touching the electric fence did not make me a more productive worker.
How do you know?
I'm saying that it's not optimal.
How do you know? (other than in a trivial sense that anything in real life is not going to be optimal)
You're making naked assertions without providing evidence.
touching the electric fence did not make me a more productive worker.
How do you know?
Well, I can tell you that afterwards, I felt like shit and didn't get much done for a while. Or I started looking for a new job (whether or not I ended up taking one, this takes time and mental energy away from my current job). And getting yelled at has never seemed to me to correlate with me actually being wrong, so I'm not clear on how it would have changed my behavior.
I'm saying that it's not optimal.
How do you know? (other than in a trivial sense that anything in real life is not going to be optimal)
You're making naked assertions without providing evidence.
Upthread, you linked to an article which quotes someone saying, "Thanks for standing up for politeness/respect. If it works, I'll start doing Linux kernel dev. It's been too scary for years." I also pointed out, in my discussion of the rdrand thread, that Linus wastes a bunch of time by being cantankerous. And speaking of the rdrand thread (which I swear I didn't choose as my example for this reason; I really did just stumble across it a few weeks ago), your linked article also quoted Matt Mackall, whom Linus yelled at in that thread: he's no longer a kernel hacker. Is Linus's attitude why? Well, he's complained about Linus's attitude before, and shortly after that thread, he ceased posting on LKML. And he's probably pretty smart -- he wrote Mercurial -- so it's a shame for the kernel to lose him.
I can tell you that I, personally, would be uninterested in working under Linus, although kernel development isn't really my area of expertise, so maybe I don't count.
It's important to distinguish between Linux the operating system kernel, and the complete system of GNU+Linux+various graphical interfaces sometimes called "Linux".
The Linux kernel can also be used with other userspaces, eg. Busybox or Android, and it's very popular in these combinations on embedded systems and phones/tablets respectively. GNU+Linux is popular on servers. The only area where Linux is unsuccessful is desktops, so it's unfortunate that desktop use is so salient when people talk about "Linux".
Linus only works on the kernel itself, and that's making great progress towards taking over the world.
Yes, I used to work for RMS; I am well aware of the difference. I should also note that most of the systems you mention use proprietary kernel modules; it would be better if they didn't, and perhaps if Linus's attitude were different, there would be more interest in fixing the problem.
Also, desktops are where I spend most of my time, so I think they still matter a lot.
For what it's worth, I've never worked at a place that successfully used aversive stimulus.
Ahem. I think you mean to say that you never touched the electric fence. Doesn't mean the fence is not there.
Imagine that someone at your workplace decided not to come to work for a week or so, 'cause he didn't feel like it. What would be the consequences? Are there any, err... "aversive stimuli" in play here?
I can't imagine that anyone would willingly do so ... This is especially true of kernel hackers
No need for imagination. The empirical reality is that a lot of kernel hackers successfully work with Linus and have been doing this for years and years.
Also, Linus doesn't have employees.
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.
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.
I think it's pretty clear that Linus is more on the power-play end of the spectrum.
That's not clear to me at all.
Note that management of any kind involves creating incentives for your employees/subordinates/those-who-listen-to-you. The incentives include both carrots and sticks and sticks are punishments and are meant to be so. If you want to talk about carrots-only management styles, well, that's a different discussion.
The real question is whether it's fun for others.
I disagree. You treat fun and enjoyment of working at some place as the ultimate, terminal value. It is not. The goal of working is to produce, to create, to make. Whether it's "fun" is subordinate to that. Sure, there are feedback loops, but organizations which exist for the benefit of their employees (to make their life comfortable and "fun") are not a good thing.
The incentives include both carrots and sticks and sticks are punishments and are meant to be so. If you want to talk about carrots-only management styles, well, that's a different discussion.
For what it's worth, I've never worked at a place that successfully used aversive stimulus. And, since the job market for programmers is so hot, I can't imagine that anyone would willingly do so (outside the games industry, which is a weird case). This is especially true of kernel hackers, who are all highly qualified developers who could find work easily.
