The first half is an argument with a strawman:

It can be done, but you have to make it a deliberate project and put some time and thought into it, rather than just stumbling on a bunch of programmers in a cafe.

The story about the programmers in the cafe was not evidence for any claim. It was just an explanation of what set me thinking about the problem. It's not a pillar holding up anything, so attacking it proves nothing.

(Incidentally, a moment's thought would have made it clear that I have in fact "put some time and thought into it." I've spent 24 years as a professional programmer, during which I've observed thousands of programmers working for all sizes of companies. Plus I've seen first hand the transformation undergone by roughly 200 YC-funded founders so far.)

The second half is fallacy:

But rather than pointing out fallacies, a better way to refute Graham's evolutionary argument is by reductio ad absurdum. ... Our ancestors lived in a world that was shrouded in darkness half the day, therefore we would be happier without electric lights.

This supposed refutation can itself be disproven by reductio ad absurdum, because it could be applied to any explanation of our inclinations based on how we evolved.

(Bad example, incidentally. There do seem to be conflicts between electric lights and human biology: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02...)

Neither of these arguments even attempts to refute the central point of the essay. In case anyone wants to try it, the central point is that in an organization organized as a tree structure, structural forces tend to give each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the whole tree. That we work better in groups of 10 than 100 I feel is obvious enough not to need justification. The argument from evolution is just an attempt to explain why groups that size work.

Though on the whole my reaction is "I want my 20 minutes back," there was one encouraging thing about this experience. Even these dishonest DH5s are more civil than Atwood DH2ing about my choice of metaphors.

This is wrong, but being a civil argument, at least there are concrete things to refute.

One problem with direct observation is that it's hard to get a representative sample. It can be done, but you have to make it a deliberate project and put some time and thought into it, rather than just stumbling on a bunch of programmers in a café.

False dichotomy. PG's sample is neither a deliberate project, nor the people in the cafe. It's the programmers he has known and observed over his life. There's no reason to doubt representativeness of his sample.

a case where an ad hominem argument is relevant and valid.

There's never a case where ad hominem is valid. If it's valid, it's not ad hominem, by definition. A logical fallacy can't be valid. But I'm nitpicking here. His point is:

The fact that this observation confirms his preexisting belief in the worthiness of startups makes it less credible than if the same observation were made by someone who had no particular interest in startups.

Occam's Razor suggests that PG works with startups because he thinks they're better, not that he thinks they're better because he works with them. He is rich enough to work on whatever he wants.

A creature that's perpetually dissatisfied, always striving for advantage, wins out over a creature that's happy.

Then why does happiness exist? Why hasn't it been eradicated millions of years ago? Answer: because it serves a purpose. It's how evolution tells the organism, "keep doing what you're doing". Not everything that mentions nature is an appeal to nature.

I somewhat agree with sah in that Roth's essay did not fully address the central point of Graham's essay: the effect that large hierarchical structures have on people. The discussion of ad hominem arguments aside, I would point out that you could phrase Roth's argumentative method as, "you've argued for x given method y, and I can use method y to also prove z, you don't believe z, therefore you can't prove x". A rough sketch might look like this: y --> x y --> z therefore z <--> x (this step is hard to sketch out because it's unclear) ~z therefore ~x.

The difficulty with this argument is a fallacy about implication. Roth states that the "evolutionary argument" supports pg's view, but that he can then use that same "evolutionary argument" to prove an absurd point of view. Then he holds that he has disagreed with pg's central viewpoint.

This method of argumentation is fundamentally flawed because pg's view might be supported by a multitude of arguments, the truth or usefulness of the "evolutionary argument" is not a necessary condition for the truth of pg's view of organizations, bosses, and human nature. Hence, Roth has merely attacked pg's method of proof while leaving the central claim untouched. I have other criticisms of Roth's argument, but even if I am wrong in such criticism the argument would fail to disagree with pg.

This reads like Mister Spock's review of a punk rock concert.

"I don't understand why the audience was asked if it was 'ready to rock', as they clearly did not have instruments. Also, it was illogical to ask them to 'fight the power', since power is an abstract physical quantity that cannot meaningfully be 'fought'."

And did PG's monumental catalogue of rhetorical errors mention the rule about "not arguing with straw men"? Because I don't think the real PG actually believes that literally everyone "wasn't meant to have a boss", nor would the real PG ever endorse the concept that "you weren't meant to have a chair, because our ancestors didn't evolve to sit in chairs."

I find it kind of upsetting that none of the various disagreements with pg's essay that I've read have been in reaction to what I felt was the core of the essay. As far as I'm concerned, the centerpiece of the essay is this interesting observation about organizational hierarchies, and why they might necessarily place limitations on individual freedoms.

He also makes some guesses about the effects of those limitations on the happiness of employees in companies of different sizes, which I think he marks off pretty clearly as being drawn from observation. What's so incendiary about those, anyway? Regardless of whether it's true or not, isn't the stereotype of the creatively stifled employee of a large company a cultural cliche?

I'm ready to stop hearing about this now.

Best point was at the end:

One difficulty with disagreeing with people is that you have to present their argument and your argument, and so your essay ends up being longer than theirs.

This is why I gave up on a Philosophy Degree: I was jaded by the intense over-analyzing and language-parsing. Perhaps the blogosphere will ponder whether or not we were meant to have a boss for as long as we’ve pondered whether or not we have Free Will.

Nice ideas (voted it up), but I'm of a mind that the "weren't meant to have a boss" thing is kind of played out.

>When you break it down, Graham's argument from evolution goes like this: our ancestors worked in groups of eight or so, therefore humans evolved to work in groups of eight or so, therefore contemporary humans will be more alive and fulfilled working in groups of eight or so.

>In a general sense, this is the logical fallacy known as the "appeal to nature" -- the idea that what's natural is ipso facto good or right. There is no reason to believe this: plenty of natural things are neither good nor right.

Paul is not saying that working in groups of about 8 is not "good or right." He's saying that it's satisfying and functional. It's perfectly reasonable to say that something we were evolved to do is something we do well, and something we were not evolved to do, we have trouble with.

>Maybe the correct conclusion to draw from them is "People who work for an asshole look less alive," or "People who work on boring projects look less alive."

It seems like both of these possible explanations are endemic to large organizations, and would be impossible if you were a startup founder. If you start your own company and your boss is an asshole and your project is boring, you only have yourself to blame. You also have the authority to fix it immediately.

If you see a job posting that says something like, "Come work with us--we're fun, with employee empowerment, etc etc" you don't bother to argue with it because you know the angle it's coming from. Likewise if someone tells you to drop out and tune in because that's how they did it coming up from the muck, well, you have to remember that his writing has motivations closer to a job posting than a research paper.

I don't think we were actually meant to have chairs :)

tl;dr