[HN Gopher] Reversible and irreversible decisions (2018)
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Reversible and irreversible decisions (2018)
Author : durmonski
Score : 61 points
Date : 2022-10-30 18:15 UTC (4 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (fs.blog)
| noduerme wrote:
| This may work for business, where only money is at stake. But the
| hardest decisions in life are the ones where both options are
| irreversible. e.g. choosing to have an abortion or have a baby
| with someone you barely know. There's no reversible way to check
| the other side of either door.
| FinanceAnon wrote:
| I use this model a lot in life. I like to remember about this
| when in arguments with someone - once you say something that you
| later regret, it's very difficult to take it back.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Interesting framework. Perhaps one of the difficulties is that
| decision reversibility tends to lie on a spectrum between
| "reversible" and "irreversible", and sometimes it's hard to even
| know where on that spectrum it lies. Thus you end up having to
| figure out if a decision is "reversible", maybe even first
| needing to develop a decision framework in which to make such a
| determination. I think all of the truly difficult decisions I've
| made in work and life have been in this category.
|
| Still, I appreciate this concept and I think it's better to have
| the mental model than not.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Right, Bezos & this blog are framing the world as black & white
| when its really just lots of gray.
|
| Many things that you could bucket into "type 2" decisions which
| are not one-way doors, effectively are. For example, orgs that
| tend to never go back and fix technical debt means everything
| is a one-way door.
|
| Further, design decisions that require substantial and growing
| effort once you go through the door .. are effectively one-way
| doors as well.
|
| Maybe ZIRP era over staffed FAANG could afford to build and
| rebuilt, have multiple competing redundant systems to see who
| wins, etc.. but most tech orgs just don't work that way.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I've been learning a bit about distributed databases and of
| course AWS is a major user of such systems. The decision to do a
| mass migration from one distributed system to another, as an
| example, doesn't fit well with the kind of 'executive boardroom'
| mentality that this article is talking about.
|
| The fundamental issue is more just taking the possiblity of error
| and failure of strategy into account. Hence, having a rollback
| strategy in place beforehand is wise. This post discusses a few
| basic recovery strategies plus more complicated ones:
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/rolling-back-from-a-mi...
|
| Bezos is likely well aware that the real world is always more
| complex than two simple choices, but that's too much information
| for a sales-confidence pitch to shareholders, I imagine.
| simonw wrote:
| I've used a similar model successfully in work situations where a
| decision is taking too long to make but is something that's
| reversible: pick a path, and put a note in the calendar to review
| that decision in a couple of weeks time.
|
| If it turns out to be the wrong direction you can course correct
| then.
|
| This really helps if not everyone on a team is convinced that
| it's the right decision: they can commit to it knowing that there
| will be a chance to change direction pretty soon if it turns out
| not to work.
| ghaff wrote:
| Way back when I was a product manager the team would constantly
| want decisions in this or that. The reality was that a lot of
| these decisions really didn't matter or didn't matter much and
| could be course corrected. So the best course of action was to
| make some decision any decision. It was usually more informed
| than flipping a coin but it often didn't need a lot of deep
| study either.
| scared333 wrote:
| I guess russian leadership failed to consider this when they
| started their illegal imperial war to annex Ukraine. People of
| russia are almost irreversibly becoming the new 'nazis' of whose
| attrocities the kids will learn at school and of whom they will
| learn to despise for the rest of of their lives (while the
| earlier ones will be just another chapter in the history books
| that is read with the same enthusiasm that most study geopolitics
| behind WW1 currently).
|
| This is not to suggest that the attrocities (at this point
| anyway) would be comparable, but that history is moving ahead.
|
| Sorry about political angle, but due to my circumstances, I am
| very angry of what is happening, and I think these things cannot
| be repeated too many times.
| uri4 wrote:
| Everything with US is reversible, just wait until next
| election... I really hope not too many people will die until
| then. Iran, Afghanistan, Lybia, Syria, Jemen... another
| pointless war. World needs something better!
