7 ms·

There are many, many ways to tell this story. However it resonates because it fits well with an ongoing dynamic. Which is that programmers naturally want to b

by btilly 7y ago

There are many, many ways to tell this story. However it resonates because it fits well with an ongoing dynamic. Which is that programmers naturally want to build perfect tools while the business need tends to be for a quick and dirty solution that can be assembled out of prebuilt pieces. Except that this one is extreme. It is hard to find any programmer who builds a more perfect tool than Knuth. There isn't a better known problem where the discrepancy between the perfect and the good is this dramatic. Therefore this became the poster child for this ongoing type of conflict retold by those who see themselves as on the side of the quick and dirty solution built out of preassembled pieces. Who, of course, slant the story to further fit their prejudices. This kind of slanting is common. Take a famous WW II example where they were looking to improve bomber durability by putting more armor plate where the bombers were coming back hit. A wise statistician advised them that those were the spots that didn't need armor, they should put it on where the bombers were hit and didn't come back. Which, assuming that bombers were hit evenly everywhere, was all the places that they didn't find holes. The reasoning is perfect, and illustrates a key point of statistical wisdom. But the retelling of the story almost never admits that the advice didn't really make a difference. The actual solution to the rate at which bombers were being destroyed was to drop chaff - strips of aluminum cut to half the length of the German radar - so that the radar systems got overwhelmed and the Germans couldn't find the bombers.

pdpi 7y ago
> Which is that programmers naturally want to build perfect tools while the business need tends to be for a quick and dirty solution that can be assembled out of prebuilt pieces. Nope, this is nothing of the sort. It's just a case of two people solving two different (if related) problems, and everybody else trying to draw (by necessity, completely worthless) conclusions by comparing solutions to different problems. McIlroy solved the K most common words problem. Knuth used a from-the-ground-up solution to that problem as a way to illustrate how Literate Programming works. His solution was never meant to be as tiny as McIlroy's, it needed enough meat on it that LP actually did something non-trivial.
- btilly 7y ago
  You missed my point. I was not saying that this story is a good example of that ongoing dynamic. But instead that there is such a dynamic in our industry, and the telling of the story resonates well with it.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
thrower123 7y ago
Actually, the real solution was to build fighter escort planes that could match the bomber's range, like the P-51 Mustang, or to have bases in France or Italy that the other shorter range fighters could escort the bomber fleets out of. Once this happened, the Luftwaffe was quickly decimated and bomber casualties dwindled.
- btilly 7y ago
  Actually, the US and UK airforces took very different strategies. And different things worked for them. The US went during the day mostly aiming for precision bombing of targets. The UK went at night with mass bombing runs. The UK had horrible casualties until the introduction of chaff. After that they shut down the German air defense and took out Dresden. The USA had lighter casualties but didn't dare hit targets at the same range until they had better fighter escorts. Fighter escorts didn't work so well for the British because the German planes had better radar. And while we are at it, the European war was mostly won by American manufacturing and Russian soldiers. During the Cold War decades, we retold the story in ways that minimized the Soviet contribution. But more German soldiers died fighting on the Eastern front than were killed by all other countries in all other theaters of war combined.
  - derefr 7y ago
    > the European war was mostly won by American manufacturing and Russian soldiers. That's one way to think about it. Another way to think about it is that WW2 was two separate campaigns: one between all the powers you normally think about, and the other just between Germany and Russia, an entirely-optional war that likely wouldn't have begun if Germany hadn't decided to start it. It's not really that Russia was aiding the Western powers in a single fight; it's more that an independent, simultaneous Russo-German conflict starved Germany of the materiel it needed for its other campaign. See also: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-if-hitler-never-invaded-russia-during-world-war-ii-17492 https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-if-hitler-never-in...
    - vl 7y ago
kwillets 7y ago
