you see in Europe there's much more sort of acceptance of, okay, we need some rules.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's just Well, I think one of the things was from the beginning, this group of people has allowed complete immunity, and it's in law. That's right. Now that's getting chipped away. But when you're allowed complete immunity, you tend to, I think there's a bright line between that and what happened at Facebook last year in the election. They just weren't minding the store at all. And people, they say they were, but the results seem to be very obvious that they didn't even, in the design of it, they never thought of it. They never thought of it one minute because they had no strictures on them. Yeah, that's right.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that it was a process of, you know, that this is getting so successful technically. It's providing a lot for the world, but really what it's also doing is it's now inhibiting us as in our communication, our elections, all because we have no norms and rules. And that's why we see that starting to happen bottom up, because people want to live in a world that has some kind of respect and etiquette, and they're starting to push back. I talked to my kids about it. How do you identify norm violators? And let's talk about this. I have a course on it. Let's kind of have our driver's license, you know, as the co-founder of the internet said, like, let's kind of be mindful about this, our new world. But then it also has to come from top down. You know, that's where you see like the United States is really struggling with this. How much should we be regulating the internet? I think we need that Goldilocks balance. And it's just people don't think about the psyche.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, because we live in this new world, like this is where our lives are taking place now. And so like we did in the Industrial Revolution, we figured out a way to coordinate and have rules that help people to cooperate across hundreds, if not thousands of people. Now we have the same problem. And the issue is that we just kind of didn't realize it's going to happen. You know, we didn't think about the psychology. So why not?”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they were down in they were down in nasty lane for an awfully long time for growth because all that debate started it. Like, how does that, when you're, I just recently interviewed Nicole Wong from, he shoots to work for Google and Twitter, and she was talking about how we need to introduce a slow food movement into the internet. Many people feel that tech has exploded because of this lack of rules, because of the looseness, because of anything goes. When you have that culture, it's very hard to throttle it back, for sure, or you think of yourself that way almost continually.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out spiraled out of control because of the lack of rules and the lack of accountability. And I think what's exciting is to see that it's starting, I mean, humans are kind of adaptive. Like you're starting to see that we live online. We have to make it more of a normative place. And we're starting to try to figure this out, like kind of trial by error. So like Reddit is a great example. They really promote open discussion as far as I can tell. But they really want people to debate. They don't want to squelch dissent. But they also say, look, guys, like we got to, you know.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tech Yeah, I think philosophers for centuries have been pondering how much freedom should we have versus constraint. And you see people like Plato or Confucius, you know, or Hobbes that say, you know, we need rules to coordinate. You know, we can't just let people go. And then you have, you know, the flip side, John Stuart Mill and other people, even Freud was kind of a clamped over a lot of rules, thought they'd cause a lot of neuroses. And I think that those debates never entered that tech world. It was never like, you know what? Like this is going to be a totally free world. We only see the advantages of that. And there are many advantages. You know, economic efficiencies, openness, except that we kind of underestimated people. Again, psychologically people are not just going to start interacting with people outside of their echo chambers. Right, right, right. So I think there was this sense that, you know, the focus on the positive, and I think that's respectful in a lot of ways that the internet has done so many things for the world and high tech. And in terms of that openness, but it's lost, it's a”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why didn't we realize? Why didn't these leaders realize that? What I'd love to first talk about is the idea that one of the things they talk about in tech a lot for sure, and I think a lot of places now, but tech was the first group to really talk about it out loud, is this is our culture. This is, you know, don't be evil or whatever Facebook's is. But they all talk about how they're building a culture. And it's critically important for their identity to have that. That wasn't around. You didn't think of cultures before. I mean, tech was the first place that just touted it so heavily.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. I mean, it has the internet has that lack of social presence also has all sorts of benefits of being free and open, but it has a really serious downside of excessive looseness. And in the book, I talk about context where we need to think strategically about how to use social norms to better the planet. Sometimes we need to tighten up. Sometimes we need to loosen. And the internet is a great example of that it's a context that we I believe we have to have more of this Goldilocks principle. It's because of this psychological lack of accountability people do all sorts of terrible things on the internet. And Americans are really kind of, you know, not all, but many people feel like we should err toward freedom. But the reality is that both extremes, as I mentioned, are problematic. And I think that that's where we see that there was this unanticipated kind of”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you don't sort of see the cues of the social presence of people. And so it's so fascinating is that for years, for millennium, we've been operating face-to-face for small-scale societies where we create rules and we keep each other accountable. And then we sort of scaled up with industrial revolution, which is bad.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Social science. Because for years. Or you can teach him. You can't see someone that's right. You torture him. It produces a huge amount of. Is that right? You torture people. You're more willing to cause more pain when you can't. Yeah, you don't.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They didn't anticipate the human psychological issue that happens on the internet. And I know I remember reading your awesome New York Times article about Zuckerberg should have took some humanities in college to understand. Actually, he should have taken psychology, social science. Because for years nine of them. For years, we've known that when people are not monitored, when they are online and they're not accountable, they do all sorts of weird stuff. It's the online disinhibition effect that we've seen in research in the early 80s even.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they run the show kind of thing Yeah, it's so interesting. I think what happens is, and I write about this in the book, there's kind of a serial startup phenomenon where like the whole goal is to get bought out and to scale up. But then when you enter those organizational cultures, they're just so different and they're so rule-oriented. And they need to be because they have much more coordination. And I think that's what we find is people then coming from a loose standpoint, people think they're irresponsible and they're kind of crazy and don't have any discipline. And the flip side, people coming from the startup culture thinking, you know, there's just so rule bound and they don't, they're not fluid enough and they don't anticipate these problems. And then a lot of people weave. And I think this is the same issue of mergers. But, you know, what's interesting about places like Facebook, like you're saying, they do make the rules. It's clearly the case that”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you could look at Amazon and Whole Foods, which is clearly looks like a match made in heaven, but they come from very different worlds in terms of tight loose. ahead of time they can identify well wait you know we respect the culture of whole foods it's pretty loose but let's figure out where we need to be tighter there but allow looseness in other contexts and to maintain itself likewise like Amazon veer is tight like where places could we introduce some discretion there and I think these are the kind of things that you can negotiate ahead of time You can sort of sit down and do an assessment, a cultural diagnosis of where the Titan loose domains are in these organizations. And I think it would make for a far more successful merger.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then it could have problems. So I think identifying some of the types of the people and the practices and the leaders of these organizations are very different. And so that's another sort of general principle. When companies try to merge that very on Tight Loose, they have huge problems that I write about the price tag of those mergers in the book. So there's a lot of other interesting application of this, whether it's again it's dynamic. So people try to merge to gain strengths of looseness or tightness. And then they find I can't stand these people. How do you negotiate this ahead of time? We should be negotiating culture versus just thinking it's all technical. Like we're going to gain a lot of advantages technically from merging.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT