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Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes August 2013 - Less Wrong
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Eric Raymond
In the thread, there were at least a couple of examples of high-verbal-abuse programming cultures (Apple and Linux) which get significant amounts of useful work done, and I think there were more.
I don't believe that scorn just gets dumped on people who don't have a git'r'done attitude-- there have certainly been flame wars about the best programming language and operating systems, and no doubt about other legitimate differences of opinion.
Still, I'm wondering about successful programming environments which enforce courtesy rules. The only one I can think of is dreamwidth from its self-description. Running a livejournal clone isn't nothing, but it also isn't as much as inventing new products. Any others?
So I asked a friend about courteous programming environments, and he mentioned a couple that he's worked at:
Webmethods, renamed as Novell Business Service Management Managed Objects at Software AG
Anyone know where Google fits on the courtesy to flame spectrum? How about Steam?
There is a bit of a difference between commercial, for-profit companies (especially public ones) and FOSS projects.
The courtesy rules at LW are pretty strict. I don't know whether things are different at CFAR and MIRI, but does insufficient scorn interfere with things getting done?
We use the karma system for that.
LW uses a karma system. I assume that CFAR and MIRI include a lot of in person and private conversation which isn't subject to a karma system.
How do you think the effectiveness of cultures which have karma + courtesy compares to cultures which permit flaming?
Empirically, heaping scorn on everyone and seeing who sticks around leads to lots of time wasted on flame wars.
Straw man. The grandparent explicitly made the scorn conditional, not 'on everyone'.
Failure to steel man. Replacing "everyone" with "people" leaves the basic point unchanged.
ETA: ... or, I should say, leaves a point that (1) deserves reply and (2) was probably what the original hyperbolic version was getting at anyway.
Abuse of the 'steel man' concept and attempt to introduce a toxic social norm. I am strongly opposed to this influence.
MixedNuts attempts to refute a quote using a non-sequitur. Supporting a false refutation is not being generous, it is being biased. It is being unfair to the initial speaker.
So much so that it leaves the basic point a straw man.
Steel-manning a refutation does not equal supporting that refutation. In fact, steel-manning entails criticizing the original refutation, at least implicitly.
However, when a claim is plausibly intended to be a hyperbolic version of a reasonable claim, pointing out that the hyperbolic version is a straw man, without addressing the reasonable version, is mostly just poisoning the discourse.
(This charge doesn't apply to you if you sincerely believed that MixedNuts was non-hyperbolically claiming that literally everyone has scorn heaped on them in the community under discussion, or that MixedNuts would be read that way by many readers.)
I oppose your influence in this context for the aforementioned reasons.
The point that you think is reasonable is still a straw man.
It would help me to understand why my version is a straw man if you would steel-man it. Then I could compare your steel man to my straw man and better feel the force of your criticism. (I certainly wouldn't take you to be supporting my straw man, which seemed to be your earlier concern.)
As it stands, I am puzzled by your accusation because Eric Raymond said, "Let’s drive away people unwilling to adopt that 'git’r'done' attitude with withering scorn ...". Why is it a straw man to characterize this as "heaping scorn on people and seeing who sticks around"?
Is it because you read it as "heaping scorn on people randomly...", rather than as "heaping scorn on people who are unwilling to adopt that 'git’r'done' attitude ..."? Or is it something else?
There isn't a convenient steel man available. Not all wrong (or, to be agnostic with respect to the correctness of our positions, disagreed with) positions have another position nearby in concept space that is agreed with (or, sometimes, disagreed with only with significant respect and more complicated reasoning).
Because that is a different described procedure. They are similar in as much as scorn is applied in both cases but the selection process for when scorn is applied is removed and the intended outcome is changed.
To illustrate, consider taking the required equivocation back in the other direction. We end up with:
This seems to be a different empirical claim. It is also a more controversial claim and one that is less obviously correct. I certainly wouldn't expect scorn to be the optimal response in such circumstances but the claim that it wastes more time than the described alternative is still an empirical claim that would actually require empiricism to be done and cited. It isn't something that I have seen anywhere.
This was a helpful comment.
I agree that, in general, wrong positions may lack steel-man versions. However, I am not convinced that this is the case here. Indeed, it seems to me that you provide just such a steel man in your comment.
You are reading "seeing who sticks around" as the reason why the scorn is being applied. This is a possible reading. It might be the intended meaning, but it might not. The intended meaning might just be that "seeing who sticks around" is an outcome, and not the intended outcome.
If the meaning was what you said, the sentence could have been written as "heaping scorn on people to see who sticks around". That would have been equally concise and less ambiguous. Since that wasn't what was written, your reading is less certain.
Refutations of straw men are usually obviously correct. That is why straw men are offered. The steel man version of the straw-man-based refutation will rarely be so obviously correct, but it will be obviously better. The steel man will be more relevant, raise more important issues, be more likely to move the conversation forward in a productive way, and so on.
