When I read journalism without knowing the subject well, I assume what I read is accurate. But I'm always shocked by the inaccuracy of reporting on stories I know/understand well.
I wonder whether this book is less accurate than average, or whether this review is finding only the typical level of inaccuracy.
I remember learning firsthand just how inaccurate journalism can be. My family ran a small business (a small factory) that tragically caught fire early one morning and burned to the ground. The newspaper account was ridiculous. It described how the fire sent employees "fleeing for their lives from the building". In reality, the building was entirely unoccupied at the time since it was the early morning (likely part of the reason the fire happened to begin with). I don't remember all of the details now, but reading the story, I was stunned at how wrong the overall picture was that it was painting. It was like a parallel universe. I take news accounts with a huge grain of salt now.
Yep. Several years ago the Eastern Technology Council (a local business association) had its annual party on the campus of one of its member companies named Safeguard Scientifics. The local paper reported it as a Safeguard Scientifics networking or recruiting event (I forget which, but no mention of ETC), and claimed that resumes were being exchanged (I was there and didn't see a single resume, just people from various companies chatting, eating, and exchanging business cards). The article was so off-target that people on the Yahoo finance board for Safeguard Scientifics were claiming that this was a sign that the company was in great shape because it was on a big hiring spree. Reality: The company allowed a party to take place on its property, that is all.
Your addition of the word "just" to the second option makes it sound less serious, but falsely dramatizing what is supposed to be a factual story is far more concerning than a genuine mistake.
I'd suggest you re-read the review. She only points to one inaccuracy -- the timeframe when Bezos read Remains of the Day. Stone has acknowledged and corrected that fact for future editions.
Everything else she says is subjective. She thinks Stone portrayed Amazon as a cutthroat, sinister culture; she tries to re-frame it as an Edenic workplace. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but her version is certainly not a fact.
I think the other argument she makes is that the book is filled with "Bezos worried about..." and "Bezos believed this...". How can the author make such a claim if they didn't interview Bezos? And no mention of having a source claim this.
I am sure most of these thoughts and feelings attributed to Bezos are fictional.
> When I read journalism without knowing the subject well, I assume what I read is accurate. But I'm always shocked by the inaccuracy of reporting on stories I know/understand well.
How long before you either () stop being shocked by the stories you understand, or () stop assuming the journalist is telling you the truth in stories you don't? A sentence like this makes more sense in the past tense...
When I was small, my parents taught me that if it appeared on TV, it wasn't true （they were mostly thinking of commercials, but news programs were offenders too). It may be sad, but those seem more and more like words to live by, and extend to other media.
In an archive of the thousands of thank you messages written
to Jeff over the years, a small sampling includes “I just
wanted to thank you for giving my husband the opportunity to
work for your company so many years ago and let you know
that he always spoke kindly and enthusiastically of the
distribution center, the people and you.” “Having finished
my shift I thought I would send you a short email to say
thank you. There is a fantastic team based here and we have
super support. Our mentors are true Amazon angels providing
guidance and showing great patience.” “I cried as I read the
Career Choice announcement on Amazon today. What Amazon is
doing to help its employees is affecting lives in the most
meaningful way I can think of. It restores my faith in
humanity.”
I'm not saying they haven't received thousands of thank-yous, but that's weird, right? I've never once considered sending a thank-you to any CEO/boss, nor have I met anyone who has. (Of course, I've also never worked at Amazon--)
It might be weird, but I'm a thank-you letter writer. I wouldn't write those exact letters, but I've written similar sentiments.
I've written my CEO, because I live in a house I bought with money earned from this job, raising a family of three kids, and appreciate that my enterprise is sustainable. I'm grateful for my job, the opportunity to do the work I do, and to the people who make it happen.
However, I write a half-dozen or so such letters per year. Not just professional: personal, community, and so on. This rate is trending up as I get older. I'm getting more and more grateful for how our lives all fit together. There are many people working hard toward good ends and probably not being thanked for the good work they do.
I absolutely don't think people writing thank you notes to their boss is weird. I do this on almost a daily basis via email or text.
This block of text does seem weird though - I think it's because she was highly emotional while writing. (Completely a guess.) And this particular portion would have likely been the most emotional for her. It's not as well composed as the rest of the fairly well-formed critique.
I don't think it's a weird thing to do if someone loves what they do or is very grateful for the opportunity they have. However, I'm biased as I have written a thank you note to my CEO before (small company - I was #13 and we have 36 people now).
I guess doing the math it's just likely below my radar.
Thousands of thank-yous comes out to around ~100 / year, and Amazon has probably had between 10,000 and 100,000 employees for most of that, so it's around 0.1%-1% of employees choosing to write a thank-you in any given year. I probably don't know 100-1000 people well enough for that to show up in my personal experience.
Prior to the Internet and e-mail, the days of yore 20+ years ago, writing thank you notes was far more common. Can you believe it was actually expected job-hunting etiquette to send a thank-you note/letter after an interview, thanking the interviewer for their time and getting in a couple final "why you should hire me" points?
If the Internet has done anything successfully, it has drastically eroded much of our common courtesy and etiquette.
Not long ago, following an interview with a company, I emailed the hiring manager (with whom I had spoken and emailed previously) with a short thank-you for having me in for the day.
Time goes by and I don't hear back from said hiring manager. I follow-up with the HR recruiter a week later, and he'll find out why I haven't heard a reply.
The hiring manager follows up with me a day later, saying among other things that they felt I was trying to "game" their interview process by communicating directly with their team, and was trying to influence their evaluation.
I thanked them for the follow-up and wished them good luck filling their role. The manager then states that they're still considering which candidates to pursue for a final conversation. My reply: I likely wouldn't be a good fit for their culture, but appreciated the consideration.
I'm not sure it ever dawned on the manager why I declined at that point.
Having worked in corporate at Walmart, I don't find this weird at all. Especially coming from early employees (from whom I presume these came), many of whom probably made a decent chunk of change from the performance of the company's stock since the early days.
Sam Walton, the late founder of Walmart, is revered as something of a demigod by the early Walmart employees (many of whom are still around). This is especially true of early administrative, distribution, and store-level employees. These folks had limited prospects and came for stable employment -- but they were rewarded beyond their wildest expectations when the company grew from a regional general store into a $100B+ business in a little over a decade. Early Walmart employees speak of "Mr. Sam" (as they call him) the way we speak of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson.
I wouldn't be surprised if early Amazon employees have a similar reverence for Jeff Bezos.
Reading Sam Walton's autobiography has had a huge influence on my life, I found it quite inspiring as a teenager. I grew up in Southwest Missouri, and remember Walmart being the "local" chain, as compared to say, Kmart, their bigger, national competitor.
All that said, I do not agree with many of the decisions the company has made sense Sam Walton's departure. I find many of the companies current philosophies to be in direct opposition to those that Sam Walton espoused in his own autobiography.
I think writing to the CEO says more about a person writing the letter than the person the letter is being addressed to. Especially if the writer doesn't know the CEO well.
Just 10 minutes ago I wrote an email of appreciation to the boss of someone who I think is doing a good job, out of the blue. People do write thank you notes, directed at a person's boss, from time to time even if you don't.
I think Jeff Bezos and Amazon have changed the world of commerce (online and offline). Imagine what kind of world it would be without such efficient online e-commerce as an option.
Did you take a poll of everyone you've met about this topic?
Or are you assuming that the people you've met would have told you if they sent letters to the CEO?
Consider this possibility: maybe Jeff Bezos sends personal replies to the letters. If word got around, it wouldn't be that weird for 1-2% of the workforce to write a thank you note hoping for a personal reply.
People definitely do this at Amazon--especially as they're leaving the company, if they had a good experience working there, as many people did. I don't think I sent Jeff a note when I left Amazon, but I know others who did.
She supplied that specifically as evidence that not all sentiments were negative, and that there was another side that was left out, not as an example of how everyone felt.
Thanks, I sort of assumed this was Jeff's elementary-school-aged child. I even had an androgynous, towheaded, smiling image in my mind. ("MacKenzie" is a rather androgynous, and dare I say infantilizing, name.)
Well of course I didn't click through to read it. I was just trying to imagine why so many people cared about what someone in the Bezos family thought about a book about Bezos, and I figured it must be, "aww, what a talented little kid, that's so cute!"
Which says nothing about the person at whom they're aimed, but considerable about the person who made them -- and such assumptions as these say nothing particularly complimentary.
