7 ms·

Then we complain about the sad state of the industry. What about empirically proving that something works instead? Like in serious professions. Imagine going

by gfs78 8y ago

Then we complain about the sad state of the industry. What about empirically proving that something works instead? Like in serious professions. Imagine going to a doctor and the doctor saying: "The cure to your illness is eating a big warm turd every morning. I know you will object but turn it into a goal and you'll see its value". Better to use guru status and force people to use an objectionable idea (turn objections into goals) until they are invested in it and hence start to find value in it. This is Machiavellism 101. Once you get invested you get emotional and you will defend it, no matter if its shit. As another example go find the original scrum papers by Sutherland. Every claim is pulled from his rear end. No serious studies, metrics, none, whatsoever. Luckily this people does not promote brain surgery procedures and techniques.

beat 8y ago
I have empirically proven that empirically proving that things work is not sufficient to get past people's objections. I'm serious. The idea that you can logic your way around feelings simply doesn't work in practice.
- gfs78 8y ago
  >I have empirically proven that empirically proving that things work is not sufficient to get past people's objections So? Proving that empirically proving something is not sufficient to get past people's objections does not prove that TCR or whatever is right. You first have to prove (but in a respected way) that say TCR works, and then you can discuss the objections.
  - beat 8y ago
    You absolutely do not need to prove anything in order to get past people's objections to whatever it is you're trying to talk them into doing. Not only do you not need to prove that your plan is right or that it works, you can get people to agree to things that provably will not work! Humans are incredibly irrational. If you want to talk them into stuff, it's a lot more effective to appeal to their irrational feelings than to appeal to reason - even if you're trying to convince them to do the rational thing. Believing that reason trumps emotion in human decision-making is itself demonstrably irrational. (And yes, this means the people who think they're being reasonable are probably wrong.)
    - njarboe 8y ago
      True, but convincing people to believe things that you know are false or do things that you know don't work by tricking them with reason or emotion is wrong. Bad people do that. Societies full of such people suck. Don't do it and call people out that behave that way.
      - beat 8y ago
        Unethical/dishonest behavior is bad, therefore don't do unethical/dishonest things. Now, a question... is an appeal to emotion, in itself, unethical/dishonest? If that's what you believe, then you really need to defend that with a strongly reasoned argument. So if an appeal to emotion can act in the best interest of the person you are trying to convince, if your motives are pure and the results beneficial, is it a good act? And interestingly, if you refuse to use emotion to convince someone of something beneficial to them, is that in itself unethical? There's a strong argument that it is.
        njarboe 8y ago
        tldr: Using sex to sell beer on TV is unethical. I think that emotions, feelings, and reason are all pretty good tools for humans to use with other humans. The real problem is that we are less and less dealing with people in-real-life face-to-face interaction. In the last few hundred years there has been a huge increase in what some call super-stimuli where humans are now out of their evolutionary element and are responding poorly. Amplified voice, radio, TV, motorized transport, telephone, internet, video calls, social media, credit cards, a smartphone in your pocket that can do all sorts of crazy things (take pictures or video, contact anyone on earth, let you go into more debt to get a hamburger, etc), foods from refined sugar to trans fats, refined and artificial drugs from liquor to fentanyl. Couple this with the rise of the scientific study of human psychology and the advertising and PR industries, its pretty amazing the we are functioning at all. I wonder what the number of minutes the average American spends each day interacting with each other face-to-face. Not much and less every year. An honest appeal to emotion done by a person face-to-face with your best interest at heart, great. Not what one really is getting these days.
jasode 8y ago
>Imagine going to a doctor and the doctor saying: "The cure to your illness is eating a big warm turd every morning. I know you will object but turn it into a goal and you'll see its value". Fyi trivia about your analogy and its coincidence with turd eating... This was recently coined the "bs asymmetry principle": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr... It takes much more effort to disapprove somebody's bad idea than for the crackpot to propose it. (To be clear, citing that does not mean I think Kent Beck's TCR is bs or a bad idea.)
quantumhobbit 8y ago
Not really relevant, but if you have a recurrent c-diff infection, eating a warm turd is pretty close to the empirically proven treatment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_microbiota_transplant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_microbiota_transplant
sanderjd 8y ago
I have a new baby. There is a metric ton of guesswork involved in figuring out what's going on with her health and well-being at any moment. The pediatricians have better more targeted hypotheses and ideas for things to try than us or our books or the internet, but I would not call what they're doing empirical in the sense you're using it. I honestly don't find it very dissimilar to the type of iterative hypothesis testing informed by past experience we do when building software. I think a similar thing is true for most (but perhaps not all) of the "serious professions" you're thinking of.
- gfs78 8y ago
  But this is a problem of magnitude. What would you think of your baby's pediatrician if he/she starting pushing his/her unproven ideas as good practices that should be followed by the medical community and writing about pushing against the objections when someone objects them?
  - meheleventyone 8y ago
    At least from my perspective there is a ton of this sort of thing in the medical community. Lots of Doctors promote disproven ideas as good practices let alone unproven ones. A really concrete example is the funding of homeopathy by the NHS.
    - gfs78 8y ago
      I'm not from the UK. I just took a glimpse at an article. From what I read some lobby got some funding for homeopathy which will not be granted anymore as there is no conclusive information that homeopathy really works. This seem like business lobbyists at their best. Someone got some money from some agreement, now he is not getting it anymore (and probably the money is going to some other lobbyists that played their cards better) It does not look like a case where we have a well known practitioner pushing practices just because.
      - meheleventyone 8y ago
coldtea 8y ago
>What about empirically proving that something works instead? Like in serious professions. Imagine going to a doctor and the doctor saying: "The cure to your illness is eating a big warm turd every morning. I know you will object but turn it into a goal and you'll see its value". What the doctor says is exactly "empirically proving that something works" -- that's what "you'll see its value" means. And one can only suppose that the doctor has already proved it in other tries, which is why they suggest it. >Better to use guru status and force people to use an objectionable idea (turn objections into goals) until they are invested in it and hence start to find value in it. This is Machiavellism 101. Once you get invested you get emotional and you will defend it, no matter if its shit. That's a jump to conclusions there. First, where it's written that they'll "defend it no matter if its shit"? How about empirically proving that that they will do that? Second, it's merely asking (nobody's "forcing" anybody). Third, the whole "once they've tried it and are invested in it it's too late for them to see it's not good", is your addition, not some logical deduction. And it's surely not some ...machiavellian plan from the author. I'd put what the author says thusly: "yeah, you might find what I say objectionable, but try it and give it a try and you'll see that it has value". Whether someone will try it, see it doesn't works, and still continue to support it, is not something I expect to happen, unless that someone is stupid to begin with. But then again, the same can be said for any suggestion to try something.
- gfs78 8y ago
  >And one can only suppose that the doctor has already proved it in other tries, which is why they suggest it. Medicine is not coding. It takes almost a decade of formal education to get the specialist title. And at that point they are at the starting point of their career as specialists. And they are not supposed to try ideas with patients. They can get in serious trouble if they pull treatment ideas out of nowhere and push them to their patients. >Third, the whole "once they've tried it and are invested in it it's too late for them to see it's not good", is your addition, not some logical deduction. This is just plain human nature working. Why do you think our industry is plagued with fads and buzzwords?

