I don't agree with that at all, and taken literally it would make adaptation impossible, which can't be right.
HN has never been a rule-driven, legalistic kind of place, and isn't going to get that way. But I've had to learn a lot about people who do feel this way and obviously have a lot to learn yet. My own temperament is very far from this; it's almost impossible for me not to read "we'll figure it out as we go" as a good, fine thing.
You're missing the point others are trying to make. I'm all for experimentation - by all means. I experiment literally every single day, often failing, but occasionally succeeding.
The issue was that it wasn't clear there would be rule-changing or experimentation /during/ the experiment, rather than after the experiment.
I agree that if that wasn't clear, it was a huge problem. The whole idea was to figure this particular experiment out as we went along. Not putative future instances of it, which we hadn't even thought about or mentioned amongst ourselves. Why would we, when the first one hadn't even started?
From my point of view that sentence about making it up as we go was the most important thing in the original post. It meant that we didn't have to plan a fixed set of rules: if and when something unforeseen came up, we'd adapt to it then. That's why I said "initial conditions". I'd never have proposed anything that took away our ability to adapt in the middle of this, and especially not about something so untried.
You changed the rules to keep Pinboard out of the program. Even Kevin Hale admits that. You weren't turning the knobs to see what would change. The outcome was clear, you didn't like it, and so you prevented it from happening.
I think, at this point, the issue is that it's clear to most of us what happened, but YC is still trying to put a gloss on it.
The more you and Kevin Hale try to mitigate this, the more polarized it gets, and the meaner some commenters get about Maciej, who didn't do anything wrong. You don't have to accept Pinboard into YCF, but you have a responsibility not to let him take any of the blame for this.
It is very difficult to have a meaningful experiment if you change what you're doing in the experiment as you go. "Initial conditions" makes sense as "the conditions for this initial run".
Or maybe, now that you've figured out what this experiment is supposed to be, you should actually run this experiment, i.e., start it over, with a clear understanding of what's going on and what the parameters are. It's unsurprising that people were confused about the parameters since you yourselves were confused about them. Their confusion is on you.
no rule of law -> automatic bullshit.