Politics, nothing -- someone who can read a review such as the one Mrs. Bezos wrote, and not once question his assumption that a 13-year-old wrote it, has extremely sloppy habits of thinking at the very least.
MacKenzie Bezos: Everywhere I can fact check from personal knowledge, I find way too many inaccuracies, and unfortunately that casts doubt over every episode in the book.
Brad Stone: Mrs. Bezos also suggests that there are a handful of factual errors in my account.
There is something slippery about the way Brad Stone writes.
There's something slippery about the way Mrs. Bezos writes as well.
She says: "Readers should remember that Jeff was never interviewed for this book."
She conveniently elides the fact that Brad Stone has interviewed Bezos several times for previous articles, and has written about Amazon for a decade or more.
It is certainly tricky, however, for an author to suggest he/she knows what a subject was thinking/feeling in the past.
This was posted yesterday on Reddit in writing tips. It's advice from Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club) to never use 'thinking' verbs wrt your characters. It's for fiction, but I think it is every better applied for non-fiction. Mr. Stone should have a look at it.
Indeed, but the two may not be mutually exclusive. "Everywhere I can fact check from personal knowledge" doesn't automatically mean more than a handful
When accused of getting the facts wrong, this journalist responded by attacking the impartiality of the accuser. A person who didn't know the meaning of the word "fact" might find that insightful.
If you'd read the article you'd note that he barely addresses her or her status, and primarily responds to her review and elucidates his reporting process.
I quoted that line because I think it usefully reframes the conversation. Journalists certainly can be biased, but the good ones try very hard not to be. Spouses by definition are biased.
Stone's comment is rather dumb. Insofar as Mackenzie was accusing him of "bias" (not a word she used) she might be interpreted as accusing him of trying to tart up his story to make it exciting. She appeared to be more concerned with Stone getting facts wrong and pretending to understand what Bezos might have been thinking.
Stone's comment was defensively knocking over a strawman and I wonder if it is indicative of his overall seriousness as a writer.
I think she streisanded the book, this "controversy" is the first I had heard of it myself. But now I've seen her review mentioned in three different online news sources in the last 24 hours.
If she attempted to have the book banned from Amazon (or get her husband to do it), and sales rose, then I would agree with calling it a case of the "Streisand Effect". But all she did was say "The events described do not match my recollections as a primary source."
I'm not sure, I think the streisand effect works when people want to access the source material to see by themselves. The problem here is that you and I can't easily fact-check the book by yourself and therefore we can't really make our own opinion by buying and reading it. Therefore I can't really imagine anyone buying it because "hey, someone knowledgeable on the subject said it was full of half truths!"
Well, what that means depends on your view of the maxim that "all publicity is good publicity". I'm sure more copies will be sold. I'm also sure more copies will be read with a more skeptical eye than normal. And for many of us, the quality of her review, the specificity, especially to critical and basic factual errors, tells us a lot if we find her believable (helpfully she cites two other reviewers making the same claim). For me, that's enough to decide not not buy it.
How long before the factual inaccuracies noted by Mrs Bezos bleed into Wikipedia's articles on Jeff Bezos and Amazon, with this book being cited as a notable reference?
Ahhhh, now we begin to glimpse that asking for published information over first person information leads down the path of wikipedia becoming a reference of published works rather that an encyclopedia. Not everything that is useful knowledge for mankind is published, and not everything that is published is useful for mankind. I think I can finally word what's been nagging me. Thank you.
For someone so close to Amazon, you'd think she would verify her name in her profile so that the review would show the Real Name tag next to her name (adding a little more credibility). Maybe it doesn't really matter since this is just her third review on Amazon, the other two written in year 2001.
I think it's notable that a review (that is currently the second most 'helpful') is the way to disagree with a book. It reaches people considering buying it, so it's less grandstanding than announcing the same facts to a newspaper, where there would be much less editorial control.
If the subject does not want to do an interview, than it is not unprofessional to not have interviewed the person. In fact, I can't imagine why even a dishonest reporter would not interview their subject given the chance, as that reporter is still in control of the transcribed material and can use it dishonestly, even moreso than if they didn't have the interview, because they can claim their biography has extra weight, due to the exclusive interview, even if they then end up twisting to their purposes.
