I've waited as long as I can stand it before inserting a spoiler:

"In the early 1990s, I was writing a lot of essays and columns for magazines and journals, so much so that I was using a pseudonym for some of that work: Nickieben Bourbaki. The original idea for the name was that my staff at Lucid would help with the writing, and the single pseudonym would represent the collective, much as the French mathematicians in the 1930s used "Nicolas Bourbaki" as their collective name while rewriting the foundations of mathematics in their image. However, no one but I wrote anything under that name."

http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

That must explain how people have already written posts complaining that it's elitist and consists of nothing more than my subjective opinions presented as if they were true.

I'm not sure this is a good thing.

As far as I can see, Apple is if anything even more tyrannical and monopolistic than Microsoft, the main difference being that Apple is sexier. Apple wants the computer to become like a household appliance, closed to outside modification.

Looking at how they've run iTunes, the restrictive iPhone SDK, etc ... M$ wanted to control all your software but they at least gave you some choice on hardware. If Apple becomes the new monopoly we won't even have any say on that.

Did you guys ever watch that South Park episode where one of the grade-school girls starts to grow tits? Suddenly all of the boys start thinking "she's so smart!" and "she's so funny!" and wanting to hang out with her, and they honestly have no idea that there is any connection between their new attitudes and her new tits.

There is no question in my mind that Macs are beautiful. The latest gadgets like the iPods and iPhones are real works of art.

Sometimes I wonder if Apple doesn't get cut a bit too much slack just because they are "cool". Just because someone is beautiful and smiling at you doesn't necessarily mean they do not have malicious intent. And especially it seems a lot of times, we are just so eager to believe in any credible opponent to M$ that we are willing to overlook any warning signs. I wonder if the peasants that supported the French and Russian revolutions felt the same way?

Damn. Forgot that. Yes, sorry, it's not an April Fools' joke. I am actually nickb.

I already read your new essay using GDay ;-)

April Fools. Read to the bottom and it's clearly a joke.

But it's a day early (though to be fair, it is April 1st in some parts of a world)

Please please please don't post every single April Fools joke you see on the internet tomorrow. If it's particularly hacker-worthy, then sure. This is not.

Damn. Forgot that. Yes, sorry, it's an April Fools' joke. Thanks, Alex, for helping out. The recent outage (now fixed, let's hope) is unconnected, btw.

Your "(Incendentally, a moment's...)" comment makes me sad. Obviously Roth spent well over a moment reading and contemplating your essay. The fact that you disregard his thoughts so flippantly, along with those of other intelligent people, makes me wonder whose opinions you would respect.

He clearly states he thought your central point was: "It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck," because "humans weren't meant to work in such large groups."

How is this so different than your stated thesis that: "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?"

His refutation relies on examples of humans partaking in behavior that they were not originally "evolved" to do. It is a direct response to your reliance on evolution. If you thought the whole point of your essay was "obvious enough not to need justification," then why did you write a whole essay on the subject?

To address your central point, I would cite the space program. Humans were obviously not evolved to be space-faring creatures, and yet hundreds (thousands?) of human intellects in concert (in a tree-structured organization) managed to land a man on the moon. The idea of synergy, where many humans in an organizational structure can accomplish more than any single human's evolved capabilities, has long been recognized (http://www.complexsystems.org/magic.html). Many people that work in such organizations draw personal satisfaction from the fact that they are furthering what they consider a greater good, rather than their own personal desires. Where a start-up glorifies individuals, organizations tend to glorify the whole. The fact that this is not satisfying to some does not mean it is not satisfying to others, and certainly does not imply that “You were not meant to have a boss.”

The first step is admitting you have a problem. You're on the right track.

What a pity. I had been assuming for a while that nickb was a code for 'nickname b' (where pg was 'nickname a').