[HN Gopher] Invert, always, invert
___________________________________________________________________
Invert, always, invert
Author : anupj
Score : 519 points
Date : 2020-07-21 08:23 UTC (14 hours ago)
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| fizixer wrote:
| Something tells me OP hasn't read Polya "How to solve it" and is
| attempting a bad rediscovery of a tiny aspect of the overall body
| of problem-solving tactics.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Me: how can I finish this project smoothly
|
| Inversion: what can makes this project not finished smoothly
|
| My answer: if my boss died
|
| Me: ...
| ISL wrote:
| So you'll look out for the health and well-being of your
| boss/colleagues and look for ways to improve the resilience of
| the organization?
| mola wrote:
| I think this is useful in zero sum/life and death situation.
| Otherwise you might go on a path which leads away from your core
| values and intentions.
| ptero wrote:
| It seems like a good model, but probably because it helps you see
| things from a new angle.
|
| That is, the benefit is not focusing on (not (not A)) instead of
| A -- with the right choice of A you can flip those, but rather
| when everyone is thinking about A, see if a double inversion
| offers new solutions. My 2c
| rwmj wrote:
| Is the example correct?
|
| _> Instead of asking how do we increase the adoption of a
| product or feature? You could instead consider - what are some of
| things preventing adoption?_
|
| Surely to invert the question you'd want to consider how do I
| deliberately decrease adoption of the product? It might lead to
| some of the same answers, like make it slower. But also to
| different ones, like constantly bad-mouth my own product on
| social media. (Which would indicate a path to adoption is to
| rigorously rebut criticism using Google Alerts.)
|
| Edit: I think the difference is if I'm only looking for what
| about my current product prevents adoption, then I've narrowed my
| scope to looking at aspects of my current product. Whereas if I
| blue-sky think about ways to make the product bad, that allows a
| broader range of solutions for making it good.
| maps7 wrote:
| Yeah a direct inversion doesn't seem to work. I think you
| invert the idea but with the premise that you don't want to do
| it.
|
| So instead of: How do I decrease adoption?
|
| You think: How do I avoid decreasing adoption?
|
| I think this works anyway. Another example:
|
| Goal: Fly to Spain
|
| Question: How do I fly to Spain?
|
| The inverted question should not be "How do I not fly to
| Spain?" (answer: get put on a flying ban or don't buy a ticket)
| but "How do I avoid not flying to Spain?" (answer: pick a date
| and book tickets)
| jameshart wrote:
| Don't invert the _question_ , invert the _goal_.
|
| If you want to be in Spain, why aren't you there right now?
| the_af wrote:
| It seems to me the inversion of "how do I fly to Spain"
| (goal: "I want to visit Spain") is "what could prevent me
| from flying to Spain?".
|
| In general, instead of "how do we achieve $X?" the inversion
| is "what is stopping $X?" or "what would cause $X to fail?".
| gsk22 wrote:
| In what situations do the answers to the inverse differ from
| the original? It seems to me it's just a rewording of the
| original question with a double negative.
|
| ("How do I not not fly to Spain?")
| maps7 wrote:
| Good point - the 'fly to Spain' example wasn't the best.
| Running through multiple things in my head.. it seems the
| most powerful thing is to have a good initial question so
| the inversion actually helps.
| iQuercus wrote:
| How do I make money? - Get lucky in a Casino.
|
| How do I not lose money? - Don't gamble.
|
| How do I not not make money? - Take more risks.
|
| A true inversion with a negative works better than the not-
| not structure, and it is easier to wrap your head around.
| [deleted]
| dtech wrote:
| But that isn't really an inversion, more a double negative.
|
| The example given is "how do I keep my pilots alive?" with
| the inversion "what could kill my pilots?". Your result would
| be "how do I avoid not keeping my pilots alive?", which is
| just the original question.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > The example given is "how do I keep my pilots alive?"
| with the inversion "what could kill my pilots?".
|
| Pretty much that, except in any long-standing industry,
| it's framed as "what does kill pilots?" and "Lets study the
| last few decades of pilot mortality data and identify
| causes". Safety standard improve one Air-crash
| Investigation at a time.
|
| "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'" by Sidney
| Dekker is probably where to start with that field.
| maps7 wrote:
| I agree my example was more a double negative. The way I am
| thinking though would result in something similar to yours.
| Wistar wrote:
| I have read about mathematician Abraham Wald's operational
| research for the US on WWII aircraft armor placement. Wald
| challenged the instincts and conventional wisdom of
| military commanders who thought that more armor should be
| added to the places on airplanes that had the most bullet
| holes upon returning from a mission.
|
| Wald instead flipped it and recommended armor be added to
| the areas with less or no combat damage on returning
| airplanes because the shot-up areas were the parts of the
| plane that COULD withstand damage, since the plane had made
| it back.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I imagine a single negation would increase the solution
| space so much that it wouldn't be useful anymore. A double
| negation will change the question format, so our
| (irrational) minds treat it differently, yet keep the
| solution space the same.
| EGreg wrote:
| I think this is like the question of do you want the inverse or
| the contrapositive? Most likely the second one.
| xapata wrote:
| In other words, minimize regret.
| larrydag wrote:
| This reminds me of the Dual in Linear Programming.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_linear_program
|
| https://web.stanford.edu/~ashishg/msande111/notes/chapter4.p...
| load wrote:
| The inversion principle is a great mental model in my opinion.
| The best way I can sum it up in the most basic way is instead of
| thinking "What can I do to [achieve goal]?", think "What is
| preventing me from [achieving goal]?".
|
| If some of you like this, I suggest delving into the 'mental
| model' rabbit hole. There's some pretty inspiring stuff on it.
| maps7 wrote:
| Is the link in the blog post a good place to start?
| (https://fs.blog/mental-models/#what_are_mental_models) or do
| you have an alternative suggestion?
| [deleted]
| gweinberg wrote:
| Well, obviously you don't always want to invert, since inverting
| twice will just get you back to where you started. In fact, you
| have to be doing worse than random guessing initially if
| inverting the problem in general makes it easier to solve.
| maire wrote:
| Murphy's law is a more humorous way of saying the same thing.
|
| "If something can go wrong it will go wrong."
|
| There are earlier references - but Murphy's Law is associated
| with high g-force testing just after WWII. The team used Murphy's
| law to anticipate every possible failure and prevent it before
| the experiment ended in death. There is nothing like death to
| sharpen your focus.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| Reminds me of how an AI agent that tries to minimize the worst
| case scenario is almost always better than one that tries to
| maximize the best case scenario.
