Comment by CalChris
6 years ago
Regina Dugan is a former head of DARPA as well as ATAP. She has an impressive resume. Why would she do something like this? For a not particularly important patent, LED popup books? It seems bizarre.
6 years ago
Regina Dugan is a former head of DARPA as well as ATAP. She has an impressive resume. Why would she do something like this? For a not particularly important patent, LED popup books? It seems bizarre.
People don't get to the top by being ethical. They get to the top of the org chart by playing politics. Many of them are practically psychopaths.
The good news is that very few people are at the top. Most are in the middle, and it's entirely possible to be ethical and in a good middling position.
How can you justify your work in the middle as ethical, if it directly supports a rotten apple at the top? Your life's work turned into a support system for a beast, wonderful!
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The psychopaths at the top are a lucky minority of a mass of psychopaths, most of which prosper a bit less at middle levels in organizations. Only low-functioning psychopaths are exposed and thrown out, and usually only by chance because of specific incidents.
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Also, you don’t get to be the head of an organization whose primary goal is to figure out better and more efficient ways of mass murdering people whilst having any semblance of a moral compass, either.
It does increasingly feel this way, but I think (hope?) it's selection bias. In other words we hear about the psychopaths because they are newsworthy. We don't generally hear about the average CEO, because they are average and generally follow expected social norms.
At least, that's what I hope.
Sorry but I don't share that hope, it doesn't make logical sense. The higher you go in organizational pyramid, and the bigger the pyramid is (in width and amount of levels), the harder it gets to progress. Sure, you can impress here and there with your raw technical/managerial skills, but sooner or later that won't get you much further. That's where backstabbing, alliances, quid pro quo, slanders happen. It comes about how you look to those important, not actual results. Good hearted balanced individual could theoretically survive, but constant battle with those skilled in these games would wear them down over time.
Politics on the other hand works almost always, the person just needs to be apprehensive and adapt to whom they try to please. Its not limited to corporations, plain old state politics and bureaucracy is the same.
Btw minor nitpick - I would expect much more sociopaths than proper psychopaths in top of the pyramid.
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Reminds me that anecdote, not sure who it was, he was wondering where are the Caesars or the Hitlers of our time, all that brand of ambitious, manipulative and dominant personalities. The answer, he found, was that nowadays those people are absorbed into corporate instead of going into politics.
Disclaimer: I am a Google employee, who isn't listed as inventor on any patents here. I don't speak for Google and all the usual blah blah.
In my experience outside of Google, typically how this works is that you will get a visit from product counsel asking if you have any patent-able work. It's not your job to ask if it's novel enough; that's the patent lawyers job.
So they bug you for months while you are trying to get work done asking about what you are working on and how it works, and then file something on your behalf. I can't recall if I even needed to sign anything before a provisional application was filed.
The way that this is pitched is that it's a necessary evil. One needs a huge patent portfolio to protect your tech inventions, because when you are sued, you can leverage your portfolio to protect yourself. I hate this system and how it works, but it is a business reality.
I don't know Regina, but I think Hanlon's razor applies. It less likely that she woke up one day and said, "well, I want to steal other people's inventions today!", than, "oh I have a bunch of work to do and need to get counsel off my back."
It doesn't make what happened here right, but I think it's unfair to assume malice.
No reason to take what is not yours, there is no room here to justify such even if the system is broken.
“It’s a necessary evil”
Company motto: “Don’t be evil”
Do you notice the hypocrisy here?
"Don't JUST be evil. Be evil AND greedy."
My experience with patents extends beyond Google. I've never heard "It's a necessary evil" uttered anywhere here.
Aside from that, I'm not saying that there's not hypocrisy but I am saying that the real story is often more nuanced than first appearances.
>"I have a bunch of work to do and need to get counsel off my back"
You would have had a hell of a lot more work to do if you'd actually come up with the ideas you patented yourself, instead of stealing somebody else's bunch of work they did.
>It doesn't make what happened here right, but I think it's unfair to assume malice.
I'll probably burn some Hacker News points here but the old adage needs to be updated. Never attribute to stupidity or malice what can be attributed to both stupidity and malice.