(which is why very famous people often do not talk to reporters in the first place)
The "writearound", the kind of biography in which you do extensive research to fill in the gaps and talk to everyone else you can find, is actually a pretty well-honored form of biography, and one that can be very illuminating.
(I'm not defending the author in the Bezos case as I don't know the particulars. Just disputing your argument that not having a direct interview destroys the legitimacy of a biography)
You are 100% wrong. Stone interviewed Bezos many times over the years, just not expressly for this book. (Bezos refused.) Bezos did give permission for many of his friends and colleagues to speak to Stone, so he did cooperate in a fashion.
Reporting on a subject without interviewing them is so common, and so necessary, that journalists have a term to describe it. It's called a "write-around."
Full disclosure: I worked with Brad Stone for two years.
But Mrs. Bezos mentions his use of all those thinking verbs he ascribes to Jeff. I was reminded yesterday of writing advice by Chuck Paluchink (thanks Reddit) to never use these "thought" verbs and instead to show. This is even more important for non-fiction.
Presumably Mr. Stone had evidence and reason to put Bezos's mind in a certain frame from circumstance, action, or interviews and if he did, he should have laid out that evidence to show us his probably mental state and not simply told us.
I totally agree that "thought" verbs are tricky, and different news organizations have different rules regarding them. But I wanted to correct the notion that it is "unprofessional" to profile someone without interviewing that person. Gay Talese and Esquire would certainly agree with me, as would decades of journalistic norms.
I haven't read the book... and I can't possibly be an arbitrar on whose perspective is more accurate. But in my opinion, Bezos' personally worded perspective wouldn't have hurt. I'm happy to hear friends and colleagues were interviewed.
Well, such "unauthorized" biographies can have value (heck, what if you're writing one long after the author and those who knew him are dead?), but they have to be much more careful. Which she's pointing out the author wasn't.
E.g. this paragraph, in the middle of like stuff, is devastating:
"In light of the focus in many of the reviews here and elsewhere on what the book “reveals” about Jeff’s motives, I will also point out that the passage about what was on his mind when he decided to start Amazon is far from the only place where the book passes off speculation about his thoughts and intentions as fact. “Bezos felt…” “Bezos believed….” “Bezos wanted….” “Bezos fixated…” “Bezos worried….” “Bezos was frustrated…” “Bezos was consumed…” “In the circuitry of Bezos’s brain, something flipped…” When reading phrases like these, which are used in the book routinely, readers should remember that Jeff was never interviewed for this book, and should also take note of how seldom these guesses about his feelings and motives are marked with a footnote indicating there is any other source to substantiate them."
This one appears to be better, but I think that until one of these guys manages to spend more time with Bezos, we won't really get the definitive story of the company's early years.
I would really like to see such a book, as Amazon, out of all the big tech companies, is probably the one I know the least about.
She actually only refers to one specific fact that can be checked -- when Bezos read Remains of the Day. Everything else is just her attempt to re-characterize the environment at Amazon, which is subjective, not factual. (She also has some interesting, though biased, comments on the process of non-fiction writing.)
Cool. I didn't know Bezos worked for DE Shaw. Their research into how we schedule molecular dynamics simulations to gain the maximum information from limited compute resources is going to revolutionize experimental design in the engineering world. http://www.deshawresearch.com/publications.html
Having had some cards expire, I can assure you that nobody has their Amazon account suspended when a card expires; that would be insane. Instead, your account works as normal, but you can't use the expired card to pay for anything.
Amazon doesn't operate on a tab system. I'm struggling to imagine how you thought using them worked.
I understand how Amazon works ... I was implying that it didn't work the same for McKenzie Bezos. (I should have been more clear that I meant purchases suspended rather than the account).
Something bothers me about the conclusion of the review...
