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Tetronian comments on The Black Team - A Parable of Group Effectiveness - Less Wrong
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I think the next paragraph is the most important:
This makes it sound more like a cult rather than a group of rational people working together. Reminds me of this and similar posts. So instead of "A Parable of Group Effectiveness," it's more like, "A Parable of Smart People Getting Sucked Into a Feedback Loop Causing Them to Confuse Their Sense of Group Identity With the Terminal Values of Their Employer."
...they "grew long mustaches which they would twirl with melodramatic flair as they savaged a programmer's code", for god's sake. This is just a group of people who decided to have fun with their identities, go about their jobs in a bit more theatrical a manner than usual, and make people's days more surreal, and managed to get their work done more effectively and more enjoyably in the process. (Rational doesn't mean boring.) I'm sort of used to random things in nearby memespace regions being accused of being cults, but this doesn't even seem to have the surface similarities that are usually brought up to support those accusations.
I agree entirely. I hate the idea that "rationality" is being identified with the way your dress and compose yourself. Also, I know there's a sequence post somewhere that basically says that being rational doesn't mean being dispassionate.
Perhaps you're thinking of Feeling Rational, one of my personal favorites.
(blink)
Of what employer are you presuming quality code is a terminal value?
EDIT: Or, if I've misunderstood you... what employer terminal values are you presuming, here?
Uh, I think he's saying exactly that it wasn't.
That suggests that they spent way more time on ensuring quality that was actually merited by the goals of helping users.
If you read the whole article though (it's a page long!) it's clear that management loved it.
Yes, this was what I meant.
Or to put a positive spin on it, it shows that cultishness can sometimes be used to do good, productive work.
I think calling your response "a positive spin" is conceding too much. The bottom line is:
That's fact, not spin.
I question even calling it "cultishness". An in-group, certainly.
Are you saying that rational people are not supposed to have fun?
No, not at all! But it sounds like they developed a powerful sense of group identity and lost track of their goals. E.g.:
Keep in mind that the word "rational" as used in this article does not have the technical meaning we use here at LW. As a software developer, I find that a lot of bug reports I receive come from that actual users exceeding all bounds of "rational" use of the software. And most of those, I fix, and I would have been better off with top notch testing department exceeding all bounds of "rational" testing to tell me about these bugs as I write the software and before it gets deployed to customers.
I'd like to know what "software torture" means once the metaphor has been stripped. As it is, that phrase doesn't tell me what they're doing, but does tell me what I'm supposed to think about it, which combination is worrisome. Fuzz testing would probably be considered "torture" by anyone who hadn't heard of it and who didn't realize that criminals looking for software exploits were doing it too.