by gfs78 8y ago

beat 8y ago

I have empirically proven that empirically proving that things work is not sufficient to get past people's objections. I'm serious. The idea that you can logic your way around feelings simply doesn't work in practice.

gfs78 8y ago
>I have empirically proven that empirically proving that things work is not sufficient to get past people's objections So? Proving that empirically proving something is not sufficient to get past people's objections does not prove that TCR or whatever is right. You first have to prove (but in a respected way) that say TCR works, and then you can discuss the objections.
- beat 8y ago
  You absolutely do not need to prove anything in order to get past people's objections to whatever it is you're trying to talk them into doing. Not only do you not need to prove that your plan is right or that it works, you can get people to agree to things that provably will not work! Humans are incredibly irrational. If you want to talk them into stuff, it's a lot more effective to appeal to their irrational feelings than to appeal to reason - even if you're trying to convince them to do the rational thing. Believing that reason trumps emotion in human decision-making is itself demonstrably irrational. (And yes, this means the people who think they're being reasonable are probably wrong.)
  - njarboe 8y ago
    True, but convincing people to believe things that you know are false or do things that you know don't work by tricking them with reason or emotion is wrong. Bad people do that. Societies full of such people suck. Don't do it and call people out that behave that way.
    - beat 8y ago
      Unethical/dishonest behavior is bad, therefore don't do unethical/dishonest things. Now, a question... is an appeal to emotion, in itself, unethical/dishonest? If that's what you believe, then you really need to defend that with a strongly reasoned argument. So if an appeal to emotion can act in the best interest of the person you are trying to convince, if your motives are pure and the results beneficial, is it a good act? And interestingly, if you refuse to use emotion to convince someone of something beneficial to them, is that in itself unethical? There's a strong argument that it is.
      - njarboe 8y ago
        tldr: Using sex to sell beer on TV is unethical. I think that emotions, feelings, and reason are all pretty good tools for humans to use with other humans. The real problem is that we are less and less dealing with people in-real-life face-to-face interaction. In the last few hundred years there has been a huge increase in what some call super-stimuli where humans are now out of their evolutionary element and are responding poorly. Amplified voice, radio, TV, motorized transport, telephone, internet, video calls, social media, credit cards, a smartphone in your pocket that can do all sorts of crazy things (take pictures or video, contact anyone on earth, let you go into more debt to get a hamburger, etc), foods from refined sugar to trans fats, refined and artificial drugs from liquor to fentanyl. Couple this with the rise of the scientific study of human psychology and the advertising and PR industries, its pretty amazing the we are functioning at all. I wonder what the number of minutes the average American spends each day interacting with each other face-to-face. Not much and less every year. An honest appeal to emotion done by a person face-to-face with your best interest at heart, great. Not what one really is getting these days.

jasode 8y ago

>Imagine going to a doctor and the doctor saying: "The cure to your illness is eating a big warm turd every morning. I know you will object but turn it into a goal and you'll see its value". Fyi trivia about your analogy and its coincidence with turd eating... This was recently coined the "bs asymmetry principle": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr... It takes much more effort to disapprove somebody's bad idea than for the crackpot to propose it. (To be clear, citing that does not mean I think Kent Beck's TCR is bs or a bad idea.)

quantumhobbit 8y ago

Not really relevant, but if you have a recurrent c-diff infection, eating a warm turd is pretty close to the empirically proven treatment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_microbiota_transplant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_microbiota_transplant

sanderjd 8y ago

I have a new baby. There is a metric ton of guesswork involved in figuring out what's going on with her health and well-being at any moment. The pediatricians have better more targeted hypotheses and ideas for things to try than us or our books or the internet, but I would not call what they're doing empirical in the sense you're using it. I honestly don't find it very dissimilar to the type of iterative hypothesis testing informed by past experience we do when building software. I think a similar thing is true for most (but perhaps not all) of the "serious professions" you're thinking of.

gfs78 8y ago
But this is a problem of magnitude. What would you think of your baby's pediatrician if he/she starting pushing his/her unproven ideas as good practices that should be followed by the medical community and writing about pushing against the objections when someone objects them?
- meheleventyone 8y ago
  At least from my perspective there is a ton of this sort of thing in the medical community. Lots of Doctors promote disproven ideas as good practices let alone unproven ones. A really concrete example is the funding of homeopathy by the NHS.
  - gfs78 8y ago
    I'm not from the UK. I just took a glimpse at an article. From what I read some lobby got some funding for homeopathy which will not be granted anymore as there is no conclusive information that homeopathy really works. This seem like business lobbyists at their best. Someone got some money from some agreement, now he is not getting it anymore (and probably the money is going to some other lobbyists that played their cards better) It does not look like a case where we have a well known practitioner pushing practices just because.
    - meheleventyone 8y ago

coldtea 8y ago

>What about empirically proving that something works instead? Like in serious professions. Imagine going to a doctor and the doctor saying: "The cure to your illness is eating a big warm turd every morning. I know you will object but turn it into a goal and you'll see its value". What the doctor says is exactly "empirically proving that something works" -- that's what "you'll see its value" means. And one can only suppose that the doctor has already proved it in other tries, which is why they suggest it. >Better to use guru status and force people to use an objectionable idea (turn objections into goals) until they are invested in it and hence start to find value in it. This is Machiavellism 101. Once you get invested you get emotional and you will defend it, no matter if its shit. That's a jump to conclusions there. First, where it's written that they'll "defend it no matter if its shit"? How about empirically proving that that they will do that? Second, it's merely asking (nobody's "forcing" anybody). Third, the whole "once they've tried it and are invested in it it's too late for them to see it's not good", is your addition, not some logical deduction. And it's surely not some ...machiavellian plan from the author. I'd put what the author says thusly: "yeah, you might find what I say objectionable, but try it and give it a try and you'll see that it has value". Whether someone will try it, see it doesn't works, and still continue to support it, is not something I expect to happen, unless that someone is stupid to begin with. But then again, the same can be said for any suggestion to try something.

gfs78 8y ago
>And one can only suppose that the doctor has already proved it in other tries, which is why they suggest it. Medicine is not coding. It takes almost a decade of formal education to get the specialist title. And at that point they are at the starting point of their career as specialists. And they are not supposed to try ideas with patients. They can get in serious trouble if they pull treatment ideas out of nowhere and push them to their patients. >Third, the whole "once they've tried it and are invested in it it's too late for them to see it's not good", is your addition, not some logical deduction. This is just plain human nature working. Why do you think our industry is plagued with fads and buzzwords?