[urthor]

I'd say the reason I was keeping it ambiguous is that I wasn't really making a point about hardware or price negotiations specifically. I'm not a hardware person at all.

I was maybe close to making a point that with supply chains, there's many reasons that might justify that kind of secrecy.

Really I just want to create empathy about non-software engineering reasons for secrecy.

Not ram home a particular hypothesis about a corporation I've never worked for. I have a habit of thinking from the perspective of corporate titans.

re: price negotiations which is my jam (3-D Negotiation and Never Split the Difference are excellent bedtime reading).

Keep in mind secrecy is often not JUST about withholding information to negotiate the best price. Sometimes the information is something the other person in the negotiation would also like you to keep secret.

[ClumsyPilot]

' I have a habit of thinking from the perspective of corporate titans.'

Thats sounds a bit presumtious, have you ever validated how accurate that perspective is? Maybe the perspective you imagine is totally different from reality.

[urthor]

Well I don't think I'm right haha. I haven't met these people and asked them exactly what they were thinking.

But I honestly think we're very biased towards assuming our senior corporate leaders are foolish and misguided.

Saying "assuming a corporation made a smart decision, why did xxx make that decision?" is usually a very fruitful line of thought.

[lapcat]

> I honestly think we're very biased towards assuming our senior corporate leaders are foolish and misguided.

I honestly think we're very biased towards assuming our senior corporate leaders are gods and not fallible mortals.

All humans make mistakes. Very bad mistakes. Even very smart people. Depending on circumstances and level of power, some people suffer the consequences of their mistakes, and others don't.

One common mistake of leaders is to surround themselves with "yes men" who never criticize them or tell them the truth. Leaders can become very detached from reality, but their power allows them to survive and even thrive in a state of reality detachment. And these leaders always have people who will defend them no matter what and paint them as infallible geniuses because of their power, which is part of what contributes to never suffering the consequences of mistakes.

[urthor]

Everyone makes mistakes.

But when they committed to that mistake, they thought they were right at the time.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23771902/

Diagnostic errors by Doctors are probably the gold standard of being error free. My estimate is that CEO types are usually right at least 60% of the time with these big decisions as it were.

What I'm curious about is why they thought they were right when they made the decision.

[lapcat]

> What I'm curious about is why they thought they were right when they made the decision.

This may be important to determine liability in a malpractice lawsuit, but otherwise I'm not sure why we should care much why someone was mistaken if we're all agreed that the decision was mistaken.

The difference here is that we're not even agreed that Apple's culture of secrecy is wrong. It's a controversy. If we're talking about a diagnostic error by a doctor, we're assuming there's no controversy over whether it was actually wrong.

Two vastly different scenarios:

1) Tim Cook made a mistake but made the best decision he could given the information at the time.

2) Tim Cook didn't make a mistake.

If you're willing to agree on 1, and that Apple's culture should change, then I'm happy to grant you "made the best decision he could given the information at the time", or at least not argue it too much, because the culture is the important matter, and not the thoughts inside Tim Cook's brain.

"Assume he's smart" is vastly different than "Assume he's right".

There are many times in my career when I look at code that I'd previously written and wonder "What the heck was I thinking???" It's an interesting question psychologically, but still, I fully recognize that the code I wrote was bad. And regardless of how much time I spend on post-mortem analysis, the crucial thing is to fix the code.

[ClumsyPilot]

> But when they committed to that mistake, they thought they were right at the time

I never met a person who commited to a mistake, and thought they were wrong at the time. Have you?

> My estimate is that CEO types are usually right at least 60% of the time with these big decisions as it were.

How do you arrive at this number? For a doctor there is a clear correct and wrong diagnosis. For a corporate CEO, who decided against doing a merger, how do you even know that decision was taken at all? How do you known if it was right or wrong? You can't simulate an alternative business.

Suppose you could simulate it accurately, and the revenue were up, profit margin is down, and stock price is up - is that good or bad? You can't even determine, non subjectively, which option is better

[ClumsyPilot]

> corporate leaders are foolish and misguided.

> corporation made a smart decision

The bankers who traded subprime mortgages and fucked off with their gains made an excellent decision. The corporations didn't, because they are not real, they don't make decisions.

Just because something is in the interest of a senior leader, does not mean it's in the interest of the whole company.