"In this theory I treat the historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse. Histories (and philosophies of history as well) combine a certain amount of 'data,' theoretical concepts for 'explaining' these data, and a narrative structure for their presentation as an icon of sets of events presumed to have occurred in times past. In addition, I maintain, they contain a deep structural content which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic, in nature, and which serves as the precritically accepted paradigm of what a distinctively 'historical' explanation should be." (Hayden White, Metahistory, p. IX)
What MacKenzie Bezos points out, albeit in a localised fashion, is what the Humanities have come to regard as the "linguistic turn" during the course of the 20th century. As Hayden White states above (in his concern with historical writing), historical writing takes a certain set of data that is then fitted into a wider narrative, alongside some underlying meta-narrative, which marks a certain interpretive paradigm (e.g. a progress-narrative). This, in turn, means that no account can desribe "historical truth". It also means that every account is fundamentally literary (or, as he formulates it, at least linguistic). It is no surprise, then, that the Bezos biography does not describe "historical fact". However, it also means that a biography written by Bezos's wive or even his autobiography cannot describe "historical truth" either. Every account remains a narrative, and thus fictional, even if based "on real events", as Hollywood so neatly calls it.
Hayden White continues: The chosen (or, in this case, criticised) writers' "status as possible models of historical representation or conceptualization does not depend upon the nature of the 'data' they used to support their generalizations or the theories they invoked to explain them; it depends rather upon the consistency, coherence, and illuminative power of their respective visions of the historical field." (Hayden White, Metahistory, p. 4)
So her final claim is dubious, at best: "Ideally, authors are careful to ensure people know whether what they are reading is history or an entertaining fictionalization. Hollywood often uses a more honest label: 'a story based on true events.' If authors won’t admit they’ve crossed this important line, their characters can do it for them."
While the "character" may certainly give you their version of the story, what they present is far from being "historical truth". They also choose examples, omit others, pick and make decisions, depending on their very own narrative. This is less a clash of "fiction" versus "historical truth", but instead a clash of two narratives. The character's narrative (in this case, Bezos's) might carry more authority (he is the character in question, after all), but the account remains nevertheless a narrative, which can also be criticised.
This is the same reflex as can be observed sometimes with old guest listeners at universities who torpedo (especially) historical lectures with a simple claim: "But I was there in 19xx, and I didn't know about or notice any of that." And while that might be a true data point, it doesn't mean that it somehow invalidates the wider narrative.
Edit: The author can thus certainly criticise the overall narrative or narrative thrust in the biography, but pointing out singular data points that simply oppose a given data point do not serve the same function.
This is a bunch of pretentious hock. The linguistic turn has nothing to do with this. In fact, I hate how you bring up an external source and quote extensively from it as if it proves anything. Okay, armchair liberal arts student, here's the smack:
When you purport to be writing a factual account, there are certain standards that you can be held accountable to.
Take, for instance, "A Million Little Pieces". It was a memoir written by James Frey in 2003 that absolutely imploded when people found out that he made up large chunks of the material (wikipedia now lists it as "semi-fictional"). There's a difference between the two categories, and the difference is in exactly the type of anecdotal evidence that you don't think is important.
Edited to add:
I agree that maybe the overall narrative of the book--the feeling and reportage of Amazon's culture--may still be accurate. I'd like to see more examples of inaccuracies before drawing any conclusions. It's also important to bear in mind just how much of a vested interest MacKenzie Bezos has in debunking this, because presumably the book makes Jeff Bezos and Amazon look bad (haven't read it yet though).
Ad hominem aisde, your edit seems to actively counter your other point.
My whole point is that both sites spin a narrative a certain way because they both would like history to look a certain way. The reason why I "extensively quote" an external source is to show that there are other elements involved in the perception of truth than just the given data points.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with pointing out inaccurate data. However, there seems to be a general propensity to then discount a whole narrative in favour of the seemingly corrected narrative of the person doing the corrections. The whole point of bringing up the underlying bias of any historical account, however, is to just keep in mind that all correction is capable of doing is to erect another narrative. Which one you find more convincing is entirely yours to decide. I merely (or, perhaps, "merely") contest that what happens in the review is an opposition of (semi-)fiction on one hand and "historical truth" on the other.
Well, either the Remains of the Day anecdote is true or false... it's one thing to pick and choose the facts you think are important in the context of the narrative you think is important, another if the facts are incorrect, which is what Mrs. Bezos is alleging.
Certainly, a given anecdote might be right or wrong. The thing that seems to follow here, however, is an implied claim that because of the falsity of a given (singular?) data point, somehow the overall narrative becomes unsustainable. However, this means that the claimed truthfulness of the counterpoint is used to support a completely opposing narrative without any further backing. This is, in a round-about way, an appeal to authority that then seemingly provides a complete alternative to a given narrative, seemingly without the need to substantiate the wider claims in their entirety.