|
| (admittedly that's a bit anecdotal, maybe someone with more
| knowledge can give better details on that statement)
| PKop wrote:
| > an AI agent
|
| And probably life itself.
|
| Good article from Nassim Taleb [0] relating to
| rationality/irrationality and survival...
|
| "survival comes first, truth, understanding and science later"
|
| which would seem to relate to a the simpler model for AI
| centered around preventing disaster being more robust than
| trying to solve some form of maximization while risking ruin.
|
| In some ways it is arguably better to be paranoid/"irrational"
| about risk than try to be perfectly sufficiently rational
|
| "I have shown that, unless one has an overblown and a very
| unrealistic representation of some tail risks, one cannot
| survive -all it takes is a single event for the irreversible
| exit from among us. Is selective paranoia "irrational" if those
| individuals and populations who don't have it end up dying or
| extinct, respectively?"
|
| [0] https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-be-rational-about-
| rational...
| ladberg wrote:
| That just depends on how you what your AI to optimize and what
| results you value. After 3 attempts, would you rather have the
| best-case twice and the worst-case once or a medium-case three
| times?
| ajra wrote:
| Great advice! I have to say though, I love the irony of the
| author mentioning reducing investment losses by asking the
| question "Am I diversifying enough to prevent long term loss?"
| when Munger+Buffett have the opposite view of diversification for
| the savvy investor - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJzu_xItNkY
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I'd never thought of Charlie Munger as a pomo, but here we are?
| Next thing you know the POTUS will be engaging in a supplementary
| play of meaning which defies semantic reduction?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Pedantry for those who have implicitly asked for it:
|
| Munger spots binary hierarchical oppositions, such as between
| forwards and backwards, seeking and avoiding, or intelligence
| and stupidity, and displaces the privileged term, what we take
| implicitly to be primary, by inviting us to consider the
| secondary term in its own right, as another endpoint of the
| same relationship.
|
| (Is this process somewhat like Category Theory's displacement
| of objects by consideration of the arrows between them?
| Attacking problems by inverting to generate coproblems?)
| youeseh wrote:
| In business, I believe this translates to always protecting
| against the downside.
| z3t4 wrote:
| According to positive psychology it's better to do something good
| rather then avoiding something bad. But it's good to ask yourself
| _why_ you want to do something, as there might be easier ways to
| achieve the same thing once you understand what you really want.
| bumelant wrote:
| In combinatorial optimization, the basic principle is is always:
| every primal, has a dual. That is, minimazing some expressions,
| means maximizing the other. Primal-dual would also - I feel - fit
| better to the principle, as described in this article.
| davecap1 wrote:
| Interesting way of describing/thinking about hazard or risk
| analysis which is applied in many industries through ISO standard
| frameworks such as ISO 14971 for medical devices (but is also
| used elsewhere). Risk analysis complements requirements analysis
| in that risk mitigation plans become requirements of the system
| (if the risks meet some threshold).
| kejaed wrote:
| I came here to note the same thing, from an aerospace
| perspective.
|
| In a formal development following something like ARP4754A even
| before one works on the requirements that a system has to meet,
| the high level system functions are considered and a Functional
| Hazard Assessment is done to look at the criticality of those
| functions failing. Then one can add requirements and
| architectural mitigations as the system and Safety Assessment
| is developed.
| mlangenberg wrote:
| As a software developer I have been doing this exact thing for
| the past twelve years: think of all the possible reasons why
| something can fail.
|
| The downside is that I have trained my mind in such a way that it
| is difficult to turn it off outside of work and it is influencing
| my personal live negatively.
|
| (or maybe I'm just wired to be a doom thinker and that is what
| makes me a good software engineer)
| yetanta wrote:
| There is a secondary issue on this sort of thinking too.
| Sometimes you can doom out anything worth doing. I see it on
| the internet quite a bit. "look at the cool project I built".
| Then come out the doomsayers. How everything is wrong with it.
| The opposite happens too. But the negative ones stick out in my
| mind this morning :)
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| You can always answer those doomsayers with one of my new
| favorite quotes: "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly"
| liveoneggs wrote:
| this has been identified as a regular personality trait in
| operations teams where it is a benefit in work context.
| mtgp1000 wrote:
| To all of the people who feel similarly, and have problems
| ruminating:
|
| Try thinking in terms of probabilities - that's the real way
| out, to recognize that all of the negative scenarios you keep
| replaying in your head are very unlikely to happen at all.
|
| Once you realize that much it might get easier to brush these
| thoughts aside sooner.
| maps7 wrote:
| For me, it has made driving difficult. I think of everything I
| can do incorrectly and everything others can do incorrectly. I
| think of all possible events happening on the route. On the
| plus side, I am a careful driver. On the negative side, I
| _really_ hate driving.
| jyriand wrote:
| Sometimes while driving I wonder how come I'm always crashing
| cases in video games, but in real life i can survive for
| hours.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| So it's not just me being paranoid. If my luck is any worse
| and the worse possibility happened, I've already hit 5+
| people and crashed my cars 5+ more times.
|
| Driving is very very dangerous but not many realized it.
| james_s_tayler wrote:
| Apparently everyone experiences an accident once per every
| 17.9 years of driving.
|
| My wife just got hit by a truck on the freeway yesterday.
| Amazingly there was not a scratch on her. It made us re-
| evaluate what we drive though as when we checked our car
| had only a 2 star safety rating and apparently where we
| live 2/3 of fatal crashes are from 1 and 2 star safety
| rated cars. Today we're car shopping for a 5 star safety
| rated car.
|
| So, yeah it carries an inherent risk and it's important we
| do what we can in terms of driving safely, driving the
| safest car you can afford and upgrading to a safer car when
| you can afford in order to minimize those risks.
| binsh wrote:
| I think this is healthy and actually comports with reality.
| Driving _is_ dangerous, and a lot of people do it really
| badly. I see way too many people on their phones on the
| highway to ever feel safe driving.
| solidr53 wrote:
| Can be very difficult when you can only see the problems in
| other people's ideas. Knowing that it's not the purpose, but
| rather to actually help, people that don't know you will not
| appreciate it.
|
| My advice is to stop doing it with people that don't know how
| you think. It's usually the people who have unexpected problems
| again and again in their life.
| munificent wrote:
| God, yes, this. I have twenty years's of failure-mode engineer
| mindset training, and my wife has generalized anxiety. Between
| the two of us, we are _constantly_ in this state of trying to
| prevent bad things from happening.
