16 ms·
Invert, always, invert
- arjitkp 6y agoI have actually saw quite a few examples of Inversion * Herta Herzog laid the foundation for the basis of modern media psychology, but simply inverting. What do media do to people --> What people do with media. This shifts focus from strong media influences to human being an active consumer of media. * In statistical testing is fundamentally based on the principle of inversion, if the resulting statistic can be used as an evidence to reject the null or favour the alternative.
- blunte 6y agoPerhaps always invert but after approaching the problem from the front. I would apply the 80/20 rule from both directions (so in theory perhaps spending up to 40% effort) to get the best chance of success. And really, you can't invert without first knowing enough about the problem you're trying to solve.
- zigzaggy 6y agoThis follows the way my brain works too. Dog into the problem -> invert -> learn more about problem -> uninvert -> map problem in much greater detail -> reinvert -> discover truth -> solution
- smitty1e 6y agoI'd follow up inverting with decomposing. Solving smaller problems in the service of the bigger one is as powerful as flipping the problem upside down.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- amelius 6y agoWhy only invert? For example when designing a car, don't just consider putting the steering wheel in the front or in the back. But also consider left and right.
- bluehatbrit 6y agoThis seems to line up really nicely with "Jobs-to-be-Done Theory" proposed by Clayton Christensen and Co [1]. This inversion approach seems like a great technique to help move from thinking about products and think about the jobs that need doing. [1] - Competing Against Luck - https://www.amazon.com/Competing-Against-Luck-Innovation-Customer/dp/0062435612 https://www.amazon.com/Competing-Against-Luck-Innovation-Cus...
- agumonkey 6y agoFunny a few years ago I thought that Failure Oriented Design could be a nice starting point. Think about all the failures/errors, the remaining space will then be a safe playground.
- the_af 6y agoThinking about all possible failures seems daunting though. It reminds me of the Anna Karenina principle: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." What does this say about the tractability of enumerating possible failures? :P
- rwmj 6y agoIs the example correct? > Instead of asking how do we increase the adoption of a product or feature? You could instead consider - what are some of things preventing adoption? Surely to invert the question you'd want to consider how do I deliberately decrease adoption of the product? It might lead to some of the same answers, like make it slower. But also to different ones, like constantly bad-mouth my own product on social media. (Which would indicate a path to adoption is to rigorously rebut criticism using Google Alerts.) Edit: I think the difference is if I'm only looking for what about my current product prevents adoption, then I've narrowed my scope to looking at aspects of my current product. Whereas if I blue-sky think about ways to make the product bad, that allows a broader range of solutions for making it good.
- maps7 6y agoYeah a direct inversion doesn't seem to work. I think you invert the idea but with the premise that you don't want to do it. So instead of: How do I decrease adoption? You think: How do I avoid decreasing adoption? I think this works anyway. Another example: Goal: Fly to Spain Question: How do I fly to Spain? The inverted question should not be "How do I not fly to Spain?" (answer: get put on a flying ban or don't buy a ticket) but "How do I avoid not flying to Spain?" (answer: pick a date and book tickets)
- gsk22 6y agoIn what situations do the answers to the inverse differ from the original? It seems to me it's just a rewording of the original question with a double negative. ("How do I not not fly to Spain?")
- iQuercus 6y agoHow do I make money? - Get lucky in a Casino. How do I not lose money? - Don’t gamble. How do I not not make money? - Take more risks. A true inversion with a negative works better than the not-not structure, and it is easier to wrap your head around.
- load 6y agoThe inversion principle is a great mental model in my opinion. The best way I can sum it up in the most basic way is instead of thinking "What can I do to [achieve goal]?", think "What is preventing me from [achieving goal]?". If some of you like this, I suggest delving into the 'mental model' rabbit hole. There's some pretty inspiring stuff on it.
- maps7 6y agoIs the link in the blog post a good place to start? (https://fs.blog/mental-models/#what_are_mental_models https://fs.blog/mental-models/#what_are_mental_models) or do you have an alternative suggestion?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- davecap1 6y agoInteresting way of describing/thinking about hazard or risk analysis which is applied in many industries through ISO standard frameworks such as ISO 14971 for medical devices (but is also used elsewhere). Risk analysis complements requirements analysis in that risk mitigation plans become requirements of the system (if the risks meet some threshold).
