[codechicago277]

Aaron Greenspan created the early version of what Facebook became, and has loudly criticized the zero-sum tactics used by Zuckerberg, Gates, and other billionaires: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-legend-of-mark-zucker_b_7...

Some interesting books in this category: * Masters of Doom. It’s about John Carmack and the team that built Id Software * Einstein. By Walter Isaacson, author of the Jobs biography. Einstein’s 4 papers are one of the most unexpected, ground breaking discoveries in history * Houdini!!! Tells the story of the escape artist and magician, and exposer of psychics. * The Double Helix * Stress Test. By Tim Geithner who pulled the world out of the financial crisis * Man’s Search for Meaning. Surviving and finding meaning in a concentration camp

[jcranmer]

> * The Double Helix

This one is rather famous for Watson's minimization of the role Rosalind Franklin played in the process of discovering DNA, and Watson himself later acknowledged his mistakes in doing so (though he never corrected them).

[PaulHoule]

I'm fairly convinced most successful "social" sites have bodies buried somewhere. The problem of launching a two-sided market is tough.

It was against my ethics but we sent a round of unsolicited emails to about 10,000 people in Brazil to launch a voice chat service circa 2001. It must have been a really good list (and a different time and place) because we had close to a 40% response rate. (Later we got a list that was so bad some of the emails didn't have '@' signs in them!)

There's that famous story of how reddit was initially populated with fake users too.

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I've never been able to enjoy that Viktor Frankl book, Man's Search for Meaning ,since I read an essay that pointed out how pernicious it was that postmodern people like to fantasize that everyday life is like a concentration camp -- paradoxically that fantasy undermines Frankl's own thesis

I recently read an account of a 14 year old girl (a demo that is vulnerable to Franklism, I had one in an acting class I was in) who said she thought about the Holocaust (survived by some ancestors she'd never met) every day and experienced it as a trauma. If that's what it means to "remember the Holocaust" we might be better to forget. We hear the refrain that "it must never happen again" but it happens over and over again routinely

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide

and if that memory makes us think it is a memory and not an ongoing crime, it is part of the problem and not part of the solution. You can take your own experiences of your group being persecuted and apply that to justice universally (Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner gave their lives together with African-American James Chaney in 1964 to fight racism in the U.S. South) or you can use it as an excuse to commit similar crimes (kill and displace civilians) against other people. It's your choice.

[thinkharderdev]

I read the Einstein biography. Highly recommended. But to the parents point, I came way think Einstein was a huge asshole, especially given his pop culture representation as a kindly old grandfather type.

[thruway516]

Probably every human being looks like a huge asshole if you put their entire life under a microscope. Even Mother Teresa did some giant asshole things if I remember. You're just not aware what a huge asshole you are because someone hasn't written a very good biography of your life from a perspective different from yours (or you havent lived long enough)

[throaway54]

Most people are very selfish when it suits them, and most people would completely deny that selfishness as being not part of their "morality."