|
| And, in many ways we have. And that's good. We're in a pretty
| stable, safe, comfortable state, which not something everyone
| can say in 2020.
|
| But as an unintended side effect, we have also prevented good
| things from happening. Because we are so focused on controlling
| outcomes, we have eliminated almost all serendipity from our
| lives. The only surprises left are unpredictable, unpreventable
| bad ones: health issues, political disasters, stuff breaking in
| the house, etc.
|
| It is a recipe for slow-burning misery. Even before COVID-19,
| we found ourselves going out less and less, trying fewer new
| things, and just... sort of winding our way into an
| introverted, over-thinking, ball of anxiety.
|
| I'm now trying to re-train myself to consider the inverse of
| that mindset: what's the _best_ that could happen? If we knew
| for certain that activity X was going to work out, would we
| give it a try? Do we need to keep thinking about and analyzing
| this, or is our anxiety just using "you need to think about it
| more" as a rationalization to keep us inside our comfort zone?
|
| It's a hard habit to break. And, obviously, 2020 is like the
| worst possible fucking year to be dealing with this. (Though,
| conversely, we entered the lockdown pretty well-prepared to
| handle being stuck at home since we're so used to it...)
| kkotak wrote:
| Sounds like paranoia to me. I'd suggest therapy.
| mleonhard wrote:
| How about asking yourself a new question. "How can we make
| sure that we never try anything new or experience happy
| surprises?" and try to avoid doing that?
| phogster wrote:
| How about asking yourself where does the inversion
| principle apply? and avoid applying it where you shouldn't?
| eumenides1 wrote:
| Try inverting your perspective outside of work.
|
| The basis of the advice is I have a hard problem --invert
| problem statement--> new perspective/approach angles.
|
| Your problem is just a little more meta.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > The downside is that I have trained my mind in such a way
| that it is difficult to turn it off outside of work and it is
| influencing my personal live negatively.
|
| I think it's important to remember taking on _too little_ risk
| can be dangerous and lead to negative outcomes.
|
| Maybe you need to invert and ask questions like "What is
| keeping me from spending more time with family?" or "What is
| keeping me from going to more parties?" or "What is keeping me
| from asking that person out?" or whatever the situation is in
| your personal life.
| teekert wrote:
| I wanted to contribute the same to this discussing.
|
| At work, I'm really good at thinking things through and
| avoiding unnecessary work. Outside of work, I worry that when
| we restructure our roof, we will negatively impact the
| neighbors solar panel output. I constantly grind about how I'm
| going to discuss this with them. Even though we may not even
| restructure the roof.
|
| Or I wonder how I'm going to handle it the next time my
| neighbor turns on an outdoor speaker. Even though he may not,
| for months to come, and when he does, I might just be on my way
| out.
|
| Now the wife and kids want chickens, and I'm sitting here
| discussing (in my head) how our neighbor is wrong about all the
| downsides she may bring up. Even though she may even like that
| we have chickens.
|
| It's tiring and impacts my life negatively.
|
| At work I do manage to keep a "do-ers" attitude, I mean I will
| start many things, take in criticism, change my approach. I
| think I'm generally pretty good at my job and radiate a
| positive attitude. I wish I was the same at home.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| It seems like you get caught in a worry loop. The solution
| I've found is I have to fully answer the questions in my
| head. Worry loops happen when things get almost resolved,
| then you move on. For example:
|
| > Or I wonder how I'm going to handle it the next time my
| neighbor turns on an outdoor speaker. Even though he may not,
| for months to come, and when he does, I might just be on my
| way out.
|
| Really answer the question. Something like "at 10pm I'll go
| over and ask them to have it off by 11pm. If it's not off by
| midnight, I'll make a noise complaint". Or "If it's too loud,
| I'll ask them to turn it down a bit." Or "I'll trust myself
| to make the right decision if that happens." Then consider it
| resolved. Write it down if that helps.
| teekert wrote:
| I'll try that, thanks! I did do something similar once when
| I could not stop fussing about what job to take (current
| one or a new one). I wrote and printed 2 a4-papers full of
| text and it was pretty clear I liked my current job more
| but was afraid I was just taking the easy route (and that I
| would feel weak because of it later). I was able to let it
| go and feel better after that indeed.
| throwaway7uA4 wrote:
| May I chime in with some more practical experience WRT
| writing down worries:
|
| - I tried something similar to this Negative Thinking
| Analysis Form [1]
|
| - In my experience this takes a lot of time, when you try
| to do it right. You really have to let a thought sink in
| for a long time to actually find out where it is
| distorted. And it sometimes even takes longer to find the
| underlying thought behind a series of thougts and
| worries.
|
| - But once done the thinking is usually over and
| sometimes I learned something about the beliefs that
| underpin my thinking.
|
| [1] http://discoveryoursolutions.com/toolkit/negative_thi
| nking.h...
| throwaway7uA4 wrote:
| Yes, I am exactly the same. While at work I feel very
| productive eliminating future risk by being very conspicuous
| towards all design decisions, but the same attitude in "real
| life" is very troublesome.
|
| For example, a very small random sample of thoughts that
| routinely pop up:
|
| - Lent somebody your bike? Oh my god he/she may die, because
| it's badly maintained (and thinking about the details about
| different kinds of breakage vs. harm caused).
|
| - Opening plastic containers or cans for food: oh my god,
| sharp edges may fall into the food (how to keep parts of
| packaging from falling into food while opening is
| surprisingly complex topic, think about knifes vs. scissors
| vs. tearing it open, all have very different hehaviour wrt.
| creating debris :)
|
| - doing mistakes when filing taxes vs. the risk and penalties
| that may ensue
|
| - furniture / cupboards being insufficiently bolted to the
| wall and coming down (and thinking about how it would move,
| where it would hit and the likelhood of bad injuries)
|
| - risk of injuries due to electricity after fixing electric
| installation at home (am I sure I didn't damage some
| insulator, is the ground wire really properly attached, is
| the strain-relief properly done etc.)
|
| For me this is pretty much modulated by stress level. Doing a
| lot of sports, less coffee, and sleeping enough usually
| leaves me much less inclined of doing these not so helpful
| analysis for stuff outside work. And I'm always amazed how
| other people can just "wipe away" such thoughts as
| unnecessary without any analysis at all. Maybe that's the
| difference between employing proper intuition vs. striving
| for "mathematical proof" kind of certainty in all areas of
| life.
