12 ms·

Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots

374 points by stanrivers 5y ago

mherdeg 5y ago
I've worked with engineers who have used a premortem -- once they have the bare sketch of a project to solve a problem, they imagine that it failed and think about the most likely causes, then adjust their project to mitigate those risks. The process described here happens a step earlier, when you're deciding which projects to tackle in the first place, which is an interesting angle.
deleted 5y ago
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amelius 5y ago
> thinking about how to do the exact opposite of your goal is sometimes the best way to ensure you achieve it. It also makes for a great clickbaity headline.
- tzs 5y ago
  If you were a bit disappointed that the article, even though it was quite excellent, wasn't more about actually killing pilots, this might help [1]. [1] https://www.cracked.com/article_18839_7-planes-perfectly-designed-to-kill-people-flying-them.html https://www.cracked.com/article_18839_7-planes-perfectly-des...
lordnacho 5y ago
Suppose I want to build a program that trades in the markets to make money. So to do the opposite I would try to lose money as fast as I could, according to this? But the way to do that is just to churn my book a lot and pay costs and spreads. It's not clear how that illuminates how to make money.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  It actually illuminates more than you might think. The market is mostly a zero sum game. When someone loses money, someone makes money, and vice versa. Just think about it. I think the best way to lose a lot of money is to fall into scams. And avoiding scams is an important part of investing. It also tell you that scams can be profitable. So the next question is: how to scam and lose money doing it, which will hopefully put you back on the right track... or make you a really good scammer. Back to honest investing, losing a lot of money is not that trivial. It is easy to take risks but you can still get the occasional big payoff and if you think about ways of not getting that payoff, it is the same as thinking about how to get it, just with a different angle. That kind of reverse thinking goes best when you pair it with regular thinking. That's a "meet in the middle" algorithm, kind of like solving a maze by going both forwards from the entrance and backwards from the exit.
- probably_wrong 5y ago
  You now have your first data point. You now need to come up with a second strategy that loses money while, simultaneously, avoiding those steps. Repeat until you run out of ways of losing money.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tyree731 5y ago
  The interesting thing about the markets is that if you had a strategy that consistently lost money, oftentimes you can use the “opposite“ of that strategy, so to speak, to make money. This is one reason why it’s difficult to find these losing strategies.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > oftentimes you can use the “opposite“ of that strategy, so to speak, to make money The opposite of Robinhooding might be buying a smattering of stocks and holding until infinity. It’s better than constantly trading options, a consistently losing strategy. But I wouldn’t call it a winner.
    - unmole 5y ago
      If buuying OTM options is a consistently losing strategy, the opposite would be selling OTM options. And that's a reasonable way to make money.
      - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > the opposite would be selling OTM options. And that's a reasonable way to make money. It's the original "vacuuming up nickels in front of a steamroller" trade. It looks like it works well for a while until it doesn't. Option pricing has many degrees of freedom. Most result in value frittering away. As a result, most options trade participants lose money. (By design. It's a hedging tool.) The alpha bleeds into the underlying market through market makers' hedging.
- hamilyon2 5y ago
  Strawman. Suppose you are market maker and never have to pay a dime in fees. Morover, anything lost on spread is immediately refunded. If you have strategy that very quickly loses money in this harsh conditions, you have a winner.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > anything lost on spread is immediately refunded This is unrealistic and produces fantasy strategies. Capping spreads over a unit of time is more realistic. That said, this way of thinking, iterated with discipline, does lead to a decent portfolio strategy. (Though not necessarily an outperforming one.)
- iamben 5y ago
  I know nothing about trading, so forgive me in advance - but I assumed the point of the article is to break it down a bit more specifically. What causes you to lose money quickly, what's the program doing - how do you stop it from doing those things? If you start to remove the roads to failure you're kind of forced onto the road to success - or at least a place where you're not falling into the places you're planning around.
  - WJW 5y ago
    In the case of trading, removing the known roads to failure is no guarantee that you are now on the road to success. There are many MANY ways to fail in finance and more are being invented every day. I suspect (but cannot prove) that this is because financial markets are "PvP" instead of "PvE", you trade against intelligent humans who can and do adapt their strategies to what they observe to be the strategy of other players in the market. If there is any form of rock-paper-scissors dynamic, this means that there will never be a stable strategy that keeps winning and so the method from the article will not work. In most engineering problems OTOH, you are basically fighting against the environment. This can still be very difficult (see rocket science for example) but at least the laws of physics don't change from day to day. So, any progress in solving the problem you made yesterday will remain. Successful application of the TRIZ method requires that the problem remains relatively stable, so that the options you "chip away" remain poor options forever. The markets are not like this and neither, I think, is career design.
- kaycebasques 5y ago
  > It's not clear how that illuminates how to make money. I mean you did already start to think of some interesting starting points: > But the way to do that is just to churn my book a lot and pay costs and spreads. Don't churn your books, reduce costs, reduce spreads
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > the way to do that is just to churn my book a lot and pay costs and spreads Iterate the question. Assuming a limited number of trades per quarter and a cap on spreads and commissions, how would one maximally lose money?
- throwaway316943 5y ago
  Think of it like the weather map that was mentioned. Your job is to fill in all of the parts of the map that will kill the pilot. Once you’ve exhaustively done that, the clear path will be evident.
  - WJW 5y ago
    How will you know you have indeed exhaustively done so though? This seems like a strategy that will only work for extremely well understood fields and things like "career development" that the article talks about are definitely not well enough developed that you can exhaustively enumerate all the ways it can go wrong.
    - throwaway316943 5y ago
      Using the weather map analogy again, you’ll only have accurate data for some parts of the map and you’ll need to rely on second hand information or predictive modeling to fill in the other parts and after all of that sometimes you just have to go look for yourself.
- buffetknowledge 5y ago
  Forgive me, but I think you've illuminated the exact way to be a great investor repeated by buffet ad nauseam. Don't buy and sell repeatedly - you lose on the transaction fees. Act like you have a punch card with 10 holes for your entire life and you use one every time you buy a company. That way you'll really consider you decisions and won't lose money on transaction fees from repeated buying and selling. Buy great companies cheap or at a good price. Only sell if you think they are technologically threatened (horse and cart vs car situation) or have grown to take up too much of your portfolio (like up 50%+ of your portfolio). This is basically how buffet got mega rich. Amex, Coca Cola, Apple, Geico, etc. These few big bets made him a very rich man and he still holds them today. Losing 1% per year to transaction/currency/ management fees per year really adds up over a lifetime. And it doubly matters when you are rich enough to pass the cap gains threshold. 20% lost on every time you sell at a profit in the UK - that compounds too! Or - if you can't be bothered with the effort to try and beat the market - you've also illuminated another bit of buffets advice. Invest in and hold an s&p ETF through your whole life. In fact Munger is one of the biggest proponents of "invert, always invert"
- ajuc 5y ago
  > But the way to do that is just to churn my book a lot and pay costs and spreads. It's not clear how that illuminates how to make money. Well it suggests to invest long-term?
pmichaud 5y ago
There's a saying in my neck of the woods that captures this: If you can't optimize, pessimize!
kaycebasques 5y ago
HN loves this idea of thinking in reverse. Is anyone here actually doing it? What problem did you solve?
- jbluepolarbear 5y ago
  Constantly, as the article states, some problems can’t be solved. But they can be incrementally made less problematic. I’ll use game networking as an example: there is no one way to solve networking between clients and servers. There is however a lot of ways to ruin the networking. So think about it it reverse. If I want the client to have a very poor experience I’d put them on an unstable network (cell), I’d have random packets dropped, I’d send at a rate higher than the clients download speed. Turns out these are really common problems with many options for addressing. I think of it less of reverse the problem and more changing my frame of reference or perspective of the problem.
- palijer 5y ago
  I'm in QA, and this is something like what I've been doing with running pre-mortems. Basically, at the project planning stage, I get everyone together and ask how this shit is going to blown up in our faces. What are all the scenarios that are complete failures. Then a few weeks before a release, I do the same thing. It's amazing the issues this catches from the cross team approach. For instance, something that the product manager was worried about, they never brought up because they assumed engineering knew about it was covered, but in reality, they had no idea that was important. Or with two engineering teams, or DevOps etc. Normally we have more than a dozen action items out of these meetings.
- codetrotter 5y ago
  On a small scale I find this way of thinking useful in software development. Say that you are implementing a role-based access control system. And then ask yourself how can my RBAC system fail? Well one way it could fail is if someone without the necessary role can operate on something that they ought not have access to. So then create roles A, B, and C, and create a resource and say that group A can rw, and group B can r this resource. Then create a user and give that user role C. And then try to use this user in that role and try to read the resource. If it can, fail the test. Then another test where you try to write using such a user. If the resource was modified, fail the test. This is as opposed to only thinking about what you want to happen, in which case you might be writing tests that only ensure that those that should be able to read/write can do so. And of course you want to test that too. But ensuring that those that should not be able to access a resource cannot is the more important thing to be sure of, and also the type of thing that might slip by unnoticed. A system where those that should be able to access resources cannot, this will be detected in normal operation anyway, by way of users performing their usual tasks. But accessing resources you should not is the most critical and could go by unnoticed for a long time. And that is why the tests that are written in the backwards thinking fashion are the most important ones.
MattGaiser 5y ago
Isn’t this basically just a failure mode and effects analysis?
- rocqua 5y ago
  In some sense, it is taking "fail fast" and moving the failure closer in time by just imagining the failure rather than waiting for the real failure. This allows for a quicker feedback loop. It also allows for having the feedback without actually having failure. I suspect the second feature is more important than the first. Feedback from real failure remains more valuable than feedback from imagined scenarios. Thing is, real failure can also be quite expensive.
- paul_f 5y ago
  Not exactly inversion as described in the article, unless an attempt was made to actually fail and then you study that.
kortex 5y ago
Suppose I wanted to make a program inscrutable, hard to modify, hard to test, heavily coupled, and hard to reason about: - hide information so that it's not queryable - force information to flow through multiple hops - make it hard/impossible to set the true state of the system in its entirety - allow state to be mutated silently - give interfaces roles and force certain state to have to flow through specific paths - multiple concurrent access - pointers - spray the app across as many machines as possible Sounds familiar, maybe like a scathing criticism of OOP? Well check this out. What if I wanted to make a program as slow and bloated as possible? - put all state in one place. Bonus points if you can bottleneck it and force all changes to be well-ordered and sequential - all data has to be immutable and copied over in its entirety when propagated - use larger data structures than necessary. Lots of wrapping and indirection - no caching. Can't trust data unless it's fresh - read/write from disk/net tons - use scripty garbage collected languages - spray the app over as many machines as possible The latter kind of feels like a criticism of FP, though really it's more critical of distributed monolith. What if I want to make my app as vulnerable to outage and overload as possible? - concentrate the app in as few machines as possible It's really interesting how all the different tradeoffs of approaches just kinda appear when you take this inverted approach. It's all too easy to get caught up on the positives of an approach. (opinion - I still think FP comes out looking better than OOP, but it does suggest that you need a lot of techniques to safely hide optimizations to make FP more performant, which can make it harder to scrutinize all the layers)
- golergka 5y ago
  > What if I wanted to make a program as slow and bloated as possible? That sounds like a very exact description of React/Redux.
  - fastball 5y ago
    We've built a React/Redux application[1] that people keep telling us is very snappy, and we definitely haven't optimized as much as is possible, so from my experience React/Redux is not inherently slow and bloated. [1] https://my.supernotes.app https://my.supernotes.app
sam_lowry_ 5y ago
The basic premise of TIPS was that one could train engineers on solving problems, pretty much like martial arts trainers do: by exercising and learning tricks. Theory of Inventive Problem Solving nicely abbreviates as TIPS. That's how it has been known in the west for decades. ТРИЗ is a Russian acronym. TRIZ just replaces Cyrillic letters with equivalents. If the author digged a bit deeper, they would have known it and a few funny stories. Like the fact that Genrich Altshuller did not want his teaching to carry on once he dies, but fan groups of engineers existed until the fall of the Soviet union when many of their members emigrated and continued the TIPS cult following, selling courses and software to large enterprises (Dassault, Lockheed Martin and the likes).
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  For what it’s worth, theory of inventive problem solving is not a very good translation of теория решения изобретательских задач teorija rešenija izobretatelʹskih zadač: as far as I can see, it parses as [inventive [problem solving]] with inventive meaning something like “unconstrained by convention, prolific intellectually, embodying the spirit of invention”, for which the proper Russian is изобретательный izobretat-elʹ-n|yj; the original name has a different syntactic structure and uses изобретательский izobretat-elʹ-sk|ij “belonging to or characteristic of inventors”, so the proper translation would instead be something like theory of solving problems of invention, which is admittedly awkward (and doesn’t afford a snappy acronym) but at least successfully conveys the idea that the “invention” part pertains to the problems, not the solutions or the theory.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    > (and doesn’t afford a snappy acronym) TOSPOI even sounds Russian!
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      It still rolls off the tongue better than TANSTAAFL ("There ain't no such thing as a free lunch").
spydum 5y ago
Sounds a lot like threat modelling. It's great, if you are creative enough to imagine all the threat scenarios.
- atatatat 5y ago
  Or at minimum, the likely ones.
markmsmith 5y ago
Before I do anything, I ask myself: 'Would an idiot do that?' And, if the answer is yes, I do not do that thing. - Dwight Schrute
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  "Would an idiot eat breakfast?" Uh oh.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - m3kw9 5y ago
    There are exceptions like breathing and taking space
  - webreac 5y ago
    an idiot would eat an ordinary breakfast. I will eat an extraordinary breakfast.
  - ARandomerDude 5y ago
    DangitBobby, this is comedy.
  - samatman 5y ago
    Jokes on you I do intermittent fasting, only coffee until noon.
ethbr0 5y ago
I first heard about this in the context of software project estimation. The author (forgotten to me) made the point that nobody has permission to think about disasters when estimating project completion time. So why not explicitly ask them to? "So now we have our estimate, what would cause us to miss it?" And in the course of giant monster attacks, you give people permission to talk about specific scenarios that are actually very likely to derail the schedule. It was an interesting observation, vs the "just multiply the everything goes right estimate by X" method. If everyone else is being positive, no one wants to be the lone (realistic) downer.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Spot on. They used to call me 'Dr. No' because that is exactly what I would do, but it saved us tons of money so it was tolerated. We also actually delivered on time and within the budget but I'm sure it cost us contracts to more optimistic competitors.
  - oceanghost 5y ago
    This. Most engineers delude themselves and plan for the happy path. I was famous too for "being negative." In the planning of a complex project once a rather dull engineer, after I had just pointed out a major potential problem asked, "Why are you so negative?" "I'm not negative, I'm planning for success."
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Guest42 5y ago
      My approach was to allocate 2 weeks for even the most basic things because unknowns always creep in and a tighter schedule tends to make those things creep in even more. Also, many of the requests had no particular urgency to begin with.
    - underwater 5y ago
      I've seen a lot of engineers be negative in a destructive way. They tear down ideas, but fail to offer solutions. Usually this is about their ego rather than a desire to help the team.
simonh 5y ago
Convince them that the world is a globe, when it's actually flat, so they get their navigation calculations wrong and their plane's crash when they run out of fuel.
andridk 5y ago
As I was clicking this link I was thinking "Oh great, now I'm on watch list". Turns out, it's about thinking and problem solving and I was pleasantly surprised.
tjchear 5y ago
Is there a software invention/systems equivalent of TRIZ matrix? Some of the dimensions/parameters we wish to analyze that I can think of may include: - latency - throughput - modifiability - binary/data size - memory size - cpu cycles - interoperability/compatibility - accuracy - precision - staleness - bandwidth - availability - etc As a simple example, perhaps we want to reduce bandwidth while preserving data size. One of the resolutions may include compression (lossless/lossy).
0xF57A 5y ago
>Continue to be a rent-taker as opposed to adding value One of the most pervasive falsehoods in existence. Take them out of the equation and play the scenario through. What do you end up with?
dTal 5y ago
> rather than solving for success, solve for failure. If you want to design a dust filter that works at 600 Celsius within a steel mill, instead design all the ways you could develop a filter that would fail miserably in those conditions. That's a strange example. There are infinite ways of not accomplishing a task, and as a non-expert in filter design I have no trouble listing them: make the filter out of butter, make it just a big hole, pay someone to pluck dust out of the air with tweezers... how exactly is this helping?
- kolinko 5y ago
  The point is to make a filter that works in lower temperatures but breaks around 600C. Using the other example - of course to kill the most pilots you coukd out them in a big meat grinder or just blow up their planes. But the point is to design planes so that they both fly and kill pilots.
  - stanrivers 5y ago
    Hahaha I love this response; yes, you can always change the rules of the game, so to speak, and make things worse; however, if you keep within the rules of reality then it might be a bit more useful.
- GormanFletcher 5y ago
  I interpreted it as brainstorming ways to actively sabotage success. "Solutions" that appears superficially plausible, but undermine the outcome in real world situations. So for the dust filter, maybe selecting a material that's only rated for high temperatures in short bursts. Or one that needs frequent, labor-intensive replacements in that dangerous environment. Or test that your filter survives at high temperatures, and test the filtration efficacy, but forget to test the efficacy at high temperatures.
BLanen 5y ago
I like how it references the Gulag Archipelago which two links to buy it, a pseudo-historical book. For no reason. Except for that a certain controversial person likes to talk about it a lot. Of course 3 articles back they reference Jordan Peterson.
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  Oh good grief. Eat the meat and throw away the bones.
mmcconnell1618 5y ago
Is this another way to help define the problem you're trying to solve? It sounds like "Keep pilots alive" wasn't detailed enough. By thinking about all the failure conditions, you're building a more robust description of the true problem you're trying to solve. I also wonder where you draw the line and stop thinking of failure conditions.
wildermuthn 5y ago
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Inverted problem solving, done naively, is an infinite task — you could kill all the pilots in infinitely and progressively improbable ways (e.g., use time-travel to kill someone in their chain of ancestry, or their pilot instructors, or the aircraft engineers, etc). So inverted problem solving must identity the most probable modes of failure until their hypothetical resolution causes failure to becomes improbable. This sounds a lot like unit tests, which in my experience are notoriously bad at correctly estimating probable modes of failure for complex units of functionality, Contrast this to generative testing of simple units of functionality, which in my experience do in fact provide comprehensive coverage of failure modes. Or contrast both of them to languages like Rust and Haskel which many claim to solve a set of discrete failure modes automatically by virtue of the limitations set upon problem solving itself. It seems to me that it is better to set limits upon problem-solving that are known to often lead to failure rather than attempt to estimate the probabilities of an unknown infinite — i.e., identify types of failure modes across domains that have high failure rates and construct a framework of problem-solving that precludes those types. This is done all the time in the form what I would call “worst-practices”. Cheating on your partner is almost always a bad way to increase marital happiness, and the framework of marriage excludes it (even “open marriages” require honesty as part of its framework). Paul Graham puts cofounder disagreements at the top of his list of ways that startups fail — the most basic form of such failure being that cofounders disagree on whether to give up on their startup. Although there are infinite ways for cofounders to disagree, perhaps it is possible to proactively address the manner in which disagreements are identified and resolved before they become lethal. The only good solution I’ve seen to this problem is the advice to split equity equally — ensuring that the problem is more obvious and severe by amplifying its consequences. This is similar to Rust — the consequence of a “poorly” written program is that it won’t run at all. This is also why monopolies in America are sometimes broken up: a monopoly can succeed by failing, whereas a startup can only succeed by actually making something people want. Perhaps a better framework for problem solving would be something like, Make Problems Catastrophic, or Burn Your Lifeboats, or Amplify Consequences of Failure. It has always fascinated me that Leprosy doesn’t directly cause your body to fall apart — it indirectly causes failure by removing the feedback of pain. Without pain, we hurt ourselves unknowingly and profoundly. Make Problems Painful?
wildermuthn 5y ago
There’s a really interesting parallel here with evolution: exaptation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaptation?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaptation?wprov=sfti1 This occurs when a trait that evolved to solve one problem also happens to solve (or almost solve) another problem — for example, perhaps feathers originally evolved for the purpose of keeping warm but also opened up an evolutionary path to flight.
sobriquet9 5y ago
This is a common pattern, also found in proofs by contradiction and optimization techniques. If you know how to find the minimum, you may be able to use that knowledge to find the maximum. The problem with using this pattern in real life is that it rarely applies. Unlike the one-dimensional toy examples, in real life there are many more ways to fail than there are to succeed. Eliminating or even enumerating all possible ways to fail may be prohibitively expensive. Even if you do that, you only found a way to maintain status quo, not necessarily to improve. This can be said about the rest of TRIZ/TIPS. I learned about it a long time ago, but can't remember a single time I solved a practical problem by applying it. I may be able to find examples that can be classified under one of TRIZ rules, but only in hindsight. It's not like you can look at a new problem, apply TRIZ approaches one by one, and find a solution faster than you normally would.
tacon 5y ago
Suppose you wanted to become as fat as possible, as fast as possible? How would you pull off that trick? You might stop to think about your answer before continuing. One way that happens all over nature is to gorge on fruit, just like bears and other animals do every fall before they hibernate.[0][1] An old article from Ken Hutchins entitled "So, Your Ambition Is to Become a Circus Fat Lady?", is essentially a TRIZ failure design for fat loss.[2] [0] https://peterattiamd.com/rickjohnson/ https://peterattiamd.com/rickjohnson/ [1] https://www.amazon.com/Fat-Switch-Richard-J-Johnson-ebook/dp/B009XVKUDE/ https://www.amazon.com/Fat-Switch-Richard-J-Johnson-ebook/dp... [2] https://nebula.wsimg.com/e2e6c217edf4c5dd64bb0486df430804?AccessKeyId=C51AAAB48BC458E4316B&disposition=0&alloworigin=1 https://nebula.wsimg.com/e2e6c217edf4c5dd64bb0486df430804?Ac...
madmads 5y ago
There is a good book employing the TRIZ mindset for self-improvement called "How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use"[0]. Although some of the outcomes the book lead you to can seem banal, if you approach them from the perspective of how to optimize misery, it can give you a new perspective. It certainly did for me in some areas. CGP Grey also made a video based on the book, called "7 Ways to Maximize Misery"[1] that may be easier to digest. [0]https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25898044-how-to-be-miserable https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25898044-how-to-be-mi... [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o
- villasv 5y ago
  Read the book because the video got me interested, one of the most entertaining reads of my life and definitely the one book that could somehow count as self-help that I'd ever recommend.
- lighttower 5y ago
  I have always had trouble making short term attainable goals. For example I want to restart doing yoga. But it's been a few years since I've done yoga and now I can no longer touch my toes. Whereas before I was able to do the full primary sequence of ashtanga. Every time I think of my decline it kills any motivation to do anything to stop it. Anyone have any tips?
lamontcg 5y ago
I do this all the time. At work, I'd consider what it would take to wipe all the servers, and all the backups (while creating enough of a distraction on the network to delay people from pulling the power in the datacenters). We had way too many people with global root access that could have done something about it, so the point would be to consider engineering to restrict access (this was before kubertnetes took over the world). Walking down the street yesterday I saw someone had a little bucket full of dog treats for anyone to take and my first thought was the risk of someone spraying a bit of poison on them. I don't necessary "fear" things like that, but its just obvious to me that you're implicitly trusting the thousands of people who has walked past that box not to be pathological. Probably good that not everyone in the world thinks the way I do.
- LorenPechtel 5y ago
