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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

It's like the complaints about Wikipedia you read on Hacker News.

Someone smart who knows something wants to add it and gets tangled up in "useless" beaurocracy. Why can't they just let me do it!?

Because if they did just let people do stuff, then lots of other people you consider idiots would have already done things you consider stupid and or bad.

Basically everyone wants rules for the idiots so they don't ruin things and at the same time to not be included in the list of idiots.

That would sound harsh though, so mostly people just moan about rules, rather than them not being exempted, but I don't think anyone genuinely wants the rules to be dropped for everyone.

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The main criticism of wikipedia here afaik is of "deletionism", and I don't think that framing fits for that - most people are completely happy if other people also get to make articles about their pet interests.

Wikipedia doesn't have an idiot problem. It has a smart people with an agenda problem.

It also has an idiot problem. The idiots are there, and you will occasionally run into them. I've found pages in the course of natural browsing which were suffering from both obvious and very subtle vandalism.

The solution for that is review by a smart person who is empowered to consider the context and use her professional judgement, not a static set of criteria.

Unfortunately, a 'smart person' in the employ of one industry might not agree with a 'smart person' in the employ of another industry.

For example, consider two smart Wikipedia editors working on the climate change and global warming pages... one from the fossil fuel sector, one from the renewable energy sector.

The sensibilities of your gatekeepers are your organization’s culture. If you don’t like them, you have a deeper problem which rules aren’t going to fix.

Precisely, rules are implemented by people, and people are often idiots.

1) Such smart person might not even exist

2) If she exists, and is as smart as she should be, she will realize quite quickly that her power can be used for personal gain and she will become corrupted. Power corrupts, etc. and you can't really entertain any kind of organizational solution without considering game theory of the situation.

I want no idiots, not rules.

Idiots is a bad term for this. Novices need rules before they are competent. After a certain level of expertise you start breaking the rules, develop your own specialized style, because you know when to break them and how to make up new ones. And we're all novices in some contexts, very rarely anything above that.

The problem is not rules/"idiots"/novices. The problem is when people who make/enforce the rules are not fit to do so, cling to the rules and apply them with sweeping generality. The people who create those problems are typically incompetent but eager or even zealous at the same time.

They are resistant to learning, addicted to power and/or afraid of change and certainly afraid of appearing incompetent. So they never get past that level where they start to recognize when rules need to change or need to get broken.

It's not just novices. Humans are just error prone and make mistakes. Processes to help prevent those mistakes from making material impact on the business are critical to making it sustainable. Honestly though, these processes, if done well can improve velocity of the organization. For example having a comprehensive set of precommit tests may enable your team to continuously ship from head every day. An alternative process to achieve the same effect may only allow shipping once every 3 months. This sort of thing applies to non-technical processes as well.

It’s not just errors. There is the effect of bounded rationality: The organization is too complex to consider everything, so intelligent people make decisions which have unintended bad effects.

I'm fucking brilliant, I'm literally the opposite of an idiot. I swear.

Ask me to navigate a bus station in a provincial Chinese city and I'm a complete fucking moron though. Ask me how I know.

Point being, there's no such thing as idiocy without context.

We are all somewhere on the idiot scale.

Not only that, but we have multiple on differing levels of the idiot scale depending on the topic at hand. The biggest idiots I've encountered are brilliant people outside their knowledge domain.

The other way around I hope ;)

*The biggest idiots I've encountered are brilliant people within their knowledge domain.

Exhibit A: me writing ;p

Don’t worry :) I read it as “The biggest idiots I've encountered are brilliant people (who are [idiots when they are]) outside their knowledge domain.”

  >  we have multiple on differing levels of the idiot scale depending on the topic at hand

or even depending on the time of day, or current stress/work levels

alot of things can affect the idiot scale...

That's very narrow way of thinking ... I believe myself to be idiot in multiple different ways which can have multiple dimensions with multiple different scales.

And the real problem is that it is only a really small set of things one person can have even mediocre competence during one lifetime, whereas the space of things where you can be completely idiot is infinite. So, as a very good approximation, we all are complete idiots.

The trouble is that even if everyone has great ideas, implementing all of them at once is idiotic.

You need some brakes on the organization to assure that the rate of change is manageable and that marginal ideas are implemented more slowly if at all.

If it's better to slow down the good and the bad ideas, red tape, organizational brakes, and a "default nope" culture are great.

It might also be better to have a much faster pace and more freewheeling "default don't care; if you can make it work, it'll stay" which also then requires a relatively ruthless culling mechanism (even if slightly unfair) for the things that don't work.

What complaints about Wikipedia are you referring to? I post a lot on HN and I also edit Wikipedia. I don't recall any complaints of that kind.

I block Wikipedia from all search results, mainly because so many links to sources are broken or paywalled. This is kind of ridiculous for an outfit that claims all information must be properly sourced and no 'original research' is allowed.

It would seem fairly easy for Wikipedia to examine its own pages for broken links and flag any such link (and its related content) as unreliable. Wonder what that would look like...

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