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Isn't that an appeal to authority? Because someone hasn't done X they don't have the right to criticize X? Facebook's "code problem" is what really does happen

Isn't that an appeal to authority? Because someone hasn't done X they don't have the right to criticize X? Facebook's "code problem" is what really does happen in the real world with such humongous business enterprises. But does it have to be this way?

evgen 10y ago
Until someone provided s counter-example the assumption is that yes, this is just what happens. We have entire industries of competing methodologies, some almost cult-like in their slavish devotion to "the one true process", and none have birthed any great successes. Why is that?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dustingetz 10y ago
  History is littered with counter-examples and great successes. Each generation of company is more efficient or solves more complicated problems than those before it. Facebook itself is an industry leader in open source innovation, which is why their product is so smooth. But not all companies specialize in hard tech, and all companies get old.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >Facebook itself is an industry leader in open source innovation In the sense that they gave us React and couple JS tools? What are their other "industry leading open source innovations"? That's hardly a major "open source innovation". Heck, Google itself has produces 2-3 similar JS pieces (Angular, GWT, Closure compiler, Dart, etc).
    - objclxt 10y ago
      > In the sense that they gave us React and couple JS tools? What are their other "industry leading open source innovations"? OpenCompute (http://opencompute.org http://opencompute.org), Hack (http://hacklang.org http://hacklang.org), Phabricator (now spun off, still OSS, https://secure.phabricator.com https://secure.phabricator.com), GraphQL (http://graphql.org http://graphql.org)...none of these are JS tools, all have had major industry impact. GitHub's entire API, for example, is now GraphQL based. And that's just a small sampling. I can't quite decide if you're being deliberately provocative or just misinformed.
      - coldtea 10y ago
        >I can't quite decide if you're being deliberately provocative or just misinformed. Or maybe I genuinely disagree in your assessment that any of those technologies (apart from GraphQL, and that is still nowhere near major league) had any major "industry impact".
- chii 10y ago
  Let me provide a counter example. facebook, revenue in 2016 is $27 Billion, maintains approx 60mil lines of code (incl backend - source http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/ http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million... find facebook in the list) Nasa, budget is $19 billion. I can't find a public official record of their code size, but the IIS is approx 6 mil lines of code, and i don't think the other missions they did (all 33 unmanned space missions in total) are too far off, so lets give each an average of 5mil per mission. That's 165 million lines of code. And arguably, probably more difficult code than facebook's domain.
  - evgen 10y ago
    And all of the code for the NASA HR system, and budget management tools, and conference system, etc. The Facebook code base is not just the web pages you see and backend to serve them, but encompasses just about everything used to run the company. It is also built and maintained by a much smaller group of coders for a much more ambiguous target domain. (And no, I do not think that the NASA domain is in any way more difficult than Facebook's.) I guess I have to question the relevancy of your counter-example.
    - muricula 10y ago
      If programmers at NASA make a serious mistake on say the space stations's code, people will die and billions of dollars of equipment will be lost. The same cannot be said for a social website which serves a bunch of content. NASA has way more on the line than Facebook. Here's a great article on how NASA did development on the space shuttles code and the importance of process and quality: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/sp13/hand-outs/They-Write-the-Right-Stuff.pdf http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/sp13/hand-outs/They-Wri...
      - evgen 10y ago
        Well, if someone at Facebook screws up and inadvertently reveals certain names or locations or the existence of particular groups within some countries people get arrested, tortured, and die. Last I checked NASA screw ups only kill a couple of people at a time. So you are right, they are not even close to comparable. See how easy it is to make false equivalences? I am familiar with the referenced article and if anyone in the software industry outside of few specialized areas tried to push a process like that they would need to start the endeavor by polishing their resume because they would soon be looking for a new job.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
watwut 10y ago
You have right to criticize, but don't expect your criticism to be taken too seriously. There are two reasons for it: a.) you don't have frame of reference to compare whether facebooks result is better or worst then other companies b.) you don't know what tradeoff are necessary for making it work nor what it takes to achieve success.
- europeansoft 10y ago
  So by the same logic, criticism agains the government shouldn't be taken seriously unless they come from a former prime minister?
  - pliny 10y ago
    Criticism against governments by former governors should and is taken more seriously than criticism by some joe who's never had to wrangle a bureaucracy.
  - watwut 10y ago
    Government criticism from people who have experience with running government or being in the politics tend to have much higher quality then criticism coming from sixteen years old high school class president.
    - ue_ 10y ago
      What tends to be the case is irrelevant. The contents of what is being said is all that matters.
    - sooheon 10y ago
      So when it comes to the highest level of government, only those who have reached such heights may say a peep. Only criticism from former US presidents regarding Trump, please!
      - watwut 10y ago
        When random dude possibly with asperger gives advice/criticism on how to negotiate, reasonable government official will igore him - even if the criticism came in form of a blog. Likewise, succesfull activists ignore armchair advice from people on anonymous twitter. Not sure how is that controversial. Torwalds does not spend his time worrying about whether random bloggers agree with linux core style guide. You did not demonstrated enough of knowledge/expeciance for me to take your criticism seriously is valid answer.
emodendroket 10y ago
Well, sure, they can. But don't you think someone who has been involved in a massive company would have more trenchant insights into massive companies?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
feedjoelpie 10y ago
Appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy. It's a valid argument unless said authority is false in some way.
- thehardsphere 10y ago
  It's fallacious if you use it merely as "Authority X said so," no matter whether the authority is true or false. A fallacy happens when the conclusions do not follow from the premises of an argument. E.g. it doesn't follow from the fact that "Al Gore says that Global Warming is happening," that Global Warming is happening. If, on the other hand, you say "Al Gore said Global Warming is happening, Al Gore's argument is premise A and B, therefore C" that's not fallacious because your argument doesn't actually rest on the identity of the authority, but the argument they made. But all of this is irrelevant because it's not an appeal to authority. It's an ad hominem. The author is being attacked for not-being-an-authority.
thehardsphere 10y ago
It's ad hominem; the author is being attacked to invalidate the argument, instead of attacking the argument itself. Which is never valid. Appeal to authority usually takes the form of skipping making an actual argument for something and instead resting upon "X said so" and not explaining further. This is also not valid but is sometimes a shorthand for saying "X made argument Y," which can be valid if argument Y is valid (in which case the fact that X made the argument is purely incidental trivia).