You seemed to me to be offering just such a steel man when you wrote,
Yes, your version is a different empirical claim, but steel men are generally different claims from the original "unsteeled" version. Your version raises controversial issues, but that need not obviate productive discussion.
Most importantly, and as you point out, your steel man version raises empirical issues, which would help keep the conversation connected to reality. Moreover, addressing those empirical questions would probably require getting into the specific dynamics of the community under discussion. (What have the documented conversations in this specific community actually been like? What are the actual social dynamics and the actual history of how they've changed over time? What has this community accomplished, and under just what conditions, as a function of how much scorn was being applied? Etc.)
This would make the conversation far more likely to stay relevant to the actual matter at hand. The conversation would be more likely to stay at the object level, instead of floating in the meta level, where accusations of fallacies live.
To summarize, I think that what you offered is a good steel man of MixedNuts's original claim for the following reasons:
It is recognizably related to what MixedNuts said, although it is different. Moreover, it is plausible that he could be convinced that this is what he should have said.
The antecedent ("driving away people unwilling to adopt that 'git’r'done' attitude with withering scorn, rather than waste our time pacifying tender-minded ninnies and grievance collectors") is not a straw man.
It raises promising and empirically grounded points of disagreement, as I argue above.
I don't believe that it does, and here's why.
Heaping scorn on everyone and seeing who sticks around is a selection process; the condition for surviving is being able to accept scorn, whether or not such scorn is warranted by the value system of the society. This is somewhat similar to hazing.
Heaping scorn on a specific group of people for their unwillingness to adopt the values of the society (or, rather, some powerful subset of the society which has enough clout to control how things are run) is a selection process based on something of value to the society, and is more like punishment or selective admissions: people with the valued trait are encouraged, those without are allowed to leave.
It would appear that there are very different implications, as the former selects those who can take unjustified scorn (a quality of dubious value), and the latter selects for any demonstrable quantity desired by the society (in this case, a specific attitude towards problem-solving).
This is a good argument for the claim that MixedNuts's hyperbolic version, read literally, misses something important. (Your argument convinces me, anyway.)
It is not clear to me that your argument addresses the "steel man" version in which "everyone" is replaced by "people who are unwilling to adopt that 'git’r'done' attitude".
Eric Raymond isn't suggesting that. Why are you?
A relevant example:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/linus-torvalds-defends-his-right-to-shame-linux-kernel-developers/
Linux kernel seems to me a quite well-managed operation (of herding cats, too!) that doesn't waste lots of time on flame wars.
I don't follow kernel development much. Recently, a colleague pointed me to the rdrand instruction. I was curious about Linux kernel support for it, and I found this thread: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1173350
Notice that Linus spends a bunch of time (a) flaming people and (b) being wrong about how crypto works (even though the issue was not relevant to the patch).
Is this typical of the linux-kernel mailing list? I decided to look at the latest hundred messages. I saw some minor rudeness, but nothing at that level. Of course, none of these messages were from Linus. But I didn't have to go back more than a few days to find Linus saying things like, "some ass-wipe inside the android team." Imagine if you were that Android developer, and you were reading that email? Would that make you want to work on Linux? Or would that make you want to go find a project where the leader doesn't shit on people?
Here's a revealing quote from one recent message from Linus: "Otherwise I'll have to start shouting at people again." Notice that Linus perceives shouting as a punishment. He's right to do so, as that's how people take it. Sure, "don't get offended", "git 'er done", etc -- but realistically, developers are human and don't necessarily have time to do a bunch of CBT so that they can brush off insults.
Some people, I guess, can continue to be productive after their project leader insults them. The rest either have periodic drops in productivity, or choose to work on projects which are run by people willing to act professionally.
tl;dr: Would you put up with a boss who frequently called you an idiot in public?
Actually, that depends.
Mostly that depends on what the intent (and context) of calling me an idiot in public is. If the intent is, basically, power play -- the goal is to belittle me and elevate himself, reassert his alpha-ness, shift blame, provide an outlet for his desire to inflict pain on somebody -- then no, I'm not going to put up with it.
On the other hand, if this is all a part of a culturally normal back-and-forth, if all the boss wants is for me to sit up and take notice, if I can without repercussions reply to him in public pointing out that it's his fat head that gets into his way of understanding basic things like X, Y, and Z and that he's wrong -- I'm fine with that.
The microcultures of joking-around-with-insults exist for good reasons. Nobody forces you to like them, but you want to shut them down and that seems rather excessive to me.
I think it's pretty clear that Linus is more on the power-play end of the spectrum. Notice his comment above about the Android developer; that's not someone who is part of his microculture (the person in question was a developer on the Android email client, not a kernel hacker). And again, the shouting-as-punishment thing shows that Linus understands the effect that he has, but doesn't care.
