That may be so but I'm pretty sure that pretty much every study that's been done on this says insulting people is demotivating and generally destructive behaviour.
Linus can believe what he likes but the evidence contradicts him.
Linus can believe what he likes but the evidence contradicts him.
Plus, the bug report he filed towards gcc is entirely matter-of-fact and polite.
I don't really know for sure why this is. Maybe they're more attached to what they've created, seeing it more as a work of art or something like that, instead of just a tool?
These people are very different from, say, the young Rubyist who will have his feelings hurt when legitimate flaws are pointed out with something he's worked on. The GCC developers won't cry if you report a bug, and they won't deny that it exists to try to save face. Getting the bugs fixed is what matters to them, so they don't waste time allowing their feelings to be hurt by hyperbolic mailing list discussion.
What I'm saying is that the scenario you've built up isn't very realistic at all. The GCC developers I've dealt with would not waste their time getting offended. What was said in the mailing list, and its tone, is pretty much irrelevant. Getting the problem fixed is what matters to them.
To put it plainly, the post I responded to made the claim: "Linus was nice when he posted it to the GCC list; therefore everything is fine." This argument doesn't hinge on the GCC guys having thick skin but rather on the apparent unlikeliness of their seeing the more offensive messages in the kernel list.
Further, even if we take into account the 'thick skin' argument, it does not excuse the behavior-- bad behavior is bad even if the affected party doesn't think so. This is why often times the State will prosecute domestic violence cases even when the affected spouse/partner does not wish to do so.
There is no legitimate reason for your comments to have been voted down.
I'm seeing this sort of blatant and unjustifiable misvoting happening more and more often here. It's really making it harder to read a lot of legitimate content, and it's discouraging participation in otherwise perfectly fine discussion.
I made no such argument; in fact my reply to you specifically recognized the fact that a GCC developer might come across Linus' message on the Linux kernel list. My argument was that such a GCC developer would recognize that the Linux kernel mailing list does not belong to him or his project, it belongs to Linus and his project, and the fact that Linus' tone when he posted to GCC's bug tracker was quite different shows that Linus understands the difference too.
>>>>>> Linus just being Linus (paraphrased).
>>>>> That may be so but I'm pretty sure that pretty much every study that's been done on this says insulting people is demotivating and generally destructive behaviour.
>>>> He has not insulted any people though. He has said bad things about the piece of software called gcc-4.9.0, but he has not once in that email adressed a person in a negative way.
>>> Uh, do you think GCC just spontaneously sprung forth into being? No, it was created by people, and Linus is indirectly insulting them.
>> As a number of people have already commented, when Linus posted the bug report to the GCC project, he was careful not to insult them.
> Do you think those people exist in some sort of vacuum where they don't have access to (or will become aware of) the kernel mailing list thread?
Did you really intend to say that a person can only be insulted if they are insulted in every place a particular issue is discussed? Or are you saying that if a person is treated kindly in at least one avenue, then it doesn't matter how many others they may be insulted in (i.e., the one kind treatment negates all the other offenses)?
That said, my own argument had nothing to do with "what counts as an insult", whether Linus being non-insulting on the GCC bug tracker "cancels out" what he said on the kernel mailing list, etc., etc. I was simply pointing out that the fact that Linus was not insulting when he posted the bug on the GCC bug tracker indicates that he had a genuine intention to help get the bug fixed. (The GCC bug tracker thread makes it clear that the GCC developers recognized that too.)
In other words, I (like the other commenters I referred to) was focusing on whether or not Linus was actually trying to help or not, and what actually got accomplished as a result of his raising the issue. You are focusing on what kind of language he used and where, whether it was "kind", whether "kind" language in one place "cancels out" insulting language in another place, etc., regardless of the substance of what does or does not get accomplished. I was not making any claim whatever about the questions you raise.
But that's not what actually happened, as far as I can see; Linus' post on the GCC bug tracker appears to have gotten the GCC developers to pay attention to the bug, not to ridicule Linus for using nice language on their bug tracker but insulting language on his own mailing list.
> the mere fact that Mr Torvalds can get it right in one context but not in another shows that he in fact knows the difference between right and wrong
I would say it shows that he knows the difference between one context and another. Whether or not that difference is also "the difference between right and wrong" is one of the points at issue; you can't just assume that your personal opinion about that is shared by everybody. As you pointed out in an earlier post, it's up to each of us to decide that for ourselves.
The 'ridicule' I was referring to is this firestorm of a thread: the mere fact that we are even talking about this on HackerNews (and the wider Internets) and that a large majority of the commenters here agree with me that it was, in fact, deserving of ridicule.
> Whether or not that difference is also "the difference between right and wrong" is one of the points at issue;
Whether one can [in his own reasoning] get all the way to 'wrong' from 'adolescent, silly & childish' is really quite a minor issue to me. But, I think it's pretty obvious to most adults that it was in fact pretty adolescent, silly & childish (i.e., socially under-developed) and that's enough for me.
Further, if I had to choose one form of overly adolescent behavior, it would be the fun type coming from 'brogrammers' and startup culture rather than this trite anti-social and uber-negative poison from 'hardcore Linux(TM) hackers' (but I can certainly understand that this is merely a preference of mine in particular).
Which is not going to have any effect on the Linux kernel or the GCC compiler. I'm not participating here because I think it will change anything substantive; I'm just doing it because I feel like it.
> a large majority of the commenters here agree with me
Have you actually counted?
> I think it's pretty obvious to most adults that it was in fact pretty adolescent, silly & childish
I think you are overestimating how many "adults" agree with you.
Only in the sense that you can view them on the Internet. But there are lots of forums that anyone can view on the Internet, with a wide variety of norms. Just as in the real world, there are lots of "public" places where in theory anyone can show up, with a wide variety of norms. Anyone who doesn't like the norms of a particular place is free not to go there.
> the fact that there were in fact two very different presentations here from Linus is further proof of the fact that one of them was uncalled for
No, it isn't, because, once again, the two presentations were made in different contexts for different purposes. On the GCC bug tracker, Linus' purpose was to inform them of the issue and try to help resolve it. On the kernel mailing list, his purpose was to make sure that the compiler issue did not result in problems with the kernel. The latter purpose may well require a different style of presentation than the former; and since it's Linus' kernel and mailing list, he gets to judge what style is required to accomplish his purpose there.
However, I will still respond to your nitpicks: public is public. If you don't want to be seen as an unsavory character, you would do well to not say mean and nasty things about other human beings in public (and as the Donald Sterling case taught us, perhaps even in private). If you want to be a truly virtuous human being, you will not do so either in public or in private but that is certainly up to you to decide. I think it is the case that a person who bad mouths people in their [perceived] absence but not in their presence is a morally compromised individual but that is for you to decide if you want to keep company with that sort or not. Just be forewarned: if they are bad mouthing other people around you then they are likely doing the same about you in your absence.
My response to your second nitpick is essentially the same as the one above. But, I would still be interested to see if you have any thoughts on the [remaining previously ignored] substantial point in my last message to you.
Indeed. And the same applies to Linus.
> the single substantial point which still remains
If you mean the fact that in his LKML post (but not in the GCC bug tracker) Linus attributed the bug to "incompetence/ willful ignorance/ etc" instead of assuming that it just snuck in (I'm not sure I agree with that interpretation, but I'll adopt it here for the sake of discussion), for a bug that's severe enough to make Linus prohibit kernel compiles using the affected version of gcc, I'm not sure what the difference is, practically speaking. Either way, the compiler can't be used with the bug present, so, substantively, it doesn't matter whether the bug just snuck in or the GCC developers wilfully ignored the behavior; that version of gcc can't be used to compile the kernel until the bug is fixed.
A number of people have made that point.
So if I were to say "Hacker News' emotional maturity ranks below that of 12-year-olds, who generally recognize that contempt expressed for an inanimate entity is actually targeted at the persons who created the flaw in question", that would not be taken personally?
seems to me he has some runs on the scoreboard (and some facts on the ground)
(And you're using the shitty rhetorical tactic of sarcasm, which allows you to tell someone that they're wrong without making any claims of your own, or even understanding what they're saying.)
But that's just supposition, not a normative claim.
Edit: I wonder if I'd be down-voted so harshly if I was Linus Torvalds.
From me, the answer is yes, and I hope that is true for others on HN as well. I'm sure it's not always appreciated, but I think it's important for influential people to receive honest feedback. Although in the rare cases when I downvote 'pg' on this board, I do wonder if some 'all-future-downvotes > /dev/null' switch might get flipped. For what it's worth, I downvoted your sarcastic grandparent, and upvoted this somewhat more constructive reply.
I can show you evidence (China, etc.) of supreme levels of output in the most abusive of situations. That doesn't mean that society doesn't place value on a balance between productivity and the way we treat fellow human beings.
It'd be a lot healthier if malleable, hero-worshiping younglings could get their heads around the fact that sometimes their flawed, human heroes accomplish their greatness despite their outrageous flaws and not because of their outrageous flaws. Then we might end up with fewer kids affecting the asshole-ness, misogyny, alcoholism, or misanthropy of their idols thinking it will make them better programmers, writers, basketball players, or mathematicians.
But noooo, it's all "Linus did X, so I'll do X and be cool like Linus!"
But correlation is evidence of causation.
Unless you believe correlation is providing evidence of causation here:
http://gizmodo.com/5977989/internet-explorer-vs-murder-rate-...
and here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2012/03/23/true-fa...
In both cases, yes, it is evidence of causation. However the low prior probability of causation in each case massively overwhelms the evidence provided by observing a correlation.
Here's an easy way to tell if A is evidence of B: ask the inverse question - is "not A" evidence of "not B". If so, it is trivially provable that the answer is yes.
To have a real discussion then requires a finer nuance of what "insult" means. Verbal abuse includes "scolding, yelling, swearing, blaming, insulting, threatening, demeaning, ridiculing, criticizing, belittling" (see http://journals.psychiatryonline.org/data/Journals/AJP/3768/... ). That paper, which looked at verbal abuse of children, concluded "Parental verbal aggression was a potent form of maltreatment. Exposure to multiple forms of abuse was associated with very large effect sizes [comparable to those associated with witnessing domestic violence or nonfamilial sexual abuse]."
The references for the Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_incivility is one place to start. For example, the abstract for http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=880458 is:
> Obnoxious behaviour has become endemic in the workplace. Some of the worst offences are: not turning off mobile phones in meetings; leaving a jammed printer, gossiping, and snapping at coworkers. Yet, it is this small stuff that relentlessly grinds down collegial working relationships. Incivility is at the low end of the continuum of workplace abuse. Workplace incivility is not violence or harassment or even open conflict, although it can build up to any of those things. Links between the work environment and indicators of employee loyalty, commitment, and productivity show this is not a “fluff” issue. In addition, a recent study on workplace incivility reveals that rude employees and managers can cost a company millions of dollars a year. This paper will look at a definition of incivility in the workplace, the causes of poor behaviour, the costs to organizations, and what employers can do to help.
You may also be interested in "Sticks and Stones The Philosophy of Insults" by Jerome Neu.
I bring this up to point out you have not succeeded in being a devil's advocate. My response is not part of a dialog testing the original hypothesis but instead is only criticism in the way you structured your question.
I still remember when Linus and friends couldn't write a VM that worked on a server to save their fucking life and all Linux was good for was running xmms on Linus' desktop, but I was stuck trying to run his garbage in production. What goes around eventually comes around.
And we can either all yell at each other and wind up tuning the fuck out, or we can try to be slightly more civil and realize that everyone is trying to solve hard problem and getting yanked in a dozen different directions. I'm willing to give the GCC compiler team the benefit of the doubt that these bugs were not due to the team being generally incompetent or lazy.
The evidence shows that his way works to lead the people working at Linux.
Whether Linux would be more successful with a more benevolent dictator remains to be seen.
The evidence is that the Linux kernel is one of the most successful large-scale coding projects ever. So whatever Linus is doing, it appears to be working.