| rvba wrote:
| > People of russia are almost irreversibly becoming the new
| 'nazis'
|
| Is this really "new"? It's like you never heard about
| Stalinism, or even earlier: Leninism. Starting from 1920 war
| Bolsheviks tried to invade Poland; they starved millions in
| Ukraine in holodomor ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
| ), they backstabbed Poland in 1939 only to "free" it, just like
| they "freed" rest of Eastern Europe. Later they crushed the
| Czech uprising in 1956 (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring )...
|
| Not to mention millions who died in gulags.
|
| It's like history 101. High school level stuff. You really
| never heard about it earlier?
|
| The cycle is described in the old cartoon:
| https://twitter.com/theeconomist/status/447387748748759040
| scared333 wrote:
| I haven't been completely unaware of those and other things.
| But vast majority of my history classes and bringing up
| focused on nazi germany being the sole responsible for
| everything WW2 and how we beat them. And then soviets being
| the commies and the enemy of the free world. And then the
| wall came down and everything was swell again.
|
| So yes, I have been ignorant. Of which I am sorry. I may be
| late in the game, but let's put it out a loud: where are the
| russians living outside of russia that are protesting against
| russias war on Ukraine?
| creatorbytes wrote:
| What Russia is doing is horrible. War crimes and all. However I
| wouldn't go so far as call them nazis, think it dampens that
| metaphor when it's over used.
|
| Russia feels NATO expansion is too close to their doorstep, he
| warned many times and this is the outcome.
|
| Obviously not condoning it, and it's many millions of lives
| displaced and tens of thousands lost. Generations will be
| effected.
|
| Russia using the excuse of nazis in Ukraine, and the need to
| free the Ukrainian people is a tall tail. Though there is a
| small amount of truth, of actual nazis existing in some of the
| armed forces of Ukraine [0]. But by no means justifies what's
| been done.
|
| [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ukraine-has-nazi-
| probl...
| Animats wrote:
| No, that's when you _thought_ you were making a reversible
| decision but events played out in a way that made it
| irreversible.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Decision reversibility is much overlooked in resilience
| engineering.
|
| In a perfect world we'd have a kind of quantum uncertainty, where
| we forked reality into two streams, and maintained two options
| until one or the other proved a safe passage. Quoting from
| Digital Vegan; "Consider how the UK government
| let our drinking water reservoirs be sold off for property
| development, believing that advanced JIT (just in time)
| management technology, smart metering and so forth, would
| dispense with them. Then climate change came. Reservoirs are like
| power supply capacitors; they absorb as well as smooth out
| supply. Now in the UK we have housing estates built on flood
| plains. Rivers burst their banks with every downpour.
| Knocking down thousands of peoples' houses to regain
| reservoir capacity is much /harder/ than it was to sell the
| reservoirs to developers."
|
| The transition from a reservoir to a housing estate looks like a
| net gain in "order" (entropy reduction) because it seems to
| create value, but considering the system as a whole (cost of
| losing infrastructure) it increases disorder.
|
| Similarly our gushing project toward an "online cashless society"
| is playing with dangerous forces. It's a net destruction of
| wealth and order. It won't be cheap or quick to re-open shops,
| print and distribute cash, install ATMs and money handling
| facilities once the terrifying brittleness of a wholly digital
| economy becomes clear. Those imagining "Nothing can possibly go
| wrong with the all Bitcoin + Amazon society", haven't thought
| through the reality of what happens when tens of millions of
| people can't get food even though it's in a warehouse less than
| 100 miles from their house.
| city17 wrote:
| I try to apply a similar mental model to new purchases. It can be
| tempting to weigh all the pros and cons of different products and
| find out a detailed list of all the possible alternatives.
|
| But often you just have to try a product to find out if it works
| for you. In that case it can help to think about what risk there
| is in just buying something that seems ok.
|
| If you can return it easily, or if it doesn't lose much value in
| using and you can sell it used for 90% of the new price then
| there's no real downside to just making a quick decision.
|
| Detailed analysis is only really worth it for more 'irreversible'
| purchases where it's either a big hassle to undo the purchase
| (buying a house) or there's a large cost (cars lose value
| quickly).
| lazide wrote:
| What goods can you easily get 90% of the purchase price back?
|
| In my experience, unless you're spending a lot of time and
| effort selling, 50-60% is the best you can hope for most of the
| time.
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