[HN Gopher] Leonardo Syndrome
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Leonardo Syndrome
Author : memorable
Score : 74 points
Date : 2022-10-04 08:50 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thoughtfulatlas.bearblog.dev)
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| Sophistifunk wrote:
| This isn't a "syndrome" it's normal adaptive behaviour. Like
| everything you encounter in the real world, 80% of everything you
| decide to start doesn't actually need to be finished. Sometimes
| you need to start something in order to learn you're not willing
| to pay the price to have it finished, or you don't really need
| it.
| simonsarris wrote:
| I get the author's point but this is kind of an odd read. He did
| finish the horse inasmuch as possible. He made full clay models.
| He never completed it only because Ludovico needed the bronze to
| make cannons for defense instead. But that's not his fault.
|
| And making experimental paints that happened to not last very
| long is also not a failure to finish something. It's just an
| experiment.
|
| > misunderstanding several aspects of the heart
|
| These few words don't really give his work justice. He
| discovered/theorized how the aortic valve and its leaflets worked
| that was correct and wasn't really conclusively proved for
| another 400 years. (He was nonetheless wrong about blood
| circulation, generally)
|
| > to the Mona Lisa - which in itself is unfinished
|
| I don't know. He worked on it for 4 years, taking it with him
| everywhere, and if it is really unfinished it may be because his
| right hand was simply starting to paralyze. There's more to be
| said about perfectionism in the Mona Lisa than Leonardo syndrome.
|
| Leonardo definitely started far more than he could finish
| (disappointing a lot of patrons), and had a somewhat self-
| aggrandizing streak in what he claimed he could do, but the
| examples here are not super accurate. As much as I wasn't crazy
| about the Walter Isaacson bio its worth reading if you want a
| better picture of his accomplishments and failures.
|
| At the end of the day he is remembered because he did actually
| have a very large set of detailed ideas, drawings, plans, and
| accomplishments. Most of us would love to have created a work of
| art as unfinished as the Mona Lisa.
| hirundo wrote:
| Syndrome implies malady. Better words for this style as applied
| to Leonardo would be Power/Capacity/Knack/Talent/Aptitude.
| jebarker wrote:
| There is a malady that looks like this where someone is just
| flaky or incompetent. But then it probably shouldn't be named
| after Leonardo if he was actually displaying genius levels of
| knowing when to quit.
| svat wrote:
| On the other hand, there are many reports that Leonardo himself
| lamented not finishing things, and wrote "Tell me if anything
| was ever done" in his notebooks.
|
| (I don't know the full context of this--searching online
| suggests the original was "Dimmi se mai fu fatta alcuna cosa"--
| but as you yourself say, Leonardo was prone to perfectionism
| and starting far more than he could finish and had a reputation
| for disappointing patrons, which seems to fit well with the
| author's main point, even if the example of the horse doesn't.)
| black_13 wrote:
| He was still Leonardo.
| f1shy wrote:
| >> Leonardo da Vinci himself. Despite being one of the most
| famous polymaths and creators in history - who doesn't know about
| him?! - he was also somebody prone to failure.
|
| I actually prefer to think to myself: failure is not even trying.
| If not, I would not start many things and finish few, but never
| start anything at all...
| teddyh wrote:
| Charles Babbage may be a more fitting example:
|
| _In the first room I saw the parts of the original Calculating
| Machine, which had been shown in an incomplete state many years
| before and had even been put to some use. I asked him about its
| present form. "I have not finished it because in working at it I
| came on the idea of my Analytical Engine, which would do all that
| it was capable of doing and much more. Indeed the idea was so
| much simpler that it would have taken more work to complete the
| calculating machine than to design and construct the other in its
| entirety, so I turned my attention to the Analytical Machine."
