Dan Luu
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A surprising thing (to me) about bay area groupthink
🕑 Added 2019-06-03 09:00:01 +0000 UTCOne of the things that's most surprised me about moving to the bay area is how much cultural groupthink there is. I don't mean that it exists, that was obvious when I lived on the east coast. I mean that now that I've moved here, I have no idea how people get converted into one of the numerous bay area groupthink bubbles, so it's unclear why it's so common.
An example of the kind of thing I used to see when I lived on the east coast was, a programmer in my extended social circle moved west to work at Uber. They initially found practices there to be very strange, but within a couple months, they were as staunch a defender of Uber practices as anyone could be, very much in the style of https://danluu.com/wat/. When asked why the Uber app was so buggy (at the time, the app crashed pretty regularly and often charged me what seemed like incorrectly low prices) they explained to me that of course the app had bugs, developers time was too valuable to waste time chasing down bugs. Any bug that took more than a couple hours to debug wasn't worth debugging since they had to ship and couldn't afford to hire enough developers to debug bugs since developers are so expensive/valuable.
IIRC, this was after Uber had raised multiple billions of dollars and had a valuation of multiple tens of billions of dollars.
This person somehow also simultaneously held the view that Uber's data-driven policies are amazing and don't really make mistakes (e.g., when banning drivers for being bad drivers, so there are almost no bad drivers on Uber and also people don't get incorrectly banned due to biases in ratings). From the outside, one might be surprised that someone can believe that no one should spend more than two hours debugging any bug could also believe that their systems and policies are so carefully considered and flawless that they don't make bad decisions, but if you've seen enough people move into the bay area tech cultural bubble, this doesn't seem surprising at all. I keep seeing this happen to acquaintances of mine who move to the bay area tech.
To be clear, this isn't unique to tech or the bay area. Here's a conversation I had with an east coast finance person, one that mirrors other conversations I've had with east coast finance folks:
Me: [something about the work of some economist]
Finance guy: economists are all idiots
Me: how do you figure?
Finance guy: if economists are so smart, how come I make more money than economists?
Finance and law have their own sets of bubbles with intra-bubble shared cultural beliefs that seem just as bizarre to outsiders. And in tech but outside of the bay area, there are a couple of large outposts of bay area tech companies that seem pretty good at acculturating folks to something like bay area tech culture. But, as someone in tech, I get much more exposure to people in a funny tech cultural bubble than a funny law or finance cultural bubble and the odds of someone getting indoctrinated in tech seem much higher if they move to the bay area.
Before moving here, I figured there was some funny thing going on that would be subtle and difficult to resist. Instead, after moving out here, the views I see from various cultural bubbles seem even more absurd than they did when I lived on the east coast because I'm closer to it and get the raw, unfiltered, views in all of their absurd glory. Watching discussions in a group where twenty people think that spending two hours debugging a bug is such an obvious waste of time that you shouldn't even consider doing it is much stranger than occasionally seeing someone who's converted.
I thought there might be something deeper happening that would make these seemingly absurd views seem more reasonable, but after moving here, it's just the opposite! I can ask many different people about some groupthink opinion and get answers that would only be convincing to the converted from most or all of them. This... is not convincing.
The thing that puzzles me is, if the absurdity of what's going on is more apparent after moving to the bay area and not less, how do people get indoctrinated? I wonder what I'm missing here.
Comments
Sometimes ideas persist not because people are "convinced" by them, but because they are comforted by them. They are not so much propositions to be evaluated for truth or falsity as they are a form of soothing self-talk which meets an emotional need. In the case of the debugging thing, you might hypothesize that the emotional need that is being met by that is the need to be doing work that isn't pointless/stupid/worthless/result of perverse incentives. It's quite hard to wake up every morning and suit up for that. And if you look at the structure of the belief it does seem to have characteristics of a rationalization (ie. it's shallow, it's really just a fancy way of asserting a value judgement, etc.)
People generally value social proof higher than the explanatory power of an idea? That would explain why the distortion field is stronger in the bay area than in the east coast.
