[HN Gopher] Overthinking
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Overthinking
Author : z0mbie42
Score : 78 points
Date : 2022-06-12 14:55 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (kerkour.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kerkour.com)
| itsmemattchung wrote:
| Amazon has an internal tool called "Forte", a tool used once a
| year for employees to provide "anonymous" feedback for one
| another. One piece of feedback that cropped up multiple times for
| me, from multiple people, was that I could improve in "bias for
| action", akin to analysis paralysis mentioned in the article.
|
| At first, I got a bit defensive ... and in response, I ended up
| running an experiment, delivering code & written documents that
| -- inside my head -- felt incomplete, unpolished, not quite at
| the "bar".
|
| The feedback following?
|
| Overwhelmingly positive.
|
| I had anticipated that my peers and leadership would notice a
| drop in quality. Instead, I was commended for speed of delivery.
| throwawayarnty wrote:
| This made me think of science and academia. One of the things
| that seems to distinguish productive people in science is the
| balance between "doer" mentality and "thinker" mentality.
|
| Too much "thinker" mentality and the project never goes anywhere.
| Too much "doer" mentally and the project moves but may go down an
| unproductive path.
|
| Perhaps an analogy is that "thinker" and "doer" mentalities work
| together like a stochastic gradient descent algorithm.
|
| The "thinker" mode tries to calculate accurate gradients, but
| never moves towards the goal.
|
| The "doer" mode takes a step towards the next iteration,
| regardless of whether you have an accurate gradient already.
|
| Balancing the two correctly can give beautiful momentum dynamics
| that steers towards your goal.
| glial wrote:
| > Balancing the two correctly
|
| There are some famous examples complementary and different
| personalities working together very well, like e.g. Kahneman
| and Tversky:
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-two-friends-...
| bombcar wrote:
| A big part of learning this is _not_ overanalyzing past failures.
| Check and see if you missed something major, but then don 't
| dwell much on the details; perhaps anything you would have done
| would have been doomed to failure; it wasn't the time, etc.
| hinkley wrote:
| PA Yeomans, the 'other' father of permaculture, had a checklist
| he called the Scale of Permanence. It's a sort of priority list
| for irreversible decisions, and is helpful for figuring out if
| you're expending energy on something that's easy to change
| later, or rashly deciding on something that is going to be
| difficult or infeasible to change later.
|
| In a system that favors watching first and acting at the last
| responsible moment, this is in someways both a counterweight
| and an anchor for analysis.
|
| There are some ways in which systems thinking is the same no
| matter what domain you're looking at, and to some extent the
| ways in which they are different have more to do with lack/lag
| in cross-domain communication rather than any intrinsic
| distinctions between the domains. There is probably a Scale of
| Permanence for creating a business, it's just not called that
| or nobody has compiled a canonical list from the available
| sources.
| astrange wrote:
| > PA Yeomans, the 'other' father of permaculture, had a
| checklist he called the Scale of Permanence.
|
| What an interesting case of nominative determinism.
| contingencies wrote:
| Living in China it's quite amazing how the business culture
| differs from many western markets. People seem to throw
| themselves in to ventures without business plans, market research
| or specific costings. I suppose that when the cost of failure is
| reduced, dynamism results, because reaction times to
| opportunities are reduced and people are able to take the risk of
| following a new path. These days, when I think of analysis
| paralysis, I think of conservative traditional western business
| mindsets. The worst of which, frankly, seem to be continental
| European and governmental bureaucracies.
|
| FWIW in the last 18 months I recall pitching one major European
| industrial group requesting specifically disruptive technology
| for established industries. Considered at the board level, their
| feedback was unanimously positive: but they could not take the
| opportunity because it was "too far from existing business
| lines". If you thought corporate VC was bad, try that in an old-
| Europe context...
| Deritio wrote:
| There are not many industry breaking huge china based companies
| globally in comparison of how many people they have.
|
| Perhaps our way might not be that bad after all.
|
| And while Chinese currently the EV market discovers it's
| totally unclear how the car industry will look in 10 years
| Archelaos wrote:
| > If you thought corporate VC was bad, try that in an old-
| Europe context...
|
| I am not sure whether it is specific for old-Europe or not just
| a universal symptom for long-running companies unable to re-
| invent themselves, because they were somehow locked into an
| established pathway, so that fundamental changes promissing
| probable benefits in the long run would mean certain short-term
| losses in the near future due to major investments and
| canibalization of their legacy businesses. An example outside
| of Europe seems to be Boeing's stretching of a several-decade-
| old airplane design towards a limit were it became increasingly
| problematic, while starting over would have involved extremely
| large investments and the loss of much of the experience gained
| from the old design.
|
| On the positive side, such lock-ins of traditional companies
| can mean sound business opportunities for small newcomers. I
| was myself working with small dynamic companies in Germany and
| Austria who were afraid that one day a large, financially
| strong competitor might decide to copy their successful
| products and business modell or enter their highly profitable
| niche market -- however, it never happened. In other words: If
| the parent is right and established companies in old-Europe are
| even more unflexible than elsewhere, it should be safer to
| attempt to disrupt their old-Europe markets than to try the
| same somewhere else.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| A refreshingly good take on paralysis by analysis. I have
| suffered from this in the past as well. I found that having
| projects that are otherwise meaningless that I can hack together
| helps. It's almost like a mini hackathon where the only thing
| that matters is the end product. Maybe I'll choose something
| completely out of my professional life (eg woodworking with scrap
| wood) or write something in a language nobody around me likes
| because it's "ugly."
| wnolens wrote:
| Kind of like practicing non-perfectionism? I received that
| advice from a friend once. Pick a domain with much lower
| stakes, and practice making decisions.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| Yes, I find failure is a key component here too. Without
| being able to fail, you get stuck in the perfection loop.
| [deleted]
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| > I've also noticed that, up to a certain point, the smarter a
| person is, the more it has to be apparent in their work. Every
| algorithm needs to be perfect, every function needs to be side-
| effects free, every data structure needs to be the fastest, and
| every best practice needs to be followed.
|
| Many engineers are somewhere on the Asperger's spectrum, as
| Temple Grandin tells her Googler audience in [1]. Overthinking is
| a prime symptom of it. I'm disappointed to see that not even
| mentioned in this article.
|
| There are some engineering practices that, unfortunately, amplify
| this rather than tamping it down. Code reviews, in particular,
| can do that; a reviewer gets points by nitpicking ("you could
| have done that in one line instead of two!").
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA4tE3_2qmI
| kissiel wrote:
| Thing that helped me with avoiding this kind of problem was
| learning about wabi sabi[0]. A mindset of accepting and finding
| beauty in imperfection.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi
| blocked_again wrote:
| Are there any books you recommend?
| astrange wrote:
| I'd recommend https://metarationality.com/.
|
| It's a book optimized for arguing with rationalists (who
| among other things think overthinking can solve every
| problem) so some of the points seem irrelevant to most
| people, but they can be useful.
| padde wrote:
| I like the article. The architecture bit I'm not so sure about
| though. I wish in my company the architects actually did _more_
| thinking and especially talking / negotiating with all the other
| architects of adjacent components. That would really help.
| Instead they work hard to fix minor problems and build walls in
| between the components... or yet another middleware-generator-
| middleware-wrapper.
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