"Don’t Be Afraid of Self-Reflection
That
man in the mirror is typically a man, and a young, white, privileged
one, whose capacity for self-reflection is about as big as Donald
Trump’s ability to stop hate-tweeting. But self-reflection is the
hallmark of maturity and good decision-making. Of all the interviews I
have done in Silicon Valley, I keep coming back to the one I did with
Mr. Zuckerberg this summer, in which I pressed him to reflect on how his invention had caused deaths in places like India and Myanmar.
After
trying several times to get an answer from him, I got frustrated: “What
kind of responsibility do you feel?” I said I would feel sick to my
stomach to know that people died possibly “because of something I
invented. What does that make you feel like? What do you do when you see
that? What do you do yourself? What’s your emotion?”
Mr.
Zuckerberg’s answer left me cold. And also more than a little worried
for the future of his company. It’s bad enough not to be able to
anticipate disaster; it’s worse, after disaster strikes, to not be able
to reflect on how it happened.
“I
mean, my emotion is feeling a deep sense of responsibility to try to fix
the problem,” he said. “I don’t know, that’s a … that’s the most
productive stance.”
But it’s not the
most productive stance. As with those California fires, putting out the
flames is important. But understanding how they got started in the first
place, to stop it from happening again, is what actually keeps us from
hurtling over the edge."
