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by urthor
1495 days ago
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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. |
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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.