On 11/11/02 2:51 PM, "Poor, Edmund W" Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com wrote:

I'm not going to understand you better just because you repeat yourself.

Try: *Hospital Administrator *Chief Surgeon *Surgeon *Scrub Nurse *Orderly

Each has authority over those on the level below.

Only in a sense; I certainly wouldn't want the hospital administrator to tell the chief surgeon how to perform an appendectomy; nor, say, if the chief surgeon is a cardio specialist, would I want her to tell a neurosurgeon how to remove a brain tumor; nor does the surgeon know more about the scrub nurse's job than the nurse does, etc.

And if the orderly happens to be my mother, the HA doesn't have moral authority over the orderly.

Authority and levels are *contextual*.

To not use analogy: the developers know more about (or at least have a greater combination of knowledge, time, and interest) Wikipedia code than others. That hardly means that they are better judges of what makes a good editor than non-developers. It doesn't even mean they're a better judge of interface.

Similarly, I respect Jimbo's authority not because he controls the project, but because he's demonstrated that he controls the project *and* he knows how to do it well.