  It's an occupational hazard for us computer guys. It's the failure mode you didn't think of that brings the system down, so of course you learn to think of the failure modes.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  > Probably good that not everyone in the world thinks the way I do. It's funny because HN (in contrast to the world at large) seems to be frequented by a lot of people who are gifted with the forward-looking contingency mindset. I'll bet that's why you got upvoted, and it's probably why the article was posted. One reason why a community like this would exist online is because it's effectively a saf...err I mean friendly place for people who are concerned about future events, but in a positive, problem-solving sort of way. The rest of the world doesn't always reward this or want to hear about it. IT, operations, and even software development need people who can think this way (particularly the opportunistic side of software dev, as it is more COTS-components oriented and thus less NIH and thus theoretically more battle-tested/hardened against future events). Sadly one of the things I've noticed about those with this mindset is that if they are not able to act on their perceptions constructively, for example if they were raised in an environment where it was considered a crazy way to think about things (focus only on past or present), it can turn into a more subjective, fear-based practice. In those cases it seems you get more outcomes like a stance where even just going outside feels to a person more like gambling with their life. Just observationally speaking...
jedberg 5y ago
I've been doing this my entire working career. I didn't realize it wasn't something everyone does! When I worked in security, the first question I always asked was, "how would I defeat this system". When I worked in reliability, my first question was always, "how can I break this?". And now that I'm founder, I ask myself, "how will my business fail". I know that the executives at a lot of large public companies have an annual exercise where they spend a couple of days just thinking about how the company could fail, what competitors could do that would be disastrous, and then what they can do to mitigate those things. I also teach my kids these kids skills. When they build something I ask how it might break, or when they are about to do something risky I ask them how it might go wrong and what they will do to make sure it doesn't.
- djmips 5y ago
  Yeah, I think this way by default. It really does seem a natural for security!
zaroth 5y ago
At a previous job many years ago, after a project would fail my coworker and I would habitually remark, “we’ve learned another way not to do things!” There’s just such an abundance of creative ways to screw things up! But that’s kind of the point of the mental model — our brains are pretty good at spitting out tons of ways that things will fail. So hijack that process by making that list and then invert it.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
This almost is more of a testing methodology for engineered solutions to find failure scenarios, but I can see how using this would be perversely useful while searching problem spaces.
adrianmonk 5y ago
Lots of parallels to "know your enemy", if you're willing to broaden "enemy" to include the impersonal. Quotes[1]: > It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle. and > Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy. The part about both knowing yourself and knowing your enemy is similar to the idea of iterating back and forth between thinking about how to fail and how to succeed. The universe is not actually out to get you, but you can ask what its "strategy" would be if it were. --- [1] see https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sun_Tzu#Chapter_III_%C2%B7_Strategic_Attack https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sun_Tzu#Chapter_III_%C2%B7_Str...
steelframe 5y ago
First, a tangent. I've noticed recently that a number of websites aren't letting me do old-school copy-to-clipboard. They're hooking highlight events and only allowing copy according to their own method (e.g., Twitter or whatever). ScriptSafe causes them to hide the article completely. I've found that the "Absolute Enable Right Click & Copy" Firefox extension works with the article for this post, but there may be other extensions that unbreak copy-to-clipboard. That said, from the article: > Prioritize near-term income over long-term value. In terms of one's career, I'm not sure what the author has in mind. I've found that, in the long run, work experience is work experience, and your skill in interviewing plays an outsized role in your future career prospects. If you're getting paid a lot of money to do something, that generally means there's going to be competition for your job, and it's noteworthy that you're the one who got it! I'm sure there are some exceptions (and in my experience people on social media Internet forums like this one love to point them out), but I'd argue those exceptions are mostly outliers. In addition, high income early in your career means you can start accruing compound interest earlier. Disproportionate quantities of money in an index ETF in your early 20's is a very, very powerful force function for your entire life. Play your cards right, and you can FIRE by your early-to-mid-30's, at which point you can pursue any work you want without the stress of needing to care about performance reviews, layoffs, toxic work environments, etc., etc., since you can always walk away. Even if you don't end up walking away, simply knowing you can easily walk away can have a significant impact on your overall quality of life. Of course this can be easier said than done. I spent most of my 20's hardly paying any attention at all to what I was paid, focusing my efforts on the type of work I was doing and my education, and the company I worked for (a faceless Big Tech entity) was more than happy to take advantage of me. I had to spend my 30's catching up on savings. If I could rewind the clock and do it again, I'd aggressively hone my interview skills and spend a lot more time negotiating comp with a lot more companies once I had a year of two of professional experience on my resume. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you are fiscally responsible and invest wisely, short-term income can be a form of long-term value.
asimjalis 5y ago
I did not like this article because it was superficial, clickbaity, and did not explain the main idea with a worked out example. > Charlie inverted the problem in a similar way to the TRIZ practitioners — if he wanted to kill pilots, he could get them into icy conditions whereby they couldn’t continue flying, or put them in situations where they would run out of fuel and fall into the ocean. So he drew more applicable maps and better predicted the weather factors that were relevant by keeping in mind the best ways to do the exact opposite of bringing his pilots home. This tells me nothing about how Charlie Munger avoided planes crashing. There has to be more to this than this trite summarization. Can someone shed some light on this and explain why this is insightful.
- bluetwo 5y ago
  I thought the article was well written. Can I suggest trying again? The point was not tho explain HOW to avoid planes crashing, it was to explain how he saw his job not that of providing super-clear weather reports ,but focusing the reports on factors that would cause problems for pilots.
- Wronnay 5y ago
  Imagine the worst possible outcome and do the opposite. That will light your focus on what matters. I think that's the essence of the article.
failwhaleshark 5y ago
Ricin, anthrax, or polonium in FAA documents.
deleted 5y ago
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shsbdncudx 5y ago
I think this is the approach Boeing took with the 737 Max