|
| [edit] adding another perspective that is sometimes helpful
| in stopping overthinking: trying to analyse the full tree of
| possibilities is the chess computer kind of reasoning (alpha-
| beta search). It is pretty limited in what domains it can be
| applied to (e.g. it does not work for Poker or the Game of
| Go). On the other hand try to learn some Go and feel the
| difference: after gaining some experience you will give up on
| exhaustive analysis in many situations and just start relying
| on intuition, because it's the only thing that actually works
| for complex, unclear situations. Now sometimes I try to
| remember how playing Go feels when faced with real-world
| problems where I'm tempted to do an exhaustive analysis. See
| also [1].
|
| [1] https://xkcd.com/761/
| andi999 wrote:
| I can relate to this. Let me ask you a thing: when you ship
| things (release a product), do you feel lifted/happy like
| ppl here tell you, or does your worries increase (like it
| happens for me, I hate shipping)
| freehunter wrote:
| Personally when I _finish_ a project I feel great. When I
| release a project to the world, that's when the worry
| kicks in.
| pacoverdi wrote:
| +1 for reducing caffeine intake. Some years ago I used to
| wake up in the middle of the night with extreme anxiety
| about ridiculously small problems. Cutting caffeine can
| definitely help (although it may also have an adverse
| effect on work efficiency :)
| teekert wrote:
| Yeah sounds familiar. I feel it's related to stress and to
| not taking time to stop thinking or make myself stop
| thinking (and indeed do sports or play with the kids, while
| first clearing my head).
|
| I have had moments where I felt I was almost loosing it
| because I was just constantly thinking about some (in
| hindsight minor) issue. And I then start to meditate just
| to stop the thinking. I don't know if that helps or if
| there is a natural cadence to it but I do get better after
| doing that for some days usually (10-15 min here and there,
| I used the free tier of HeadSpace during 1 period as well).
| I should just also meditate regularly to see if my general
| mood improves. From everything I read, it should.
|
| I am about to go camping, that will help, although I'm
| already getting pissed (and finding nice ways to express
| said emotion) at that fictitious family with the bluetooth
| speaker on all day in the spot next to me. What a waste of
| thought. Just stop brain.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Best advice I've ever been given: Wait to worry. If you can't
| do something (anything) about it immediately, don't worry
| about it.
|
| Using your example, you haven't decided to restructure your
| roof, so there is nothing actionable you can do right now WRT
| your neighbor, so don't worry about that.
| goutham467 wrote:
| after years of suffering from unnecessary worrying, I
| realized this approach does work for few cases.
| perfmode wrote:
| Try inversion:
|
| "How can I guarantee that I will spend absolutely all of my
| time grinding on projections of the future?"
| neal_jones wrote:
| The best coder I know is also the most paranoid coder that I
| know, I don't think it is a coincidence.
| nurettin wrote:
| Dialectic is now called "invert" ?
| [deleted]
| sergioro wrote:
| Related passage from Bell's "Men of Mathematics":
| It (inversion) is one of the most powerful methods of
| mathematical discovery (or invention) ever devised, and Abel was
| the first human being to use it consciously as an engine of
| research. "You must always invert," as Jacobi said when asked the
| secret of his mathematical discoveries.
| toolslive wrote:
| This is only one of the principles featured in TRIZ.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
| m3kw9 wrote:
| "Instead of asking how do we increase the adoption of a product
| or feature? You could instead consider - what are some of things
| preventing adoption?" What if I started with "
| what are some of things preventing adoption?" Would I be
| incorrectly inverting? But you did say always invert.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If you started with "what is preventing adoption?" you would
| explore the answers to that question first, and then would
| still gain additional insight from asking "how do I increase
| adoption?".
| seanpquig wrote:
| I work on the algorithm for a widely used search engine and can
| confirm that this line of thinking has been very effective in
| improving our product over the years.
|
| Rather than trying to generate hypothetical ideas for "how can we
| make our search better", we spend a lot of time analyzing our
| data to find where we are failing. Many of our biggest relevance
| improvements have come from tracking and understanding the types
| of queries where we consistently fail to generate results or user
| engagement.
|
| I think it is a very effective approach, but can require some
| discipline and perspective. When you spend so much time focusing
| on the failures of your product, it can create this internal
| perception that the product is constantly failing and broken. So
| you do need to actively remember what you're doing well and how
| far you've come as a team/product.
| whack wrote:
| > _Rather than trying to generate hypothetical ideas for "how
| can we make our search better", we spend a lot of time
| analyzing our data to find where we are failing. Many of our
| biggest relevance improvements have come from tracking and
| understanding the types of queries where we consistently fail
| to generate results or user engagement._
|
| This sounds a lot like the 6-sigma approach of driving
| improvement by focusing obsessively on eliminating "defects".
|
| There are certainly huge wins that can be obtained by
| identifying and eliminating bugs or corner-cases with undesired
| behavior. But it's scary to imagine a world where this is used
| as a replacement for innovative thinking - ie, "how can we make
| our search better". If Steve Jobs had focused all his
| proverbial efforts on minimizing flip-phone defects, the world
| would have missed out on the smartphone revolution.
| PostLee wrote:
| That's why it's important to focus on effectiveness first. At
| any point in time you should know what you are trying to
| solve and why. The Inversion Principle is simply a useful
| tool to helps support that and figure out the how, but is by
| no means a silver bullet.
| seanpquig wrote:
| Yea I don't think it's the only principle that should drive
| product development, but it helps ensure you're always
| solving real problems for your users.
|
| There is still a lot of room for creativity once you've
| identified a class of problematic queries too. Especially as
| a search engine becomes more sophisticated, how you solve
| clear query failures can be a lot less straightforward, and
| clever features or machine learning are many times needed.
|
| I will say there are clear exceptions to this inversion rule
| too. For example, we switched to a Learn-To-Rank system for
| our core ranking in the past year and we couldn't necessarily
| point to it clearly being the solution for problematic
| queries we were seeing, but it proved to unlock a ton of
| value and drive a lot of relevance improvements and
| surprising benefits in ways we couldn't necessarily predict
| for our specific use case and users.
| imhoguy wrote:
| This is great to perfect existing features of a product and
| avoid scope creep of new ones.
| gav wrote:
| There's a huge potential in mining search data, especially if
| you can group top-of-funnel vs. bottom-of-funnel searches to
| see where failures are occurring. Segmenting queries like
| "zm950" against "shoes" or "nike" and seeing where gaps exist
| against user intent.
