[HN Gopher] Overthinking ___________________________________________________________________ Overthinking Author : z0mbie42 Score : 78 points Date : 2022-06-12 14:55 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (kerkour.com) (TXT) w3m dump (kerkour.com) | itsmemattchung wrote: | Amazon has an internal tool called "Forte", a tool used once a | year for employees to provide "anonymous" feedback for one | another. One piece of feedback that cropped up multiple times for | me, from multiple people, was that I could improve in "bias for | action", akin to analysis paralysis mentioned in the article. | | At first, I got a bit defensive ... and in response, I ended up | running an experiment, delivering code & written documents that | -- inside my head -- felt incomplete, unpolished, not quite at | the "bar". | | The feedback following? | | Overwhelmingly positive. | | I had anticipated that my peers and leadership would notice a | drop in quality. Instead, I was commended for speed of delivery. | throwawayarnty wrote: | This made me think of science and academia. One of the things | that seems to distinguish productive people in science is the | balance between "doer" mentality and "thinker" mentality. | | Too much "thinker" mentality and the project never goes anywhere. | Too much "doer" mentally and the project moves but may go down an | unproductive path. | | Perhaps an analogy is that "thinker" and "doer" mentalities work | together like a stochastic gradient descent algorithm. | | The "thinker" mode tries to calculate accurate gradients, but | never moves towards the goal. | | The "doer" mode takes a step towards the next iteration, | regardless of whether you have an accurate gradient already. | | Balancing the two correctly can give beautiful momentum dynamics | that steers towards your goal. | glial wrote: | > Balancing the two correctly | | There are some famous examples complementary and different | personalities working together very well, like e.g. Kahneman | and Tversky: | | https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-two-friends-... | bombcar wrote: | A big part of learning this is _not_ overanalyzing past failures. | Check and see if you missed something major, but then don 't | dwell much on the details; perhaps anything you would have done | would have been doomed to failure; it wasn't the time, etc. | hinkley wrote: | PA Yeomans, the 'other' father of permaculture, had a checklist | he called the Scale of Permanence. It's a sort of priority list | for irreversible decisions, and is helpful for figuring out if | you're expending energy on something that's easy to change | later, or rashly deciding on something that is going to be | difficult or infeasible to change later. | | In a system that favors watching first and acting at the last | responsible moment, this is in someways both a counterweight | and an anchor for analysis. | | There are some ways in which systems thinking is the same no | matter what domain you're looking at, and to some extent the | ways in which they are different have more to do with lack/lag | in cross-domain communication rather than any intrinsic | distinctions between the domains. There is probably a Scale of | Permanence for creating a business, it's just not called that | or nobody has compiled a canonical list from the available | sources. | astrange wrote: | > PA Yeomans, the 'other' father of permaculture, had a | checklist he called the Scale of Permanence. | | What an interesting case of nominative determinism. | contingencies wrote: | Living in China it's quite amazing how the business culture | differs from many western markets. People seem to throw | themselves in to ventures without business plans, market research | or specific costings. I suppose that when the cost of failure is | reduced, dynamism results, because reaction times to | opportunities are reduced and people are able to take the risk of | following a new path. These days, when I think of analysis | paralysis, I think of conservative traditional western business | mindsets. The worst of which, frankly, seem to be continental | European and governmental bureaucracies. | | FWIW in the last 18 months I recall pitching one major European | industrial group requesting specifically disruptive technology | for established industries. Considered at the board level, their | feedback was unanimously positive: but they could not take the | opportunity because it was "too far from existing business | lines". If you thought corporate VC was bad, try that in an old- | Europe context... | Deritio wrote: | There are not many industry breaking huge china based companies | globally in comparison of how many people they have. | | Perhaps our way might not be that bad after all. | | And while Chinese currently the EV market discovers it's | totally unclear how the car industry will look in 10 years | Archelaos wrote: | > If you thought corporate VC was bad, try that in an old- | Europe context... | | I am not sure whether it is specific for old-Europe or not just | a universal symptom for long-running companies unable to re- | invent themselves, because they were somehow locked into an | established pathway, so that fundamental changes promissing | probable benefits in the long run would mean certain short-term | losses in the near future due to major investments and | canibalization of their legacy businesses. An example outside | of Europe seems to be Boeing's stretching of a several-decade- | old airplane design towards a limit were it became increasingly | problematic, while starting over would have involved extremely | large investments and the loss of much of the experience gained | from the old design. | | On the positive side, such lock-ins of traditional companies | can mean sound business opportunities for small newcomers. I | was myself working with small dynamic companies in Germany and | Austria who were afraid that one day a large, financially | strong competitor might decide to copy their successful | products and business modell or enter their highly profitable | niche market -- however, it never happened. In other words: If | the parent is right and established companies in old-Europe are | even more unflexible than elsewhere, it should be safer to | attempt to disrupt their old-Europe markets than to try the | same somewhere else. | imoverclocked wrote: | A refreshingly good take on paralysis by analysis. I have | suffered from this in the past as well. I found that having | projects that are otherwise meaningless that I can hack together | helps. It's almost like a mini hackathon where the only thing | that matters is the end product. Maybe I'll choose something | completely out of my professional life (eg woodworking with scrap | wood) or write something in a language nobody around me likes | because it's "ugly." | wnolens wrote: | Kind of like practicing non-perfectionism? I received that | advice from a friend once. Pick a domain with much lower | stakes, and practice making decisions. | imoverclocked wrote: | Yes, I find failure is a key component here too. Without | being able to fail, you get stuck in the perfection loop. | [deleted] | UIUC_06 wrote: | > I've also noticed that, up to a certain point, the smarter a | person is, the more it has to be apparent in their work. Every | algorithm needs to be perfect, every function needs to be side- | effects free, every data structure needs to be the fastest, and | every best practice needs to be followed. | | Many engineers are somewhere on the Asperger's spectrum, as | Temple Grandin tells her Googler audience in [1]. Overthinking is | a prime symptom of it. I'm disappointed to see that not even | mentioned in this article. | | There are some engineering practices that, unfortunately, amplify | this rather than tamping it down. Code reviews, in particular, | can do that; a reviewer gets points by nitpicking ("you could | have done that in one line instead of two!"). | | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA4tE3_2qmI | kissiel wrote: | Thing that helped me with avoiding this kind of problem was | learning about wabi sabi[0]. A mindset of accepting and finding | beauty in imperfection. | | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi | blocked_again wrote: | Are there any books you recommend? | astrange wrote: | I'd recommend https://metarationality.com/. | | It's a book optimized for arguing with rationalists (who | among other things think overthinking can solve every | problem) so some of the points seem irrelevant to most | people, but they can be useful. | padde wrote: | I like the article. The architecture bit I'm not so sure about | though. I wish in my company the architects actually did _more_ | thinking and especially talking / negotiating with all the other | architects of adjacent components. That would really help. | Instead they work hard to fix minor problems and build walls in | between the components... or yet another middleware-generator- | middleware-wrapper. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-06-13 23:00 UTC)