Hi! > difficult as it would be unlikely that 5 people would all be 'corrupt' in > the same fashion compared to one where lots of individuals hold that power > and can exercise it on their own.
Here's that "corrupt" again - but the point here is that no corruption is necessary. Human perception is prone to multitude of biases, and a cohesive group of likely-minded people often amplifies those biases. And we always operate on incomplete information. Honest people are routinely vehemently disagree on many questions, including ones that only one possibility could logically be correct, without ever being corrupt. People can misunderstand, be mistaken, be opinionated, be delusional. Smaller is the group, bigger is the effect of biases (there are multiple studies on groupthink and cognitive biases, those things are very real). People do not have to be evil for them to go wrong. That's why safeguards - like prior attempts at resolution (to ensure it's not mere misunderstanding), public process (i.e. more participants, more chance to reveal and challenge biases and misunderstandings), ability to confront the accusations (thus challenging the biases and having chance to correct the facts - or at least provide difficult perspective), etc. are important. Even with all safeguards, nothing is guaranteed, but without them, mere assumption that "we are all good people, we can do no wrong" is a dangerous delusion. If we're talking about committing wrong feature - ok, big deal, we can fix it in the next release. It's only code. But when we're talking about something that can influence people's lives - and something like being permanently banned from all PHP projects could easily cost a person their career and livelihood - that's wholly different matter. That's why I am talking about those safeguards, not because I think those elected would be evil. -- Stas Malyshev smalys...@gmail.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