|
| When it comes to zero (or near-zero) results, I've had good
| results using this to identify gaps in the current product
| offering and what visitors are expecting to be there. Two
| examples:
|
| 1) A seller of custom prescription glasses: top two search
| queries were "contact lenses" and "sunglasses". They didn't
| offer the former, they did sell sunglasses (most frames could
| take a tinted lens as an option) but didn't make it obvious
| with design, content, or marketing.
|
| 2) A seller of cabinet hardware (pulls & knobs): a large
| proportion of their top 10 search terms seemed to have a door
| hardware intent. Adding this missing category boosted sales
| without additional marketing dollars spent (the customers were
| already there and just bouncing when they realized the site
| didn't carry what they wanted).
|
| These are all ways to focus on understanding failures instead
| of trying to optimize successes, which is often finding the
| local maxima.
| jermier wrote:
| I use an old inversion technique. Not sure where I read this, and
| I think Tim Ferris said it: The last thing you
| want to do is the first thing you should do
|
| There is always something mega pertinent on my TODO lists that I
| really don't want to do, and it calls out my name when I sleep
| saying: 'You really need to do this' and the feeling of
| procrastination makes you feel ashamed of having not completed
| the task. But it gets done thanks to inversion, and I proudly
| check it off as being done, until the next task I don't want to
| do comes along (and yes it will come along).
| imhoguy wrote:
| Damn. I should finally add GDPR-compliant privacy policy to my
| niche side project.
| philwelch wrote:
| A cool example of this principle in action is to read the WWII-
| era "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" (https://www.cia.gov/news-
| information/featured-story-archive/...), which reads like an
| inverted guide to productivity. Some fun bits:
|
| > Managers and Supervisors: To lower morale and production, think
| of the worst boss you've had and act like that. Be pleasant to
| inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions.
| Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about
| their work. When possible, refer all matters to committees for
| "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees
| as large and bureaucratic as possible.
|
| > Employees: Be forgetful. Clumsy. Work slowly. Think of ways to
| increase the number of movements needed to do your job: use a
| light hammer instead of a heavy one; try to make a small wrench
| do instead of a big one.
|
| > When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further
| study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large
| as possible - never less than five.
|
| > Apply all regulations to the last letter.
|
| Admittedly, some of the techniques--like releasing a bag full of
| moths in a movie theater to disrupt enemy propaganda--are oddly
| specific and not easily inverted.
| arjitkp wrote:
| I have actually saw quite a few examples of Inversion
|
| * Herta Herzog laid the foundation for the basis of modern media
| psychology, but simply inverting.
|
| What do media do to people --> What people do with media.
|
| This shifts focus from strong media influences to human being an
| active consumer of media.
|
| * In statistical testing is fundamentally based on the principle
| of inversion, if the resulting statistic can be used as an
| evidence to reject the null or favour the alternative.
| pgt wrote:
| The article gets it right, but "man muss immer umkehren," is
| better translated as "man must always turn upside down", "inside
| out," "turn back" or "reverse" depending on the context.
|
| In Afrikaans, "omkeer" is derived from the Germanic umkehren and
| would be used as changing direction (in a military sense) or
| upside down as in 'leave no stone unturned.'
|
| Strangely, nowadays I would refer to inverting your trousers as
| "binneste-buite" (inside-out) or "uitkeer" in Afrikaans: roughly
| 'about face'.
| alberto_ol wrote:
| According to the wikipedia page about Jacobi, in the
| mathematical context the best translation is invert. Also in
| Italian (my language)it is used the verb 'invertire' in this
| context.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustav_Jacob_Jacobi
| hibbelig wrote:
| To turn a piece of clothing inside out is "auf Links ziehen",
| which is hard to translate. I find "inside out" to be quite the
| intuitive metaphor.
|
| The idea is that clothes have a "right" side (rechts) and a
| "left" side (links), and you pull it (ziehen) so that the left
| side is visible, i.e. on the outside.
|
| Someone wrote that the terms left and right come from knitting
| where the right side is the flat side, and thus worn on the
| outside. Not sure whether that holds water.
| trampi wrote:
| Native german speaker here: In this context, I would read
| "umkehren" as "turn back / turn into the direction where you
| came from"
| felixr wrote:
| I agree. I would have never thought about translating it as
| invert.
| k__ wrote:
| I would translate
|
| "Man mus immer umkehren"
|
| with
|
| "One always has to return"
| jyriand wrote:
| I think hackers are pretty natural at this type of thinking. A la
| "what this application is not supposed to do?"
| alexpetralia wrote:
| I wonder if this is better described as "solution-oriented"
| problem solving versus "failure-oriented" problem solving.
|
| Inversion seems like a misnomer and is easily conflated with the
| logical/mathematical meaning.
| blunte wrote:
| Perhaps always invert but after approaching the problem from the
| front.
|
| I would apply the 80/20 rule from both directions (so in theory
| perhaps spending up to 40% effort) to get the best chance of
| success. And really, you can't invert without first knowing
| enough about the problem you're trying to solve.
| zigzaggy wrote:
| This follows the way my brain works too. Dog into the problem
| -> invert -> learn more about problem -> uninvert -> map
| problem in much greater detail -> reinvert -> discover truth ->
| solution
| codezero wrote:
| That's fun. My personal version of this is when I'm stuck on a
| problem at home or work I'll lay down on the ground and look up
| at the ceiling or lay on a couch with my head hanging off to see
| the room upside down.
|
| Surveying an area I'm familiar with from a weird perspective
| always sparks new ideas for me because I almost always also see
| something new in that familiar place because of the positioning.
|
| In doing so, it helps me unblock other thought processes.
| AHappyCamper wrote:
| My uncle has a similar saying: "The most important consideration
| in any situation is the alternative". He's a very smart man and
| an excellent engineer.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| It's Staparfi, it's always STA-PAR-FI!
|
| That is:
|
| Standard: Start with standard, commonly applicable piece of
| advice. Lists of these can be found many places (for example, "to
| achieve success, avoid failure").
|
| Paradoxical: Reformulate in terminology that's opaque,
| paradoxical, jargony and truncated (OPJART!)
|
| Fixation: Claim that's always true, that it's best thing since
| sliced bread. etc. Your audience will recoil but some of them
| will work and realize there's some good advice in your stream of
| jargon. And having _worked_ at getting this understanding, they
| will value it more and be happy to endorse the exaggerated value
| you 're assigning to your jargon and your point, which is,
| indeed, something that is true moderately often.
|
| STA-PAR-FI! This phrase can launch a thousand consultancies.
| nate wrote:
| This is also a great way to surprise people.