- kejaed 6y agoI came here to note the same thing, from an aerospace perspective. In a formal development following something like ARP4754A even before one works on the requirements that a system has to meet, the high level system functions are considered and a Functional Hazard Assessment is done to look at the criticality of those functions failing. Then one can add requirements and architectural mitigations as the system and Safety Assessment is developed.
- mlangenberg 6y agoAs a software developer I have been doing this exact thing for the past twelve years: think of all the possible reasons why something can fail. The downside is that I have trained my mind in such a way that it is difficult to turn it off outside of work and it is influencing my personal live negatively. (or maybe I'm just wired to be a doom thinker and that is what makes me a good software engineer)
- maps7 6y agoFor me, it has made driving difficult. I think of everything I can do incorrectly and everything others can do incorrectly. I think of all possible events happening on the route. On the plus side, I am a careful driver. On the negative side, I _really_ hate driving.
- binsh 6y agoI think this is healthy and actually comports with reality. Driving _is_ dangerous, and a lot of people do it really badly. I see way too many people on their phones on the highway to ever feel safe driving.
- cutemonster 6y agoI agree. Now recently after having spent days reading and thinking about a legal agreement with another company, I'm wondering, why am I so careful with that, but at the same time accept being a passenger in other people's cars -- when I know some of those drivers text-and-drive, making them as dangerous as drunk drivers. Or they don't keep the distance to the car in front, or try to overtake two large trucks at once, limited sight. Should I be fine with that, saving me a few hours, Whilst spending days reading an agreement?
- fendy3002 6y agoSo it's not just me being paranoid. If my luck is any worse and the worse possibility happened, I've already hit 5+ people and crashed my cars 5+ more times. Driving is very very dangerous but not many realized it.
- pgt 6y agoThe article gets it right, but "man muss immer umkehren," is better translated as "man must always turn upside down", "inside out," "turn back" or "reverse" depending on the context. In Afrikaans, "omkeer" is derived from the Germanic umkehren and would be used as changing direction (in a military sense) or upside down as in 'leave no stone unturned.' Strangely, nowadays I would refer to inverting your trousers as "binneste-buite" (inside-out) or "uitkeer" in Afrikaans: roughly 'about face'.
- hibbelig 6y agoTo turn a piece of clothing inside out is "auf Links ziehen", which is hard to translate. I find "inside out" to be quite the intuitive metaphor. The idea is that clothes have a "right" side (rechts) and a "left" side (links), and you pull it (ziehen) so that the left side is visible, i.e. on the outside. Someone wrote that the terms left and right come from knitting where the right side is the flat side, and thus worn on the outside. Not sure whether that holds water.
- trampi 6y agoNative german speaker here: In this context, I would read "umkehren" as "turn back / turn into the direction where you came from"
- alberto_ol 6y agoAccording to the wikipedia page about Jacobi, in the mathematical context the best translation is invert. Also in Italian (my language)it is used the verb 'invertire' in this context. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustav_Jacob_Jacobi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustav_Jacob_Jacobi
- lentil 6y agoOne of the ways to apply this inverted thinking is to conduct a "pre-mortem" at the start of a project. By deliberately imagining that something has failed, and speculating about the reasons, you can sometimes uncover useful steps that prevent those imagined failures from actually happening. I've found this can be quite useful, both for minimizing risk, and also (interestingly) as a source for new product/feature ideas.
- ssss11 6y agoI think it depends on the scenario selected. I’ve found pre-mortems annoying, and given any number of risks that could materialise how do you choose the right one for the pre-mortem for maximum value discussion? Plus I generally dislike the idea and feel like its a trend that should go away.
- EForEndeavour 6y ago> how do you choose the right one for the pre-mortem for maximum value discussion? Isn't that where domain expertise comes in? It sounds pretty sensible and important to me to try to imagine various realistic failure modes and preemptively try to prevent them. To not let the website go down, pre-empting hard drive failure or DDoS makes a lot more sense than worrying about network cables spontaneously disintegrating, or the outbreak of nuclear war.