374 points by stanrivers 5y ago

I've worked with engineers who have used a premortem -- once they have the bare sketch of a project to solve a problem, they imagine that it failed and think about the most likely causes, then adjust their project to mitigate those risks. The process described here happens a step earlier, when you're deciding which projects to tackle in the first place, which is an interesting angle.

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amelius 5y ago

> thinking about how to do the exact opposite of your goal is sometimes the best way to ensure you achieve it. It also makes for a great clickbaity headline.

tzs 5y ago
If you were a bit disappointed that the article, even though it was quite excellent, wasn't more about actually killing pilots, this might help [1]. [1] https://www.cracked.com/article_18839_7-planes-perfectly-designed-to-kill-people-flying-them.html https://www.cracked.com/article_18839_7-planes-perfectly-des...

lordnacho 5y ago

Suppose I want to build a program that trades in the markets to make money. So to do the opposite I would try to lose money as fast as I could, according to this? But the way to do that is just to churn my book a lot and pay costs and spreads. It's not clear how that illuminates how to make money.

GuB-42 5y ago
It actually illuminates more than you might think. The market is mostly a zero sum game. When someone loses money, someone makes money, and vice versa. Just think about it. I think the best way to lose a lot of money is to fall into scams. And avoiding scams is an important part of investing. It also tell you that scams can be profitable. So the next question is: how to scam and lose money doing it, which will hopefully put you back on the right track... or make you a really good scammer. Back to honest investing, losing a lot of money is not that trivial. It is easy to take risks but you can still get the occasional big payoff and if you think about ways of not getting that payoff, it is the same as thinking about how to get it, just with a different angle. That kind of reverse thinking goes best when you pair it with regular thinking. That's a "meet in the middle" algorithm, kind of like solving a maze by going both forwards from the entrance and backwards from the exit.
probably_wrong 5y ago
You now have your first data point. You now need to come up with a second strategy that loses money while, simultaneously, avoiding those steps. Repeat until you run out of ways of losing money.
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tyree731 5y ago
The interesting thing about the markets is that if you had a strategy that consistently lost money, oftentimes you can use the “opposite“ of that strategy, so to speak, to make money. This is one reason why it’s difficult to find these losing strategies.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > oftentimes you can use the “opposite“ of that strategy, so to speak, to make money The opposite of Robinhooding might be buying a smattering of stocks and holding until infinity. It’s better than constantly trading options, a consistently losing strategy. But I wouldn’t call it a winner.
  - unmole 5y ago
    If buuying OTM options is a consistently losing strategy, the opposite would be selling OTM options. And that's a reasonable way to make money.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > the opposite would be selling OTM options. And that's a reasonable way to make money. It's the original "vacuuming up nickels in front of a steamroller" trade. It looks like it works well for a while until it doesn't. Option pricing has many degrees of freedom. Most result in value frittering away. As a result, most options trade participants lose money. (By design. It's a hedging tool.) The alpha bleeds into the underlying market through market makers' hedging.
hamilyon2 5y ago
Strawman. Suppose you are market maker and never have to pay a dime in fees. Morover, anything lost on spread is immediately refunded. If you have strategy that very quickly loses money in this harsh conditions, you have a winner.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > anything lost on spread is immediately refunded This is unrealistic and produces fantasy strategies. Capping spreads over a unit of time is more realistic. That said, this way of thinking, iterated with discipline, does lead to a decent portfolio strategy. (Though not necessarily an outperforming one.)
iamben 5y ago
I know nothing about trading, so forgive me in advance - but I assumed the point of the article is to break it down a bit more specifically. What causes you to lose money quickly, what's the program doing - how do you stop it from doing those things? If you start to remove the roads to failure you're kind of forced onto the road to success - or at least a place where you're not falling into the places you're planning around.
- WJW 5y ago
  In the case of trading, removing the known roads to failure is no guarantee that you are now on the road to success. There are many MANY ways to fail in finance and more are being invented every day. I suspect (but cannot prove) that this is because financial markets are "PvP" instead of "PvE", you trade against intelligent humans who can and do adapt their strategies to what they observe to be the strategy of other players in the market. If there is any form of rock-paper-scissors dynamic, this means that there will never be a stable strategy that keeps winning and so the method from the article will not work. In most engineering problems OTOH, you are basically fighting against the environment. This can still be very difficult (see rocket science for example) but at least the laws of physics don't change from day to day. So, any progress in solving the problem you made yesterday will remain. Successful application of the TRIZ method requires that the problem remains relatively stable, so that the options you "chip away" remain poor options forever. The markets are not like this and neither, I think, is career design.
kaycebasques 5y ago
> It's not clear how that illuminates how to make money. I mean you did already start to think of some interesting starting points: > But the way to do that is just to churn my book a lot and pay costs and spreads. Don't churn your books, reduce costs, reduce spreads
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> the way to do that is just to churn my book a lot and pay costs and spreads Iterate the question. Assuming a limited number of trades per quarter and a cap on spreads and commissions, how would one maximally lose money?
throwaway316943 5y ago
Think of it like the weather map that was mentioned. Your job is to fill in all of the parts of the map that will kill the pilot. Once you’ve exhaustively done that, the clear path will be evident.
- WJW 5y ago
  How will you know you have indeed exhaustively done so though? This seems like a strategy that will only work for extremely well understood fields and things like "career development" that the article talks about are definitely not well enough developed that you can exhaustively enumerate all the ways it can go wrong.
  - throwaway316943 5y ago
    Using the weather map analogy again, you’ll only have accurate data for some parts of the map and you’ll need to rely on second hand information or predictive modeling to fill in the other parts and after all of that sometimes you just have to go look for yourself.
buffetknowledge 5y ago
Forgive me, but I think you've illuminated the exact way to be a great investor repeated by buffet ad nauseam. Don't buy and sell repeatedly - you lose on the transaction fees. Act like you have a punch card with 10 holes for your entire life and you use one every time you buy a company. That way you'll really consider you decisions and won't lose money on transaction fees from repeated buying and selling. Buy great companies cheap or at a good price. Only sell if you think they are technologically threatened (horse and cart vs car situation) or have grown to take up too much of your portfolio (like up 50%+ of your portfolio). This is basically how buffet got mega rich. Amex, Coca Cola, Apple, Geico, etc. These few big bets made him a very rich man and he still holds them today. Losing 1% per year to transaction/currency/ management fees per year really adds up over a lifetime. And it doubly matters when you are rich enough to pass the cap gains threshold. 20% lost on every time you sell at a profit in the UK - that compounds too! Or - if you can't be bothered with the effort to try and beat the market - you've also illuminated another bit of buffets advice. Invest in and hold an s&p ETF through your whole life. In fact Munger is one of the biggest proponents of "invert, always invert"
ajuc 5y ago
> But the way to do that is just to churn my book a lot and pay costs and spreads. It's not clear how that illuminates how to make money. Well it suggests to invest long-term?

pmichaud 5y ago

There's a saying in my neck of the woods that captures this: If you can't optimize, pessimize!

kaycebasques 5y ago

HN loves this idea of thinking in reverse. Is anyone here actually doing it? What problem did you solve?

jbluepolarbear 5y ago
Constantly, as the article states, some problems can’t be solved. But they can be incrementally made less problematic. I’ll use game networking as an example: there is no one way to solve networking between clients and servers. There is however a lot of ways to ruin the networking. So think about it it reverse. If I want the client to have a very poor experience I’d put them on an unstable network (cell), I’d have random packets dropped, I’d send at a rate higher than the clients download speed. Turns out these are really common problems with many options for addressing. I think of it less of reverse the problem and more changing my frame of reference or perspective of the problem.
palijer 5y ago
I'm in QA, and this is something like what I've been doing with running pre-mortems. Basically, at the project planning stage, I get everyone together and ask how this shit is going to blown up in our faces. What are all the scenarios that are complete failures. Then a few weeks before a release, I do the same thing. It's amazing the issues this catches from the cross team approach. For instance, something that the product manager was worried about, they never brought up because they assumed engineering knew about it was covered, but in reality, they had no idea that was important. Or with two engineering teams, or DevOps etc. Normally we have more than a dozen action items out of these meetings.
codetrotter 5y ago
On a small scale I find this way of thinking useful in software development. Say that you are implementing a role-based access control system. And then ask yourself how can my RBAC system fail? Well one way it could fail is if someone without the necessary role can operate on something that they ought not have access to. So then create roles A, B, and C, and create a resource and say that group A can rw, and group B can r this resource. Then create a user and give that user role C. And then try to use this user in that role and try to read the resource. If it can, fail the test. Then another test where you try to write using such a user. If the resource was modified, fail the test. This is as opposed to only thinking about what you want to happen, in which case you might be writing tests that only ensure that those that should be able to read/write can do so. And of course you want to test that too. But ensuring that those that should not be able to access a resource cannot is the more important thing to be sure of, and also the type of thing that might slip by unnoticed. A system where those that should be able to access resources cannot, this will be detected in normal operation anyway, by way of users performing their usual tasks. But accessing resources you should not is the most critical and could go by unnoticed for a long time. And that is why the tests that are written in the backwards thinking fashion are the most important ones.