|
| Surprise seems to be one of the most important ingredients to
| getting things to spread (I won't quote the academic or anecdotal
| research of that here.) So I use this inversion analysis often in
| thinking about coming up with ways of surprising people. My most
| successful example of this:
|
| I was originally thinking, "How can I get more customers?"
|
| Inverting it I came up with, "How can I lose more customers?" (A
| different inversion from the OP's but an inversion nonetheless).
|
| Using that as my base I came up with this funny campaign where I
| tried to figure out how to fire more of my customers. What if I
| could fire the worst of my customers. So I invented a honey pot
| website called trickajournalist.com where I described some
| software you could signup for to spam journalists. And then I
| used the list of people who signed up for that and banned them
| from using my product that had an email newsletter component. We
| didn't want spammers.
|
| It was a nice media/traffic win for what we were doing. And it
| all came from inverting what we originally struggled to answer.
|
| P.S. If you're interested more in the whole trickajournalist.com
| thing, the original site is dead now, but some articles about it:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathankontny/2018/02/27/trick-a...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathankontny/2018/03/08/reddit-...
| [deleted]
| mola wrote:
| So you lied to a bunch of people? While enticing them to
| participate in bad behaviour? I don't get the joke
| nate wrote:
| This was definitely a point of debate before and during this.
| Honeypots are by definition a deceit. Whether they are a net
| positive we may have to disagree on. I think in many cases
| they are a positive as in this case.
|
| Spam is out of control. After we launched our bulk email
| tools, we immediately saw bad actors. So this was one novel
| attempt at filtering them out. If someone were awful enough
| to signup for a tool that had the copy and intent of the
| trickajournalist.com website had, they shouldn't be using our
| email tool. We didn't publicly shame them or make their lives
| any worse than they might already be. They just couldn't use
| our tool.
| mola wrote:
| Maybe I'm not understanding, but I thought these are not
| professional spammers. More like people not happy with
| journalists that you enticed to behave badly. A minor form
| of entrapment.
| derefr wrote:
| People who sign up for _both_ TrickAJournalist.com, and
| the Highrise CRM tool (GP 's software), are very likely
| professional spammers, looking for whatever bulk-emailing
| software they can get.
|
| There's no negative consequence to _just_ signing up for
| TrickAJournalist; only a negative consequence for
| attempting to sign up for Highrise while already having
| signed up for TrickAJournalist.
|
| Someone who just literally wants to "trick a journalist",
| once, might sign up for TrickAJournalist; but such a
| person has no reason to also to use that same email
| address to sign up for the B2B CRM software Highrise.
|
| Someone who wants to send knowingly-spammy bulk emails
| while purposefully dodging spam filters, would sign up
| for TrickAJournalist (which claims to be exactly _for_
| that); and _also_ would sign up for Highrise, since it
| has bulk emailing capabilities and likely also has
| positive spam-filter cachet from all the legitimate uses
| other companies put it to.
| mola wrote:
| Thanks, this clears some things for me. I guess trick a
| journalist was mostly geared towards spammers.
|
| As an aside, the main reason I _didnt_ follow these links
| and find out for myself is because this is in part satire
| but mostly a marketing scheme to advertise Highrise.
| Sorry, I dislike these sort of tricks, it makes me feel
| manipulated. And I prefer not to add my traffic to such
| endeavours.
|
| And come on, spam is hardly an unnoticed issue which one
| meeds to raise awareness for.
| nate wrote:
| "spam is hardly an unnoticed issue which one meeds to
| raise awareness for" - I thought so too. Until I tried to
| run a bulk email service. We had a countless number of
| people, good people, sending spam, not realizing it's
| spam. There's a ton of awareness that needs to be raised
| to email senders what spam is. There's also awareness
| that needs to be brought to the attention of developers
| creating email tools. They will be and might already be
| misused in ways you are probably not protecting for
| today. During this phase I also saw some very elite
| developers (not on Highrise) go through some "we've been
| hit by spammers and we never predicted they'd use our
| tool to do this". I could go on an on how we should still
| be educating ourselves on how to fight this and what I
| learned even being an experienced operator.
| derefr wrote:
| > There's a ton of awareness that needs to be raised to
| email senders what spam is.
|
| Someone should create something like Grammarly or
| Medium's community-editor feature, for email campaigns.
| "Before you hit send, get a first impression on your
| campaign from 10 random beta readers from our community."
| Then give the beta-readers a prominent "this looks like
| spam" button to press.
|
| Probably it wouldn't give any different of a response
| than a regular spam filter; but I imagine that most ad
| people will think of "it went into the spam filter" as a
| _technical_ problem, rather than a problem with their
| messaging. Whereas, if real humans tell them the campaign
| looks like spam, maybe they 'd listen.
| nate wrote:
| That's a super interesting idea. There's a ton of
| community incentive to participate too since everyone's
| sharing this IP reputation. On the biz side, policing
| this sucked. Ate up a ton of support time analyzing the
| email being sent, freshness of the contact uploaded, etc.
| Not to mention the fights with customers about buying
| lists, getting optins, etc. This might just be a really
| great intermediary. Cool thought.
| compscistd wrote:
| Since Highrise doesn't take new signups (for the last two
| years actually), it was just a fun story
| kleer001 wrote:
| I doesn't seem like a joke to me. It seems like a sincere way
| to filter out bad actors.
| mdorazio wrote:
| ...by being a bad actor yourself? I'm with the parent
| poster, I don't get it.
| yumraj wrote:
| Context matters.
|
| A bad actor towards spammers and a bad actor towards your
| legitimate customers are not the same thing.
|
| A bad actor towards spammers, is being a good actor
| towards their legitimate customers.
| mola wrote:
| OP description seemed like it was mainly a gimmick for him
| to get media attention at the expanse of other people.
| nate wrote:
| I think the original site might make it more clear. But
| the forbes article might help: https://www.forbes.com/sit
| es/nathankontny/2018/02/27/trick-a...
|
| "Treating journalists like suckers" or "stalking them"
| isn't the same demographic as "folks who are disgruntled
| with journalists".
|
| And really, what "expense"? They weren't outed. They lost
| nothing but possible future use of an email tool we
| produced (we found no current users signing up for
| trickajournalist.com).
|
| And as for the intent of the site. It was a lot of
| things. But first and foremost it was to raise an
| awareness of how bad email has become. People are doing
| awful things with email. All the automation, cold email
| targeting, etc. I wanted to put some satire out so maybe
| some folks operating sites might take pause at what
| they're offering, and who they're offering it to. I
| wanted to raise a novel method of how to deal with things
| like this. I wanted to raise how easy it is to promote
| awful tools like this was even when ads are supposed to
| be human moderated on a lot of places.