- fendy3002 6y agoThen in reality the website is down due to the simplest things that's so common we don't reconsider it, such as user input some special characters that makes the server error. Edit: I'm not downplaying the importance of prevention
- cutemonster 6y ago> server error Seems to me that bugs is then a high risk in that project. And to prevent or reduce the number of failures, the project needs an auto test suite
- kwhitefoot 6y agoIt seems to me that a better English equivalent to umkehren would be turn around. That also fits the text of the article better. That is to say look at the problem from the other side, form another angle. Invert is simultaneously too specific (leading to formulaic methods) and too ambiguous (leading to pointless discussions of whether it means considering putting the steering wheel at the back or on the other side when in fact it means do both). See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/umkehren https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/umkehren Edit: fixed typo.
- ralfd 6y agoJacobi was a mathematician and his "Umkehrfunktion" is in english "Inverse function". It also seems the common english translation: https://www.google.com/search?q=invert+always+invert https://www.google.com/search?q=invert+always+invert To be fair though: While his Wikipedia entry has the sentence: > He is said to have told his students that when looking for a research topic, one should 'Invert, always invert' ('man muss immer umkehren'), reflecting his belief that inverting known results can open up new fields for research, for example inverting elliptical integrals and focusing on the nature of elliptic and theta functions.[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustav_Jacob_Jacobi#Scientific_contributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustav_Jacob_Jacobi#Scien... The attributed source for that, a paper from 1916, differs in the translation: https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1916-23-01/S0002-9904-1916-02863-1/S0002-9904-1916-02863-1.pdf https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1916-23-01/S0002-9904-1916... > The great mathematician Jacobi is said to have inculcated upon his students the dictum: Man muss immer umkehren. One must always seek a converse, turn a thought the other end to.
- jdmichal 6y agoThe LEO dictionary is a consistently-good online dictionary for German <-> English: https://dict.leo.org/german-english/umkehren https://dict.leo.org/german-english/umkehren It seems to have a strong sense around "returning to a previous place / state", not just "turn around". Which is where the mathematical use of "invert" comes from, because an inverted function swaps the domain and range. But also words like "repent" being a possible translation; to repent of your actions and thus (ideally) return to a previous state of innocence.
- ptero 6y agoIt seems like a good model, but probably because it helps you see things from a new angle. That is, the benefit is not focusing on (not (not A)) instead of A -- with the right choice of A you can flip those, but rather when everyone is thinking about A, see if a double inversion offers new solutions. My 2c
- 082349872349872 6y agoI'd never thought of Charlie Munger as a pomo, but here we are? Next thing you know the POTUS will be engaging in a supplementary play of meaning which defies semantic reduction?
- 082349872349872 6y agoPedantry for those who have implicitly asked for it: Munger spots binary hierarchical oppositions, such as between forwards and backwards, seeking and avoiding, or intelligence and stupidity, and displaces the privileged term, what we take implicitly to be primary, by inviting us to consider the secondary term in its own right, as another endpoint of the same relationship. (Is this process somewhat like Category Theory's displacement of objects by consideration of the arrows between them? Attacking problems by inverting to generate coproblems?)
- bumelant 6y agoIn combinatorial optimization, the basic principle is is always: every primal, has a dual. That is, minimazing some expressions, means maximizing the other. Primal-dual would also - I feel - fit better to the principle, as described in this article.
- nurettin 6y agoDialectic is now called "invert" ?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- uses 6y agoThis feels too similar to my default mode of thinking, which is risk aversion, and constantly thinking about what can go wrong, and then steering away from that. Is that because this concept isn't really for me, like it's more helpful for go-getter optimists?
- laybak 6y agosimple and actionable. A quick way to snap out of what is currently constraining my thinkign
- hackerindie 6y agoGreat short post! Big fan of Farnam Street and Charlie Munger myself as well
- m3kw9 6y ago“Instead of asking how do we increase the adoption of a product or feature? You could instead consider - what are some of things preventing adoption?“ What if I started with “ what are some of things preventing adoption?“ Would I be incorrectly inverting? But you did say always invert.
- marcosdumay 6y agoIf you started with "what is preventing adoption?" you would explore the answers to that question first, and then would still gain additional insight from asking "how do I increase adoption?".
- alexpetralia 6y agoI wonder if this is better described as "solution-oriented" problem solving versus "failure-oriented" problem solving. Inversion seems like a misnomer and is easily conflated with the logical/mathematical meaning.