I disagree. You treat fun and enjoyment of working at some place as the ultimate, terminal value. It is not. The goal of working is to produce, to create, to make. Whether it's "fun" is subordinate to that. Sure, there are feedback loops, but organizations which exist for the benefit of their employees (to make their life comfortable and "fun") are not a good thing.
I would point out that Linus Torvalds's autobiography is called "Just for Fun". Also, Linus doesn't have employees. Yes, he does manage Linux, but he doesn't employ anyone. I also pointed out a number of ways in which Linus's style was harmful to productivity.
Would you put up with a boss who frequently called you an idiot in public?
Actually, that depends.
Mostly that depends on what the intent (and context) of calling me an idiot in public is. If the intent is, basically, power play -- the goal is to belittle me and elevate himself, reassert his alpha-ness, shift blame, provide an outlet for his desire to inflict pain on somebody -- then no, I'm not going to put up with it.
On the other hand, if this is all a part of a culturally normal back-and-forth, if all the boss wants is for me to sit up and take notice, if I can without repercussions reply to him in public pointing out that it's his fat head that gets into his way of understanding basic things like X, Y, and Z and that he's wrong -- I'm fine with that.
The microcultures of joking-around-with-insults exist for good reasons. Nobody forces you to like them, but you want to shut them down and that seems rather excessive to me.
I think it's pretty clear that Linus is more on the power-play end of the spectrum. Notice his comment above about the Android developer; that's not someone who is part of his microculture (the person in question was a developer on the Android email client, not a kernel hacker). And again, the shouting-as-punishment thing shows that Linus understands the effect that he has, but doesn't care.
Also, Linus, as the person in the position of power, isn't in a position to judge whether his culture is fun. Of course it's fun for him, because he's at the top. "I was just joking around" is always what bullies say when they get called out. The real question is whether it's fun for others. The recent discussion (that presumably sparked the quotes in this thread) was started by someone who didn't find it fun. So even if there are some "good reasons" (none of which you have named), they don't necessarily outweigh the reasons not to have such a culture.
A relevant example:
Linux kernel seems to me a quite well-managed operation (of herding cats, too!) that doesn't waste lots of time on flame wars.
Linux kernel seems to me a quite well-managed operation (of herding cats, too!) that doesn't waste lots of time on flame wars.
I don't follow kernel development much. Recently, a colleague pointed me to the rdrand instruction. I was curious about Linux kernel support for it, and I found this thread: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1173350
Notice that Linus spends a bunch of time (a) flaming people and (b) being wrong about how crypto works (even though the issue was not relevant to the patch).
Is this typical of the linux-kernel mailing list? I decided to look at the latest hundred messages. I saw some minor rudeness, but nothing at that level. Of course, none of these messages were from Linus. But I didn't have to go back more than a few days to find Linus saying things like, "some ass-wipe inside the android team." Imagine if you were that Android developer, and you were reading that email? Would that make you want to work on Linux? Or would that make you want to go find a project where the leader doesn't shit on people?
Here's a revealing quote from one recent message from Linus: "Otherwise I'll have to start shouting at people again." Notice that Linus perceives shouting as a punishment. He's right to do so, as that's how people take it. Sure, "don't get offended", "git 'er done", etc -- but realistically, developers are human and don't necessarily have time to do a bunch of CBT so that they can brush off insults.
Some people, I guess, can continue to be productive after their project leader insults them. The rest either have periodic drops in productivity, or choose to work on projects which are run by people willing to act professionally.
tl;dr: Would you put up with a boss who frequently called you an idiot in public?
...whom nobody has ever heard of?
Though he wasn't a public figure, he was actually pretty famous in his field. I assumed /u/BenjaminLyons meant the "powerful" but lightheartedly.
me picking up that $20 would have been a Pareto-improvement
If it were something other than currency (say, a watermelon), I'd agree. But picking up a twenty-dollar bill has the same welfare effects as minting one yourself. If you spend it, you'll boost prices slightly, which harms other buyers. (And if you don't spend it, it's still not a Pareto-improvement, because you haven't benefited from it--unless you just like having money around, in which case your example could have been about anything at all.)
Edit: I see now that even finding a watermelon would not be a Pareto-improvement, except under the unrealistic assumption that a watermelon is not a substitute for other goods.
