[HN Gopher] Perfectionism is optimizing at the wrong scale
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Perfectionism is optimizing at the wrong scale
Author : Curiositry
Score : 78 points
Date : 2024-06-15 16:55 UTC (6 hours ago)
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| jeremywho wrote:
| Good-enough seems to be the sweet spot. After that I think you
| run into diminishing returns.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Especially if you're inventing Lithium batteries.
| mjburgess wrote:
| "Perfectionism" is just avoidance. You don't want to work on
| something because it won't be "good enough". The keep part there
| is: you dont want to work on something.
|
| Avoidance has a approach/repel dynamic. You are attracted to it
| because you want the reward, but repelled by it because you think
| it's difficult. "Don't spare the rod" parenting, beats children
| until they stop avoiding things (ie., an approach-side policy:
| encourage approach). You can also break tasks down, make them
| less core to your identity, rewards etc. (repl-side policy: make
| it less repulsive).
|
| A lot of people try the approach-side policies, and beat
| themselves up, etc. which works sometimes but not always.
| "Perfectionism" is often caused when people beat themselves up to
| do something thereby making that very thing seem even more
| difficult/essential/important/etc. which makes it even more
| repulsive.
|
| "Perfection" is the propaganda of a mind doing everything it can
| to avoid a task, often also caused, by pathological demand
| avoidance wherein avoidance can become extremely elaborate in
| justification to the point of apparent delusion.
|
| Ignore all this superficial language. The heart of the behaviour
| is in what isnt being done; that's the truth of what's going on.
| jjulius wrote:
| >"Perfectionism" is just avoidance.
|
| And this is an absolute that isn't true.
| mjburgess wrote:
| Perfectionism in this context of task-based perfectionist
| behaviour.
|
| If you mean the broad category of maladaptive behaviour
| called perfectionism, see, eg.,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfectionism_(psychology) --
| where, when applied to tasks, it has the dynamics i've
| described.
|
| > Perfectionism can be damaging. It can take the form of
| procrastination when used to postpone tasks and self-
| deprecation when used to excuse poor performance or to seek
| sympathy and affirmation from other people. These, together
| or separate, are self-handicapping strategies perfectionists
| may use to protect their sense of self-competence.[44][45] In
| general, perfectionists feel constant pressure to meet their
| high expectations, which creates cognitive dissonance when
| expectations cannot be met.
| rconti wrote:
| > "Don't spare the rod" parenting, beats children until they
| stop avoiding things (ie., an approach-side policy: encourage
| approach).
|
| Unless the "don't spare the rod" parenting is beating the
| children over substandard quality, or something other than the
| one specific aspect you chose to highlight.
| mjburgess wrote:
| Perfectionism isn't about quality, that's the illusion: it
| isn't anyone sincerely trying to make something perfect.
| Depending on the type, it can be about control; or on tasks,
| as with this article, it's typically just a disguise for
| avoidance.
|
| It doesnt make sense to argue with a perfectionist about how
| to make something perfect. That completely misses the point.
| They have no interest in making it perfect, nor any notion of
| what it being perfect would even be like. In the vast
| majority of cases, it's avoidance.
|
| In any case, when people beat their children it is because
| they aren't doing what they "are supposed to do" and is very
| much connected with perfectionism. Children grow up worried
| to fail to meet some parental standard. When they apply this
| beating-themseleves-up means of self-motivation to some tasks
| this can cause avoidance, because the tasks spiral into ever
| more delusional levels of importance and difficulty.
|
| The solution to this sort of perfectionism is emotional. It
| is engaging with what a person is afraid of, what's causing
| their avoidance, what part of them is being "triggered" by
| the task, and working backwards from a completed state, etc.
|
| A perfectionist, in many ways, _wants_ to argue about how to
| perfect a task; this just enables more avoidance; and indeed,
| confirms their fears.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > "Perfectionism" is just avoidance. You don't want to work on
| something because it won't be "good enough". The keep part
| there is: you dont want to work on something.
|
| Everybody talking about perfectionism is trying to explain to
| you that this is not true. Perfectionists have anxiety about
| _delivering_ things, and will often avoid extremely easy work
| in order to do harder things. I 'd almost say that's the
| defining characteristic; you'll see a lot of things that are
| 95% completed, and instead of finishing and delivering, they'll
| switch to learning ancient Greek (edit: or add a bunch of
| "necessary" complications that balloon that 5% into infinity.)
|
| Go through a perfectionist's projects, find one that's close to
| deliverable with a few finishing touches. They will try to keep
| you away from it (they may even pick a fight with you), they
| will hide it from you, they'll tell you it's terrible, they may
| try to destroy it, and if you manage to pry it away and finish
| it, they'll beg you to take their name off of it. They will do
| this to the point of emotional manipulation and open threats.
|
| The avoidance of the task isn't the _cause_ , it's the _only_
| symptom.
|
| > Ignore all this superficial language. The heart of the
| behaviour is in what isnt being done; that's the truth of
| what's going on.
|
| Perfectionism has absolutely fuck-all to do with the specific
| task. Perfectionists like working on things, which is why
| they're constantly doing it.
