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> From my perspective the fact that good people were clearly split suggests that either option would work perfectly well.

It's a nice rationality gem right here. If the costs and benefits of both options you're choosing from balance each other out, instead of carefully searching for optimal solution that will yield little marginal utility benefit you may as well toss a coin and be done with it.



http://lesswrong.com/lw/th/harder_choices_matter_less/

There's also Piet Hein's classic decision-making strategy when both strategies seem equally good: flip a coin and do what it says. And if you suddenly feel in your gut that the coin picked the wrong option, then you've discovered they weren't equally good.


Actually it's where I first read that insight ;). Though I'm never able to find the link when I need it.


Definitely a management perspective.


Sometimes that's the best perspective to have. And in this case, I believe it is. If left up to us engineers/hackers/nerds, we would continue to stubbornly work on or with one system or the other, prolonging the debate indefinitely. And hey, if enough people really feel strongly that Upstart is superior, it's FOSS! Fork and build a community! I know it's not easy but if enough people share your passion it can happen, and that's Yet Another Reason(tm) Open Source rocks.


No, it's an intelligent perspective. I would hope that any engineer would follow similar reasoning and arrive at similar conclusions given the facts.


The problem is, of course, knowing both options are roughly equivalent. That may take a lot of work to find out.




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