6 ms·
Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots (2020)
- jedberg 3y agoThis is basically the idea behind Chaos Engineering. Think of all the ways a system can break, make it happen, and see if we survive. If we don't, fix it so we do next time.
- aftbit 3y agoAn interesting concept. If you want to succeed but cannot see the solution, spend a lot of time thinking about how you might fail, then just don't do that.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 3y agoYes, it's a neat concept. Have you ever met someone who has unerringly bad judgment? Maybe it's useful to know a few and ask them for advice.
- don_neufeld 3y agoWhile funny, I think that misses the point. I see the value here being: when you can’t understand the causal relationships for success, use the causal relationships for failure that you can understand and then avoid specific failure modes. “Friend gives generally bad advice” is not that kind of a clear causal relationship.
- sixstringtheory 3y agoI’ve often thought in life that I’ve learned most of what I know by seeing examples of what not to do. If for no other reason than that there are many more people running around without a clue than truly wise individuals making well-reasoned decisions. At least that’s how it’s seemed IME; I’m sure in reality people are just doing the best they could and making decisions in the moment, but they often seem to be thinking in the extremely short term (and then sometimes, still wrong even for that).
- dfxm12 3y agoFind your Eddie Mush. Never bet the same way :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ulWjFfLsL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ulWjFfLsL0
- fnimick 3y agoOh hey, this is me, when it comes to products. I am almost certainly of the "harbinger of failure" group where if I like your product, it's going to be a disaster. https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/certain-customers-spell-doom-for-new-products/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/certain-customers-sp... Not only did I buy a Zune, I was an early enthusiastic customer of their streaming subscription service and thought that it would topple the iTunes sales model. We all know how well that went.
- booleandilemma 3y agoExcept Zune wasn't a bad product. I liked it. It had a radio and was easy to develop apps for.
- datavirtue 3y agoDoomed to failure. How come none of Microsoft's bad products ever die? RIP Windows Phone.
- _ah 3y agoAlso: subscription streaming did topple the iTunes sales model. It just wasn't Microsoft that made it work in the marketplace.
- datavirtue 3y agoSame here. "Split brain," logical, analytical person. We aren't even a rounding error in market numbers. If I like it it is probably the superior product providing the most value...rarely ever matters.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoA bit stronger: Think about all the ways you could fail, then make sure those things don't happen (to the extent you can). That is, failure isn't always caused by me doing something. Sometimes it's caused by something external. My wonderful new box might not ship if we can't get the chips to make it? I should probably look at lining up a second source. (Yeah, a couple of years ago we saw that that may not work. You can't always prevent everything bad that can happen. You can prevent some of them, though, and it makes enough difference to be worth trying.)
- User23 3y agoAh, the Douglas Adams technique for flight: just throw yourself at the ground and miss.
- pixl97 3y agoThe only problem I see with this is the potential ways to fail are unbounded, maybe possibly infinite. While the ways to succeed may also be unbounded its growth metric is much smaller. That is, some infinite sets are larger than others.
- mcmoor 3y agoAll happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle
- pikminguy 3y agoThis reminds me of How to be Miserable by Randy Patterson. A guide on all the ways to ruin your mental health so you can not do them.
- gustavus 3y agoThere's an episode of Sienfeld about this. George realizes that he always makes the wrong decision so he decides to do the opposite of whatever he would normally do, and it ends up working out for him pretty well.
- JCM9 3y agoThere are some real life “George” figures that I pay attention to. If they think something is a great idea and that’s in line with something I’m thinking about doing, I’ll take a hard look at what I might be missing since X’s judgment is usually terrible. In an odd way, their consistently bad judgment has proven a valuable tool.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dharmab 3y agoMost of the best decisions of my life were the opposite decisions my parents would have made. They're not stupid people, but they grew up in a totally different time and place. Nowadays I sometimes ask for their advice as "inverse input."
- kurthr 3y agoI suspect part of this is that there are other parts of society (corporations) that are preying on their older intuition. It also means that as we get older, we should also question "obvious answers", because others will have learned to take advantage of them (and any accumulated wealth).
- afterburner 3y agoSpeaking of X...
- TMWNN 3y agoI figured out a long time ago that the Reddit hivemind is a superb contraindicator.
- phkahler 3y agoSame thing applies to figuring out what you want. First identify all the stuff that you don't want - particularly things you already have and are willing to get rid of. Getting rid of things really reinforces the notion that you don't want them. This also makes space and frees up time to explore things you do want even if you're not sure what that is yet.
- elSidCampeador 3y agotldr - "invert, always invert" or something to that effect that Jacobi said
- louwrentius 3y agoI’m not really fond of this concept. I think the simple idea of “risk analysis” is much more intuitive and better captures the idea that is being conveyed.
- rootusrootus 3y agoI saw something like this for suicide. Dark, and fairly graphic. All the possible ways you might want to kill yourself, complete with descriptions of how it usually goes wrong and you'll just be maimed for life instead. The intent was clearly to convince people not to do it.
- selimthegrim 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Manual_of_Suicide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Manual_of_Suici...
