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Yeah. I love HN and many of the thoughts expressed on it, but if there's one thing that always jumps out at me as being an incredibly widely held cognitive bias
by mwfunk 7y ago
Yeah. I love HN and many of the thoughts expressed on it, but if there's one thing that always jumps out at me as being an incredibly widely held cognitive bias in the tech community, it's a tendency to view certain things in a very black and white, binary fashion, and to treat certain very complicated, messy problems with lots of social nuances as if they were simple problems, if only everyone could be rational about it. Grades and hiring are obvious examples, but you can also see plenty of it in discussions about open source business models and codes of conduct and copyright and so on.
Throughout my life and career I've seen so many statements of this nature from my peers: "the status quo will only ever be a 90% solution at best, therefore we should throw all of that away and just do everything on a case-by-case basis in isolation from one another, then we'd all live in an ideal meritocracy (or something)".
See also any discussion about flat management. "Explicit management hierarchies obviously aren't perfect, therefore let's get rid of them altogether and assume that everyone is awesome and will magically self-organize and do the right thing."
I guess the common theme is, someone is greatly overestimating their own rationality, and projects it onto other people, and ends up with an almost religious faith in the self-organizing competencies of unmanaged people, or the natural inclination of unregulated schools or industries to always do the right thing even when it's not in their own self-interest.
IME there are lots of fundamentally messy or imperfect things in life, where any choice you make has negative consequences. There's also a personality type that is repelled by this sort of messiness and will always be drawn towards throwing everything away and starting from scratch, often with a childlike belief that things they don't understand aren't important, and why can't everyone see how obvious and elegant their solution is? IME they're usually wrong about those situations, but I guess I'm still glad people less pessimistic than I am are tilting at those windmills.
- throwawaymath 7y agoThis is an excellent observation. The problem isn't hyperrationality per se; it's a lack of intellectual humility and self-awareness. The behavior you're talking about arises when someone looks at a problem, immediately wants to fix it and makes snap judgements to figure out how to do so. Instead, they should dispassionately consider 1) whether the problem is fixable in any meaningful sense, and 2) whether they have the requisite experience, skill and insight to solve it in five minutes of thought. You could further distill this idea with the observation that a lot of people consider things too systematically, rather than holistically. "First principles" thinking is a powerful drug, which appears to crack open the world and solve every problem. But no problem-solving paradigm can deconstruct away unknown unknowns or inexperience.
- rglullis 7y agoSorry, it seems that you are jumping into conclusions that were never warranted. Chesterton's fence is a principle that I learned a while ago and I am not defending that we need to throw everything away. What I am saying is that what you regard as a "90% solution at best" is actually not a solution at all. Standardized tests are terrible predictors of performance on actual jobs. If standardized tests (or IQ tests or anything that is supposed to be a proxy for measuring performance) shows time and again that it only manages to measure people that are good to "study for the test", then why do we keep trying to use them to measure performance? Is it because it "the only thing we have"? This seems like saying "I am lost in Rome but all I have is a map of Paris, let me use that anyway." And no, I am not proposing some other solution to replace it.
- throwawaymath 7y agoWhat about that comment made you believe it was referring to something you said specifically?
- closeparen 7y agoExercising power over other people is a serious thing. It's extraordinarily presumptuous to believe you have designed a rule that will do more good than harm. I'm much more worried about the cognitive bias that says that because someone is currently the decision-maker, they must be competent at it.