evgen 10y ago

Until someone provided s counter-example the assumption is that yes, this is just what happens. We have entire industries of competing methodologies, some almost cult-like in their slavish devotion to "the one true process", and none have birthed any great successes. Why is that?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dustingetz 10y ago
History is littered with counter-examples and great successes. Each generation of company is more efficient or solves more complicated problems than those before it. Facebook itself is an industry leader in open source innovation, which is why their product is so smooth. But not all companies specialize in hard tech, and all companies get old.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Facebook itself is an industry leader in open source innovation In the sense that they gave us React and couple JS tools? What are their other "industry leading open source innovations"? That's hardly a major "open source innovation". Heck, Google itself has produces 2-3 similar JS pieces (Angular, GWT, Closure compiler, Dart, etc).
  - objclxt 10y ago
    > In the sense that they gave us React and couple JS tools? What are their other "industry leading open source innovations"? OpenCompute (http://opencompute.org http://opencompute.org), Hack (http://hacklang.org http://hacklang.org), Phabricator (now spun off, still OSS, https://secure.phabricator.com https://secure.phabricator.com), GraphQL (http://graphql.org http://graphql.org)...none of these are JS tools, all have had major industry impact. GitHub's entire API, for example, is now GraphQL based. And that's just a small sampling. I can't quite decide if you're being deliberately provocative or just misinformed.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >I can't quite decide if you're being deliberately provocative or just misinformed. Or maybe I genuinely disagree in your assessment that any of those technologies (apart from GraphQL, and that is still nowhere near major league) had any major "industry impact".
chii 10y ago
Let me provide a counter example. facebook, revenue in 2016 is $27 Billion, maintains approx 60mil lines of code (incl backend - source http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/ http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million... find facebook in the list) Nasa, budget is $19 billion. I can't find a public official record of their code size, but the IIS is approx 6 mil lines of code, and i don't think the other missions they did (all 33 unmanned space missions in total) are too far off, so lets give each an average of 5mil per mission. That's 165 million lines of code. And arguably, probably more difficult code than facebook's domain.
- evgen 10y ago
  And all of the code for the NASA HR system, and budget management tools, and conference system, etc. The Facebook code base is not just the web pages you see and backend to serve them, but encompasses just about everything used to run the company. It is also built and maintained by a much smaller group of coders for a much more ambiguous target domain. (And no, I do not think that the NASA domain is in any way more difficult than Facebook's.) I guess I have to question the relevancy of your counter-example.
  - muricula 10y ago
    If programmers at NASA make a serious mistake on say the space stations's code, people will die and billions of dollars of equipment will be lost. The same cannot be said for a social website which serves a bunch of content. NASA has way more on the line than Facebook. Here's a great article on how NASA did development on the space shuttles code and the importance of process and quality: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/sp13/hand-outs/They-Write-the-Right-Stuff.pdf http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/sp13/hand-outs/They-Wri...
    - evgen 10y ago
      Well, if someone at Facebook screws up and inadvertently reveals certain names or locations or the existence of particular groups within some countries people get arrested, tortured, and die. Last I checked NASA screw ups only kill a couple of people at a time. So you are right, they are not even close to comparable. See how easy it is to make false equivalences? I am familiar with the referenced article and if anyone in the software industry outside of few specialized areas tried to push a process like that they would need to start the endeavor by polishing their resume because they would soon be looking for a new job.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