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| Well said. I've been reading through the comments looking for
| this nuance and I think you're the only one (so far) that hit
| the nail on the head.
| pflenker wrote:
| The equivalent thought process is: you can't optimize for both
| the whole system and each subsystem at the same time. If you
| optimize for one, the other will suffer.
|
| This is why even the best companies have in parts chaotic
| internal sub-structures and teams.
| jp57 wrote:
| I agree with the thesis of this article but I actually think the
| point would be better made if we switch from talking about
| _optimizing_ to talking about _satisficing_ [1].
|
| Simply put, satisficing is searching for a solution that meets a
| particular threshold for acceptability, and then stopping. My
| personal high-level strategy for success is one of continual
| iterative satisficing. The iterative part means that once I have
| met an acceptability criterion, I am free to either move on to
| something else, or raise my bar for acceptability and search
| again. I never worry about whether a solution is optimal, though,
| only if it is good enough.
|
| I think that this is what many people are really doing when they
| say they are "optimizing", but using the term "optimzing" leads
| to confusion, because satisficing solutions are by definition
| non-optimal (except by luck), and some people (especially the
| young, in my experience) seem to feel compelled to actually
| optimize, leading to unnecessary perfectionism.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing
|
| ps -- Re-reading that wikipedia article reminds me of how often
| the topics that make the front page as "new" thoughts have been
| studied and written about in detail by thinkers of the past.
| Herbert Simon's Bounded Rationality has a lot to say about the
| toping of the original link.
| secondcoming wrote:
| What a terrible word.
|
| Seems like it's for people who like to kick the can down the
| road and convince themselves they're doing something good and
| 'out of the box'
| jp57 wrote:
| That totally describes Herb Simon, for sure.
| wenc wrote:
| Instead of being so hostile toward a word that you've just
| encountered, how would it be if we were more curious about
| the concept behind it?
|
| Satisficing is a form of constraint satisfaction under
| certainty, which although leads to local optima, can turn out
| to be more robust to unknowns.
|
| Optimization assumes a correct model of the world, and that
| we can find a point within that model that gives us the best
| trade-offs (optimum).
|
| But our models of the world are often incomplete or wrong.
| And even if we get to that optimum point, we back ourselves
| into a corner if the environment ever changes on us.
|
| Instead, iteratively finding a satisfactory solutions that
| helps us make progress in the right direction is often far
| more valuable, and more robust to model mismatches to the
| real world.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> What a terrible word.
|
| I agree. It's truly cromulent.
| ein0p wrote:
| 90% of the time "perfectionism" is pure procrastination. Being
| self-aware of this fact is a requirement for shipping anything of
| value.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'm not sure to follow. Do you think procrastinating is a
| better way to reach perfection ? or do you think working too
| much is equivalent to procrastination (aka a defect) ?
| ein0p wrote:
| There's no goal in this case to "reach perfection" on the
| whole. One just focuses on the stuff they're good at and find
| easy to do at the expense of necessarily, but perhaps more
| difficult and less pleasant work. I've been guilty of this.
| And I will be guilty of this in the future I'm sure. It just
| helps to be self aware or it could get way out of hand.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Oh I see, I partially agree. You can yak shave forever,
| until you find another thing to yak shave. It takes some
| maturity to balance this and avoid disrupting the project
| because you optimized non important stuff.
|
| I even had a strange lesson. In a team of three, the
| smartest did try to improve everything and never finished
| so his contributions were mostly wasted. While the weakest
| programmer, but one who would focus on solving some tickets
| in very low quality ways managed to feel less harmful to
| the team overall.
| antonyt wrote:
| "Perfectionism" can be just an excuse for avoidant behavior.
| I'm going to focus on this thing until its perfect. Does it
| need to be perfect? No, but I enjoy fiddling with this one
| thing and don't want to think about this other pile of work
| that's less fun to engage with.
| rconti wrote:
| Every time the topic of perfectionism comes up, a lot of people
| come out of the woodwork with a weird fetish for arguing that
| the psychological establishment is using the term wrong. To
| what end, I'm not sure.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Perfectionism is what leads to good results. Many people who aim
| directly for good enough come short.
| m463 wrote:
| looking at these comments, it seems perfectionism is ill-defined.
|
| it seems to be positive - perfectionism is not giving up, it is
| excellence, it is beyond mediocre.
|
| it also seems to be negative - it is going too far, it is
| avoiding/procrastinating, it is self-defeating.
