Richard Garriott on why "most game designers really just suck" - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/19/richard-garriott-game-designers-suck/ <comment><USER2> This really has been my experience at several game studios, including the current one I am at. Often enough, the 'game designer' tends to be someone who exists mostly as a political organism in the company. Without fail, none of the designers I've worked with know much about the history of video games and will usually be rather dismissive about the subject.

The current game designer I'm with could not tell you anything regarding various character creation tools and strategies that have been used in various games (APB, City of Heroes, Skyrim, etc. being good relatively recent examples), yet his job is to spec out that very thing for one of our products. The result has not been very good, but this person outranks the rest of the team on these decisions.

Currently this guy is so bereft of anything to do design-wise, he's decided to read some books on Agile and has moved into pushing the artists and programmers around as if he's the project manager as well, which upper management collectively shrugged at and allowed. Management is where every 'designer' I've worked with has wound up and this guy will be no exception.

At the end of the day, I no longer have much faith in the average game studio because I know these people are out calling the shots on creative decisions. If you aren't a coder or an artist, for the love of fuck, please at least be a genuine gamer with a working understanding of game design history. There's been tens of thousands of video games produced now and some are very much worth remembering when considering a new design, both what to do and what to avoid. Your products will be better for it.

<comment><USER3> Hold on, how do these people get to the role of a designer in the first place? Where do they come from?

<comment><USER4> For some reason, testing graduates a lot of designers.

What I found in various game companies is that game designers usually graduate from other positions in the company and rarely hired as designers from the start.

<comment><USER5> > For some reason, testing graduates a lot of designers.

I have been wondering for a while how transparently bad game designers must be to produce well... a lot of what we see. This actually explains a lot.

Testers are not designers. :( Testers can be wonderful user advocates, if they make that effort, but... designers they are not. If anything, they're antithetical to design at their best.

<comment><USER6> Good testers are hard to find, and what's even harder to find are good testers who want to remain testers. The pay is terrible, the benefits are usually non- existent, and they're quite often placed socially at a lower level than the other game developers. Finding someone who is good at testing and doesn't want to be a programmer or a designer is nigh impossible in the games industry. Even if they don't want to be a designer/engineer, they want to advance their career which leaves them with the option of managing other testers, which as we all know, leaves no time to actually exercise their testing skills.

Until testing is treated like a real career, with architect-style career growth options, it will continue this way. Instead, testers spend a lot of their time growing their connections, internally and externally to the studio, hoping that a junior level designer/engineer position will open up. Because there are so many testers, it's quite cutthroat, so spending time at work "showing off" or playing politics is almost a necessity here for career advancement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "If you're not a good artist and not a good programmer, but you still like games, you become a designer."

Is this true?

I thought that actual "game design" jobs in terms of creative direction were like gold dust and something you could only get by either starting your own studio or rising through the ranks.

All of the game jobs I see advertised are either art,programming or testing.

<comment><USER8> It is true.

That's because the management have tricked people into getting the game design jobs - the easiest (in terms of stress and problem solving) job there is with most often the highest pay check.

Lotta' ass kissin'.

<comment><USER9> That depends a lot on the company. I've seen game-designers which took it easy, but I've also worked with good ones which took their job extremely serious.

The good ones are able to catch problems before stuff is coded or modeled. A good designer manages to describe every object needed (including rough sketches what they should look like and describing needed animations), every mission condition (which is very close to coding and needs good understanding what is technically possible). A good designer can describe the GUI pretty much ahead in a way that coders don't have to rework it over and over until it fits (including describing stuff like left-click/right- click/drag&drop/selection box behavior which can get very tricky pretty fast in games). A really good designer might even know excel good enough to calculate all kind of stuff through before even approaching any coders.

A bad designer thinks it's all just about some great idea and throwing in lots of stuff and the team will do the rest. A good designer knows it's 90% about describing details and about removing as much stuff as possible.

<comment><USER8> It's 70% Software and Graphics. Don't kid yourself.

EDIT: decreased from 90 to 70 - need some space for voice acting, sounds and music.

<comment><USER9> Yes, around 10%-20% time for design looks correct to me - which is why you have maybe 1-2 designers in a team of 10 people. But the designer still has to work 100% to get stuff done and it can get very stressful as well. And his work is important - because design-errors are early errors which means they are the most expensive ones you can have.

But it's really as in all jobs - the difference between good and bad designers is so absolutely unbelievable huge that if you worked with some bad ones and then meet good ones you hardly believe they are doing even similar jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the reason that the people he credits as being as good designers are from his generation is because that was back in the day that a designer could make a top quality game with a team of 5-10 people.

I don't think that it's because designers suck, but that when you are working with AAA games with 100 million dollar budgets, you often don't get a single designer whose focused vision can drive the project. You have multiple designers working on multiple systems, and then you have a layer of management who wants to hold some of your feature ideas for their DLC monetization strategy down the line, and you need to maybe break some of your systems in order to add social media integration options or compromise on your core ideas in order to create some integration that can justify the always online DRM that you need to put in place.

When Richard was making Ultima, he could just say no. Well, up to a point anyways. By Ultima 7 and origin's acquisition by EA, references to difficulties with EA even bubbled into the game. I mean the main antagonists were named Elizabeth and Abraham. Origin's tagline was "We create worlds" the evil force in the game was known as the destroyer of worlds.

Even if you're skeptical about that, nobody can doubt that the quality of Ultima 8 and 9 were, at least in terms of game design, quite poor. Was that because Richard all of a sudden became one of those bad game designers? Or was that because the design of the game became more committee based and had to cater to focus groups and demographics determined from on high.

Maybe Richard had to work with other bad designers. But that's just how things work now. It's just that because you can't work by yourself so much any more, the quality of management and other designers directly influence people's perception of you. I mean, if Richard were to be judged, instead of by his work on Ultima 1-7 but by his work on games like Ultima 8-9, Lineage 2, CoH/CoV, Tabula Rasa, his highly anticipated "Ultimate Collector" someone might consider him a designer who sucks.

It's not the designers who necessarily sucks, it's the ecosystem that allows sucky design to persevere. In the 80s if you had a designer who sucked, they made a game who sucked. Today if you have a designer who sucks, you have one more bad system in an otherwise good game. That becomes tolerated and users are willing to get yet another bad system in a good game, until the games become a mass of "could have been nice" features that end up poorly realized, rushed, or retooled to appeal to a wide audience.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't know, some fluffy arguments and self-back-patting here, but I have to tentatively agree on one point. Out of the 11 designers that I've worked with, 7 were rock solid and came from a programming or art background, with the artists doing some scripting now and again. The other 4 were pure designers, and only one of them was good (although damn good)...the others fit Richard's stereotypes pretty well. This doesn't include the few games I've worked on that didn't have a designer at all, and didn't seem the worse for it.

Not exactly huge sample sizes here, I know, but his argument is plausible to me. It behooves designers to at least be ankle deep in the technical cesspool of game development.

</comment><comment><USER12> I basically agree, but those who made Tabula Rasa shouldn't throw stones.

</comment><comment><USER13> The core of his argument centers around that compared to the other disciplines, it's harder to find a "good" game designer than it is to find a "good" programmer/artist etc.

But that makes sense- as he says, it's hard to go to school for it. It is a non-linear discipline. You need to be knowledgeable of all the other disciplines (how the game is technically built to understand scope of design), you have to be able to work from a systems scale all the way down to individual variables, you have to be able to talk the language of engineers, artists, and producers/business/marketing.

What I find offensive is that Garriot is saying "If you don't hit all those points, you really just suck as a designer."

Well thanks for the input, Lord British. Your flamebait has really elevated the state of the industry.

</comment><comment><USER14> Game design is NOT easy, and it's just as much an art form as painting or writing music. Asking what makes a game fun is sort of like asking what makes a certain song "good"; it boils down to a question of personal preference, and everyone has different tastes. You can't please everyone at once, but if you dumb down the game enough you can appeal to a very wide audience. That's what happens with formula movies, pop music, and increasingly, video games as well.

Maybe the problem isn't that most game designers suck, but that the major studio's have calculated that they can be more profitable if they don't bother spending the time and money it takes to make games that are actually well designed.

</comment><comment><USER15> What has this guy done for anyone lately? I get that he might have made something good decades ago, but why does that mean his advice is relevant now? The entire landscape is different now.

Look at someone like Ed McMillen if you want to learn about current game design. I get the feeling that Garriott hasn't even PLAYED a video game in ages.

<comment><USER16> What he's done lately is launch a kickstarter for a new game, this is just marketing.

Or in less polite terms, bullshit hype from a man who needed to come back to Earth long long before he went into fucking space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hilarious. The Ultima games were far from perfect, and it's not like they stood alone without any influences. They were heavily derivative of D&D, like any fantasy RPG.

Also, this idea that a person is infallible in any role (such as Game Designer) is absurd. He seems to believe that he posesses some special mojo or insight which means that any game he makes is a work of genius. This is obvious on the surface that it is not the case.

Just because a talented person is involved is no guarantee the work will turn out any good, games or otherwise. This is a simple truth. Creating something great is much more complicated than that.

<comment><USER18> I totally disagree.

The Ultima series had that ability to transport you into these universes (or this universe) that Lord British (aka Richard Garriott) created.

When there are threads on forums about one game to pick if you had to choose only one (which is very hard to do, but that's the game: pick one and only), if you had to choose "the best game ever", well very often people will cite an Ultima.

I played III, IV and V like crazy. The Commodore Amiga port of Ultima V really sucked. I was so sad that I paid for that crap. So what did I do? I went back to the Commodore 64 to be able to play Ultima V.

Yes, you read correctly: dodging the Amiga which has a _way_ superior machine than the C64 (they're not even comparable feature-wise, these are two different eras of computers) to go back to an old C64 to spend countless hours / days playing Ultima V.

The crappy graphics didn't matter: it was all about the experience.

The only game which did something similar to me is FTL's "Sundog: The Frozen Legacy". FTL then made Dungeon Master which is considered to be one of the most influencial game ever.

Lord British is full of it? Yes. Totally deserved. There are no two game designers like him on this planet.

<comment><USER19> I disagree - I regard Garriott much like Chris Roberts: incredibly influential, certainly talented, early pioneers of their field, but whose relevance in modern gaming is in doubt.

I for one have more faith in Roberts than Garriott, who reminds me a bit of Molyneux in his focus on personal branding and professional fame.

Before we fall all over ourselves painting Garriott as some kind of infallible game design ubermensch, let's look at his track record.

His career pre-2000 is dominated by Ultima games, which were doubtlessly groundbreaking, iconic, and by almost all accounts, great games.

His career post-2000 is limited. He produced Lineage II, City of Heroes, City of Villains, and Tabula Rasa. City of Heroes gained a cult, if small, following, and both Tabula Rasa and Lineage II were commercial failures. Lineage II in particular was savaged by both gamers and the gaming press - 6.7/10 by IGN, 6.0/10 by GameSpot, 62% on Metacritic.

But don't take my word for it, this is lifted from the Wikipedia article:

"Scott Stahl of the The Daily Orange praised the game's graphics and design, though he also mentioned that the game "quickly degrades into an incredibly tedious and monotonous process of killing the same monster a thousand different times", and that the character creation options are "incredibly shallow, with maybe two or three different faces and hair styles for each type of character." Andrew Park of Gamespot said that the game "offers either a repetitive grind or a stiff challenge""

By all accounts, Garriott's seemingly unquestionable sense of game design seems to fall apart when he left the Ultima series. I very gladly accept that he was/is one of the top game designers the industry has seen, but treating like "there's no one else like him on this planet" is unreasonable.

Secondly,

> _"When there are threads on forums about one game to pick if you had to > choose only one (which is very hard to do, but that's the game: pick one and > only), if you had to choose "the best game ever", well very often people > will cite an Ultima."_

Citation sorely needed. If you went solely to a RPG forum, and specifically excluded JRPG aficionados, then you'd probably get a lot of answers to the tune of "Ultima". There have been many "top video games _evar_ " lists made both by the gaming press and by vote participation, and I've yet to see Ultima top any of them.

There's a lot more to video gaming than "old school RPGs".

<comment><USER20> His post-2000 career is basically just Tabula Rasa. Lineage II is Korean made. City of * is all Cryptic (and later Paragon). Garriott is only attached to those products by way of being high up in NCsoft's US division at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Back when I was working for one of NCSoft's studios, Richard Garriott came out and took a giant steaming dump on us in the press - and at the time he still worked for NCSoft. Needless to say, we were all pretty offended. He apologized, of course - but it looks like he's still up to the same old tricks.

Why speak your mind tactfully when you can call everyone else bad at their jobs and get more buzz as a result?

<comment><USER22> Garriott always struck me as a bit of an attention whore. There's the author self inserts in just about every game (Including Tabula Rasa, a failed MMO where he took the title as General British), the random lashing out at various people with what seems like no intent other than to stir the pot..

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "If you're not a good artist and not a good programmer, but you still like games, you become a designer."

This is what I have been preaching all along. I apply this to UX monkeys and other scum too.

Game Designers are basically just idea guys - get a gamer game developer or a gamer graphics artist you'll get a better job, leaner too.

Thanks for getting some validation here, Richard.

<comment><USER23> what are UX monkeys?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Pretty self-centered. For a world with only a couple great game designers, there's an awful lot of excellent games out there.

</comment><comment><USER25> Ultima VII still reigns supreme.

</comment><comment><USER8> Because "game designers" are "idea guys". I rather have a gamer graphics artist or gamer game developer, than an "idea guy".

</comment><comment><USER26> I've done some game design, but the only thing anyone would have heard of is the card game, Ambition. ( [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhH...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhHZh5IEKBDf56ExgErv4o/edit) )

To become a good game designer, one has to design games and-- here's the important part-- get feedback from _human_ players. That seems tautological and obvious, but it's an important insight. What seems like a great game will be broken in ways a designer might not anticipate once it meets real players. Non-designers might find the brokenness of the earliest Magic cards to be laughable-- how could they _not_ see that Ancestral Recall was broken?-- but designers get it. Balance is hard, man.

It's hard as hell to come up with a game worth playing. I probably designed a hundred crappy ones as a teenager before I got a hang of it and, even then, I only have one real success which is a card game-- a fairly closed system, not something continually expansive like Ultima Online or Magic: the Gathering. It takes a lot of trial and error to get good at it. It's easier to go through that process when you have access to other nerdy teenagers who'll be playtesters. For adults, it's much harder to get testers. That's a huge limiting factor.

Then, combine this with the big-budget corporate setting. Few game designers get to design a whole game. They work on pieces, not having responsibility for a whole. It's the same issue that we have in software engineering: most programmers never get good because so few ever work on real stuff in their paid gigs. I haven't worked in AAA game development, but it wouldn't surprise me to see the same principle in force: mediocre designers because most corporate work is mediocre and people never get the chance to get good.

I think Garriott has a point, though, in the assessment that it's rare for a "pure idea guy" to be anything but mediocre and passive. Curiosity is an important trait in a game designer. If you've got it, you'll code. That doesn't mean that you'll do it professionally or be able to write x86 assembly by hand, but you've no excuse not to fire up Codecademy and learn the basics of programming. Most of the great designers had other interests. You can see Garfield's CS and math backgrounds in the design of Magic. You can see Paul Graham's painting experience in his approach to programming and language design. The biggest hits require crossing wires.

<comment><USER27> _It's hard as hell to come up with a game worth playing._

It's really easy to come up with a game worth playing. Cloning is incredibly easy. While I admire that you went through the hard process of designing the game, what was learned?

Taste (and hence design) is completely arbitrary in videogames. There's no intuitive reason why pushing around sticks on a controller to move around guns is something people like, or that we use 52 cards instead of 60 or 40.

In other words, Richard Garriot is a bit contradictory: if there's nothing learnable about videogame design, the things that make a game good are arbitrary. If the things that make good games are arbitrary, isn't the idea of a game design guru (Lord British) absurd?

To hammer home the point that making a fun game is pretty easy, there are thirteen major MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) titles with more than one million players, and thousands of "endless running" games across all platforms. But the reason League of Legends and Temple Run reign supreme over the DoTA WarCraft 3 scenario and Canabalt is not superior design or balance.

The best games, the best in the genres really, are more like entertainment services, not just mathematical abstractions decorated with pictures and text.

Good games are about running servers; polishing user experience; providing customer support; maintaining a community; the art, the sound, the writing, etc.

While your card game looks interesting, I click on it and see a Google Document. Shouldn't the first link be a web app hosted in Facebook, complete with bots and achievements? All this engineering and craft is both hard and vital to making a game.

I'd say what makes a game different from a math problem is _precisely_ everything outside the game design. Math problems aren't that much fun.

<comment><USER28> >Taste (and hence design) is completely arbitrary in videogames.

Taste is definitely _not_ completely arbitrary in video games.

What makes a video game good is however harder to operationalize - as it always is with mediums of art. Ask the average person why they like some song, an example of an answer would be something like "It's got a catchy hook", which the video game equivalent would be "It's got good controls and explosions."

I do not know what actually makes a game good, but I also have a very hard time believing that taste is completely arbitrary in video games and that video game design is useless.

>But the reason League of Legends and Temple Run reign supreme over the DoTA WarCraft 3 scenario and Canabalt is not superior design or balance.

Sure WC3 DOTA is less popular than LoL, but you'd be insane to say that people do not notice imbalanced stuff.

You seem to hold the view that the more popular a game is, the better. This is probably not true considering how popular Farmville is (or at least used to be) while not being a very good game at all.

Hm, I have a lot more to say overall but I think it's just gonna end with me ranting to a straw man, so I 'm gonna stop here.

<comment><USER29> > What makes a video game good is however harder to operationalize - as it > always is with mediums of art. Ask the average person why they like some > song, an example of an answer would be something like "It's got a catchy > hook", which the video game equivalent would be "It's got good controls and > explosions."

While an individual's taste may be particular to him or her, it is possible to group and classify visual art styles. This is applicable to other aspects of game design as well, like genre and specific game mechanics.

I hate to link to Quora, but there was a great question about video game art styles at: [http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-taxonomy-of-names-of- videoga...](http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-taxonomy-of-names-of-videogame- art-graphical-styles)

<comment><USER30> FYI, when you link to Quora if you add ?share=1 then people won't be prompted to create an account.

[http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-taxonomy-of-names-of- videoga...](http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-taxonomy-of-names-of-videogame- art-graphical-styles?share=1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> He's right except for the part where he paints himself and molyneux as being in the "not suck" camp. Being a head in the clouds idealist who produces impressive hype for poor games is still sucking.

<comment><USER32> He's trading heavily on nostalgia and free press for his new game. Talking about Wright, Roberts and Molyneux is a way to stoke the nostalgia, and blanket blasting the industry with contentious quotes is just a way to get that free press. He doesn't have a "point" beyond that. He's not 'right' about anything of substance.

If you actually drilled into Garriott's argument here -- instead of just recording 'bombshells' and briefly trying to establish some room for him to backpedal later -- his argument would dissipate into a lot of hand-waving. Because the particulars are just going to identify exceptions and display a lack of concrete evidence for his view, beyond slinging arrows at designs that 1. he personally doesn't like 2. are beyond any designers' ability to influence (e.g. things handed down, or shortcuts taken due budget/scheduling issues, etc)

<comment><USER31> >He's not 'right' about anything of substance

He is right that most "game designers" suck, and that the core reason is because they were people who didn't cultivate a real skill, so went through the QA -> level designer -> designer path. A path which doesn't make any sense, and for which there is very little useful training or education available. There is so little analysis of what makes games fun and how to design fun games, and 99% of game designers never see or hear about the little that is available.

<comment><USER32> He gets people nodding along by saying "most stuff sucks". But the absence of examples is intentional. Because while most people will nod along to "most stuff sucks", they do not all agree on _what_ sucks. And that goes for music, games, films, books -- essentially all arts and culture.

Until he actually defines what is and is not good design, he hasn't actually made a point that can even be evaluated.

The bit about the career path is somewhere between ad hominem and red herring. The path is irrelevant to the results. If bad designers are getting through, it'd be due a failure of the filter between level/encounter designer and lead designer. Not a product of whether the level/encounter designer came from QA or development or ops or whatever else.

There's also no way for us to evaluate how much a given 'bad design' was a function of 'no effective training' as opposed to 'time crunch', 'no resources', 'dictate from management', 'tech limitation', or even 'novel theory that just didn't pan out'. And absent that, how could we lay the blame at the feet of career path?

<comment><USER31> Yes, everyone who works in the industry is wrong and doesn't know anything. Good point.

<comment><USER32> Did you miss the part where we don't all agree on what it is that actually sucks?

When I say "most people think most things suck, but they don't agree on what sucks" - that applies to industry people too. And nothing about their being industry people means they magically all agree on _what_ , in particular, sucks nor in what the _non-sucky_ alternative would be.

<comment><USER31> No, I didn't miss it. It just is a meaningless statement and does nothing to further the conversation.

<comment><USER32> My pointing out Garriott's fallacy doesn't advance the conversation but your repeating it does?

One last time: Garriott's statement is uselessly vague. If we ask people "do most designers suck" we will be lumping together the affirmative answers of those who think (e.g.) Halo's designers suck alongside those who think they do not.

So both groups agreeing to the over-broad phrasing "most designers suck" gives us only the _illusion_ of consensus.

So as long as Garriott avoids defining "what sucks" and "what does not suck", he is not saying anything true or worthwhile.

<comment><USER31> No, you don't need to define what sucks. Most people agree that most game designers suck. Most people agree that getting punched in the face sucks. This is not a difficult concept, and trying to pretend the point is "uselessly vague" simply because you don't like it is absolutely useless.

<comment><USER32> > _"This is not a difficult concept"_

I'd have thought not, but you seem impervious to it.

Your consensus includes people who disagree on what sucks. How in the world can you pretend their seeming agreement on a broad phrasing remotely matters?

8 out of 10 people might says shooters suck, but if 4 think health packs are the problem and 4 think auto-regen health is the problem and health packs are the solution, _they do not agree_. The 8 out of 10 number is useless in deciding not only which is the design that sucks and need to change, but in deciding _how_ to change it to not suck.

Saying "most people think most design sucks" is at the level of abstraction of "most people think most human interaction sucks". "getting punched in the face" is a specific, defined human interaction. If you or Garriott wanted to specify an example design at that level of specificity, we could evaluate it.

<comment><USER31> You are inventing an imaginary problem so that you can complain about it. Your problem is imaginary, so make your complaints imaginary too.

<comment><USER32> Right, because no-one has ever disagreed on whether a game or game mechanic is good.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Block Me If You Can: A Large-Scale Study of Tracker-Blocking Tools (2017) [pdf] - u-dissolve https://www.sba-research.org/wp-content/uploads/publications/block_me_if_you_can.pdf <comment> u-dissolve From a HN user who used to work on circumventing ad-blockers: "The hardest to beat is uBlock Origin"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21036260](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21036260)</comment>


First Sednit UEFI Rootkit Unveiled [video] - <AUTHOR> https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9561-first_sednit_uefi_rootkit_unveiled <comment><USER3> UEFI is perhaps the single most egregious pile of garbage ever concieved by humans. I don't think it's possible to overstate how awful it truly is.

Here's how BIOS works: basically, the computer loads the first 512 bytes of disk into memory and jumps to it. The OS takes over from there and does whatever it needs to, like bootstrapping stage 2 and loading the kernel from the filesystem. The spec[0] is 46 pages long and you are granted the rights to reproduce, distribute, and implement it free of charge.

Want to know how UEFI works? The spec[1] is a 2,899 page PDF which you have to pay to use in any way, including writing an implementation.

[0] [https://web.archive.org/web/20110715081320/http://www.phoeni...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110715081320/http://www.phoenix.com/resources/specs- bbs101.pdf)

[1] [https://uefi.org/specifications](https://uefi.org/specifications)

Every copy of this specification should be found and burned. The ashes should be buried deep in a dark place and the earth above salted. Anyone who thinks this is the first rootkit made for it is completely insane. This thing was probably explicitly designed with rootkits in mind.

<comment><USER4> Agreed completely.

But remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)).

UEFI smells like it was designed by a committee, so the value it adds (if any) seems far outweighed by the added complexity (and corresponding security challenges) it creates... to paraphrase Douglas Adams: (and replacing the word "Universe" with "BIOS":)

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the BIOS is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable... There is another theory which states that this has already happened..." <g>

<comment><USER5> Don't forget the corollary to Hanlon's razor, Grey's law which i think is far more applicable here: 'Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice'.

I'm not sure why others who respond think if something is old it isn't applicable, I suppose I'm on the X/millennial border so I don't get it though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hmmm, looking at the post from u/voltagex_, I'd suggest changing the URL to [https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9561-first_sednit_uefi_rootkit_u...](https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9561-first_sednit_uefi_rootkit_unveiled), and changing the title to "First Sednit UEFI Rootkit Unveiled".

The original URL ([https://threatpost.com/uefi-rootkit- sednit/140420/](https://threatpost.com/uefi-rootkit-sednit/140420/)) looks like a short writeup, but I'm not sure if it adds any new content. And given the tendency to link back directly to source, it's probably worth a change.

<comment><USER7> Ok, we changed the URL from [https://threatpost.com/uefi-rootkit- sednit/140420/](https://threatpost.com/uefi-rootkit-sednit/140420/).

Looks like this work was discussed a few months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18090651](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18090651)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Writeup: [https://www.welivesecurity.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/09/ES...](https://www.welivesecurity.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/09/ESET-LoJax.pdf)

Video: [https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9561-first_sednit_uefi_rootkit_u...](https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9561-first_sednit_uefi_rootkit_unveiled)

</comment><comment><USER9> Will this rootkit run on Linux?

<comment><USER10> The UEFI payload would work on Linux systems, yes. But the delivery system described would not.

<comment><USER9> >> It abuses platforms that do not implement the BIOS Write Lock mechanism incorrectly

I agree that post-boot the BIOS should be read-only.

> The UEFI payload would work on Linux systems, yes. But the delivery system > described would not.

There was a case of rm -rf / erasing UEFI variables on linux system, rendering the system unbootable. Mapping the BIOS into the file-system doesn't strike me as too clever, but then again what do I know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> New article, but it's old news: [https://www.welivesecurity.com/2018/09/27/lojax-first- uefi-r...](https://www.welivesecurity.com/2018/09/27/lojax-first-uefi-rootkit- found-wild-courtesy-sednit-group/)

</comment><comment><USER12> > The purpose of the legitimate LoJack software is to help victims of a stolen > laptop be able to access their PC without tipping off the bad guys who stole > it.

Promise?

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't this computrace repurposed? this research is about 10 years old. [https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh- usa-09/ORTEGA/BHUS...](https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh- usa-09/ORTEGA/BHUSA09-Ortega-DeactivateRootkit-PAPER.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> I hope it's not too off topic. But on Linux systems with NVIDIA drivers - <USER2> it even possible/reasonable to re-enable secure boot?

<comment><USER15> Yes, you can add a key with mokutik and sign your locally built drivers.

<comment><USER16> But does it buy you any real security at that point ? If the private key is stored on the file system, a local root exploit can just as easily use the key to sign whatever it wants. I don't even see the benefit or the threat model of secureboot on regular linux disros.

<comment><USER17> Don't store the private key on the local filesystem then. Use a USB stick or build and sign the modules on a separate machine. Depending on your threat model, a strong passphrase on the signing key might already go a long way.

<comment><USER16> I'm no so sure about that. Unless you are using an android/chromeos like system, secureboot alone itself is quite ineffective to begin with because your filesystem is writable. And keeping the private key elsewhere, while possible in theory, would just add too much friction. For instance, apt install nvidia-xxx won't work.

<comment><USER17> Sure, security adds friction. Whether the added friction is worth the added security in your case depends on the amount of friction and the amount of security it buys you. The trade off is likely different for you than it is for a larger org. For example, you (or the admins responsible for your org) could maintain an apt repo with signed nvidia drivers for your org. This would reduce the friction by centralizing the signing process.

I keep my signing key on my machine, but gpg-encrypted bound to a yubikey. Is that frictionless? No, certainly not. Does it provide perfect security? No, certainly not. A dedicated attacker can root my box and wait until I need to sign a module. Does it protect me from loading random kernel modules if I get hit by an automated attack? Most likely. Good enough for what I currently expect as threats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ah, interesting video! Now I've got something to watch/listen to while I'm on the bus today.

</comment><comment><USER18> Its interesting that nobody does a SHOW HN on their rootkits on Hackernews

Instead third party stuff like this comes very occassionally

The name is a misnomer

<comment><USER19> Only because you're completely unaware of the history of the word "hacker"; It certainly doesn't just mean someone who breaks into other computers.

Reading the old Jargon File entry for the word might clue you in: [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html)

<comment><USER18> Nah, that doesnt actually explain whats going on now

A) Either people dont post that kind of stuff here, which is still ironic anytime this century

B) People do post and it doesn't get upvoted

C) People do post and it gets moderated away

<comment><USER20> I don't think it's ironic at all. It's just that most of us may be a different kind of hacker.

<comment><USER18> Right......

I get that it was an all encompassing term, but it hasnt been colloquially this entire century

But to be fair, the Pedantic News wouldnt be a misnomer</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Battery-Powered Ships Next Up in Battle to Tackle Emissions - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-06/battery-powered-ships-next-up-in-battle-to-tackle-emissions <comment><USER2> It only operates in Tokyo bay to answer the first question that everybody is going to have.

Transatlantic and transpacific container shipping is still going to be among the last sectors of the economy to be electrified.

It's probably more practical to build modern sailing ships than to try to electrify bulk overseas cargo shipping. Or maybe a hybrid approach where the sails are also lightweight efficient hardy cheap solar cells that turn electric motors to add a few knots to the speed during the day.

But even then you need massive energy storage to make sure you have power to maneuver in a storm.

<comment><USER3> _It 's probably more practical to build modern sailing ships than to try to electrify bulk overseas cargo shipping_

Back in the heyday of the battleship, replacing the engine was one of the things it wasn't worth doing. It's so hard to do, you might as well just build a new ship. I have no idea if this is still true, or not. Construction techniques have come a long way. Today, there are cruise liners that have all of their propellers in multiple swiveling pods containing electric motors. (They generally have generators run by diesel or steam turbine.)

<comment><USER4> It is absolutely still true, most ship engines are not removable without breaking the hull above the engine. If you're going to do that, it's often easier to start fresh.

<comment><USER3> _It is absolutely still true, most ship engines are not removable without breaking the hull above the engine._

Seems to me, especially with electric engine pods, ships can be designed to allow the replacement of the engine/generator.

<comment><USER5> They can be, but the ones that are currently afloat haven't been.

Shipping companies have had decades of success fighting against legally- mandated retrofits - double-hulled tankers, trivial safety features for passenger ferries... I don't think your idea of replaceable engines is going to get any traction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I recently saw this Fully Charged video about a short, but very frequent, ferry crossing that is now fully electric, with automated charging at both ends of the trip

The scale here is enormous, and just for a 4km journey

[https://youtu.be/rE_M1n-ClOA](https://youtu.be/rE_M1n-ClOA)

<comment><USER7> And the new Norwegian ferry Color Hybrid was recently delivered. Not quite twice as large (2k pax, 0.5k cars). Similarly-sized 5-ish MWh batteries, plug- in or diesel-electric. Electric operation around ports, to minimize pollution, and hybrid or diesel elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lots of ships run on bunker fuel, a cheap refining fraction nobody else can use. Those 3 story diesel engines are a different breed wherein "one massive container ship equals 50 million cars"

[https://newatlas.com/shipping- pollution/11526/](https://newatlas.com/shipping-pollution/11526/)

<comment><USER9> In terms of global warming potential, they are nowhere close to that. The "50 million cars" statistic is specific to the SOx output of the ships (sulfur oxides). These cause local impacts (breathing issues, view haze, damage to plants etc) and wide impacts (acid rain) [1]. Because of the strong local impacts, fuel grades for cars, trucks, etc had strong reductions to sulfur content, but ships did not (though often they are required to use more expensive, more refined fuel in port or 20km of shore or what have you).

All this to say, these ships do create super high emissions of Sulfur Oxides, but their CO2/equivalents emissions are quite low (the lowest per kg*km of any means of transport! [2] ). Worth addressing, but not nearly the equivalent of 50 million cars in the "emissions" that the common dialogue refers to.

[1] [https://www.epa.gov/so2-pollution/sulfur-dioxide- basics](https://www.epa.gov/so2-pollution/sulfur-dioxide-basics)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable- business/2014/aug/01...](https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable- business/2014/aug/01/sustainable-shipping-is-making-waves)

<comment><USER10> With bunker oil some fraction of a percent of generated power comes from burning the sulfur. Tells you much what you need to know about that.

And yes it's very interesting to look at transport modes by hp per ton. You find that ships, trains, and trucks requirements are modest compared to passenger cars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sounds like someone is going to have to build a network of depth chargers :-)

</comment><comment><USER12> The world's largest hybrid ferry [1] has just been launched to run between Sandefjord (Norway, on the West coast of the outer Oslofjord) to Strömstad (Sweden, on the Eastern side of the Oslofjord) [2]

[1] [https://www.ship-technology.com/projects/color-hybrid- ferry/](https://www.ship-technology.com/projects/color-hybrid-ferry/)

[2] [https://www.colorline.com/sandefjord- stroemstad](https://www.colorline.com/sandefjord-stroemstad)

<comment><USER12> Slightly further North the much shorter Horten to Moss route across the Oslofjord will be fully electric in 2021 [1]. Though with much smaller ferries.

[1] [https://www.ferryshippingnews.com/enova-contributes- nok-31-m...](https://www.ferryshippingnews.com/enova-contributes- nok-31-million-to-the-electrification-project-of-horten-moss/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if it's practical to stick a couple of Space Shuttle external fuel tank-sized liquid hydrogen tanks on a typical container ship and then run it on hydrogen. One of the problems with liquid hydrogen (not the only one) is that it's impossible to keep it from slowly off gassing. However, if the tank is large enough it would off gas slower than your engines would be consuming the hydrogen.

</comment><comment><USER14> [https://www.google.com/amp/s/spectrum.ieee.org/transportatio...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/marine/electric- container-ships-are-stuck-on-the-horizon.amp.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> These should come in handy in retrofits: [https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2009/01/365-megawatt- supercond...](https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2009/01/365-megawatt- superconducting-motor.html).</comment>


There is No Right Way to Develop Software - <AUTHOR> http://dlo.me/archives/2013/04/16/there-is-no-right-way-to-develop-software/ <comment><USER2> The problem here is that these arguments are bulking together many completely different things under the heading of 'software'. This is like trying to find a correct way to 'grow plants'. If you try to grow rice the same way you grow wheat, it's not going to work. This is obvious for plants and should be very obvious for software also.

For example, if you're developing a web-based payment processor, you should have unit tests everywhere and possibly additional runtime tests ensuring transactions are completing properly and are stored in the database, etc.

If you are developing the software for a pacemaker, unit tests just aren't going to cut it - you will need to logically prove all parts of the software work. You will need to test each piece of hardware to ensure it meets requirements. You will need to do hundreds of hours of physical testing to ensure everything works in different environments and with different electromagnetic interference. Just doing a bit of TDD is laughable here.

Lean startup validating an idea? History shows that simply shipping and having something that users can try to use is more than enough. If it breaks and goes down for hours? No problem - customers will sit there hitting F5 for hours for the chance to use it again. If nobody wants to use it, your tests are wasted anyway. In this environment, having something that partially works is better than something that isn't done yet.

There are millions of other cases, each of them unique. Software development is not building bridges. Please never use that analogy - a bridge is a fixed, known, and obvious requirement and solution. Software is the very opposite of this - if you compare 'software' to the combined industries of fabrics, farming, engineering, carpentry, electrical work, industrial building, home building and many more, then your analogy is closer to the truth.

<comment><USER3> No, there is no problem with the argument. It applies to every special case of software.

For example, you may think that your ideas to develop good software in payment processor are right, but they aren't really right. You have no evidence that such way of developing this particular type of software leads to more reliability and security than every other way. Same goes for every other example you mentioned.

So, if you cannot prove that it's right or better, why do you say that it is? I think this is the point of the article.

<comment><USER2> You (and the author) make a very good point here, and I wasn't disputing that point directly. The issue I was disputing is a generalization made by the author and the people who are insisting on their own 'only way to create software' ideologies. Arguing about software as a whole is flawed, and discussions like this must always be put into context and evidence for or against must be very specific about the exact context.

This ties into a similar issue in management academics in which, for decades, people tried to prove a 'best way to manage a company'. Management academics have now moved on from this and all management recommendations are always very rooted in as deep a specific as possible. Software best practices need to make the same transition now.

Simply saying 'TDD is best' is the same as saying 'performance linked compensation is best'. Awhile back, a number of idealists very strongly touted the performance linked compensation angle in the same way that a number of software idealists are touting TDD. There is nothing wrong with either idea when used pragmatically and in the correct situations, but the important part for the future and for software as a whole is to discovery the situations in which TDD shines, and the situations it doesn't. Only by breaking it down as specific as possible can we get any real value from TDD recommendations.

 _So, if you cannot prove that it's right or better, why do you say that it is? I think this is the point of the article._

What I'm trying to get at is that if we can drill down to the specifics we may be able to actually prove things in very specific industries/team structures. We must move away from debating 'software development' as a whole before we can arrive at anything useful though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have an interesting experience with this recently. I have been doing ruby now for a few years, I have immersed myself in the culture and concepts. I am wanting to level up on my programming skills, so I am trying to learn Go.

I went into a golang irc channel, and was labeled as "ruby brainwashed" because of the way I approached my questions on Go syntax and concepts. I admit I had a hard time mapping object oriented concepts I had come to love in ruby to the different OO model of Go. These guys genuinely thought I was doing things _wrong_! - it has been a been a wake up call to the many different approaches and opinions.

<comment><USER5> Which is why so many top developers recommend that you learn a new language regularly. It exposes you to new thinking and methods. As a result, you grow as a developer.

Kudos to you for doing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Eh, the standard "I don't know which way is best, so there must not be any objectively better or worse ways".

There clearly _is_ a correct way to develop software. It's just not clear that we've got enough experience with it to a) have found it, b) to recognize it, and c) to correctly confirm it to a reasonable degree.

As I commented on the article, the whole thing sounds a lot more silly if you replace "software development" with "building bridges" or the equivalent civil engineering task. There are clearly better, safer ways to construct bridges, and I'm fairly certain the same is true of software.

<comment><USER7> What a load of baloney! There is no one true way to develop software; it depends on the person/team, the nature of the project, the schedule, and tons of other external factors. The same with building bridges actually; to follow the one true way means a lot of bridges falling down.

The best we can do is have enough experience and intelligence to choose methods appropriate to the context. That means hiring good developers...because process won't save us!

<comment><USER8> So you're saying choosing methods appropriate to the context and hiring good developers is the one true way to develop software?

<comment><USER9> Maybe not. Sometimes all you need is developers that are "good enough." I personally don't like hiring junior talent (mostly because I hate all of the hand holding it requires), but that doesn't mean it might not make business sense to go with the cheapest talent that can get the work done.

Ironically, if your company uses a lot of junior talent, the appropriate development methods might just require things like enforcing a JIRA ticket before code, always use TDD, etc.

Perhaps what I'm saying is the one true way to develop software is to choose your methodologies to maximize the effectiveness of your specific team to fulfill its specific end goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The truest statement I have read in these comments so far is that we don't yet know the best way or ways to do software development. There might be one or more best ways, but we don't know.

The article is valuable in pointing out that most purported "best ways" are dogmas, and, despite claims of being scientific, they tend to veer off into pseudoscience.

And yet, if you don't have a plan, if you don't apply the best available tools, and if you don't have expertise and experience, you're going to have a bad time.

That leaves software development as something less than engineering, and more like a craft. You can't make it happen, or manage it, without expertise, creativity, and intellect.

Attempts to stuff it into a contained, measurable space almost always result in perverse incentives and efficiency comparable to a Soviet 5 year plan.

But that doesn't mean that a best way doesn't exist, or that it will never be found.

</comment><comment><USER11> Novices generally don't have enough experience to distinguish between situations that require a "best" practice and those that don't, hence advice given to novices is generally phrased in absolute terms: "Never...", "always...", etc. Experienced programmers have used the "best" practices enough that they know their limitations, and so they pick and choose accordingly.

pragdave gave a great talk on this very subject a few years ago: [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Developing-Expertise- Dave...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Developing-Expertise-Dave-Thomas)

</comment><comment><USER12> It all boils down to maintainability. Do I want to even attempt debugging or adding features to a 10,000 + line ASP.NET Web form page? What about a MVC project where someone took the time to observe separation of concerns and wrote unit tests for everything? Automated tests of any sort will save you when the code base grows, and it will. There are different code smells for different languages and platforms but the real developers will smell them out and see them for what they are, the wrong way to write software. Bad code is bad code and it is always the wrong way.

</comment><comment><USER13> I completely agree with the author. I think this can be summarized as "do whatever works best for you". Best practices are great - if they work for you. "Best" is highly subjective in my opinion.

<comment><USER14> For just a second I considered posting "lol" after reading the comments on this that missed the point, but I realized that's not really appropriate for HN. And besides, I didn't want to make it seem that I don't agree with the author, because I do, completely.

Then I realized that you did both for me. So, thanks, lawl.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> No, look, there really are good and bad ways to develop software. If there weren't, no-one would have invented TDD, in fact we'd still be doing everything in FORTRAN. Yes there are disagreements, but we should respond to that by looking deeper and figuring out which parts of each approach are good and which are bad, not throwing up our hands with some relativist "oh, whatever works for you must be the right way, there are no absolute truths".

<comment><USER7> > If there weren't, no-one would have invented TDD, in fact we'd still be > doing everything in FORTRAN.

TDD and FORTRAN are completely orthogonal concepts....

> not throwing up our hands with some relativist "oh, whatever works for you > must be the right way, there are no absolute truths".

Yep, that's what works in practice. Ideologues don't ship.

<comment><USER16> > TDD and FORTRAN are completely orthogonal concepts....

False. The testing I've seen heavy Fortran math frameworks go through would probably make the average frontend coder's face melt. Just because it ain't easy doesn't mean it ain't done.

<comment><USER7> You could totally do TDD and FORTRAN together, hence they are orthogonal.

<comment><USER17> Don't mean to disagree with you substantively, but just a note on words:

The colloquial meaning of "orthogonal" seems to be "all combinations of these things exist or could exist in theory". That's all good and well, but there's a more faithful way to translate the mathematical concept of orthogonality: "uncorrelated". (Correlation is scaled covariation, which is basically dot product.) Adopting this usage might add some signal to online conversations, e.g. when one hears something like "TDD is orthogonal to Fortran", one could reply "hmm, that's not strictly orthogonal, the real-world correlation seems to be nonzero and negative, which means some real phenomenon must be causing it".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love "strong opinions weakly held"!! I couldn't agree more.

<comment><USER19> Came here to say the same.

Sources for that phrase:

[http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/strong_opinio...](http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/strong_opinions.html)

[http://www.saffo.com/02008/07/26/strong-opinions-weakly- held...](http://www.saffo.com/02008/07/26/strong-opinions-weakly-held/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> wisdom is to know when to apply a theory, knowing when to use a methodology. :)

WHen someone says, hiring remote workers is necessary they are talking about it in certain context. Although they might fail to mention that context, or may even fail to notice that underlying context. Not noticing the context doesnt make them fundamentalist, it means that they are not much rigorous or they reached the particular conclusion by trial and error.

However to believe in any such conclusion without trying to understand the context or just not being aware to the fact that there might be a context is a folly on your part and not someone who mentioned a particular strategy which worked for them.

</comment><comment><USER21> Agree that there's more subjective than objective in best practices. That said, there's nothing wrong with developing and publishing best practices. The fault is in those who turn them into a rigid "bible", rather than food for thought.

</comment><comment><USER22> These kind of posts are a natural response to all the TDD hype.

</comment><comment><USER23> This reminds me of the politically correct, relativist nonsense that one often sees in response to the existence of multiple, mutually exclusive religions.

There may not be a single right way to develop all software, but as with questions of morality, there are certainly better or worse ways, and in principle, we can find them through science. Hopefully we can at least come to some definitive conclusions about "worst practices", if not best practices.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that these better ways are mostly based on opinions of others and usually lack any real evidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> There is no right way, because the term "right" is ambiguous and subjective. Even a ridicuously bug-ridden software can be considered "done right" if the requirements were quick development time and correct results for a single certain case (think of single-use one-liners). However, for example, the only known way to [provably] have a bug-free code is, unsurprisingly, to prove the code is mathematically correct.

<comment><USER8> Proving the code is mathematically correct is insufficient.

Partial list of bugs I've found before, that (for at least some definitions of "prove") would not be detected by what you suggest. Note that rigorous testing can (and, in fact did) find these.

* CPU Bugs (Including one that was unknown to the CPU manufacturer after nearly a decade of deployment)

* Memory Bugs

* Standard Library Bugs

* Compiler Bugs

Regehr even gives an example of a proven correct C compiler generating incorrect code (due to an incorrect system header), which was uncovered by testing.

[edit] Lest people misunderstand my position, I still think TDD (as it has been explained to me) is BS, but testing, in general, is a necessary part of making reliable software.

<comment><USER25> Standard Library and Compiler are also pieces of software, so assuming they could be mathematically proved correct, they won't have bugs either. CPU bug & Memory bugs, yeah, you are right.

EDIT: Oh ok, so the system header was not proved mathematically correct :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In fewer words:

There exists many context-related local maximas.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think the key here is environment. If you are in startup, writing thousand lines per day, then sure tests are not for you. But guy, who takes over code after startup is sold, will have different opinion.

</comment><comment><USER28> nope. you're wrong. there _is_ a right way.

and furthermore, the best way to write an essay is to organize a meticulous outline in advance. and then _stick_ to it, executing it faithfully.

and the best way to take a trip is to _plan_it_, with maps and tourist books, and not waver from the schedule you made, even if (especially if!) you're lured to a bar by someone you wanna boink.

stop doing it wrong!

-bowerbird

<comment><USER9> My wife is a planner. I'm more of a "let's get in the car and see where we end up." A healthy mix of both planning and spontaneity adds a lot of variety and enjoyment to life.

Which is one reason I love the start-up scene. You start out with a plan, but the challenges come when you have to make important decisions in a moment.

<comment><USER28> i couldn't turn the sarcasm up any more, so i guess i'll just have to turn it off. ;+)

-bowerbird

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> ah, the sweet voice of sanity

</comment><comment><USER30> My comment without even reading this article: Yes. There is.

</comment><comment><USER31> I asked an experienced Bridge player about bidding conventions, and if there was one _right_ way to bid a hand. He said, "there isn't one right way to bid, but there are plenty of wrong ways."

That's how I feel about software development (and business operations in general). Is there an inflexible, one-size-fit-all, "right" methodology? Hell no. Even open allocation (which isn't really a methodology) isn't right for _every_ company out there. There are, however, a ton of wrong ways to do things. The sad thing is that, because most people are driven by a mix of ego and incompetence, wrong ways of doing things are the most common.

You're Doing It Wrong if:

* managers have more power than engineers.

* mutually positive contributions (good for engineer and for firm) are disallowed for political reasons.

* people _can't get shit done_ because of too much pointless process (to start writing code, you need a Jira ticket).

* stand-up takes 45 minutes and people _sit down_.

* people are micromanaged and start doing things badly, or overmonitored (the hidden danger of too much Jira activity) and start panic-coding.

* designs are made by incompetents.

* ... and many, many more.

<comment><USER32> Interestingly, you did exactly what the author warned against, but replaced "right" with "wrong".

Some things are obvious (designs made by incompetent designers), but then giving the example of "No code without a Jira ticket" is almost certainly your personal pet peeve.

<comment><USER31> My point is that "no code without a Jira ticket" is a bad process. Slapping reporting overhead on small code changes is ridiculous. Maybe I didn't make that clear. I _don't_ support that.

I have a lot of pet peeves, because I've seen so much done wrong. Competent software managers are extremely uncommon. Maybe 1 in 20.

In the '90s, people who studied day traders found that they _were_ reliably making money on their core strategies, but those were generally only available for a small amount of time, and that most of them lost their shirts through "boredom trading" outside of their core competence that had zero-to-negative expectancy and only added noise. Boredom trading occurs because ego, combined with a need to feel active, results in a lot of activity that cuts away at the profits earned during one's good hour or two per day.

Managers are a case of trader boredom. They'd actually be quite effective if they scaled back to 1/10 the amount of process and interference, but their trader boredom just causes them to throw everything out of whack. If managers were socially permitted to work 5-10 hours per week instead of being expected to fill time by bothering people, they'd probably do a much better job.

<comment><USER33> Why is it a bad process? I know little to nothing about Jira (although I have worked in environments in the past where you don't start work on a defect without taking some form of ticket, and it didn't seem fundamentally bad).

<comment><USER34> You find a typo on the website. Instead of pull, switch the "i" to an "o", commit, push which takes 30 seconds you have:

1.) Open web browser 2.) go to your JIRA url 3.) enter your username/password 4.) enter your password again because you mis-typed it 5.) find the project page for that particular project and wait for it to load 6.) find the place where you add new tickets and wait for that to load 7.) type in a bunch of bullshit on a long form and submit that 8.) Hopefully you get to assign the bug to yourself. God forbid you have to have a PM do the actual assignment! 9.) pull, make the change, push 10.) go back into jira and open the ticket 11.) write a description of how you fixed the "bug" 12.) close the ticket

Ok, so that's the worst case, but the only real work you should /need/ to do is #9. The whole process of creating/assigning/closing the ticket probably only takes a minute or two, but it's probably unnecessary in most software systems and, over time, adds a ton of frustration where none is needed.

<comment><USER33> I like the way that the stuff you think you need is rolled up into a single "pull, make the change, push" yet the stuff you don't see any value in is spread out into having to open the application, go to the site, get things wrong etc. If it's browser-based, could you not simply have a browser link to to "Add ticket" to replace most of the first 6 steps?

Also, "type in a bunch of bullshit on a long form and submit that" - like I say, I don't know Jira, but I doubt that it forces you to type a long bit of bullshit. I'm sure that "correct spelling" would do. And I'd also expect that you'd be doing something similar in your source control system so that someone looking through the code at some point in the future can see why (or when) the particular change was made.

And how often do you make this kind of change as opposed to actually working on bugs/improvements that are coming in through JIRA?

I'm sure that there are occasions when your tool gets in the way of getting the work done, but from your description I'm not sure it sounds like it's a major inconvenience most of the time, which needs to be balanced against the benefit you get from having a centralised place to track, prioritise and allocate the work.

<comment><USER34> Of course, it was a bit of hyperbole. It's meant as an illustration.

I agree that there should be a centralized place to track, prioritize, and allocate work. But the comment I was responding to was about having a ticket for every code change, which is absurd if you take it to the extreme. If I'm working on feature X, but come across a typo, do I have to have a ticket to fix the typo or can I just fix it as I go along?

Again, we are taking things to the extreme in the examples.

In a sane workflow, someone prioritizes a list of tasks, someone (hopefully the group) divides up the tasks, and then we work on them one at a time. All of that is in a central place and developers generally don't have a problem tracking like that.

But what about the case where you find a bug (especially a small one)? In larger teams you probably want to indicate that you fixed something so that the testing team can have something to verify against. In a small team you just fix it and go on without the overhead of making a ticket for every one of those you discover.

An example from today. I just came across some code that was

"unless @blah.blank?", but it should probably be turned around to "if @blah.present?", so I made the change. If I had to write a ticket for that I would quickly want to strangle someone. And that's what the original comment I responded to seemed to be asking about.

<comment><USER33> The problem is that I've seen far too many examples of people fixing a "clearly a bug" that either turns out to be entirely correct for a reason the developer wasn't aware of, or even when it is a bug it breaks something down the line that depended on the bug being there (e.g. for a spelling mistake, it turns out some other application was screen-scraping it and depended on that spelling mistake to identify a given page).

> In larger teams you probably want to indicate that you fixed something so > that the testing team can have something to verify against. In a small team > you just fix it and go on without the overhead of making a ticket for every > one of those you discover.

I think you may have hit the nail on the head there. "to start writing code, you need a Jira ticket" isn't a bad process per se. It's a bad process if you're working on certain types of project e..g. in a small team where everyone intimately knows the codebase and all of its uses.

And I think that's what the article was about - blindly applying a process designed for one type of development to an entirely different type.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Coronavirus: Trump halts travel from Europe to US - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51846923 <comment><USER2> Given how bad our plan for the coronavirus is, Trump may yet succeed in getting Mexico to build a wall and pay for it.

<comment><USER3> ^ underrated comment ^

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone smart enough to help me understand why UK would be exempt?

<comment><USER5> I'm not claiming smarts but my guess is it's purely a diplomatic gesture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, does that mean that you can fly to London first and then on to the USA?

<comment><USER7> As I understood it: No.

> His speech said all travel from Europe would be suspended but a presidential > proclamation later said it would only apply to anyone who had been in the > EU's Schengen border-free area in the 14 days before their arrival in the > US.

You been in (Schengen) Europe the last 14 days? And not being an exempted person (eg US citizen/resident)? Then you are not going.

You could probably go to London, stay there 14 days and then go on. Problem is, in 2 weeks time, travel will likely be farther restricted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is the point? There are more cases in Seattle area than in majority of European countries with a similar population.

<comment><USER9> Protectionism, trade war, patriotism, elections, nationalism... Pretty much everything except health</comment></comment>


FBI warns US companies about backdoors in Chinese tax software - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-warns-us-companies-about-backdoors-in-chinese-tax-software/ <comment><USER2> There are backdoors in all closed software that is popular... Android, iOS, Amazon OS, etc...</comment>


Stripping Reddit From HackerNews With BOSS Mashup - <AUTHOR> http://lethain.com/entry/2008/jul/12/stripping-reddit-from-hackernews-with-boss-mashup/

<comment><USER2> Stripping Reddit from your life with /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com

</comment><comment><USER3> Related note: I wrote a program that collects all the HN, Reddit, and Digg Technology articles and ranks them. It was a fun quickie-project in F#

Instead of stripping the intersection, I find that dupes usually indicate a more important story, so I check on those first.

I find that by indicating relative movement (is the story moving up or down in rankings?) and relative comment change I can get an indication of what's hot or not. Whenever I'm bored and want to do a bunch of reading, I can control- click my way into dozens of useful stories pretty quickly! It was a fun project.

Here's the site if anybody's interested:

<http://project-management-methodologies.net>

</comment><comment><USER4> This makes front page after all those downvotes I received for commenting about essentially the same thing? Seriously?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011277>

<comment><USER5> The converse relationship also exists.

Hacker News is my first resource when I wake up in the morning, I check it before my emails. Shortly thereafter, I also check /r/programming on reddit. Sometimes, I see content pop up on reddit after it appears on Hacker News. It is not a one way road, as you suggest.

It might be interesting to write a script to watch both sites and pull data, determining where content appears first - possibly using modified code from the OP. If I get some time, I might do just this tonight. Somewhat useless, but the information might determine what is a better real time resource for topics relevant to my interests.

<comment><USER6> If you end up following through on this, please make a post or message me a link to a github/source post.

I'm bored. :P

<comment><USER5> Sorry. Got tied up last night, but I am still interested in this data and appended it on my to do list. Ping me @ any of my contact info in my profile and I will link you when it's done!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A creek splits the US in two at the Parting of the Waters - <AUTHOR> http://strangesounds.org/2014/04/a-small-creek-splits-the-us-in-two-and-connects-the-atlantic-and-pacific-oceans.html <comment><USER2> There are several watersources right on the divide.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/23juqb/the_river_c...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/23juqb/the_river_connecting_two_oceans_a_creek_in/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Divide_of_the_Amer...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Divide_of_the_Americas)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Ocean_Pass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Ocean_Pass) #here

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pass_(Wyoming)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pass_\(Wyoming\)) #nearby

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isa_Lake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isa_Lake)</comment>


The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dominance of the Stubborn Minority [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/minority.pdf <comment><USER2> Taleb should include the famous line from Shaw's _Man and Superman_ that fits this idea:

 _The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man._

<comment><USER3> I think the idea is accurate. But it's worth noting that not everything done/advocated by the unreasonable person is "progress".

<comment> barry-cotter Progress is just change that the writer agrees with.There is no objective morality and the ""long arch to justice" is just a random walk.

<comment><USER4> This is an ignorant thing to say. "Moral realism" vs. "Moral anti-realism" is a discussion that, afaik, Moral realists have the upper hand in.

<comment><USER5> Moral realists have the upper hand? Are you willing to share some articles covering the topic?

For example, [http://slatestarcodex.com/](http://slatestarcodex.com/) and [http://lesswrong.com/](http://lesswrong.com/) have plenty of essays arguing for moral subjectivity.

<comment><USER4> Not really, I can't do the debate justice on a tiny HN discussion box. You can go on r/AskPhilosophy and ask them about it. You can also seek out Derek Parfit or something.

But, it doesn't matter if you personally agree with moral realism or not. What matters is that it is controversial and that there is no philosophical consensus. As such, to claim that "there is no objective morality" as axiomatic, is to end an argument before it has begun.

edit: Also, I think LessWrong-types cling on hard to a kind of logical positivism that is philosophically pretty primitive. The most exciting way to study this is via Wittgenstein, probably. He was their foremost figure, and then he turned on them. If you don't want to delve into philosophy, try to read his biography by Ray Monk- "Duty of Genius". I think any techie could follow it and enjoy it.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the tips, r/AskPhilosophy has a lot of discussion on the topic. I am also interested to know why you seem to prefer Moral Realism.

> As such, to claim that "there is no objective morality" as axiomatic, is to > end an argument before it has begun

I don't take that as axiomatic actually, unlike scientific research where we have an objective, consistent universe to compare against, moral objectivity seems to either come from group consensus (which doesn't guarantee correctness) or at an extreme moral naturalism which has fairly horrible implications[1]. Without an objective, consistent source, how would we get objective, consistent morals?

[1] slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

<comment><USER4> It's just a very complex topic. IIRC, there's a user called ReallyNicole on AskPhilosophy, who specializes in Moral philosophy, and makes really good breakdowns about it periodically. Try to seek them out.

As far as HN is concerned, though, I think you should focus on this statement by my parent:

> _Progress is just change that the writer agrees with.There is no objective > morality and the ""long arch to justice" is just a random walk._

I don't think this is a good comment, or good attitude to bring into political discussion. You may not be able to pin down the notion of "Love" or "Art" or even "Game" to a definition, but they are still "real" enough as far as Philosophical Realism is concerned (here is where Wittgenstein may be useful), to discuss. To make quippy comments about how "there is no progress" seems to me like a cheap argumentative ploy in favor of a "fuck you got mine" life philosophy.

The idea that women's liberation and the abolishment of slavery are "arbitrarily" positive things, and that we may like them exactly as likely as we may not via some senseless quirk of history, seems pretty asinine and lazy.

I am a scientist, and I feel like sciency analogies to philosophical concepts are almost always dodgy, but I will try anyway: To me, it seems similar on some level to say that, because the particles of gas in a room could be here, or could be there agglomerated on a corner, there is no meaningful way in which we can talk about the temperature of a room. Truth is, some combinations and permutations have been observed to be way more likely than others, way before we could meaningfully articulate the underlying mechanisms with anything rigorous.

This doesn't mean that the radically opposite conclusion is true either. You could go all the way against "there's no arc of justice", and become a Fukuyamaist or a Spanish Inquisitor: "there is an arc of justice, and it bends towards _this_ ". This is not a necessary outcome of Moral Realism though. Moral realism, to me, basically seems to say, that ethics and morality is not a "nonsense" discussion topic (again: Wittgenstein).

<comment><USER5> > The idea that women's liberation and the abolishment of slavery are > "arbitrarily" positive things, and that we may like them exactly as likely > as we may not via some senseless quirk of history, seems pretty asinine and > lazy.

Its not exactly arbitrary, its more dependent on the current state of the world. Take the trolley problem, if killing one person would save billions does murder become moral?

Similarly, (and more contentiously) we might look at pre industrial agrarian societies as barbaric for favouring male children but when your society/family is absolutely dependent on human labour and men are capable of providing far more for roughly the same amount of resources consumed you can see how that moral position could emerge.

Were they fundamentally evil for holding it?

* [http://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pd...](http://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pdf) is short story which also talks about this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm interested in thinking through several examples on this subject.

One example that comes to mind with me is the campaign by many university student groups across the country to encourage endowments to divest from fossil fuel companies. For example: [http://www.fossilfreeuc.org/](http://www.fossilfreeuc.org/) [http://www.fossilfreemit.org/](http://www.fossilfreemit.org/) . The the vocal minority on this subject is very strongly in favor of their opinion (divestment), whereas the larger mass of students mostly doesn't care about the issue or perhaps leans to not divesting but only slightly.

It is interesting to consider the more detailed results of this where people don't have 0 cost acquiescence, for example if people really wanted some non- kosher soda it would still exist in the marketplace.

It is also interesting how this phenomena occurs in voting schemes where you have a fixed number of voting points to distribute over all issues up for consideration. In such systems people can have their minority issues more strongly represented.

</comment><comment><USER7> Political correctness is another great example of how the most (in)tolerant wins.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dNbWGaaxWM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dNbWGaaxWM)

<comment><USER8> A friend of mine is some kind of leader in border patrol. He said that he knows he is in real trouble the moment his dudes stop trash talking him. In most sausage fests it's like this. Offensive remark is actually flattering, as it's completely based on assumption that the receiving party is confident enough to take the joke.

It's at least seemingly male cultural phenomena. Or alternatively women are really really careful about it.

<comment><USER9> I've noticed this too. I have a couple guy friends.They are really good friends, but they trash talk each other . . . all the time . . . They usually laugh uproariously about it too. If you didn't know them, you'd think they hated each other. It's definitely a different way of social interaction than I have with my friends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> C2Wiki has some discussion of a related phenomenon of asymmetrical decision- making: [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LeastFlexibleProtocolWins](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LeastFlexibleProtocolWins)

The surrounding cluster of pages there may also be useful for people curious about this topic.

</comment><comment><USER11> A very related concept is the Overton window:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window)

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra This is why non-minorities should set limits for tolerance to avoid recursive renormalization as described in the article.

Otherwise we end up being different people without desiring that.

Of course we should let good examples transform our society, but not opinionated minorities.

<comment><USER12> There are no non-minorities in the abstract. Majority and minority only arise when one names the thing that differentiates them.

What examples do you have in mind?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I saw this happening in real-life. A minority political party insists on dividing a state and a minority of people do support it. Majority parties didn't dare to go against it for the fear of loosing votes from those minority people. When a referendum was called for, no one spoke against the division though a large majority of people and political parties did feel it as crazy. Also they didn't believe it would really happen. But it happened and the state is divided against the feelings of the people. People are still a state of shock.

</comment><comment><USER14> Also next chapter: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10455681](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10455681)

</comment><comment><USER15> So, the "tyranny of the majority" is an illusion of those who are highly intolerant?

<comment><USER16> Inaction and the consent of the majority is more what you mean. The majority doesn't force anything on you, it's just that it would be counter productive to fight the current.

There are accepted norms which are accepted by the majority for historical reasons, but also because people believe the norm seems both honest and accepted by many of who they see as honest people who are similar to them. So the norm is not just something you agree with, it's something consider to be decent and can be consented to.

In society there is always one big dominant river which current is going in one direction. That's the social contract. If you don't have one rule for everyone, there is no society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What interests me is the opposite situation: When a minority imposes itself not because they can force themselves on others, because they are immune to external influence. It's the same principle.

We see a lot of that in OSS, and I've seen it happen in companies: Bad behavior designed to make dissenting opinion go away (when sometimes the dissenting opinion is to just not be insulting), runs amok, and forces the lowest common denominator of behavior.

So IMO, it's not really about tolerance or intolerance, but about which side allows itself to be influenced, either by law, or pressure. When enough pressure to make someone resign is stronger, you end up with an environment where the intolerant wins. But in an environment where this doesn't happen, it's the people who have more to lose by leaving that wins. You can imagine how that is not helpful in a company: It's normally your best employees that have better alternatives when they leave.

Another important part is whether we really know everyone's opinion. When an opinion is considered impolite, we will think it's less popular than it really is, because people that share it will just be quite about it. It's one of the reasons we've seen quick changes of opinion in topics like Gay marriage: It's not that opinions change that quickly, but that what was considered the "polite opinion" has had a big reversal. So it isn't just about tolerance.

Ultimately what matters is, who really wins? An OSS project that kicks people out, for one mechanism or the other, wins when it keeps the most value. Maybe removing dissent is helpful. Maybe the dissent was making things better. So whether this effect is good, or bad, happens in a case by case basis.

</comment><comment><USER18> The title seems to be about something totally different than the article. Does the most powerful minority win? Sure. Does the most intolerant and stubborn win? Certainly not, at least in the long run.

Yes, you can smoke at a trainstation, or suicide bomb yourself to death in front of a football stadium. But that is only a success of your agenda in the very short term. If most of your coworkers are non smokers and you annoy them too often with your smoke, you lose their support in the long run and thereby your ability to push your agenda.

On the other hand we know that the straight white male is the default for our society beside being the biggest group, reason being that his agenda is integrated well in our world definition through media, history, etc. He doesn't win, because he's more stubborn. He wins because 90% of movies show him as the role model. You can be a very stubborn black woman but that won't make you rich and won't make people try to be like you, it won't enable you to push your agenda.

<comment><USER19> I thought something similar, but upon reading your comment and closer inspection, it seems Taleb is focusing on rules not actions (though I only got part way through the article).

For example, eating Kosher or Halal is a rule and he is saying that by a minority following this rule, all of us end up by default following the rule.

Suicide bombing or smoking is an action which we don't inherently take. We are eating already, so eating kosher or halal isn't a huge difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> tl;dr It's like a committee revising something they don't have strong feelings about just to get a member with a strong opinion to STFU about it

</comment><comment><USER21> Why do I care if I eat Halal or Kosher, if I don't care whether I eat Halal or Kosher?

Isn't that the bottom line? That in a reasonably democratic society, the majority makes way for the minority? Otherwise it's not a democratic society, it's apartheid.

<comment><USER22> > That in a reasonably democratic society, the majority makes way for the > minority? Otherwise it's not a democratic society, it's apartheid.

Would not an unregulated democratic society not care to cater to the wishes of a minority? In a raw democracy if the majority did not observe Kosher or Halal, that nation would not see an issue with making it illegal. That a minority did follow it would not matter, the majority had ruled.

Individual and minority rights are protected in the US is because there are laws in place to restrict the simply majority rule to prevent the above from occurring. Those controls were put in place having recognized the limitations of majority rule in antiquity, it is not a property of a democratic society.

Apartheid was racial segregation in South Africa and doesn't appear to apply here.

<comment><USER21> > In a raw democracy if the majority did not observe Kosher or Halal, that > nation would not see an issue with making it illegal.

The thing is, you can't "oberve" kosher or halal unless you actually believe in them.

I'm neither jewish nor muslim, but I was brought up christian, so here's an example I'm familiar with: if a priest sprinkled my food with holy water, my only concern would be hygiene; if the water was clean and he hadn't, say, used it to wash his flock's feet beforeheand, then I could care less. Or I might mind if the food was such that sprinkling water over it could make it worse somehow- I can't think of an example.

The point is, I don't believe in the supernatural. Some people do and they insist on imbuing real-world stuff with supernatural meaning. As long as the way they choose to do so has no real-world, tangible effect on me then I don't care, they can knock themselves out.

In short: people can believe anything they like about our common lives. As long as it's supernatural, it doesn't affect me. It's not real. I don't care about what's not real.

Accordingly, I don't see why halal and kosher should be made illegal. People should be free to believe in the supernatural if they so choose. Why would a democracy impose a specific set of beliefs on its people? In what sense would you say that such a democracy could be considered "unregulated" (let alone a democracy in the first place)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wish Taleb would stop making up weird phrases and pushing them in his writing. What does "skin in the game" even mean? I mean linguistically. It's a weird phrase that I still have trouble parsing and have to stop and think every time I see it. Why not "involvement"? Why "game"? Which meaning of "game" is even in this? Does he mean "have a portion of the skin of the game animal that would be killed at the end of the hunt allotted to you"? Or is it "to wager some of one's own skin on the outcome of a game"? But then your skin isn't really in the game per se, is it? As in, it doesn't take active part in the game, right? So how is it "in" the "game"? It just hurts my head :(

<comment><USER24> It's not a phrase made up by Taleb.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_game_(phrase)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_game_\(phrase\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The basic principle of Radical Democracy, which is different from Liberal Democracy, is relevant here:

> "Radical democracy" means "the root of democracy." Laclau and Mouffe claim > that liberal democracy and deliberative democracy, in their attempts to > build consensus, oppress differing opinions, races, classes, genders, and > worldviews. In the world, in a country, and in a social movement there are > many (a plurality of) differences which resist consensus. Radical democracy > is not only accepting of difference, dissent and antagonisms, but is > dependent on it.

(Wikipedia) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_democracy)

This article can be interpreted as evidence that radical democracy actually works and the root of democracy ought to be a diversity of minorities all advocating for things we could call their essential beliefs, and a healthy, free society is one in which on any given issue the majority is flexible enough to accommodate minorities that have stronger preferences.

That is, a prosperous, cohesive society isn't one that tends to homogeneity but is instead driven by its heterogeneity. Furthermore, a prosperous, cohesive society isn't based on rigid principles, but flexibility and the ability to evolve its structures to accommodate more and more diverse groups.

Seems legit to me. Most homogeneous groups in history seem to either arise from a founder effect or maintain their homogeneity through dehumanizing tribalism and Incredible Violence.

<comment><USER25> "Most homogeneous groups in history seem to either arise from a founder effect or maintain their homogeneity through dehumanizing tribalism and Incredible Violence."

Yeah, sort of like the inhomogeneous groups in history acquire their inhomogeneity through dehumanizing tribalism and (nothing incredible about it -it's just human nature) violence. Take the British Empire for example. They deliberately moved people around their empire to keep their subjects angry at each other rather than at themselves; Indian rubber tappers and Chinese merchants in Malaysia, Scottish Protestants in Northern Ireland, Indians shipped to Kenya, etc. Worked for a few hundred years. Arguably, the modern neoliberal system is an extension of this to the modern day.

Taleb's argument doesn't seem to be in favor of any flavor du jour of democracy. More an exposition of how things work in complex pluralistic social systems, democracy or no. Ornery minorities in a pluralistic society end up getting their way most of the time. As all of western civilization seems determined to become some kind of ornery minority, the next 20 years should be pretty interesting.

<comment><USER12> I think I didn't communicate clearly what I meant. I think my response to a sibling comment clarifies my observation: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10571763](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10571763)

I'm not sure what you mean about "western civilization" becoming an ornery minority but it gives me a sense of "barbarians at the gates" sort of thinking. Could you clarify?

<comment><USER25> Western civilization is very obviously dissolving itself into tiny balkanized minorities, consisting of perpetually aggrieved people whining at each other in a sort of victim olympics in hopes of status payouts and vague grubbings after ephemeral power. Taleb's hack applied on a wide scale by everyone against everyone else. There are passages on the subject in Thucidides, Ammianus Marcellinus and probably lots of other places...

Anyway, civilizations get sick and die: there is nothing I can do about it beyond scowling at the imbecile descendants of the people who once sent men to the moon. At least China seems to have walked away from its suicide attempt.</comment></comment></comment></comment>