watwut 10y ago

You have right to criticize, but don't expect your criticism to be taken too seriously. There are two reasons for it: a.) you don't have frame of reference to compare whether facebooks result is better or worst then other companies b.) you don't know what tradeoff are necessary for making it work nor what it takes to achieve success.

europeansoft 10y ago
So by the same logic, criticism agains the government shouldn't be taken seriously unless they come from a former prime minister?
- pliny 10y ago
  Criticism against governments by former governors should and is taken more seriously than criticism by some joe who's never had to wrangle a bureaucracy.
- watwut 10y ago
  Government criticism from people who have experience with running government or being in the politics tend to have much higher quality then criticism coming from sixteen years old high school class president.
  - ue_ 10y ago
    What tends to be the case is irrelevant. The contents of what is being said is all that matters.
  - sooheon 10y ago
    So when it comes to the highest level of government, only those who have reached such heights may say a peep. Only criticism from former US presidents regarding Trump, please!
    - watwut 10y ago
      When random dude possibly with asperger gives advice/criticism on how to negotiate, reasonable government official will igore him - even if the criticism came in form of a blog. Likewise, succesfull activists ignore armchair advice from people on anonymous twitter. Not sure how is that controversial. Torwalds does not spend his time worrying about whether random bloggers agree with linux core style guide. You did not demonstrated enough of knowledge/expeciance for me to take your criticism seriously is valid answer.

emodendroket 10y ago

Well, sure, they can. But don't you think someone who has been involved in a massive company would have more trenchant insights into massive companies?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

feedjoelpie 10y ago

Appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy. It's a valid argument unless said authority is false in some way.

thehardsphere 10y ago
It's fallacious if you use it merely as "Authority X said so," no matter whether the authority is true or false. A fallacy happens when the conclusions do not follow from the premises of an argument. E.g. it doesn't follow from the fact that "Al Gore says that Global Warming is happening," that Global Warming is happening. If, on the other hand, you say "Al Gore said Global Warming is happening, Al Gore's argument is premise A and B, therefore C" that's not fallacious because your argument doesn't actually rest on the identity of the authority, but the argument they made. But all of this is irrelevant because it's not an appeal to authority. It's an ad hominem. The author is being attacked for not-being-an-authority.

thehardsphere 10y ago

It's ad hominem; the author is being attacked to invalidate the argument, instead of attacking the argument itself. Which is never valid. Appeal to authority usually takes the form of skipping making an actual argument for something and instead resting upon "X said so" and not explaining further. This is also not valid but is sometimes a shorthand for saying "X made argument Y," which can be valid if argument Y is valid (in which case the fact that X made the argument is purely incidental trivia).