The ACM had a nice article debunking the Wald story: http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2016-06 http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2016-06
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  The postscript undebunks it.
- CrazyStat 7y ago
  > To be precise, regarding Wald's work on aircraft damage we have (1) two short and rather vague mentions in Wallis' memoir of work on aircraft vulnerability and (2) the collection of the actual memoranda that Wald wrote on the subject. That's it! Everything not in one of these places must be considered as fiction, not fact. (emphasis in the original) This is a rather extreme take. Ignoring the rather important fact that the author of the piece missed at least one important source where Wallis gives Wald credit (see the postscript), arguing that something must be "considered as fiction" because it is not attested to in the (known) written sources is unreasonable. I don't know at what point the postscript was added (it appears in the first archive.org snapshot of the page, from 2018; the essay was first published in 2016), but it seems misleading to leave the whole rant up there and then tack on a bit at the end saying "Oh I was wrong by the way."
  - kwillets 7y ago
    I think this statement is a reference to a wide body of fake material circulating on social media platforms, including, for instance, a drawing of an airplane dotted with x-y damage locations, which is neither an aircraft that was in use in that theater, nor a type of figure produced by Wald or anyone related. I did read through one of Wald's papers after reading that article, and I agree with the thesis that there's little in them about survivorship bias or a strong need to correct it. Maybe "debunk" is the wrong term; it's more of a clarification and re-emphasis of his actual work.
Sniffnoy 7y ago
Minor note, the statistician in question was Abraham Wald: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald Edit: Well, assuming it happened, as going by other comments here maybe it didn't!
Zimahl 7y ago
Another example people use for the KISS principle is of the 'space pen', where the US spent thousands/millions developing a pen that works in space whereas the Soviets used a pencil. However, almost none of the story is true. Regardless, it gets repeated over and over.
- bumby 7y ago
  I have heard the real reason was to avoid electrical shorts. Pencils inevitably have bits of conductive graphite breaking off and floating about, potentially damaging electrical components
  - hwayne 7y ago
    Wikipedia has a great article on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_in_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_in_space
    - bumby 7y ago
      Interesting read! Although it isn’t clear what the combustion source is based upon, on-orbit conditions are generally different from STP and combustion effects may not translate
- avip 7y ago
  We'll be living in a pretty dull place if only true stories were allowed.
  - kyuudou 7y ago
    Nah, "truth is often stranger than fiction"
  - Jon_Lowtek 7y ago
    Bashir: "Of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?" Garak: "My doctor, they're all true." Bashir: "Even the lies?" Garak: "Especially the lies."
bumby 7y ago
> assuming that bombers were hit evenly everywhere I’m not sure a statistician would make that assumption. I’ve only heard this story told in the context of survivorship bias, not root cause analysis Edit: I don’t mind the downvotes but please help contribute to the discussion by explaining what is disagreed with
- CrazyStat 7y ago
  Given the imprecision of WWII-era anti-aircraft guns it's a reasonable assumption. You also have to make some assumption about the initial distribution of the hits in order to do an analysis of survivorship bias.
  - bumby 7y ago
    I have no problem with making assumptions but it would hopefully be grounded in a domain specific understanding. If you read some of the replies, you’ll see one of the fixes involved fighter escorts. This is probably based on an assumption that fighters contributed to the downing of aircraft. These would probably have a different shot distribution than anti aircraft artillery. Not to belabor the point, but jumping to conclusions on assumptions is exactly what good root cause analysis guards us against. A random distribution may be reasonable for an uninitiated statistician but I’m not sure one with some domain background in the problem would make the same assumptions.
perl4ever 7y ago
"Which is that programmers naturally want to build perfect tools while the business need tends to be for a quick and dirty solution that can be assembled out of prebuilt pieces" I spent quite a few years trying to balance different kinds of speed in "quick and dirty solutions" - speed of writing, speed of execution, speed of understanding...and the risk of failure. To me, that's infinitely more interesting and enjoyable than an unconstrained environment or just one dimension of optimization.

