Randy Smith

@evmar Well, I've often been happy that you can never really be sure which "Randy Smith" is being referred to on the internet, and haven't felt any loss of being named as a unique snowflake, but mileage will definitely vary based on personal psychology 🙂

@chandlerc Hmmm. I don't hear you as factoring in the human experience of being in community and being ostracized from it. I think that fear, and the pain of it happening, goes fairly deep. I'm not sure if factoring it in would change your reasoning much, but I wouldn't leave it out of your thinking. At a minimum, I think people will still react very strongly negatively to the threat of ostracization, possibly even more so than the thread of criminal prosecution. Having said that, I totally see the reluctance to ostracize as being weaponized by bad actors. And I have appreciated the culture on Bluesky of "Don't engage, just block", which is basically ostracization, if of a much smaller kind than blocking someone from an open source community.

@chandlerc No argument with any of what you say. And I solidly agree with your basic point, that the standards that are appropriate in the legal world, that are backed by the state monopoly on violence, aren't the right standards for how to manage ostracization in other communities. But my gut is that the consequences are different in type, not, or not just, in degree. And that feels like it needs to be incorporated as well. Fines and incarceration by the legal system may not alienate you from your community (there's at least one case in my community were it emphatically hasn't), and I believe we're hard wired to be concerned about our relationship with our communities in a different way than our freedom and finances.

@chandlerc Yup, that all makes sense to me. It's a tricky space.

@chandlerc If you're willing I'd value hearing your critiques/questions about the conclusions, just to have another narrative in my head in this space. The major thing I took from it is how important trust is for productivity in organizations, and how much it costs when that is lost. But that's a major bias-confirming point for me (mutter mutter 11 years @ G***gle mutter mutter), so I should probably be careful about accepting it too blithely. Do you disagree with that point? Or are there other conclusions you see him as drawing you disagree with?

@chandlerc that all makes sense. Random speculation: I wonder if it's worthwhile separating out the "How many eyes look at a work product" from "Layers of review". I don't know anything about design/production in the physical assembly space, but I could easily imagine that it naturally involves multiple people. That might suggest substituting pair programming (+ trust + an emphasis on quality code) for the first layer of review, which might substitute a x2 cost for an x10 cost. Again, pure speculation; I also have very little experience with pair programming. But what I do have suggests that just having a second pair of eyes and brain going through the process in parallel catches a lot of possible failure points.