Obvious next question: should LW have a black team dedicated to exposing locally popular bad reasoning? In my opinion, criticism is too important to be left to the critics.
I think that until we produce a critical mass of full time professional confessors, exposing bad reasoning should be everybody's responsibility and nobody's privilege.
(By "everybody's responsibility", I mean that if you, yes you reading this right now, notice bad reasoning you should expose it, not that you should expect someone else to do it because it is their responsibility too.)
(By "nobody's privilege", I mean that if you are exposing bad reasoning, you have to actually make the case that it is bad reasoning rather than wrapping yourself in the mantle of "exposing locally popular bad reasoning" as members of a dedicated group might feel compelled to do, and be willing to consider counter arguments that it is actually good reasoning after all.)
Criticism by a Black Team would probably feel less personal, and would involve less worry on the part of Black Team members that their criticism would be held against them.
This is an interesting story illustrating the influence of a group’s culture and dynamic onto willing participants. Each member of the group shared a certain value and talent, and when brought together, they went into a positive feedback loop, and ended up optimizing their search for software defects.
The theatrics is a pretty time as well.
On the other hand, I imagine it would be difficult to replicate. In my experience, groups like these start off with two or three ‘heroes’, who take the charge down the road less traveled.
Has anyone had a group which parallels the black team above?
From The Black Team. (Hat tip to Adam "ata" Atlas and Mike Blume.)