- AHappyCamper 6y agoMy uncle has a similar saying: "The most important consideration in any situation is the alternative". He's a very smart man and an excellent engineer.
- fizixer 6y agoSomething tells me OP hasn't read Polya "How to solve it" and is attempting a bad rediscovery of a tiny aspect of the overall body of problem-solving tactics.
- corry 6y agoReminds one of PG's "just don't die and you become rich" advice for startup founders. FWIW, the best founders I've met within YC or outside of it have this paradoxical quality that takes high optimism about the future of their company and combines it with extreme gritty paranoia about the short-term things that could derail or kill you.
- davidrm 6y agoThat reminds me of the foreword in the High Output Management, written by Ben Horowitz and Andy Grover's words "only the paranoid survive": “CEOs always act on leading indicators of good news, but only act on lagging indicators of bad news.” “Why?” I asked him. He answered in the style resonant of his entire book: “In order to build anything great, you have to be an optimist, because by definition you are trying to do something that most people would consider impossible. Optimists most certainly do not listen to leading indicators of bad news.” But this insight won’t be in any book. When I suggested he write something on the topic, his response was: “Why would I do that? It would be a waste of time to write about how to not follow human nature. It would be like trying to stop the Peter Principle.* CEOs must be optimists and all in all that’s a good thing.”
- z3t4 6y agoAccording to positive psychology it's better to do something good rather then avoiding something bad. But it's good to ask yourself why you want to do something, as there might be easier ways to achieve the same thing once you understand what you really want.
- xapata 6y agoIn other words, minimize regret.
- ajra 6y agoGreat advice! I have to say though, I love the irony of the author mentioning reducing investment losses by asking the question "Am I diversifying enough to prevent long term loss?" when Munger+Buffett have the opposite view of diversification for the savvy investor - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJzu_xItNkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJzu_xItNkY
- codezero 6y agoThat’s fun. My personal version of this is when I’m stuck on a problem at home or work I’ll lay down on the ground and look up at the ceiling or lay on a couch with my head hanging off to see the room upside down. Surveying an area I’m familiar with from a weird perspective always sparks new ideas for me because I almost always also see something new in that familiar place because of the positioning. In doing so, it helps me unblock other thought processes.
- nate 6y agoThis is also a great way to surprise people. Surprise seems to be one of the most important ingredients to getting things to spread (I won't quote the academic or anecdotal research of that here.) So I use this inversion analysis often in thinking about coming up with ways of surprising people. My most successful example of this: I was originally thinking, "How can I get more customers?" Inverting it I came up with, "How can I lose more customers?" (A different inversion from the OP's but an inversion nonetheless). Using that as my base I came up with this funny campaign where I tried to figure out how to fire more of my customers. What if I could fire the worst of my customers. So I invented a honey pot website called trickajournalist.com where I described some software you could signup for to spam journalists. And then I used the list of people who signed up for that and banned them from using my product that had an email newsletter component. We didn't want spammers. It was a nice media/traffic win for what we were doing. And it all came from inverting what we originally struggled to answer. P.S. If you're interested more in the whole trickajournalist.com thing, the original site is dead now, but some articles about it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathankontny/2018/02/27/trick-a-journalist%E2%80%8A-%E2%80%8Athe-next-innovation-in-email-marketing/#42d395f91d25 https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathankontny/2018/02/27/trick-a... https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathankontny/2018/03/08/reddit-banned-me-so-why-didnt-google-and-facebook/#1702cd5f15a2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathankontny/2018/03/08/reddit-...
- mola 6y agoSo you lied to a bunch of people? While enticing them to participate in bad behaviour? I don't get the joke
- toolslive 6y agoThis is only one of the principles featured in TRIZ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
- seanpquig 6y agoI work on the algorithm for a widely used search engine and can confirm that this line of thinking has been very effective in improving our product over the years. Rather than trying to generate hypothetical ideas for "how can we make our search better", we spend a lot of time analyzing our data to find where we are failing. Many of our biggest relevance improvements have come from tracking and understanding the types of queries where we consistently fail to generate results or user engagement. I think it is a very effective approach, but can require some discipline and perspective. When you spend so much time focusing on the failures of your product, it can create this internal perception that the product is constantly failing and broken. So you do need to actively remember what you're doing well and how far you've come as a team/product.
