Getting along in the Arabian night [LWN.net]

Getting along in the Arabian night

Posted Jun 21, 2018 22:26 UTC (Thu) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
In reply to: Getting along in the Arabian night by ballombe
Parent article: Getting along in the Python community

> (I hope this one is outrageous enough)

I don't think you need to be outrageous when you tell a good story as well!

This is a corollary to what I think of as Andrew Morton's Law, which is that if you want to find out something, you don't post a question, you post an incorrect answer. People will put more energy into correcting a mistake than into educating the curious. Similarly it can pay to insert subtle bugs into your patches, as some people are more likely to respond to a buggy patch than a correct one. The trick is to make the bug really subtle so that the reviewer gets to appear very clever, but you don't end up looking too stupid. (But not so subtle that everyone misses it and it gets applied!)

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Getting along in the Arabian night

Posted Jun 22, 2018 16:24 UTC (Fri) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

The "Morton's Law" was in general use when I played World of Warcraft. If you wanted the "general chat" to answer a question that you didn't know the answer to, you would get an accomplice. You would pose the question to general chat, and then your accomplice would reply with an authoritative and obviously wrong answer.

This would result in a lot of people putting in significant effort to explain just how wrong your accomplice was, with all the supporting evidence and specific detail. These same people, without the accomplice, would mock the question and feed you wrong information.

Motivation manipulation sure feels dirty, but it totally works.