- jhbadger 3y agoPerhaps Charlie Munger's enthusiasm for this sort of inverse reasoning explains his (now cancelled) plan for the windowless dorm building he designed for UC-Santa Barbara -- he was creating the worst possible dorm building in order to get insights into what a good dorm building would be.
- everybodyknows 3y agoDetails on dorm cancellation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37213589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37213589 TBD, apparently, is an alternative source of ~$1B: > Estimated Budget: The projected construction budget for Phases 1 and 2 of the Project is $600M – $750M.
- foxyv 3y agoI love deep dark places. My favorite memory is of visiting the Grand Canyon Caverns. I loved when they turned out the lights and it was absolutely pitch black. A dorm like that would be amazing for me. No street lights, no car noise, no windows for people to peek into. However I can see why it would make a bunch of non troglodyte people feel weird.
- xg15 3y agoVisiting is one thing. Living there is something different.
- foxyv 3y agoThat is true, but I would love to try it out sometime.
- inafewwords 3y agoDecommissioned lookout Bunker stations here in the cliffs over looking the sf golden gate have extremely deeply sunken thick concrete buried barracks. we turned off the flash lights and it's the darkest I've been in and absolutely quiet with a group of 30+ kids and chaperones. Had better ears back then so no ringing ears. And sunken structures have the benefit of about 65° stable temperature compared to the cold outside air It was comforting
- HtmlProgrammer 3y agoIs this not just the general approach to system design? When I’m writing software, my first thought is list everything that could go wrong? Or am I just a hopelessly anxious person lol
- stronglikedan 3y agoI think it's the right approach, as long as you realize you won't be able to think of everything up front, and don't let that thought be a burden.
- bob1029 3y agoSimply being aware that there exist things that you don't know you don't know can save your project. This is the general basis for why I tend to pick tools & concepts that are at least a half-decade old. The space of unknown unknowns in something that has been around this long should be vanishingly-small, especially if we are applying the tool or concept in a typical way.
- throwawayqqq11 3y ago> You have to think your optimization approach from the other end, as how it might fail.
- fendy3002 3y agoBut definitely give it some times to think of it upfront. Weight them by 2 factor: severity and frequency. Then try to tackle as much as you can from the top list of severity * frequency level.
- brianpan 3y agoDefinitely agree it sounds like good system design. I think the overlap is the big picture thinking. It provides a way of re-framing goals to give a clearer picture of the most important things. So not just list everything that could go wrong, but maybe: what's a terrible day for your service/system that's most likely to happen? Cascading failures? Outage that makes accessing/recovering your system impossible? Backups unusable?
- franky47 3y agoThis reminds me of the drawing of WWII bomber planes with bullet holes mapped out, showing that the critical systems were where there were no holes, not because the hull was strong enough, but because a hit there would cause the plane not to return and be recorded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
- sillywalk 3y agoHere's a bit about the bombers. And it doesn't seem to have a medium paywall. https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-be-wrong-by-jordan-ellenberg-664e708cfc3d https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...
- neilv 3y agoAnother "think a bit differently" trick, which sometimes helps me, is to ask myself what I would advise someone else to do, in a similar situation. This can help get past some individual biases.
- isoprophlex 3y agoSee also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duality_(optimization) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duality_(optimization) In mathematical optimization theory, duality or the duality principle is the principle that optimization problems may be viewed from either of two perspectives, the primal problem or the dual problem. If the primal is a minimization problem then the dual is a maximization problem (and vice versa). Any feasible solution to the primal (minimization) problem is at least as large as any feasible solution to the dual (maximization) problem.
- DanielBMarkham 3y agoRelated essay: Negatives Stack, Positives Don't https://danielbmarkham.com/negatives-stack-positives-dont-a-numberline-model-of-communication/ https://danielbmarkham.com/negatives-stack-positives-dont-a-...
- karaterobot 3y agoI don't think the value of inverse reasoning is that it lets you think of new ideas. If you're trying to list all the ways something could go wrong, you're pretty much just listing the ways they could go right, and flipping them. What I mean is, I think your list of bullet points for "how to have a great career" would be able as long as your list of bullet points for "how to have a terrible career". Both lists would usually contain the same essential information, just framed differently. Where I think such a practice can be useful is in forcing you to confront unpleasant possibilities you would otherwise try to ignore, and thus at least briefly plan for them.
- cle 3y agoCharlie Munger would get his OpenAI account suspended.
- asah 3y agoOne of my favorite versions: when Steve Jobs immersed an early iPod in water to see if any bubbles came out, and therefore it could be made smaller/tighter. https://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+ipod+water+air+bubbles https://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+ipod+water+air+bu... Another is when Feynman ducked a piece of o-ring in a glass of ice water, causing it to fail. https://www.google.com/search?q=feynman+challenger+o+ring https://www.google.com/search?q=feynman+challenger+o+ring
- xtracto 3y ago[flagged]
- titzer 3y agoI feel like there is/should be some kind of programming language design equivalent of this. If you wanted to make programmers basically incapable of writing correct programs, how would you do it? Here's where I'd share examples and it wouldn't be funny and instead start a flamewar.