- gav 6y agoThere's a huge potential in mining search data, especially if you can group top-of-funnel vs. bottom-of-funnel searches to see where failures are occurring. Segmenting queries like "zm950" against "shoes" or "nike" and seeing where gaps exist against user intent. When it comes to zero (or near-zero) results, I've had good results using this to identify gaps in the current product offering and what visitors are expecting to be there. Two examples: 1) A seller of custom prescription glasses: top two search queries were "contact lenses" and "sunglasses". They didn't offer the former, they did sell sunglasses (most frames could take a tinted lens as an option) but didn't make it obvious with design, content, or marketing. 2) A seller of cabinet hardware (pulls & knobs): a large proportion of their top 10 search terms seemed to have a door hardware intent. Adding this missing category boosted sales without additional marketing dollars spent (the customers were already there and just bouncing when they realized the site didn't carry what they wanted). These are all ways to focus on understanding failures instead of trying to optimize successes, which is often finding the local maxima.
- whack 6y ago> Rather than trying to generate hypothetical ideas for "how can we make our search better", we spend a lot of time analyzing our data to find where we are failing. Many of our biggest relevance improvements have come from tracking and understanding the types of queries where we consistently fail to generate results or user engagement. This sounds a lot like the 6-sigma approach of driving improvement by focusing obsessively on eliminating "defects". There are certainly huge wins that can be obtained by identifying and eliminating bugs or corner-cases with undesired behavior. But it's scary to imagine a world where this is used as a replacement for innovative thinking - ie, "how can we make our search better". If Steve Jobs had focused all his proverbial efforts on minimizing flip-phone defects, the world would have missed out on the smartphone revolution.
- jermier 6y agoI use an old inversion technique. Not sure where I read this, and I think Tim Ferris said it: The last thing you want to do is the first thing you should do There is always something mega pertinent on my TODO lists that I really don't want to do, and it calls out my name when I sleep saying: 'You really need to do this' and the feeling of procrastination makes you feel ashamed of having not completed the task. But it gets done thanks to inversion, and I proudly check it off as being done, until the next task I don't want to do comes along (and yes it will come along).
- imhoguy 6y agoDamn. I should finally add GDPR-compliant privacy policy to my niche side project.
- fendy3002 6y agoMe: how can I finish this project smoothly Inversion: what can makes this project not finished smoothly My answer: if my boss died Me: ...
- ISL 6y agoSo you'll look out for the health and well-being of your boss/colleagues and look for ways to improve the resilience of the organization?
- fendy3002 6y agoFor me it means not everything can be prevented, and sometimes whatever bad can happen, happen. It's out of our control. We just need to handle those in our control and predict the probability of uncontrollable one, and whether we can accept those risks (probability * severity). Edit: and that's why coronavirus is so devastating to businesses. Primarily because it's probability is so small with high severity and it's out of our control. * On a side note, I really have thought about it once, that my ex boss's diet is so horrible I'm afraid he will caught a disease. Thankfully it didn't happened in my 4 years of working there.
- quickthrower2 6y agoThink of it like alpha-beta pruning. You look through all the alternatives, and some will yield useful results, others will be useless so you can prune those and concentrate on the useful.
- sergioro 6y agoRelated passage from Bell's "Men of Mathematics": It (inversion) is one of the most powerful methods of mathematical discovery (or invention) ever devised, and Abel was the first human being to use it consciously as an engine of research. "You must always invert," as Jacobi said when asked the secret of his mathematical discoveries.
- mark-r 6y agoHas anybody else ever noticed that mazes are easier to solve if you start at the end and work backwards?
- abiogenesis 6y agoI usually solved them that way when I was a kid, but that's only because maze designers set up forks in one direction but they don't bother doing it in the other direction.
- mola 6y agoI think this is useful in zero sum/life and death situation. Otherwise you might go on a path which leads away from your core values and intentions.
- larrydag 6y agoThis reminds me of the Dual in Linear Programming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_linear_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_linear_program https://web.stanford.edu/~ashishg/msande111/notes/chapter4.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~ashishg/msande111/notes/chapter4.p...
