This was a helpful comment.

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).

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.

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.

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.

This seems to be a different empirical claim. It is also a more controversial claim and one that is less obviously correct.

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,

Empirically, <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> leads to lots of time wasted on flame wars.

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. It raises promising and empirically grounded points of disagreement, as I argue above.

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.

Ahem. I think you mean to say that you never touched the electric fence. Doesn't mean the fence is not there.

No, I mean that touching the electric fence did not make me a more productive worker.

The fact that kernel development goes on and goes on pretty successfully is evidence that your concerns are overblown.

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.

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.