| After a few minutes' talk we went into the next workroom where he
| showed and explained to me the working of the elements of the
| Analytical Machine. I asked if I could see it. "I have never
| completed it," he said, "because I hit upon the idea of doing the
| same thing by a different and far more effective method, and this
| rendered it useless to proceed on the old lines." Then we went
| into the third room. There lay scattered bits of mechanism but I
| saw no trace of any working machine. Very cautiously I approached
| the subject, and received the dreaded answer, "It is not
| constructed yet, but I am working at it, and will take less time
| to construct it altogether than it would have taken to complete
| the Analytical Machine from the stage in which I left it." I took
| leave of the old man with a heavy heart._
|
| -- John Fletcher Moulton, 1914
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is however somewhat reassuring to know that something like
| feature creep or second system syndrome predates the digital
| computer.
| dariusj18 wrote:
| Sounds like someone needed a Scrum master
| leetrout wrote:
| If he had invented sprints before inventing computing
| devices he would have been able to more readily deliver
| shareholder value.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I read somewhere that he had problems into obtaining parts
| manufactured with enough precision and that he was using wood
| and that was terrible
|
| They did fashion them in modern times, from the designs, and it
| seems they did work.
| Kye wrote:
| This seems similar to the problem we have with fusion. We
| know how to do it, but the materials for sustaining it just
| aren't there yet.
| peteradio wrote:
| Sounds like he was working with agility! Do just enough work to
| find out you're building the wrong thing so that it informs
| your next attempt. Repeat!
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| > Examples of his failure include not successfully squaring the
| circle
|
| Seems kind of mean to attack a guy for failing to finish
| something later proven to be impossible.
| hirundo wrote:
| DaVinci is in good company. Another such slacker was Newton,
| who spent all of that time on alchemy but never did transmute
| lead into gold.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| For Newton to be interested in alchemy loosely makes sense,
| given the time frame.
|
| I don't really understand much about Jung, but apparently
| towards the end of his life he became increasingly interested
| in alchemy. He published on it quite a bit. It's a really
| weird chapter in his legacy.
| lioeters wrote:
| Alchemy is another expression, a symbolic language, as part
| of a larger mythological and psychological journey in
| Jung's life and inner world.
|
| > Jung referred to his imaginative or visionary venture
| during these years as "my most difficult experiment." This
| experiment involved a voluntary confrontation with the
| unconscious through wilful engagement of what Jung later
| termed "mythopoetic imagination".
|
| > From December 1913 onward, he carried on in the same
| procedure: deliberately evoking a fantasy in a waking
| state, and then entering into it as into a drama. These
| fantasies may be understood as a type of dramatized
| thinking in pictorial form... In retrospect, he recalled
| that his scientific question was to see what took place
| when he switched off consciousness. The example of dreams
| indicated the existence of background activity, and he
| wanted to give this a possibility of emerging, just as one
| does when taking mescaline.
|
| > Jung initially recorded his "visions", or "fantasies, or
| "imaginations"--all terms used by Jung to describe his
| activity -- in a series of six journals.
|
| > ..In 1957, near the end of his life, Jung spoke about the
| Red Book and the process which yielded it; in that
| interview he stated:
|
| > The years ... when I pursued the inner images, were the
| most important time of my life. Everything else is to be
| derived from this. It began at that time, and the later
| details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in
| elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and
| flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break
| me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one
| life. Everything later was merely the outer classification,
| scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But
| the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was
| then.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Book_(Jung)
| lioeters wrote:
| Ah, would that we aspire to achieve and accomplish even a
| fraction of such glorious, brilliant failures.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Finishing _(i.e. shipping)_ stuff is a pain.
|
| At some point, we reach the part where the fun stuff is done.
| We've learned pretty much everything we can, from the exercise,
| and it's "90%" done.
|
| That last 10%, however, is a _bear_. Many, many folks never
| bother with it.
|
| In a lot of cases, that's fine. The main purpose was learning,
| and there's really not enough "market pull" to justify finishing
| the project.
|
| If there is a requirement to see it through to completion (like,
| say, a contract, with your signature on it), then we need to
| complete that last 10%, even if it's boring.
|
| There's a joke: _" 90% of the project is completed in 10% of the
| time. 10% of the project is completed in 90% of the time."_
| (there are many variants, thereof).
|
| Ever notice how, when a new building is going up, it appears to
| be "complete," in an astonishingly short time? Then, it's twice
| as long, before the doors open?