- 2bitencryption 6y agoReminds me of how an AI agent that tries to minimize the worst case scenario is almost always better than one that tries to maximize the best case scenario. (admittedly that's a bit anecdotal, maybe someone with more knowledge can give better details on that statement)
- ladberg 6y agoThat just depends on how you what your AI to optimize and what results you value. After 3 attempts, would you rather have the best-case twice and the worst-case once or a medium-case three times?
- PKop 6y ago> an AI agent And probably life itself. Good article from Nassim Taleb [0] relating to rationality/irrationality and survival... "survival comes first, truth, understanding and science later" which would seem to relate to a the simpler model for AI centered around preventing disaster being more robust than trying to solve some form of maximization while risking ruin. In some ways it is arguably better to be paranoid/"irrational" about risk than try to be perfectly sufficiently rational "I have shown that, unless one has an overblown and a very unrealistic representation of some tail risks, one cannot survive –all it takes is a single event for the irreversible exit from among us. Is selective paranoia “irrational” if those individuals and populations who don’t have it end up dying or extinct, respectively?" [0] https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-be-rational-about-rationality-432e96dd4d1a https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-be-rational-about-rational...
- dctoedt 6y agoI have an "Invert"-related question for the HN hive mind — see below for the question, and why it's not off-topic: I'm a pretty-senior lawyer and part-time law professor; I'm working on turning some of my accumulated contract clauses and course materials into a "fair and balanced," annotated, contract framework, in the form of a plain HTML document w/ some CSS styling, to support using shorter contracts in business. EXAMPLE: Instead of doing a full-blown NDA, parties could agree, in an email exchange, that Party A will keep Party B's confidential information secret in accordance with the [name] Confidential Information Clause — presto, an enforceable NDA (in most jurisdictions). I'll be posting the whole thing online for free under some kind of Creative Commons license, in part for my students, and in part in the hope that if people start to use it, eventually I won't have to spend so much time reviewing random contract language for clients. The current corpus includes clauses for confidentiality; consulting services; software warranties and disclaimers; limitations of liability; terms of service; payment terms; referral payments; channel partnerships; consulting services; indemnity ground rules; and other things. I'm trying to follow (part of) the Unix philosophy: Each clause should do basically one thing, and do it well, with as few dependencies as possible (maximize orthogonality). The materials also have numerous planning checklists for spotting issues that can come up. The clauses incorporate typical wish-list items that work for both sides. In a prior life, I was the general counsel for a software company, and customers' lawyers liked that balanced approach very much because it reduced their workload; our sales people likewise liked the fact that the balanced approach helped get us to signature sooner, without screwing around with anatomy-measuring, "art of the deal" game playing. The clauses are extensively annotated with citations to real-world cases where problems arose — sometimes, big problems — explaining how the clause language seeks to avoid the problems, again in ways that work for both parties. For improved readability, I'm using Python-like indentation to avoid long, wall-of-words paragraphs of dense legalese. (That's proving very popular with my clients' business people.) HERE'S THE QUESTION: Apropos of the "Invert" subject of the posted article, should this contract framework be positioned as: 1. a vitamin — "balanced, readable terms to help you get workable contracts to signature sooner," or 2. aspirin - "learn from others' failures by adopting the [name] framework in your contracts." All input gratefully received.
- sizzle 6y ago
- bhntr3 6y ago"Imagine the worst possible outcome. Now . . . avoid that." -Baptiste
- knodi123 6y agoA similar principle from the ancient boardgame of Go is, "Your opponents best move is your best move." i.e. sometimes it can be hard to see what the most advantageous move is for you. but if you can see your opponent's most advantageous move, then just steal that one.
- ibejoeb 6y agoThe technique is also pretty good for acknowledging one's own personal decisions and being ok with them. For example: What's preventing me from being richer, more powerful, more famous? Perhaps you'd give up privacy, autonomy, free time. That might be all it takes to realize that happiness and performance are not always, or even often, the same.
- gweinberg 6y agoWell, obviously you don't always want to invert, since inverting twice will just get you back to where you started. In fact, you have to be doing worse than random guessing initially if inverting the problem in general makes it easier to solve.
- youeseh 6y agoIn business, I believe this translates to always protecting against the downside.