MattGaiser 5y ago

Isn’t this basically just a failure mode and effects analysis?

rocqua 5y ago
In some sense, it is taking "fail fast" and moving the failure closer in time by just imagining the failure rather than waiting for the real failure. This allows for a quicker feedback loop. It also allows for having the feedback without actually having failure. I suspect the second feature is more important than the first. Feedback from real failure remains more valuable than feedback from imagined scenarios. Thing is, real failure can also be quite expensive.
paul_f 5y ago
Not exactly inversion as described in the article, unless an attempt was made to actually fail and then you study that.

kortex 5y ago

Suppose I wanted to make a program inscrutable, hard to modify, hard to test, heavily coupled, and hard to reason about: - hide information so that it's not queryable - force information to flow through multiple hops - make it hard/impossible to set the true state of the system in its entirety - allow state to be mutated silently - give interfaces roles and force certain state to have to flow through specific paths - multiple concurrent access - pointers - spray the app across as many machines as possible Sounds familiar, maybe like a scathing criticism of OOP? Well check this out. What if I wanted to make a program as slow and bloated as possible? - put all state in one place. Bonus points if you can bottleneck it and force all changes to be well-ordered and sequential - all data has to be immutable and copied over in its entirety when propagated - use larger data structures than necessary. Lots of wrapping and indirection - no caching. Can't trust data unless it's fresh - read/write from disk/net tons - use scripty garbage collected languages - spray the app over as many machines as possible The latter kind of feels like a criticism of FP, though really it's more critical of distributed monolith. What if I want to make my app as vulnerable to outage and overload as possible? - concentrate the app in as few machines as possible It's really interesting how all the different tradeoffs of approaches just kinda appear when you take this inverted approach. It's all too easy to get caught up on the positives of an approach. (opinion - I still think FP comes out looking better than OOP, but it does suggest that you need a lot of techniques to safely hide optimizations to make FP more performant, which can make it harder to scrutinize all the layers)

golergka 5y ago
> What if I wanted to make a program as slow and bloated as possible? That sounds like a very exact description of React/Redux.
- fastball 5y ago
  We've built a React/Redux application[1] that people keep telling us is very snappy, and we definitely haven't optimized as much as is possible, so from my experience React/Redux is not inherently slow and bloated. [1] https://my.supernotes.app https://my.supernotes.app

sam_lowry_ 5y ago

The basic premise of TIPS was that one could train engineers on solving problems, pretty much like martial arts trainers do: by exercising and learning tricks. Theory of Inventive Problem Solving nicely abbreviates as TIPS. That's how it has been known in the west for decades. ТРИЗ is a Russian acronym. TRIZ just replaces Cyrillic letters with equivalents. If the author digged a bit deeper, they would have known it and a few funny stories. Like the fact that Genrich Altshuller did not want his teaching to carry on once he dies, but fan groups of engineers existed until the fall of the Soviet union when many of their members emigrated and continued the TIPS cult following, selling courses and software to large enterprises (Dassault, Lockheed Martin and the likes).

mananaysiempre 5y ago
For what it’s worth, theory of inventive problem solving is not a very good translation of теория решения изобретательских задач teorija rešenija izobretatelʹskih zadač: as far as I can see, it parses as [inventive [problem solving]] with inventive meaning something like “unconstrained by convention, prolific intellectually, embodying the spirit of invention”, for which the proper Russian is изобретательный izobretat-elʹ-n|yj; the original name has a different syntactic structure and uses изобретательский izobretat-elʹ-sk|ij “belonging to or characteristic of inventors”, so the proper translation would instead be something like theory of solving problems of invention, which is admittedly awkward (and doesn’t afford a snappy acronym) but at least successfully conveys the idea that the “invention” part pertains to the problems, not the solutions or the theory.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  > (and doesn’t afford a snappy acronym) TOSPOI even sounds Russian!
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    It still rolls off the tongue better than TANSTAAFL ("There ain't no such thing as a free lunch").

spydum 5y ago

Sounds a lot like threat modelling. It's great, if you are creative enough to imagine all the threat scenarios.

atatatat 5y ago
Or at minimum, the likely ones.

markmsmith 5y ago

Before I do anything, I ask myself: 'Would an idiot do that?' And, if the answer is yes, I do not do that thing. - Dwight Schrute

DangitBobby 5y ago
"Would an idiot eat breakfast?" Uh oh.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- m3kw9 5y ago
  There are exceptions like breathing and taking space
- webreac 5y ago
  an idiot would eat an ordinary breakfast. I will eat an extraordinary breakfast.
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  DangitBobby, this is comedy.
- samatman 5y ago
  Jokes on you I do intermittent fasting, only coffee until noon.

ethbr0 5y ago

I first heard about this in the context of software project estimation. The author (forgotten to me) made the point that nobody has permission to think about disasters when estimating project completion time. So why not explicitly ask them to? "So now we have our estimate, what would cause us to miss it?" And in the course of giant monster attacks, you give people permission to talk about specific scenarios that are actually very likely to derail the schedule. It was an interesting observation, vs the "just multiply the everything goes right estimate by X" method. If everyone else is being positive, no one wants to be the lone (realistic) downer.

jacquesm 5y ago
Spot on. They used to call me 'Dr. No' because that is exactly what I would do, but it saved us tons of money so it was tolerated. We also actually delivered on time and within the budget but I'm sure it cost us contracts to more optimistic competitors.
- oceanghost 5y ago
  This. Most engineers delude themselves and plan for the happy path. I was famous too for "being negative." In the planning of a complex project once a rather dull engineer, after I had just pointed out a major potential problem asked, "Why are you so negative?" "I'm not negative, I'm planning for success."
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Guest42 5y ago
    My approach was to allocate 2 weeks for even the most basic things because unknowns always creep in and a tighter schedule tends to make those things creep in even more. Also, many of the requests had no particular urgency to begin with.
  - underwater 5y ago
    I've seen a lot of engineers be negative in a destructive way. They tear down ideas, but fail to offer solutions. Usually this is about their ego rather than a desire to help the team.

simonh 5y ago

Convince them that the world is a globe, when it's actually flat, so they get their navigation calculations wrong and their plane's crash when they run out of fuel.

andridk 5y ago

As I was clicking this link I was thinking "Oh great, now I'm on watch list". Turns out, it's about thinking and problem solving and I was pleasantly surprised.

tjchear 5y ago

Is there a software invention/systems equivalent of TRIZ matrix? Some of the dimensions/parameters we wish to analyze that I can think of may include: - latency - throughput - modifiability - binary/data size - memory size - cpu cycles - interoperability/compatibility - accuracy - precision - staleness - bandwidth - availability - etc As a simple example, perhaps we want to reduce bandwidth while preserving data size. One of the resolutions may include compression (lossless/lossy).

0xF57A 5y ago

>Continue to be a rent-taker as opposed to adding value One of the most pervasive falsehoods in existence. Take them out of the equation and play the scenario through. What do you end up with?

dTal 5y ago

> rather than solving for success, solve for failure. If you want to design a dust filter that works at 600 Celsius within a steel mill, instead design all the ways you could develop a filter that would fail miserably in those conditions. That's a strange example. There are infinite ways of not accomplishing a task, and as a non-expert in filter design I have no trouble listing them: make the filter out of butter, make it just a big hole, pay someone to pluck dust out of the air with tweezers... how exactly is this helping?

kolinko 5y ago
The point is to make a filter that works in lower temperatures but breaks around 600C. Using the other example - of course to kill the most pilots you coukd out them in a big meat grinder or just blow up their planes. But the point is to design planes so that they both fly and kill pilots.
- stanrivers 5y ago
  Hahaha I love this response; yes, you can always change the rules of the game, so to speak, and make things worse; however, if you keep within the rules of reality then it might be a bit more useful.
GormanFletcher 5y ago
I interpreted it as brainstorming ways to actively sabotage success. "Solutions" that appears superficially plausible, but undermine the outcome in real world situations. So for the dust filter, maybe selecting a material that's only rated for high temperatures in short bursts. Or one that needs frequent, labor-intensive replacements in that dangerous environment. Or test that your filter survives at high temperatures, and test the filtration efficacy, but forget to test the efficacy at high temperatures.

