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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   30698 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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This is outcome based thinking and basically one of the best ways to never truly understand why the world works the way it does. If you buy a game for $1 where a coin is flipped and you get $10 if it's a head then you did the right thing even if the coin flip turns up tails. The real life outcome is not important, what really matters is the expectation.

If you look at the very top Contract Bridge or Magic The Gathering players for example they evaluate their play based on expected values of the boardstate rather than whether that specific time what they did worked out well for them or not. The right play that led you to lose the round is not an issue at all while the wrong play that led you to win that specific time is something you need to fix ASAP.

Sure you can run Yahoo for $150M but for the board it makes more sense to pay Mayer $249M if there's say a 30% probability she ruins the company and a 70% probability she makes it good again vs paying you $150M for a 100% probability of the company being ruined, irrespective of what the final outcome of Mayer's tenure turns out to be.

I don't have a specific opinion about Marissa Mayer as Yahoo CEO at the moment, other than that she's another amusing example of the female desire to be sex objects.

If you buy a game for $1 where a coin is flipped and you get $10 if it's a head then you did the right thing even if the coin flip turns up tails. The real life outcome is not important, what really matters is the expectation.

Indeed, a good outcome does not necessarily mean a good decision (and conversely with regard to a bad outcome and bad decision). Even as a kid, when watching professional sports, it annoyed me how coaches/managers would be razed or praised based on the outcome rather than the decision(s) using the information available at the time.

Some of the things she did were just ridiculous:

In November 2013, Mayer instituted a performance review system based on a bell curve ranking of employees, suggesting that managers rank their employees on a bell curve, with those at the low end being fired.[59][60] Employees complained that some managers were viewing the process as mandatory.[60] In February 2016, a former Yahoo! employee filed a lawsuit against the company claiming that Yahoo's firing practices have violated both California and federal labor laws.[61]

It's not as though she made ambitious ploys that might've worked but failed due to bad luck, she had a scattergun approach of random nonsense. "We need to do something" -> "this is something" -> "therefore we must do this" x50. Mayer had a hard task but bungled massively.

I think you can even switch those odds, it can be a hail marry, a 30% chance she turns it around. If you're a high end exec you're going to want to be heavily compensated for the risk that you're going to get fired and that possibly ending your career. "I'll try to patch up the Titanic but you're going to pay me enough that when it goes down I'm sitting on the life boat with a smile on my face."

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