- jyriand 6y agoI think hackers are pretty natural at this type of thinking. A la “what this application is not supposed to do?”
- maire 6y agoMurphy's law is a more humorous way of saying the same thing. "If something can go wrong it will go wrong." There are earlier references - but Murphy's Law is associated with high g-force testing just after WWII. The team used Murphy's law to anticipate every possible failure and prevent it before the experiment ended in death. There is nothing like death to sharpen your focus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law
- joe_the_user 6y agoIt's Staparfi, it's always STA-PAR-FI! That is: Standard: Start with standard, commonly applicable piece of advice. Lists of these can be found many places (for example, "to achieve success, avoid failure"). Paradoxical: Reformulate in terminology that's opaque, paradoxical, jargony and truncated (OPJART!) Fixation: Claim that's always true, that it's best thing since sliced bread. etc. Your audience will recoil but some of them will work and realize there's some good advice in your stream of jargon. And having worked at getting this understanding, they will value it more and be happy to endorse the exaggerated value you're assigning to your jargon and your point, which is, indeed, something that is true moderately often. STA-PAR-FI! This phrase can launch a thousand consultancies.
- philwelch 6y agoA cool example of this principle in action is to read the WWII-era “Simple Sabotage Field Manual” (https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2012-featured-story-archive/CleanedUOSSSimpleSabotage_sm.pdf https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/...), which reads like an inverted guide to productivity. Some fun bits: > Managers and Supervisors: To lower morale and production, think of the worst boss you’ve had and act like that. Be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work. When possible, refer all matters to committees for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large and bureaucratic as possible. > Employees: Be forgetful. Clumsy. Work slowly. Think of ways to increase the number of movements needed to do your job: use a light hammer instead of a heavy one; try to make a small wrench do instead of a big one. > When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible - never less than five. > Apply all regulations to the last letter. Admittedly, some of the techniques—like releasing a bag full of moths in a movie theater to disrupt enemy propaganda—are oddly specific and not easily inverted.
- esaym 6y agoAmazing....
- bigiain 6y agoBRB. Going make a cinema-focussed remake of Hitchcock's "The Birds" that _relies_ on a few bags full of moths being released during each screening...
- waste_monk 6y agoBefore holding a meeting, collect any moths in the meeting room and store them in a bag.
- l0b0 6y agoWhat is the difference between a bug report and a feature request? Is it simply that a bug report is something the system should already be doing, either because it's an advertised feature or it's something which is universally expected from that kind of software, while a feature request is about something which the system does not do, does not advertise that it does, and is not expected to be there by default? If so, we should be able to "invert" any bug report into a feature request (and vice versa), which could gain some insight by looking at it in a different way. Another thing we could do is write a feature request — which often over-specifies what should be done in a classic up-front design way — like a bug report, which usually only specifies a goal which we can't yet achieve, rather than how it should be achieved. Yet another thing which would be interesting is TDD-style tickets. Rather than simply explaining the happy path to a goal they could explain the various things which could prevent someone from reaching that goal: invalid inputs, missing permissions, inaccessible dependencies, missing UI, etc.
- golemiprague 6y agoThis is all meaningless semantics
- eyelidlessness 6y agoThis is instinctually how those of us with anxiety disorders and cognitive challenges think. WAVINGEMOJI hi please feel free to ask us how to help when you see us around. Edit: sorry, didn't mean to volunteer anyone else! Just ask those of us who make ourselves available for it, you know us as the people who are constantly warning doom.
- atum47 6y agoshort and helpful reading. thanks for sharing
- e_carra 6y agoThis is also how some problems are solved more efficiently in Operations Research: solving the dual of the problem instead of the actual problem.
- klodolph 6y agoThis is how I summarize my time in photography classes. - What’s in focus? (What’s out of focus?) - What’s in light? (What’s in shadow?) - Where is the light coming from? (Where is the light not coming from?) - What’s in the foreground? (What’s in the background?) - Positive space / negative space Similar things end up happening in audio. You want to set up a microphone to record something, it’s usually better to point the microphone away from the noise that you don’t want, instead of towards the sound that you do want. When you’re EQing, you usually want to remove unwanted frequencies rather than boost wanted frequencies. Etc.