| laybak wrote:
| simple and actionable. A quick way to snap out of what is
| currently constraining my thinkign
| smitty1e wrote:
| I'd follow up inverting with decomposing.
|
| Solving smaller problems in the service of the bigger one is as
| powerful as flipping the problem upside down.
| lentil wrote:
| One of the ways to apply this inverted thinking is to conduct a
| "pre-mortem" at the start of a project. By deliberately imagining
| that something has failed, and speculating about the reasons, you
| can sometimes uncover useful steps that prevent those imagined
| failures from actually happening.
|
| I've found this can be quite useful, both for minimizing risk,
| and also (interestingly) as a source for new product/feature
| ideas.
| LaundroMat wrote:
| It's also a useful way of making people not feel like party-
| poopers.
|
| Typically, everyone's excited at the start of a project and
| people are reticent to share their fears (especially if there
| are bosses around).
|
| A pre-mortem gives them the mental freedom to share their fears
| as they are asked to imagine they are in a future where the
| project has turned out to be a disaster).
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Conducting a pre-mortem, as you describe it, is almost
| precisely what STPA (Nancy Leveson) is about. You think of the
| system's behavior and present design and the things that can go
| wrong. Then you try to determine what would lead to bad or
| erroneous outcomes, and build in controls based on that
| analysis. Sometimes it's things that should be blindingly
| obvious, but we've demonstrated over the past 60+ years of
| higher technology use and development that we aren't good at
| spotting those things. Even simple things like, "The lawn mower
| should have a dead-man switch" is often forgotten.
| ssss11 wrote:
| I think it depends on the scenario selected. I've found pre-
| mortems annoying, and given any number of risks that could
| materialise how do you choose the right one for the pre-mortem
| for maximum value discussion?
|
| Plus I generally dislike the idea and feel like its a trend
| that should go away.
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| > how do you choose the right one for the pre-mortem for
| maximum value discussion?
|
| Isn't that where domain expertise comes in? It sounds pretty
| sensible and important to me to try to imagine various
| realistic failure modes and preemptively try to prevent them.
| To not let the website go down, pre-empting hard drive
| failure or DDoS makes a lot more sense than worrying about
| network cables spontaneously disintegrating, or the outbreak
| of nuclear war.
| badloginagain wrote:
| I always try to aim for the "Most Likely Worst Case
| Scenario"... not the worst thing that can happen, but the
| most likely bad thing that can happen.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Then in reality the website is down due to the simplest
| things that's so common we don't reconsider it, such as
| user input some special characters that makes the server
| error.
|
| Edit: I'm not downplaying the importance of prevention
| bhntr3 wrote:
| "Imagine the worst possible outcome. Now . . . avoid that."
| -Baptiste
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| It seems to me that a better English equivalent to _umkehren_
| would be _turn around_. That also fits the text of the article
| better. That is to say look at the problem from the other side,
| form another angle. Invert is simultaneously too specific
| (leading to formulaic methods) and too ambiguous (leading to
| pointless discussions of whether it means considering putting the
| steering wheel at the back or on the other side when in fact it
| means do both).
|
| See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/umkehren
|
| Edit: fixed typo.
| ralfd wrote:
| Jacobi was a mathematician and his "Umkehrfunktion" is in
| english "Inverse function".
|
| It also seems the common english translation:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=invert+always+invert
|
| To be fair though:
|
| While his Wikipedia entry has the sentence:
|
| > He is said to have told his students that when looking for a
| research topic, one should 'Invert, always invert' ('man muss
| immer umkehren'), reflecting his belief that inverting known
| results can open up new fields for research, for example
| inverting elliptical integrals and focusing on the nature of
| elliptic and theta functions.[8]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustav_Jacob_Jacobi#Scien...
|
| The attributed source for that, a paper from 1916, differs in
| the translation:
|
| https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1916-23-01/S0002-9904-1916...
|
| > The great mathematician Jacobi is said to have inculcated
| upon his students the dictum: Man muss immer umkehren. One must
| always seek a converse, turn a thought the other end to.
| jdmichal wrote:
| The LEO dictionary is a consistently-good online dictionary for
| German <-> English:
|
| https://dict.leo.org/german-english/umkehren
|
| It seems to have a strong sense around "returning to a previous
| place / state", not just "turn around". Which is where the
| mathematical use of "invert" comes from, because an inverted
| function swaps the domain and range. But also words like
| "repent" being a possible translation; to repent of your
| actions and thus (ideally) return to a previous state of
| innocence.
| [deleted]
| knodi123 wrote:
| A similar principle from the ancient boardgame of Go is, "Your
| opponents best move is your best move." i.e. sometimes it can be
| hard to see what the most advantageous move is for you. but if
| you can see your opponent's most advantageous move, then just
| steal that one.
| amelius wrote:
| Why only invert? For example when designing a car, don't just
| consider putting the steering wheel in the front or in the back.
| But also consider left and right.
| bluehatbrit wrote:
| This seems to line up really nicely with "Jobs-to-be-Done Theory"
| proposed by Clayton Christensen and Co [1]. This inversion
| approach seems like a great technique to help move from thinking
| about products and think about the jobs that need doing.
|
| [1] - Competing Against Luck - https://www.amazon.com/Competing-
| Against-Luck-Innovation-Cus...
| hackerindie wrote:
| Great short post! Big fan of Farnam Street and Charlie Munger
| myself as well
| uses wrote:
| This feels too similar to my default mode of thinking, which is
| risk aversion, and constantly thinking about what can go wrong,
| and then steering away from that. Is that because this concept
| isn't really for me, like it's more helpful for go-getter
| optimists?
| mark-r wrote:
| Has anybody else ever noticed that mazes are easier to solve if
| you start at the end and work backwards?
| dctoedt wrote:
| I have an "Invert"-related question for the HN hive mind -- see
| below for the question, and why it's not off-topic: I'm a pretty-
| senior lawyer and part-time law professor; I'm working on turning
| some of my accumulated contract clauses and course materials into
| a "fair and balanced," annotated, contract _framework_ , in the
| form of a plain HTML document w/ some CSS styling, to support
| using shorter contracts in business.
|
| EXAMPLE: Instead of doing a full-blown NDA, parties could agree,
| in an email exchange, that Party A will keep Party B's
| confidential information secret in accordance with the [name]
| Confidential Information Clause -- presto, an enforceable NDA (in
| most jurisdictions).