by btilly 7y ago

pdpi 7y ago

> Which is that programmers naturally want to build perfect tools while the business need tends to be for a quick and dirty solution that can be assembled out of prebuilt pieces. Nope, this is nothing of the sort. It's just a case of two people solving two different (if related) problems, and everybody else trying to draw (by necessity, completely worthless) conclusions by comparing solutions to different problems. McIlroy solved the K most common words problem. Knuth used a from-the-ground-up solution to that problem as a way to illustrate how Literate Programming works. His solution was never meant to be as tiny as McIlroy's, it needed enough meat on it that LP actually did something non-trivial.

btilly 7y ago
You missed my point. I was not saying that this story is a good example of that ongoing dynamic. But instead that there is such a dynamic in our industry, and the telling of the story resonates well with it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

thrower123 7y ago

Actually, the real solution was to build fighter escort planes that could match the bomber's range, like the P-51 Mustang, or to have bases in France or Italy that the other shorter range fighters could escort the bomber fleets out of. Once this happened, the Luftwaffe was quickly decimated and bomber casualties dwindled.

btilly 7y ago
Actually, the US and UK airforces took very different strategies. And different things worked for them. The US went during the day mostly aiming for precision bombing of targets. The UK went at night with mass bombing runs. The UK had horrible casualties until the introduction of chaff. After that they shut down the German air defense and took out Dresden. The USA had lighter casualties but didn't dare hit targets at the same range until they had better fighter escorts. Fighter escorts didn't work so well for the British because the German planes had better radar. And while we are at it, the European war was mostly won by American manufacturing and Russian soldiers. During the Cold War decades, we retold the story in ways that minimized the Soviet contribution. But more German soldiers died fighting on the Eastern front than were killed by all other countries in all other theaters of war combined.
- derefr 7y ago
  > the European war was mostly won by American manufacturing and Russian soldiers. That's one way to think about it. Another way to think about it is that WW2 was two separate campaigns: one between all the powers you normally think about, and the other just between Germany and Russia, an entirely-optional war that likely wouldn't have begun if Germany hadn't decided to start it. It's not really that Russia was aiding the Western powers in a single fight; it's more that an independent, simultaneous Russo-German conflict starved Germany of the materiel it needed for its other campaign. See also: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-if-hitler-never-invaded-russia-during-world-war-ii-17492 https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-if-hitler-never-in...
  - vl 7y ago

kwillets 7y ago

The ACM had a nice article debunking the Wald story: http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2016-06 http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2016-06

selimthegrim 7y ago
The postscript undebunks it.
CrazyStat 7y ago
> To be precise, regarding Wald's work on aircraft damage we have (1) two short and rather vague mentions in Wallis' memoir of work on aircraft vulnerability and (2) the collection of the actual memoranda that Wald wrote on the subject. That's it! Everything not in one of these places must be considered as fiction, not fact. (emphasis in the original) This is a rather extreme take. Ignoring the rather important fact that the author of the piece missed at least one important source where Wallis gives Wald credit (see the postscript), arguing that something must be "considered as fiction" because it is not attested to in the (known) written sources is unreasonable. I don't know at what point the postscript was added (it appears in the first archive.org snapshot of the page, from 2018; the essay was first published in 2016), but it seems misleading to leave the whole rant up there and then tack on a bit at the end saying "Oh I was wrong by the way."
- kwillets 7y ago
  I think this statement is a reference to a wide body of fake material circulating on social media platforms, including, for instance, a drawing of an airplane dotted with x-y damage locations, which is neither an aircraft that was in use in that theater, nor a type of figure produced by Wald or anyone related. I did read through one of Wald's papers after reading that article, and I agree with the thesis that there's little in them about survivorship bias or a strong need to correct it. Maybe "debunk" is the wrong term; it's more of a clarification and re-emphasis of his actual work.

Sniffnoy 7y ago

Minor note, the statistician in question was Abraham Wald: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald Edit: Well, assuming it happened, as going by other comments here maybe it didn't!

Zimahl 7y ago

Another example people use for the KISS principle is of the 'space pen', where the US spent thousands/millions developing a pen that works in space whereas the Soviets used a pencil. However, almost none of the story is true. Regardless, it gets repeated over and over.

bumby 7y ago
I have heard the real reason was to avoid electrical shorts. Pencils inevitably have bits of conductive graphite breaking off and floating about, potentially damaging electrical components
- hwayne 7y ago
  Wikipedia has a great article on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_in_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_in_space
  - bumby 7y ago
    Interesting read! Although it isn’t clear what the combustion source is based upon, on-orbit conditions are generally different from STP and combustion effects may not translate
avip 7y ago
We'll be living in a pretty dull place if only true stories were allowed.
- kyuudou 7y ago
  Nah, "truth is often stranger than fiction"
- Jon_Lowtek 7y ago
  Bashir: "Of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?" Garak: "My doctor, they're all true." Bashir: "Even the lies?" Garak: "Especially the lies."

bumby 7y ago

> assuming that bombers were hit evenly everywhere I’m not sure a statistician would make that assumption. I’ve only heard this story told in the context of survivorship bias, not root cause analysis Edit: I don’t mind the downvotes but please help contribute to the discussion by explaining what is disagreed with

CrazyStat 7y ago
Given the imprecision of WWII-era anti-aircraft guns it's a reasonable assumption. You also have to make some assumption about the initial distribution of the hits in order to do an analysis of survivorship bias.
- bumby 7y ago
  I have no problem with making assumptions but it would hopefully be grounded in a domain specific understanding. If you read some of the replies, you’ll see one of the fixes involved fighter escorts. This is probably based on an assumption that fighters contributed to the downing of aircraft. These would probably have a different shot distribution than anti aircraft artillery. Not to belabor the point, but jumping to conclusions on assumptions is exactly what good root cause analysis guards us against. A random distribution may be reasonable for an uninitiated statistician but I’m not sure one with some domain background in the problem would make the same assumptions.

perl4ever 7y ago

"Which is that programmers naturally want to build perfect tools while the business need tends to be for a quick and dirty solution that can be assembled out of prebuilt pieces" I spent quite a few years trying to balance different kinds of speed in "quick and dirty solutions" - speed of writing, speed of execution, speed of understanding...and the risk of failure. To me, that's infinitely more interesting and enjoyable than an unconstrained environment or just one dimension of optimization.