Swimmer963 comments on The Importance of Sidekicks - Less Wrong

127 Post author: Swimmer963 08 January 2015 11:21PM

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

Article Navigation

Comments (203)

Comments (203)

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

Comment author: Kenny 23 January 2015 01:14:57AM 8 points [-]

Open source projects, especially (or maybe just most saliently for me) software projects, desperately need sidekicks. I write 'desperately' because most such projects die from 'over-forking', i.e. everyone wanting to be the leader (hero) of their own project (adventure).

What I've learned most recently is that being even a moderately competent sidekick is really hard. It takes a lot of work to even be able to contribute without creating lots of extra work for the heroes and their more-devoted sidekicks.

Comment author: Swimmer963 23 January 2015 02:14:42AM 4 points [-]

That's really interesting! Are you able to break down the relevant skills at all?

Comment author: Kenny 30 January 2015 06:53:39PM 2 points [-]

Some relevant skills, off the top of my head:

  • 'Mind-reading', e.g. how are they going to interpret a complaint or request or comment
  • 'Filtering', e.g. what decision or evaluation should or must be made by a 'hero'
  • 'Readiness', e.g. "this just needs your signature"

Really, there must be lots of specific sub-skills, as the three I listed overlap to a large degree.

I initially thought I would be able to list lots of skills specific to software, and of course there are many, but they're relatively unimportant for being a good sidekick generally. For example, being able to provide clear instructions on how to reproduce a bug is incredibly valuable, but that's really just an example of the general skills I listed above, i.e. providing info that's unambiguous about what's wrong (and ideally why), not providing info that's irrelevant, and providing enough info so that they can most efficiently fix the bug.

Generally, being a good sidekick requires sufficient empathy and self-awareness. Empty because you have to know the mind of your hero to know how to best help them. And self-awareness because you have to know whether your hero's cause is really yours too. Tho, of course, some sidekick's cause is ultimately serving a specific hero.

In fantasy terms, a good sidekick delivers obvious monsters that the hero can slay.

Comment author: Nighzmarquls 05 February 2015 09:01:39PM 3 points [-]

In table top gaming terms you just described a good GM. I find it very interesting that there would be such a particular overlap.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit