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I think this story illustrates the thinking pretty well http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Complicator_0x27_s_Gloves http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Compli

• logicrook 11y ago
  Programmers, hackers, mathematician, often tend to fall into this trap. It was pretty well illustrated by Swift, in Gulliver's travel. When the protagonist arrive in Laputa, the city of mathematician, they take his measurements to make him a suit. But they only take one measure! Because we can compute all other measures through fancy equations... and that's how everyone in Laputa ends up with suits that are not well-adjusted.
• wolfgke 11y ago
  The problem is not that the ideas are bad (they are not, IMHO), but the opportunity cost of working on these problems instead of the original one.
  • acdha 11y ago
    Opportunity cost is a huge problem but it seems like an even more basic issue is just the suitability for the underlying problem. The hype around blockchains lead a lot of people to suggest them as alternatives for relational databases or digital signatures, and even if a high-quality, tested, easy to use, well-secured system magically appeared it'd still be an inferior choice for any problem which can be solved with those tools: transactions take orders of magnitude longer to clear and the capacity limit is orders of magnitude smaller, customer service and fraud are hard problems rather than routine operations, etc. Even if the opportunity cost was zero, the choice wouldn't make sense unless you had a problem which cannot be solved well with mature tools.
    • wolfgke 11y ago
      > but it seems like an even more basic issue is just the suitability for the underlying problem. Using unsuitable tools instead of working ones is also a kind of opportunity cost.
      • acdha 11y ago
        They're definitely related problems — I just find it fascinating how often enthusiasm leads people to completely downplay this category of problem, often while spending non-trivial amounts of energy trying to deal with them