The falsity of a given (prominent!) data point just puts the care and diligence of the author into question and plants doubt in the reader's mind. It doesn't imply the validity of an opposing narrative.
Not the way I read it. She said there were a lot of errors, and gave one example.
No one who was there is necessarily reliable. Absent a time machine, no narrative is going to be right on all facts.
Perhaps the critic is is self-serving. But perhaps if the author gave competing versions instead of using the device of an nonexistent omniscient narrator, that would be more defensible.
Maybe, as you say, all narratives are fictional, but some are more fictional than others. Serious historians and journalists don't go out of their way to make the narrative more dramatic at the expense of accuracy.
Interestingly, one of the "characters" did come forward, with their own "historical truth" review (4/5 stars) that doesn't exactly fall in line with MacKenzie's conclusions:
Interesting, I hadn't heard of Hayden White before:
> He has argued that historical writing mirrors literary writing in many ways, sharing the strong reliance on narrative for meaning, therefore ruling out the possibility for objective or truly scientific history. White has also argued, however, that history is most successful when it embraces this "narrativity", since it is what allows history to be meaningful.
This is relevant considering most non-fiction writing today is influence by "new journalism" and adopts a fiction/literary form. Often using a narrative structure similar to screenwriting (beginning/middle/end) which is antithetical to scientific history.
If a screenwriterly narrative is moving away from scientific history, how could we move closer? Simply publish historical data in table form? It seems like as soon as you employ verbs that imply causality you are subject to White's analysis here.
Self-reflexion. White's point is that these narratives and meta-narratives exist and are simply something we do. The way to go forward from there is to incorporate that into one's own writing by reflecting the implicit (or implied) biases, narratives and meta-structures. I think this is the case with many of thinkers like him, from Derrida over Foucault to White, that their theories are nothing that can be in any way "applied" to make something better. Instead, what they introduce is a moment of self-reflexion, where we do not just criticise somebody else for their (implicit or explicit) reliance on hierarchies or "external" truths, but instead also question our own influences, connotations and motivations.
I really like this post, and I feel like the only incorrect response is to respond. (although 2nd thought is that Derrida's project is to show us that none of the recursive attempts to account for this phenomenon ("employing narrative") prevent it)
One can include the narratives of the key figures depicted. One recent Israeli movie, The Gatekeepers, did so (for leaders of Israel's security service), and the differences in opinions remained unsettled at the end of the film.
Hayden White would distinguish between a hollywood narrative in which a false(r) history is deliberately created for entertainment or sensatinalism, and an attempt at an accurate account, regardless of how biased it is. There's a difference between intentionally crafting a narrative and expressing one you have formed through your experiences. Bezos is suggesting the former, which is quite different than what White was talking about. Not that that proves anything, but you're dismissing what she's saying completely by misapplying a theory.
The differentiation between a "hollywood narrative" and the "attempt at an accurate account", however, brings us a new set of problems: Who gets to decide which is which? Do we have to rely on authorial intention? Do we rely on reception?
Either way doesn't allow us to qualify what kind of effort we have at hand without grounding said qualification on our own biases. If we believe that the account is fundamentally flawed, we are free to assume that a hollywood narrative has been deliberately crafted to misrepresent "historical truth" (which would be the Bezos side). If we believe that the account is fundamentally correct, regardless of bias and some factual flaws, then we have to assume that the intent behind it was to give an accurate account of history.
My whole point is that neither authorial intention nor pure reception can offer us a definitive assessment of a given accounts "truthfulness" or overall expressed content. Consequently, this lets me regard both sides as biased. Both have an agenda, and both represent things a certain way, thus necessarily misrepresenting others in the process. Who I think is more believable in their account is then a question of my own choice, depending on my own inclinations, biases and presuppositions.
P.S.: I do not regard any of the quoted bits as a theory that is to be applied. Instead, they introduce two distinct elements: reflexion and self-reflexion. Theory thus introduces a mode of thought, not a structural base for analysis. White's own categories are certainly structural (and structuralist) and to be applied, but they are crafted for his own analysis of the history of historiography (and therefore notably absentin my quotations. They, however, are not the transferable meaning that is valid in for more contexts than just his intended analyses.