I'm pretty sure that argument proves too much: A watermelon substitutes for some other watermelon that I might have bought, so my grocer is worse off because the value of their watermelons are now slightly lower.
As my initial comment implies, I think the last century is qualitatively different automation than before: before, the machines began handling brute force things, replacing things which offered only brute force & not intelligence like horses or watermills. But now they are slowly absorbing intelligence, and this seems to be the final province of humans. In Hanson's terms, I think machines switched from being complements to being substitutes in some sectors a while ago.
The key Hansonian concept is that replacing humans at tasks is still complementation because different tasks are complementary to each other, a la hot dogs and buns; I should perhaps edit OP to make this clearer. It is not obvious to me that craftspeople disemployed by looms would have considered their work to be unskilled, but as that particular industry was automated, people moved to other jobs in other industries and complementarity continued to dominate. Again the question is, what's different now? Is it that no human on the planet does any labor any more which could be called unskilled, that nobody cooks or launders or drives? Obviously not. But there are many plausible changes in regulation, taxes, phasing-out benefits, college credentialism, etc.
I'd pay $5/hour for someone to drive me almost anywhere if availability was coordinated by Uber, but not taxi prices. House cleaning and yard work is not possible for me to find at a price I'd currently pay ($150 can't pay someone to trim your trees, at least not well). I strongly suspect that things would have appeared otherwise to me in 1870, when maids etc. were far more common. This looks to me like a barrier-to-entry, regulatory-and-tax scenario, not "Darn it we're too rich and running out of things for labor to do!"
Unless you want to pin unemployment on changes in people's trustingness, there is nothing obvious about your stated fears of the IQ 70 kid which would have prohibited equal fear in 1920. More to the point, a change in this characteristic is not a change in automation. A few weeks of training may indeed be necessary - I'm sure I live in a high-IQ bubble but I try to be aware of this - but people managed to get jobs requiring a few weeks of training in 1920.
I would favor Basic Income, though I would favor zero taxes on the bottom 20% even more. But this has to do with my beliefs/model/worries about distribution of gains and negotiating power, more than a belief that unemployability due to machines outcompeting many humans at literally everything is the source of the Great Recession and possible Long Depression (though I'm not sure we can get properly stuck in a Long Depression while China, India et. al. are still growing).
I'd pay $5/hour for someone to drive me almost anywhere if availability was coordinated by Uber, but not taxi prices... This looks to me like a barrier-to-entry, regulatory-and-tax scenario, not "Darn it we're too rich and running out of things for labor to do!"
Federal minimum wage has been falling relative to productivity for decades. Also, Australia has a much higher minimum wage than the US but a lower unemployment rate. They also don't have at-will employment, implying that the risks of hiring are larger. So I'm not sure the regulations are actually the problem here (that said, I oppose many of them anyway on various grounds).
Armen Alchian, the most powerful economist ever
... whom nobody has ever heard of? Like, he's not a Nobel prize winner or anything.
Also, isn't this post sort of meaningless? That is, doesn't it simply boil down to saying "everything is the way it is, and it couldn't be any other way"?
For instance, imagine that I walk by a $20 bill on the street (for the sake of argument, let's say that immediately after I walk by it, it's blown into a storm drain and destroyed). I miss it because I'm looking up in order to count air conditioners, which I'm doing because I had an argument with my landlord, which happened because because because and so on back to the beginning of the universe. Clearly, me picking up that $20 would have been a Pareto-improvement. Was it "possible"? Here's one post that discusses that.
Variants on the $20 scenario have on occasion actually happened. It's not interesting to say that me picking up the $20 "couldn't" have happened. What's interesting is how we make decisions; how we decide that certain states are/are not reachable. If we had access to the mind of God (metaphorically), the only "possible" states would those states in the actual world. There would be no scenario that was not Pareto-efficient, because there would be only one possible scenario.
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Well Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have similar reputations.
Bill Gates failed to create an organization that would thrive in his absence. We'll see how Steve Jobs did in a few more years (it seems likely that he did better, but he also had the famous "reality distortion field", which Linus doesn't). Steve Jobs also got kicked out of his own company for a bunch of years.