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Comment by phnofive | Hacker News Reader

I have been on both the receiving and producing end of a similar decision making process whereby all stakeholders are consulted, and then a solution is provided which has as its only real design consideration - beyond being effective - that no-one gets exactly what they requested.

Is there a name for this kind of anti-consensus decision making?

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Not sure if there’s a name for this, but my favourite example is settling on UTC as the acronym for Coordinated Universal Time:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time#E...

ISO stands for the International Organization for Standardization, for largely the same reasons.

Maybe I got the wrong person (on the phone), but it was explained to me the name "ISO" was the Greek word for "sameness" and that Français and English just happened to form /meaningful/ representations for an acronym.

The Greek ισο "iso" does mean "equal". I do not know if that influenced the naming of the organization, though.

You see this word in many English roots, such as isotropic, isometric, isomer, etc.

"IT'S ALL IN THE NAME Because 'International Organization for Standardization' would have different acronyms in different languages (IOS in English, OIN in French for Organisation internationale de normalisation), our founders decided to give it the short form ISO. ISO is derived from the Greek isos, meaning equal. Whatever the country, whatever the language, we are always ISO." https://www.iso.org/about-us.html

But I'd tend to call BS - if it wasn't ever an acronym, why capitalize all three letters?

The google ngrams are also suggestive:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=international+...

In a similar vein, the acronym for Web Ontology Language is OWL[1].

[1]: https://www.w3.org/OWL/

Great question! I wish I knew!

It’s a weird scenario as people are very emotional about their chosen position during the discussion, but literally nobody gives a hoot once a decision was made.

In our case, multiple organizations were merged, so the perception one camp “winning” was important to avoid.

I'd call that a compromise.

I like the sound of "anti-compromise."

Compromise?

No; the point here is to pick the worst possible compromise out of compromises that solve the problem effectively.

It's like you're dividing an 8-piece pizza between 3 people. Everyone's minimum desire is 2 pieces, compromise solution would be 2 and 2/3 split, and people keep arguing why they deserve more. However you - the decision maker - decide instead to give everyone 2 pieces and throw the remaining 3 pieces into the bin, because shut up and get back to work.

If there are 3 people, and they each get 2 slices, that is 6 slices.

So, throwing away 2 slices, because there is 8 total, is fine, as you stated that is everybody’s agreed minimum desired amount.

And there is no knife, nor protractor.

What is the difference between the worst and best compromise? If it is a compromise, it is a compromise.

Anti-compromise: A solution which pleases the fewest parties possible while still meeting each party’s needs.

Compromise: A solution which pleases the most parties possible while still meeting each party’s needs.

You understand perfectly: everyone got enough food to keep going, and they are equally dissatisfied with the result. I might take a step to the left by ordering known-unpalatable toppings and provide no further allocation instructions, but the effect is the same.

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