The same Wikipedia article that mentions a Wired article of potential conflict of interest when working for the US goverment and awarding a contract for a company she owned stock in. Totally sounds like a non-corrupt human.
> She has an impressive resume.
> Why would she do something like this?
Because the latter may be the reason for the former
As a result of many real world experiences I've started to see ridiculously impressive looking resumes as a contrarian indicator.
When I see a resume that cites multiple company foundings, dozens of patents, dozens of projects, etc. I know the person is either stealing or taking credit for others work or just padding their resume in the more conventional sense. It says this person is a liar, exaggerator, narcissist, or sociopath.
It's simply not physically possible for a human being to do the amount of stuff I see on some resumes/CVs. There are not enough hours in a day to actually invent (as in actually conceptualize, research, and prove) a hundred things in 20 years or found (as in actually shepherd to success) dozens of companies. Founding one successful company takes several years and a ridiculous amount of work. Founding two or three in a life time is possible but off the charts impressive and the number of people who can realistically claim this are few. Dozens? Physically impossible, but I've seen such things claimed... by people whom I later saw were total liars and sociopaths.
Edit: it's different if they accurately claim to have managed people who have done these things, like "managed a research organization with over 200 patents and 1000 publications" or "founded company X and also contributed as an advisor to companies Y and Z" etc. It's also important to note authorship positions in long lists of publications since some science teams add everyone who ever touched a project as an author. Being listed on a bunch of publications with 15 authors is not a contrarian indicator, but claiming to be a primary researcher on absurd numbers of things can be.
Well said! The old adage; "if something seems too good to be true; it probably is" is a truism. The outliers are very few. The Internet is used to amplify every small exaggeration and falsehood into banner headlines and for some reason even sane people default to believing them. Being sceptical takes effort while belief is wired into our DNA.
Probably because she’s been doing it to lots of people for her whole career. People don’t usually get caught the first time they shoplift.
> She has an impressive resume.
Does she? Or does she just have an impressive patent portfolio cribbed from others' work?
Or, in fairness, did this not happen as told because there's another side to the story?
They thought they could get away with it.
Someone needs to add this incident to her Wikipedia page.
Not saying it's not Wikipedia material, but perhaps a site nice and searchable site of misdeeds so we won't forget? Does something like this already exist?
On one hand I’ve long thought this would be a good thing to have after seeing how often people can prey on others repeatedly but on the other I’ve realized that some people can and do change. The fuzziness of our memories over time let’s us heal and gives others a second chance. I’ve also learned over the years that things that are designed to catch or punish bad actors will instead be used by the very people they’re meant to punish to go after their enemies. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Have had that idea when I was younger. I no longer support this idea, because I realize that nobody else wants that site to exist.
Agreed. If you’re an asshole let’s make sure some shit you do sticks to your name.
Since it is original research it will get thrown out in a minute.
Citing the inevitable tech-press coverage now that the blog-post has hit HN's front page should get around that nicely.
To be fair we can't be sure that she was personally involved or had knowledge of the patent application.
>> She has an impressive resume.
>> Why would she do something like $badthing?
Am I the only one wondering why anyone would think a person's resume should be any kind of predictor of good or bad behaviour?
You're not the only one wondering that.
In fact, one way to get an impressive resume is to railroad others and use people as stepping stones to your way to the top.
Thomas Edison had a great resume.
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I assume that statement has less to do with good behavior and more to do with doing something that can bite you in the ass when you have so much to lose.
Julian Assange did culture shifting work with Wikileaks, but allegedly sexually assaulted 2 women.
Adrian Peterson is possibly the best running back to ever play in the NFL, but has recently admitted that he still beats his children.
Steve Jobs created products that advanced how we use technology in our every day lives by leaps and bounds, but by all accounts was cruel to his daughter.
People can achieve amazing, important things in their professional life, but it's no indication that they're good people.
But this is not a matter of personal vs professional life. What she did was on a professional capacity. Not really comparable to all the examples you gave.
Inside most companies there is pressure to get a few patents.
At promotion time, people will ask 'if you've been researching $thing for 3 months, why haven't you patented anything yet?'.
That's hilarious. 3 months is far too short of a time to actually invent anything meaningful and get far enough along with it to determine whether it would actually be worth patenting.