novalis comments on Rationality Quotes August 2013 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Vaniver 02 August 2013 08:59PM

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Comment author: novalis 07 August 2013 09:46:33PM *  3 points [-]

[Linus]: And I do it partly (mostly) because it's who I am, and partly because I honestly despise being subtle or "nice".

Steelman this. I am pretty sure that in the North European culture being "subtle or nice" is dangerously close to being dishonest. You do not do anyone a favour by pretending he's doing OK while in reality he's clearly not doing OK. There is a difference between being direct and blunt - and being mean and nasty.

I don't understand what you're saying here. Are you saying that anyone is proposing that Linus to act in a way that he would see as dishonest? Because I don't think that's the proposal. Consider the difference between these three statements:

  • Only a fucking idiot would think it's OK to frobnicate a beezlebib in the kernel.
  • It is not OK to frobnicate a beezlebib in the kernel.
  • I would prefer that you not frobnicate a beezlebib in the kernel.

The first one is rude, the second one is blunt, the third one is subtle/tactful/whatever. Linus appears to think that people are asking for subtle, when instead they're merely asking for not-rude. Blunt could even be:

  • When you frobnicate a beezlebib, it fucks the primary hairball inverters, so never do that.

So he doesn't even have to stop cursing.

As I said, Linus' style is proven to work. We know it works well. An alternative style might work better or it might not -- we don't know.

There are many FOSS projects that don't use Linus's style and do work well. What's so special about Linux?

I suspect you have a strong prior but no evidence.

I've run a free/open source project; I tried to run it in a friendly way, and it worked out well (and continues to do so even after all of the original developers have left).

I can also point to Karl Fogel's book "Producing Open Source Software", where he says that rudeness shouldn't be tolerated. He's worked on a number of free/open source projects, so he's had the chance to experience a bunch of different styles.

Comment author: Lumifer 08 August 2013 01:04:33AM *  2 points [-]

The first one is rude, the second one is blunt, the third one is subtle/tactful/whatever.

We keep hitting the Typical Mind Fallacy over and over again :-)

Let me offer you my interpretation: the first one is blunt and might or might not be rude, depending on what the social norms and context are (and on whether thinking about frobnicating the beezlebib does provide incontrovertible evidence of severe brain trauma). The second one is not blunt at all, it's entirely neutral. The third one is a slighly more polite version of neutral. Your fourth example is still neutral, by the way -- there's nothing particularly blunt about explaining why something should not be done (or about using four-letter words, for that matter).

To contrast I'll offer my examples:

  • (rude) You are a moron and can't code your way out of a wet paper bag! Stuff your code where the sun don't shine and never show it to me again!
  • (blunt) This is not working and will never work. You need to scrap this entirely and start from scratch.
  • (subtle) While this is a valuable contribution, we would really appreciate it if you went and twiddled the bogon emitter for us while we try to deal with the beezlebib frobnication on our own.

What's so special about Linux?

It's only the most successful open software ever. Otherwise, not much :-P

Comment author: novalis 11 October 2013 11:20:51PM -1 points [-]

I recently came across this, which seems to have some evidence in my favor (and some irrelevant stuff): http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/10/extraordinary-leader/

Comment author: Grant 07 August 2013 10:08:22PM *  0 points [-]

A more direct approach might be: "no patches which frobnicate a beezlebib will be accepted".

There are many FOSS projects that don't use Linus's style and do work well. What's so special about Linux?

I would say the size (in terms of SLOC count), scope (everything from TVs to supercomputers), lack of a equivalent substitute (MySQL or Postgres? Apache or Nginx? Linux or... BSD?), importance of correctness (its the kernel, stupid), and commercial involvement (Google, Oracle, etc.) make it very different from most FOSS projects. Mostly I'd say the size, complexity and very low tolerance of bugs.

I have no idea if Linus's attitude is helpful or not. I tend to think he could do better with more direct, polite approaches like the above, but I don't hold that belief very strongly.

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