Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes August 2013 - Less Wrong

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (733)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: novalis 07 August 2013 05:53:31AM -1 points [-]

Do you think we have a basic difference in values or there's some evidence which might push one of us towards the other one's position?

That's a pretty good question.

Hypothesis: I think some of it might be a case of the "Typical Mind Fallacy". Maybe if Linus yelled at you, you wouldn't be bothered at all. But I know that my day would be ruined, and I would be less productive all week. So I assume that many people are like me, and you assume that many people are like you.

I would be curious about a controlled experiment, where free/open source project leaders were told to act more/less like Linus for a month to see what would happen. But I guess that's pretty unlikely to happen. And one confounder is that a lot of people might have already left (or never joined) the free/open source community because of attitudes like Linus's. We could measure project popularity (say, by number of stars on github) against some rating of a project's friendliness.

We might also survey programmers in general about what forces do/don't encourage them to work on specific free/open source projects.

I'm sure there are studies available of what sorts of management are effective generally. I'll ask my MBA friend. I did a two-minute Google search for studies about what cause people to leave their jobs generally, but found a such a variety of conflicting data that I decided it would need more time than I have.

These things could definitely influence me to change my mind.

I also think there might be a value difference, in that I do value fun pretty highly. That's especially true in the free/open source world, where nobody's getting rich, and where a lot of people are volunteers (this last is less true on Linux than on some other projects, but perhaps part of that is that all of the volunteers have been driven away)? But in general, I would like to enjoy the thing I spent eight (or twelve) hours a day on. And if even if this did make me somewhat less productive than I would be if I was less happy, I don't really mind that much.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 August 2013 06:48:14AM 0 points [-]

I think some of it might be a case of the "Typical Mind Fallacy". Maybe if Linus yelled at you, you wouldn't be bothered at all. But I know that my day would be ruined, and I would be less productive all week.

The right comparison is to compare that to how much you'd be bothered if you had to clean up the mess left by an incompetent coworker. Or having to deal with an incompetent bogon in middle management.

Comment author: novalis 09 August 2013 05:29:26PM -1 points [-]

The right comparison is to compare that to how much you'd be bothered if you had to clean up the mess left by an incompetent coworker. Or having to deal with an incompetent bogon in middle management.

Unsurprisingly, I've had to deal with both of these things. It has never seemed to me that yelling at someone could make them more competent. Educating them, or firing them and replacing them seems like a better plan.