Reading the review, I think I could create my own TL;DR:
Overall, there is confirmation bias. We see what we want to see.
This is as true for Ms. Bezos's review as it is for the author's biography. As is usually the case, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle area of consensus -- which we now know is anathemic territory for Mr. Bezos.
EDIT: would appreciate a reply to understand why this was downvoted.
Some things are actually verifiable. Or a weaker statement: if something could be easily verified, the fact that someone with an opinion on the matter hasn't bothered to research it indicates laziness. For people like journalists and writers, it may indicate misconduct.
As a society, we need to fight the idea that everyone is biased therefore if your facts weaken my argument let's just agree to disagree, m'kay.
While on a social level, this is a good idea, in the public sphere it allows bad actors to just shrug off contradicting evidence.
I don't believe everyone is biased, but I do think it's reasonable to consider that Ms. Bezos might be, due to her relationship with her husband. It's not across the board, as you state certain facts bear themselves out, but several things she addresses are subjective in nature.
I think it's more important we consider the fact that someone can raise valid points while also holding a natural bias, as opposed to the all-or-nothing state that it's become (which is what I believe you're referencing.)
>EDIT: would appreciate a reply to understand why this was downvoted.
Probably because neither of these statements is necessarily true:
>As is usually the case, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle area of consensus -- which we now know is anathemic territory for Mr. Bezos.
Also because bias is irrelevant to whether something is a verifiable fact or not. Thinking otherwise is like a reverse appeal to authority fallacy. Characteristics of the source have no bearing on the assertion, the latter must be evaluated on its own merits and verifiability alone, and nothing else. Lots of comments here about bias, none are relevant.
Also, asking for explanations for downvotes is against HN ettiquette (see FAQ and Guidelines) and usually downvoted.
Bias is certainly irrelevant to verifiable facts. Bias is not irrelevant to anything subject to interpretation, even when those subjects are presented as facts (politicians do this all the time.) I'm not suggesting bias toward anything other than the subjective matter, which I thought I'd described in other comments.
As for downvote explanation, I wasn't aware of the HN etiquette. Duly noted.
A long, well-written review that is ultimately worthless as the author is clearly biased due to being related to the subject of the book. A good illustration of the importance of context vs content.
She also points to two other reviewers with 1st hand knowledge who dispute enough of the facts to put the book at least somewhat in doubt. E.g. the first says 80/20% correct/incorrect, which makes him wonder what 20% of the claimed facts he's not privy to are also wrong....
Unfortunately, everyone is biased in some way or another. That mixed with your logic means the whole book is fiction, right?
The reality of it is that being biased doesn't mean you cannot make factual statements. It does mean you may highlight facts you want and ignore facts you find inconvenient. It also means you can lie.
In this case she is saying the author made statements of fact that were not true and is trying to point that out. As the book is an unofficial biography, you have to assume the likelihood of factual error is increased.
There is no reason for the book author to be biased. We don't know if he is biased or not. However, we know for certain that Jeff Bezos's wife is very biased. She has a horse in this race, so to speak. So whatever she says is probably to protect Jeff Bezos's reputation, not to uncover the truth.
I'm the opposite of the GP, when I see the subjunctive not being used (e.g. "If I was a rich man"), it bugs me...and the proper use of the subjunctive is actually refreshing to me and is almost a litmus test for me that the writer really knows their grammar (and yes, I know the use of "their" will really rankle some people :) ).
That said, I don't think I would've ever been aware of the difference between "were" and "was" in the singular had I never studied a foreign language in high school, in which the subjunctive was explicitly defined.
If this is really an issue for you, you should probably be aware that there is no subjunctive form in "if I were a rich man" (CGOTEL terms that form "irrealis").
The english subjunctive can be observed in e.g. "I ask that you be there on time".
Why is there no subjunctive form in "If I were a rich man"? I do agree that "If I was a rich man" would also be technically correct in as many contexts, though, so that was a bad example (but I haven't had my coffee yet and that's the first example that comes to mind :) )
The first link is by one of the authors of CGOTEL, and comes out strongly against calling that were-form subjunctive; the second link is by another syntactician, and is a little more ambivalent.
