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Ok, you can break the stopwatches, I'm sure that will make people more comfortable talking to each other. EDIT, because HN isn't letting me submit new replies:

Ok, you can break the stopwatches, I'm sure that will make people more comfortable talking to each other. EDIT, because HN isn't letting me submit new replies: It was hyperbole. I don't care if it's an actual stopwatch, if you record everything on cassette and tally up the minutes later, or if you use some hip new cloud SaaS bespoke locally-grown web-scale meeting management software. When you implement patronizing means of policing human interaction like this, you stifle conversation and make people feel like children. I'm especially aware of this at the moment, because HN is patronizingly preventing me from making any new posts because I happened to submit some replies too quickly. A dumb algorithm intended to police flamewars is making discussions ITT needlessly difficult to read, and preventing me from posting suggestions for the HN Algolia Search people in another thread. It is just as annoying and counter-productive to "rate limit" people in real life for the crime of impassioned discussion. Another suggestion mentioned in the article is that of anonymously submitting and "ranking" ideas prior to the meeting. This is literally an "upvote" mechanism with all the familiar flaws of groupthink and trying to assign quantitative value to ideas. This works poorly enough on the internet, let alone in person.

proveanegative 12y ago
I'm playing the devil's advocate here for the most part but surely today it does not need to be anything as intrusive as a stopwatch. You could conceivably track who gets to speak for how long and any interruptions that happen in live meetings with software running on your smartphone, and you could certainly do so in voice chat meetings. There may be a marketable product in this somewhere.
pdabbadabba 12y ago
The point is that we need stopwatches (etc.) to make visible social dynamics that we would not otherwise observe, and then try to make social rules (not necessarily laws) accordingly. It's folly to simply feel our way along based on anecdotal experiences which are themselves infected with the biased sought to be measured (as well as suffering from limited data). Nobody is proposing that the remedial social rule itself rely on a stopwatch.

proveanegative 12y ago

I'm playing the devil's advocate here for the most part but surely today it does not need to be anything as intrusive as a stopwatch. You could conceivably track who gets to speak for how long and any interruptions that happen in live meetings with software running on your smartphone, and you could certainly do so in voice chat meetings. There may be a marketable product in this somewhere.

pdabbadabba 12y ago

The point is that we need stopwatches (etc.) to make visible social dynamics that we would not otherwise observe, and then try to make social rules (not necessarily laws) accordingly. It's folly to simply feel our way along based on anecdotal experiences which are themselves infected with the biased sought to be measured (as well as suffering from limited data). Nobody is proposing that the remedial social rule itself rely on a stopwatch.