|
| I'll be posting the whole thing online for free under some kind
| of Creative Commons license, in part for my students, and in part
| in the hope that if people start to use it, _eventually_ I won 't
| have to spend so much time reviewing random contract language for
| clients.
|
| The current corpus includes clauses for confidentiality;
| consulting services; software warranties and disclaimers;
| limitations of liability; terms of service; payment terms;
| referral payments; channel partnerships; consulting services;
| indemnity ground rules; and other things.
|
| I'm trying to follow (part of) the Unix philosophy: Each clause
| should do basically one thing, and do it well, with as few
| dependencies as possible (maximize orthogonality).
|
| The materials also have numerous planning checklists for spotting
| issues that can come up.
|
| The clauses incorporate typical wish-list items that work for
| both sides. In a prior life, I was the general counsel for a
| software company, and customers' lawyers liked that balanced
| approach very much because it reduced their workload; our sales
| people likewise liked the fact that the balanced approach helped
| get us to signature sooner, without screwing around with anatomy-
| measuring, "art of the deal" game playing.
|
| The clauses are extensively annotated with citations to real-
| world cases where problems arose -- sometimes, big problems --
| explaining how the clause language seeks to avoid the problems,
| again in ways that work for both parties.
|
| For improved readability, I'm using Python-like indentation to
| avoid long, wall-of-words paragraphs of dense legalese. (That's
| proving very popular with my clients' business people.)
|
| HERE'S THE QUESTION: Apropos of the "Invert" subject of the
| posted article, should this contract framework be positioned as:
|
| 1. a vitamin -- "balanced, readable terms to help you get
| workable contracts to signature sooner,"
|
| or
|
| 2. aspirin - "learn from others' failures by adopting the [name]
| framework in your contracts."
|
| All input gratefully received.
| 323454 wrote:
| Huge props for this effort, I'm very excited to use this
| system. I'd advise you to think about the audience for this
| work. To my eye, that audience is the small and medium sized
| business leader, especially those with a technology focus. The
| problem this solves for them is getting the legal stuff done as
| quickly and cheaply as possible without sacrificing any
| important legal protections. They don't really care that the
| contract is balanced and readable except in as much as that
| speeds up the negotiation and let's them verify that they are
| not getting screwed.
|
| Your basic one liner might be something like "Create real,
| legally valid contracts over email"
|
| Expanding on that you could say "Use our standard library of
| legal clauses to build your own contracts in a safe and legally
| defensible way. Each clause is designed to serve a single
| purpose and offer each party fair, battle-tested legal
| protections. The library itself is free, open source and
| licensed under the Creative Commons. It can be used by simply
| referencing the clause by name in any document, even email.
| Every clause is annotated with plain English explanations, so
| it is easy for all parties to understand what your contract
| says. Go _here_ for a quick tutorial on how to use library,
| including a primer on the top N most important clauses for
| business deals"
|
| Later you might want to explain why you made this "I/we made
| this because we spent thousands of hours reviewing the same
| boilerplate contract language, fixing the same mistakes and
| watching the same disagreements play out between the parties.
| Taking a good idea from software engineering, we set out to
| create a trusted standard library for building legal contracts
| that would solve these problems once and for all. The library
| was created by professional contract lawyers and academics with
| decades of experience, so every word is backed by mountains of
| case law and legal precedent. We're confident that the library
| can be the legal backbone of your next deal."
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _To my eye, that audience is the small and medium sized
| business leader, especially those with a technology focus.
| The problem this solves for them is getting the legal stuff
| done as quickly and cheaply as possible without sacrificing
| any important legal protections. They don 't really care that
| the contract is balanced and readable except in as much as
| that speeds up the negotiation and let's them verify that
| they are not getting screwed._
|
| Exactly -- thanks!
| 323454 wrote:
| Also, down the road you might consider making a non-profit
| to manage improvements and updates to the clauses. You
| could even apply to YC with said non-profit. I'm sure
| they'd be interested.
| sizzle wrote:
| This is an great endeavour and problem you are positioned to
| uniquely solve.
|
| Think of the user's experience and come up with the key
| questions your audience will need to ask to get the job done
| like you outlined above and create an easy to use user flow
| with modern UI controls and basically reduce, anticipate, and
| outsource the complexity at all stages. What are the most
| common workflows you can automate with a wizard of questions?
| Think completing your taxes with Intuit type of experience that
| has come a long way to be user centered and anticipate answers
| to all questions they might have and ask.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _modern UI controls_
|
| It'll be an online book, in vanilla HTML with some CSS
| styling and just a bit of Javascript (to show/hide
| commentary).
| boustrophedon wrote:
| Why not both?
| dctoedt wrote:
| Good question -- maybe both would work. Thanks!
| corry wrote:
| Reminds one of PG's "just don't die and you become rich" advice
| for startup founders.
|
| FWIW, the best founders I've met within YC or outside of it have
| this paradoxical quality that takes high optimism about the
| future of their company and combines it with extreme gritty
| paranoia about the short-term things that could derail or kill
| you.
| davidrm wrote:
| That reminds me of the foreword in the High Output Management,
| written by Ben Horowitz and Andy Grover's words "only the
| paranoid survive":
|
| "CEOs always act on leading indicators of good news, but only
| act on lagging indicators of bad news."
|
| "Why?" I asked him. He answered in the style resonant of his
| entire book: "In order to build anything great, you have to be
| an optimist, because by definition you are trying to do
| something that most people would consider impossible. Optimists
| most certainly do not listen to leading indicators of bad
| news."
|
| But this insight won't be in any book. When I suggested he
| write something on the topic, his response was: "Why would I do
| that? It would be a waste of time to write about how to not
| follow human nature. It would be like trying to stop the Peter
| Principle.* CEOs must be optimists and all in all that's a good
| thing."
| ibejoeb wrote:
| The technique is also pretty good for acknowledging one's own
| personal decisions and being ok with them. For example:
|
| What's preventing me from being richer, more powerful, more
| famous?
|
| Perhaps you'd give up privacy, autonomy, free time. That might be
| all it takes to realize that happiness and performance are not
| always, or even often, the same.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Funny a few years ago I thought that Failure Oriented Design
| could be a nice starting point. Think about all the
| failures/errors, the remaining space will then be a safe
| playground.
| the_af wrote:
| Thinking about all possible failures seems daunting though. It
| reminds me of the Anna Karenina principle:
|
| "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy
| in its own way."
|
| What does this say about the tractability of enumerating
| possible failures? :P
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