There has to be a name for this. Folks love saying "people complained when I did X, now people complain when I do Y." As if that proves something. Unless it is the same people, irrelevant.

(Not that it is automatically relevant if it is the same people. But I get frustrated with this general game of moral equivalence somehow being a valid talking point.)

It is curious to me how people seem to accept certain narrative fallacies like 1) the complainers are the same; 2) if the complainers are the same, there are only two exclusive options in existence that must be chosen.

I work in an org with a lot of regulations and a rent seeking IT group different than development. I’ve heard a lot of people rationalizing decisions using emotion (eg, “they complain if we do, they complain if we don’t [;therefore their experience isn’t important to addres]”

It’s tough to solve and is based, I think, on having your measurement of success be a good story, because objective metrics are not really applicable.

In google’s case they make so much revenue and profit from search the rest of the company just kind of bounces around and doesn’t matter. So projects are run, it seems, off who has a great story. Sure, there’s massive data analysis showing things but those don’t matter. Why did a jillion people using finance used to matter, but not now.