|
| That's because making the exterior and structure is
| straightforward, and can be done by just about anyone. Framing,
| windows, doors, roofing, masonry, etc., are skills, but not
| extremely specialized.
|
| The interior stuff, though, requires a _lot_ of skill. You can 't
| just bring in some half-trained hammer monkey. You need the
| experienced finish carpenters, and the expensive painters, etc.
| These folks are harder to schedule, and won't rush the job. Their
| work is what people will see, up close, every day, so it needs a
| lot of polish, and has to be robust.
|
| Same with any product.
|
| I'm writing an SDK, right now. It was probably 90% complete, last
| week, but I wrote a pretty beefy test harness for it, and I am
| now implementing a whole bunch of "live server" unit tests. I am
| finding bugs in my implementation (I always do), and I'm fixing
| them, as I go along. I'm also encountering the "little things,"
| that I forgot to implement.
|
| Once I have the unit tests all humming along to my satisfaction
| (I tend to write unit tests after the fact, for SDKs. I write
| about that here[0]), I'll flesh out the documentation.
|
| Only then, when I can release the project as a standalone
| package, will I return to the main app, that is my initial
| consumer of the SDK, and I'll need to integrate it; replacing an
| older SDK (that I also wrote).
|
| Lot of boring stuff, but it means that I don't have to worry
| about this very critical (and dicey) communication
| infrastructure, when working on the main app.
|
| [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/blah-blah-blah/testing-
| harness-...
| alecfreudenberg wrote:
| These kind of people just do what they want. They have no
| internal obligation to complete a project, even if they at some
| point agreed to it.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-QW-0yi86c
| dqpb wrote:
| Breadth First Search
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >Examples of his failures included not successfully squaring the
| circle, multiple engineering designs that didn't work such as a
| giant crossbow and a flying machine, misunderstanding several
| aspects of the heart, and experimental painting designs that
| resulted in the slow degradation of a painting.
|
| The author is counting experiments and learning as failures. The
| squared circle is outright impossible. Only when expectations are
| set to God on Earth is Leo a "failure".
| paulpauper wrote:
| Yahoo/Google/Microsoft syndrome: the tendency to arbitrarily
| cancel projects without warning, usually after an acquisition is
| made.
| 2devnull wrote:
| We're broken by the language: work vs play is a bad distinction.
| When you apply criterion from "work" to "play" it appears as
| though there are many failures and false starts. We should do
| both, and at the same time.
| DerekBickerton wrote:
| I think I have Leonardo Syndrome. The Internet being so vast,
| there's countless things to try out and hack away at, and I have
| countless unfinished projects hoarded away on my hard-drives. I'm
| not actually a hoarder in the typical sense of keeping old
| newspapers for posterity and I'm actually a minimalist, but when
| it comes to my digital life: the ease of being able to keep
| mountains of the proverbial 'old newspapers' is magnified a
| trillion^trillion times.
|
| Leonardo would be paralyzed by the modern web. I find myself also
| becoming like a magpie, gathering little snippets of code that
| one day may come in handy, and my bookmarks are overflowing with
| interesting actionable URLs that I plan to revisit _someday_. I
| 'm a digital hoarder who likes to procrastinate a lot. Probably
| need to change that, or is this a natural response to the sheer
| vastness of the web and the only sane way to approach it?
| bob1029 wrote:
| I certainly have it, but I think there are ways to fight back.
|
| Github and strictly source-controlling all my personal projects
| has done wonders for my progress.
|
| The crappy part still is when you hit a blocker and really have
| to bust your ass to get through it. The temptation to go
| sideways and do something else is extremely strong when you
| don't have a business owner standing behind you.
| leetrout wrote:
| I could have written the same comment!
|
| I leave incomplete projects when I have gotten what I want from
| them. Many times it is just for exposure to a library or
| language or pattern.
|
| I learn by doing so to fully grok something I have to use it
| which leads to this situation.
| pfyra wrote:
| Who's to say that the projects are incomplete if you have
| achieved what you wanted from them? Sounds very much complete
| to me, even though the final result might not be useful to
| anyone else.
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