On Thursday, 5 February 2015 at 22:08:42 UTC, CraigDillabaugh
wrote:
On Thursday, 5 February 2015 at 21:21:22 UTC, Zach the Mystic
wrote:
On Thursday, 5 February 2015 at 18:44:06 UTC, CraigDillabaugh
clip
You know, I don't even like the use of voting when it comes to
important decisions which last forever. I have no mechanism
for determining fairly who has the right to vote and who
doesn't. Well, speaking more specifically, who is *competent*
to vote and who isn't. D doesn't have a Board of Approved
Members, and so putting something up for vote will let any
shmoe (such as myself) actually have an equal share in the
decision making process.
I believe in leadership. Leadership requires both confidence
and humility - confidence to stick up for yourself when you
know you're right, and humility to listen to others when
you're not sure of yourself. Leadership is really hard... but
I think it's necessary in all but the most trivial of cases.
Imagine all the people on the spectrum of competence on a
given issue - the most people will be found in the zone of
least competence, and the fewest people in the zone of highest
competence. The only reason for leadership to put something to
a vote is if they can reliably assume that the majority will
have a more competent opinion the issue than they will. There
are only two reasons to do this:
But what about?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds
Interesting article. There are a lot of opinions about the wisdom
of crowds right there in the article, some in favor, some more
skeptical. It seems like in order to get the benefit of crowd
wisdom, you have to be able to formulate a question in a rather
simplistic way - asking for a number, or choosing from a short
list of possibilities. Maybe I'm in favor of leadership here
because I don't know how such a subtle thing as a language or
library design decision could be easily formulated into that type
of simple question.
The leadership here can easily benefit from the wisdom of crowds,
though - by utilizing the public nature of the internet. At least
they can rely on whoever has enough motivation to invest time
voicing his or her opinions here.
Maybe I just prefer leadership for my own personal reasons. The
wisdom of crowds might be a valid way of making some decisions.
But I think it would still take a bit of genius to even formulate
an effective series of questions, for which the wisdom of crowds
was to be relied upon for the answers. Even that would take quite
a bit of leadership, since you'll probably agree with me that
basing important decisions on the crowd's answers to a bad
question would be a very fast road to software hell indeed!
