Groups never admit failure

> A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.”

Is this supposed to be satire?

The Linux kernel mailing list is full of admissions from most of the subsystem maintainers talking about past failures. In fact, their strongest arguments for avoiding new commits is essentially that the changes smell like some of their past failures. Look at the kdbus thread. I'm certain I've also seen some ranting about untangling code related to CORBA as well.

Frankly, if an organization were more critical of ongoing fuckups and failures than the Linux maintainers, you'd have to question their core competency.

And Debian! What about the Debian dev who removed entropy from their key generator? Again, if Debian had a more egregious admission of systemic failure it probably wouldn't exist as a distro today.

Even cranks on HN don't attempt a steel man that fucking up the GPG key generation somehow wasn't a failure. Instead, cranks speculate about whether some super secret spy was recruited to introduce a "subtle" change that would have been laughed out of the room if anyone had bothered to directly ask an openssl dev about it.

Now let's commence HN cranks attempting to steel man a novel argument that two of the most prominently discussed groups on HN aren't actually groups.

Edit: also notice that Debian did not fork after the GPG key generation/valgrind patch debacle. AFAICT they released a statement saying, "All your Base from the past several years belong to script kiddies." One could argue that they didn't take the right steps to fix their process going forward. But one cannot argue that they didn't admit failure.

I accidentally killed a very promising project this way. I gave a pitch demonstrating how it could stand up brilliantly to multiple avenues of ruthless investigation and criticism. People didn't listen to the words, they listened to the emotion of the ruthless investigation, and they discarded the idea in favor of one which would have tipped over if someone had brought a similar magnifying glass to within a mile.

Once I realized that good pitches were about emotions, I started getting much better results.

I don't think the claim that he supported Pinochet means he had a direct hand in the coup, it's that he attempted to re-engineer the Chilean economy after the CIA linked plot assassinated the democratically elected socialist president who was attempting to socialize parts of the economy. The free market reforms were a disaster for the people that were only able to be applied under the terms of dictatorship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende

The principle claim of this essay is that groups never change their viewpoints. What's ironic is that it appears in a public environment in which groups are changing their viewpoints, often quite publicly. Many are taking extreme heat for this.

Technical projects and groups are adopting codes of conduct and behaviour, changing stances on what had long been accepted.

Companies are similarly changing their views on what types of behaviour are considered acceptable amongst both staff and leadership.

The high court of the United States just heard a case in which it seems highly likely that it will substantially change its collective mind over a decision it had made some 50 years ago.

The two major political parties of the United States have, over the course of some 60 or so years, virtually completely changed their respective stances on racial equality and civil rights. Not a fast change, but a profound one.

The Catholic Church has reversed itself on earlier condemnations and beliefs, notably of heliocentrism and the conviction of Galileo.

Scientific bodies and disciplines change their mind, preferably based on evidence, all the time. It's what science is. A remarkable case was the development of the theory of plate tectonics from a radical fringe concept to the central organising principle of geology, from 1915 to 1965.

We're in the midst of an onging attempt to change collective understanding, and response to the overwhelmingly evident fact of anthropogenic global warming as a consequence of fossil fuel use.

Reputable news and media organisations report on their own errors and omissions on an ongoing basis.

The most durable institutions in the world are not commercial entities (the five-year failure rate of new enterprises is about 50%). Rather, they are not-for-profit service organisations and institutions, typically schools. The oldest universities date back over 1,000 years, and there are primary schools dating to before the year 1.

And the field of economics has been in the process of admitting the failure of free-market absolutism, or even of free markets as anything other than a special case, for over 150 years.

Groups are resistant to change, yes, but they are not absolutely incapable of it.

Arguing against facts is quite easy where one doesn't bother to consult them.

> This happens in crypto land, too, where the coins fork

You only get hurt when you're holding? Crypto for me was always about not using it as a speculative currency, but actually /using/ it when you could. There's a thing called /spending/ which all the wealthy seem to avoid.