Also, Linus, as the person in the position of power, isn't in a position to judge whether his culture is fun. Of course it's fun for him, because he's at the top. "I was just joking around" is always what bullies say when they get called out. The real question is whether it's fun for others. The recent discussion (that presumably sparked the quotes in this thread) was started by someone who didn't find it fun. So even if there are some "good reasons" (none of which you have named), they don't necessarily outweigh the reasons not to have such a culture.
That's not clear to me at all.
Note that management of any kind involves creating incentives for your employees/subordinates/those-who-listen-to-you. The incentives include both carrots and sticks and sticks are punishments and are meant to be so. If you want to talk about carrots-only management styles, well, that's a different discussion.
I disagree. You treat fun and enjoyment of working at some place as the ultimate, terminal value. It is not. The goal of working is to produce, to create, to make. Whether it's "fun" is subordinate to that. Sure, there are feedback loops, but organizations which exist for the benefit of their employees (to make their life comfortable and "fun") are not a good thing.
For what it's worth, I've never worked at a place that successfully used aversive stimulus. And, since the job market for programmers is so hot, I can't imagine that anyone would willingly do so (outside the games industry, which is a weird case). This is especially true of kernel hackers, who are all highly qualified developers who could find work easily.
I would point out that Linus Torvalds's autobiography is called "Just for Fun". Also, Linus doesn't have employees. Yes, he does manage Linux, but he doesn't employ anyone. I also pointed out a number of ways in which Linus's style was harmful to productivity.
Ahem. I think you mean to say that you never touched the electric fence. Doesn't mean the fence is not there.
Imagine that someone at your workplace decided not to come to work for a week or so, 'cause he didn't feel like it. What would be the consequences? Are there any, err... "aversive stimuli" in play here?
No need for imagination. The empirical reality is that a lot of kernel hackers successfully work with Linus and have been doing this for years and years.
Which means that anyone who doesn't like his style is free to leave at any time without any consequences in the sense of salary, health insurance, etc. The fact that kernel development goes on and goes on pretty successfully is evidence that your concerns are overblown.
As of 2012-04-16, 75% of kernel development is paid. I would assume those developers would find their jobs in jeopardy if Linus removed them from development.
No, I mean that touching the electric fence did not make me a more productive worker.
I'm not saying that Linus's style will inevitably lead to instant doom. That would be silly. I'm saying that it's not optimal. Linux hasn't exactly taken over the world yet, so there's definitely room for improvement.
Punishments seem to have rapidly decreasing returns, especially given the availability of alternatives that are less abusive. Otherwise we'd threaten to people when we wanted to make them more productive, rather than rewarding them - which most of the time we don't above a low level of performance.
I don't understand the point that you are arguing.
Basically all human groups -- workplaces, societies, countries, knitting circles -- have punishments for members who do unacceptable things. The punishments range from a stern talking to, ostracism, or ejection from the group to imprisonment, torture, and killing.
In which real-life work setting you will not be punished for arbitrarily not coming to work, for consistently turning in shoddy/unacceptable results, for maliciously disrupting the workplace?
Of course all societies have punishments, but that doesn't address the point you were responding to which was that Linus was more on the power-play end of the spectrum. The ratio of reward to punishment, your leverage as determined by the availability of viable alternatives, matters in determining which end of that spectrum you're on.
And that has implications for the quality of work you can get from people - while you may be punished for blatantly shoddy work, you're not going to be punished for not doing your best if people don't know what that is. The threat of being fired can only make people work so hard.
This is a shift of topic-- heaping scorn is one particular sort of punishment. Firing someone who isn't working after having given them several warnings is a punishment, but it isn't the same as a high-flame environment.
The claim, as I understand it, is that the culture trades off fun for productivity. A common example given is Apple, where Steve Jobs was a hawk that excoriated his underlings, and thus induced them to create beautiful, world-conquering products.
Also that the culture selects for the people who find being productive fun.
While the more socially enlightened attitudes lead to very effective and high signal-to-noise conflict handling, as can be observed on Tumblr and MetaFilter?
Here's my thought process upon reading this. (Initially, I assumed “git 'er done” meant something like ‘women are unimportant except as sex objects, and I misread “unwilling” as “willing”.)
(Anyway, if an adult woman complains because you called her a girl, the course of action that leaves you the most time to get stuff done is apologizing, not doing that again, and getting back to work, not endlessly whining about how ridiculous the PC crowd are.)
Not necessarily, it might just encourage further frivolous complaints.
As opposed to feeding trolls, which is widely known to be extremely effective in making them shut up?
In the context the group you position here as 'trolls' are described as frivolous complainers. You advocate apologising and complying. Eugine is correct in pointing out that this can represent a perverse incentive (both in theory and in often observed practice).
I dunno... if someone's goal is to fuel a flamewar to discredit you, it would seem to me that ranting about that is more likely to make their day than just reacting as though they had pointed out you misspelled their name and then going back to your business.