|
| I wonder what the perfect definition would be?
| cm11 wrote:
| Arguing with something/someone by labeling it (too) perfect is a
| bit of a signal for me. Criticizing perfectionism is often just a
| lazy way to argue for one's side--usually to argue for doing
| less, but notably the less that doesn't matter to the arguer.
| Requesting more QA time, improving load times, getting one more
| feature in could be perfectionist, but have to argue against the
| particular thing not perfectionism.
|
| The thing I most worry about using anti-perfectionism arguments
| is that it begs a vision in the first place--perfectionism
| requires an idea of what's perfect. Projects suffer from a lack
| of real hypotheses. Fine, just build. But if you're cutting
| something important to others by calling it too perfect, can you
| define the goal (not just the ingredients)? We tend to justify
| these things by saying, we'll iterate. Much like perfectionism
| can always be criticized, iteration can theoretically always make
| a thing better. Iteration is not vision and strategy, it's nearly
| the reverse, it hedges vision and strategy.
|
| This is a slightly different point, but when we say we don't need
| this extra security or that UX performance, you're setting a
| ceiling on the people who are passionate about them. Those things
| really do have limits (no illusions!), but you're not just
| cutting corners, you're cutting specific corners. That's a
| company's culture. Being accused of perfectionism justifiably
| leads to upset that the company doesn't care about security or
| users. Yeah, maybe it's limited to this one project, but often
| not.
|
| I agree with others that on a personal level, perfectionism is a
| lot of individual procrastination. I'm commenting a bit more
| about groups, but it might work quite well to look at the leader
| as procrastinating on strategy by calling downstream work
| perfectionist.
| ChicagoMan wrote:
| Similarly, it's helpful to remember that "high level" rhymes
| with lie level.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Makes me think of one of the Akin's Laws of Spacecraft
| Design:
|
| _6. (Mar 's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log
| with a fat magic marker._
|
| It's all fine in context, but things go wrong if you _only_
| look at that high-level view and then step back down to low-
| level: you may think you 've done something useful, but you
| mostly just threw away the high-frequency components, i.e.
| the important bits of the signal. Your view gets blurred and
| unrefined (literally, in case of dropping the high
| frequencies of an image).
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| Not sure you can talk about perfectionism without clarifying
| between "healthy" perfectionism and "unhealthy" perfectionism.
|
| Both exist, but often people are thinking of one or the other
| when discussing perfectionism, and it creates cognitive
| dissonance when two people thinking of the two different modes
| are singing perfectionism's praises or denouncing its practice.
| therobots927 wrote:
| Perfectionism is sort of polarizing, and a lot of product manager
| / CEO types see it as the enemy. In certain contexts it might be,
| but in others "perfectionism" translates to "building the
| foundation flawlessly with the downstream dependencies in mind to
| minimize future tech debt." Of course, a lot of managers prefer
| to pretend that tech debt doesn't exist but that's just because
| they don't think they can pay it off in time before their team
| gets cut for not producing any value because they were so busy
| paying off tech debt. That's why it's critical to try to minimize
| it in the first place, which almost never happens because
| engineers are held to tight launch deadlines and sacrifices are
| made in the process. And this is not just a problem at startups,
| if anything it's a bigger problem in BigTech(tm) where I have the
| privilege of cleaning up after messes that were made over a
| decade ago.
| cedws wrote:
| "Perfectionism is sort of polarizing, and a lot of product
| manager / CEO types see it as the enemy." And it definitely
| shows. In the software world low quality is almost a given now.
| CEOs rush things out so they can start making money as soon as
| possible only for the product to be unstable and hated by the
| users it was forced upon.
|
| Recall just got Recalled probably because Nadella said "we'll
| iterate."
|
| Would DOOM be the same game if Carmack et al were told to rush
| things, cut corners, and iterate?
|
| I see programming as an art, and art takes time. It doesn't
| conform to deadlines and sprints.
|
| From what I've heard it works differently in Japan. They take
| their time to get things right the first time.
| kazinator wrote:
| This article argues against an utterly strawman form of
| perfectionism that almost no perfectionist exhibits.
|
| The details that perfectionists are concerned with almost always
| matter, just maybe not much or not in a contextually appropriate
| way.
|
| Obsession with details _that matter_ can still be
| counterproductive and unhealthy.
|
| The difference between a $1000 watch, $10,000 watch and $100,000
| watch matters. It's counterproductive if you're in charge of
| producing $1000 watches to try to put in the same effort and fuss
| as if you were making $100,000 watches, while the revenue per
| unit stays pegged at $1000. It's not counterproductive if you're
| asking $100,000. That's just a contextual difference; all watches
| are objects on the same scale.
| drewcoo wrote:
| The article which causes HN to hurriedly redefine perfectionism,
| thus solving the problem . . .
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