Isn't there an equivalent negative utility monster, who is really in a ferociously large amount of pain right now?

why should I care?

Isn't this an objection to any theory of ethics?

Presumably, that's diminishing marginal returns relative to dollars input. In other words, "You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are."

Yes, but we can generalize the games (which is what Hearn and Demain do), and see how the solving complexity changes with the size of the board. This is the only reasonable way to talk about the computational complexity of games.

Well, it's not entirely unrelated, since jkaufman says:

Go is the most interesting of the three, and has stood up to centuries of analysis and play, but Dots and Boxes is surprisingly complex (pdf) and there used to be professional Checkers players.

The interest here is not provided by the complexity of the rules themselves, but by the complexity of solving the games (or, rather, playing them well, but this is probably related). One can easily imagine games with very complex rules that nonetheless admit simple strategies and are thus boring.

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.

[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.

Since OSS projects are easy to create and it's easy for developers to move from project to project

Creating projects is easy; forking is hard. And nobody wants to create a new kernel from scratch. Kernel hackers don't really have a lot of options. So I don't think your theoretical world has anything to do with the real world. Also, it seems to me that culture doesn't end up contained within a single project; Linux depends on GCC, for instance, so the Linux people have to interact with the GCC people. Which means that culture will bleed over. I was recently at a technical conference and a guy there said, "yeah, security is perhaps the only community that's less friendly than Linux kernel development." So now it's not just one project that's off-limits, but a whole field.

I also don't think there are necessarily any actual roar-and-smash types. That is, I think a fair number of people think it's fun to lay a beatdown on some uppity schmuck. I've experienced that myself, certainly. Why else would anyone bother wasting time arguing with creationists? But I'm not sure there are a lot of people who find it fun to be on the losing end of this. This is an extension of Arguments as Soldiers. When you're having a knock-down, drag-out fight with someone, it's harder to back down.

Notice that the original example of a person in that category was Mannie O'Kelly -- a fictional character.

Put yourself into manager's shoes

[Linus]:

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

(later in that email, he does give a nod to effectiveness, but that doesn't seem to be his primary motivator).

I think it remains an open question whether Linus's style is in fact better than the alternative from the "get shit done" perspective. And the original quote implied, without evidence, that in fact it is. Not really sure why this is a "rationality" quote.

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.