Thanks for making my argument [LWN.net]

Thanks for making my argument

Posted Mar 7, 2013 11:54 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: Thanks for making my argument by airlied
Parent article: Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H)

No one is accusing you of being a mouth-piece.

However, there is clear evidence that even well-intentioned, professional people tend to be affected by their affiliations. They tend to have biases toward arguing or acting in favour of the interests of their affiliations. This can happen subconsciously, even against the logical desires of the person. It's well documented in other fields, medical research particularly, and there are various psychological experiments you can do to demonstrate what is thought to be the underlying behaviour involved.

No matter how logical and dispassionate we try to be, our wetware just appears naturally to have a predilection for biasing us towards groups we are members of. There is no good reason to think software people would be immune to this.

Rather than deny this general fact, the best thing to do is to acknowledge it, so we then can find ways to minimise it or work-around it.

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Thanks for making my argument

Posted Mar 7, 2013 12:23 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Oh, and these effects occur even with full information. In the real-world, an obvious/frequent source of affiliation bias, is of having more complete or better information about your affiliations than of others.

Or as other commentators put it, communication issues. :)

Thanks for making my argument

Posted Mar 7, 2013 12:30 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

It's rather hard to be informed about what Canonical is doing when they do it behind closed doors. And that's actually what all this is about: the fact that Canonical utterly misses the point in Open Source Software: collaboration instead of competition.

Sources of bias

Posted Mar 7, 2013 12:41 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

In-group bias is another well-researched source of bias, that probably can be traced back all the way to primate groups. This is important not because it is more primitive, on the contrary: it is much more subconscious and entrenched than other, more cultural (you could say "human") biases. We want our group / tribe / company to thrive not because we will be better off, but because we are the best.

Sources of bias

Posted Mar 7, 2013 12:49 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Yeah, I must have put it clumsily. My point was that lack of information is one obvious source of bias. But even when we have full information, we *still* have a definite tendency to be biased toward group members - even if subconsciously, as per your link.