What follows is a mixture of (a) my understanding of some terminology and facts, and (b) my interpretation of the arguments:
"Subjunctive" is a label for a type of sentence mood, where "mood" has to do with the relationship between the sentence and reality. Subjunctive mood is usually, like indicative and imperative moods, marked on the verb. (In my mind, interrogative is also a mood, but it is usually marked on the sentence, not on the verb.) Indicative and imperative moods have fairly narrow commonly-agreed semantics, but subjunctive is more of a catchall (my second link above will warn of the danger of confusing syntactic terminology with semantics, but while they don't correspond perfectly, they are related). We can quickly note that "if I were a rich man", a counterfactual clause, easily fits into area that can be covered by a "subjunctive" mood in various languages.
It's widely agreed that the following construction in English should be called "subjunctive":
I ask that you be polite to him.
The subjunctive form of "be" is so distinct from any other finite form that it makes for good examples. Any time a finite verb can be realized as "be", we're comfortable calling it subjunctive ("be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread").
That construction is productive today and nicely applies to any english verb:
I'm going to have to ask that your son return my necklace.
The argument against calling "if I were a rich man" subjunctive makes the following points:
- It doesn't use the subjunctive form.
- It is not obviously related to any construction that does use a subjunctive form.
- Though it is obviously a special form, it only applies to a single verb, and even there it's not required (Zwicky, my second link, talks about this some more). This can raise questions about how much it's a "real phenomenon", vs how much it's basically just an archaism.
- In the past, subjunctive forms could appear in English conditionals, but they no longer do.
Zwicky will tell you (and this is a point that follows my own inclinations well) that as long as you've described the rules correctly, the names that you give to the rules ("subjunctive") are irrelevant. So in that sense, you can call any form you want "subjunctive", as long as you're willing to extend the description to every instance of an analogous form, which is easy with "if I were a rich man", as it is the only form of its kind.
- However, as the generally-agreed subjunctive is a living and useful phenomenon, and is unrelated to the were-form, it might be nice to give the were-form a name that won't confuse people.
But we don't give the names of foreign languages' syntactic structures to any english sentence that happens to have the same semantics. If we're naming syntactic structures, then we want to divide sentences according to their syntax.
So, in Latin (and other languages, but I know Latin), there's a verb form called future tense:
laudo -> present 1sg active indicative, "I praise"
laudabo -> future 1sg active indicative, "I will praise"
English has nothing analogous. To achieve the same semantics (referring to the future), you need some combination of explicit time reference and periphrasis ("I will praise him tomorrow"). So we usually say that English has two tenses, which you might refer to as present and preterite, or past and non-past, or A and B, or any combination thereof (though I don't recommend "preterite and B"). Referring to a "future tense" in English is buying into the idea that every structure in every language has not only a conventional way of being expressed in every other language, but an analogous structure there as well.
On a totally unrelated note, the 1sg Latin subjunctive forms of esse [to be] are sim (present), essem (imperfect), fuerim （perfect), and fuissem (pluperfect). The Italian form "fossi" appears closely related to fuissem, so I'm a little surprised to see that it's called "imperfect". How many tenses of subjunctive does Italian have? Are there obvious analogs to any of the other three Latin forms?
Unless I completely missed your point and you felt that the correct grammar clashed with your intuition, in which case I apologise, and I suppose it depends on your linguistic surroundings when you learn the language.
Okay. As I said in my comment further down, I suppose this depends on your linguistic surroundings when you learned to speak.
To me using 'were' in the incorrect mood feels wrong. I'm not a strict grammarian (I had to look that reference up to double-check before posting), and my feel for grammar is intuitive rather than learned from verb tables. Obviously the verb-tables (or fragments of them) are encoded in that haze of language in some latent form, but it's entirely down to the environment in which I learned to speak.
Acquisition of grammar is a fascinating topic. Can anyone can recommend any books on the subject?
Since you asked specifically about the acquisition of language, Steven Pinker has written a number of books that touch on the topic, e.g. The Language Instinct. Note that there are a number of conflicting theories about language and how it's acquired so probably no single book will give you an unbiased view of the current best thinking in the space.
I wonder whether this book is less accurate than average, or whether this review is finding only the typical level of inaccuracy.