BLanen 5y ago

I like how it references the Gulag Archipelago which two links to buy it, a pseudo-historical book. For no reason. Except for that a certain controversial person likes to talk about it a lot. Of course 3 articles back they reference Jordan Peterson.

ARandomerDude 5y ago
Oh good grief. Eat the meat and throw away the bones.

mmcconnell1618 5y ago

Is this another way to help define the problem you're trying to solve? It sounds like "Keep pilots alive" wasn't detailed enough. By thinking about all the failure conditions, you're building a more robust description of the true problem you're trying to solve. I also wonder where you draw the line and stop thinking of failure conditions.

wildermuthn 5y ago

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Inverted problem solving, done naively, is an infinite task — you could kill all the pilots in infinitely and progressively improbable ways (e.g., use time-travel to kill someone in their chain of ancestry, or their pilot instructors, or the aircraft engineers, etc). So inverted problem solving must identity the most probable modes of failure until their hypothetical resolution causes failure to becomes improbable. This sounds a lot like unit tests, which in my experience are notoriously bad at correctly estimating probable modes of failure for complex units of functionality, Contrast this to generative testing of simple units of functionality, which in my experience do in fact provide comprehensive coverage of failure modes. Or contrast both of them to languages like Rust and Haskel which many claim to solve a set of discrete failure modes automatically by virtue of the limitations set upon problem solving itself. It seems to me that it is better to set limits upon problem-solving that are known to often lead to failure rather than attempt to estimate the probabilities of an unknown infinite — i.e., identify types of failure modes across domains that have high failure rates and construct a framework of problem-solving that precludes those types. This is done all the time in the form what I would call “worst-practices”. Cheating on your partner is almost always a bad way to increase marital happiness, and the framework of marriage excludes it (even “open marriages” require honesty as part of its framework). Paul Graham puts cofounder disagreements at the top of his list of ways that startups fail — the most basic form of such failure being that cofounders disagree on whether to give up on their startup. Although there are infinite ways for cofounders to disagree, perhaps it is possible to proactively address the manner in which disagreements are identified and resolved before they become lethal. The only good solution I’ve seen to this problem is the advice to split equity equally — ensuring that the problem is more obvious and severe by amplifying its consequences. This is similar to Rust — the consequence of a “poorly” written program is that it won’t run at all. This is also why monopolies in America are sometimes broken up: a monopoly can succeed by failing, whereas a startup can only succeed by actually making something people want. Perhaps a better framework for problem solving would be something like, Make Problems Catastrophic, or Burn Your Lifeboats, or Amplify Consequences of Failure. It has always fascinated me that Leprosy doesn’t directly cause your body to fall apart — it indirectly causes failure by removing the feedback of pain. Without pain, we hurt ourselves unknowingly and profoundly. Make Problems Painful?

wildermuthn 5y ago

There’s a really interesting parallel here with evolution: exaptation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaptation?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaptation?wprov=sfti1 This occurs when a trait that evolved to solve one problem also happens to solve (or almost solve) another problem — for example, perhaps feathers originally evolved for the purpose of keeping warm but also opened up an evolutionary path to flight.

sobriquet9 5y ago

This is a common pattern, also found in proofs by contradiction and optimization techniques. If you know how to find the minimum, you may be able to use that knowledge to find the maximum. The problem with using this pattern in real life is that it rarely applies. Unlike the one-dimensional toy examples, in real life there are many more ways to fail than there are to succeed. Eliminating or even enumerating all possible ways to fail may be prohibitively expensive. Even if you do that, you only found a way to maintain status quo, not necessarily to improve. This can be said about the rest of TRIZ/TIPS. I learned about it a long time ago, but can't remember a single time I solved a practical problem by applying it. I may be able to find examples that can be classified under one of TRIZ rules, but only in hindsight. It's not like you can look at a new problem, apply TRIZ approaches one by one, and find a solution faster than you normally would.

tacon 5y ago

Suppose you wanted to become as fat as possible, as fast as possible? How would you pull off that trick? You might stop to think about your answer before continuing. One way that happens all over nature is to gorge on fruit, just like bears and other animals do every fall before they hibernate.[0][1] An old article from Ken Hutchins entitled "So, Your Ambition Is to Become a Circus Fat Lady?", is essentially a TRIZ failure design for fat loss.[2] [0] https://peterattiamd.com/rickjohnson/ https://peterattiamd.com/rickjohnson/ [1] https://www.amazon.com/Fat-Switch-Richard-J-Johnson-ebook/dp/B009XVKUDE/ https://www.amazon.com/Fat-Switch-Richard-J-Johnson-ebook/dp... [2] https://nebula.wsimg.com/e2e6c217edf4c5dd64bb0486df430804?AccessKeyId=C51AAAB48BC458E4316B&disposition=0&alloworigin=1 https://nebula.wsimg.com/e2e6c217edf4c5dd64bb0486df430804?Ac...

madmads 5y ago

There is a good book employing the TRIZ mindset for self-improvement called "How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use"[0]. Although some of the outcomes the book lead you to can seem banal, if you approach them from the perspective of how to optimize misery, it can give you a new perspective. It certainly did for me in some areas. CGP Grey also made a video based on the book, called "7 Ways to Maximize Misery"[1] that may be easier to digest. [0]https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25898044-how-to-be-miserable https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25898044-how-to-be-mi... [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o

villasv 5y ago
Read the book because the video got me interested, one of the most entertaining reads of my life and definitely the one book that could somehow count as self-help that I'd ever recommend.
lighttower 5y ago
I have always had trouble making short term attainable goals. For example I want to restart doing yoga. But it's been a few years since I've done yoga and now I can no longer touch my toes. Whereas before I was able to do the full primary sequence of ashtanga. Every time I think of my decline it kills any motivation to do anything to stop it. Anyone have any tips?

lamontcg 5y ago

I do this all the time. At work, I'd consider what it would take to wipe all the servers, and all the backups (while creating enough of a distraction on the network to delay people from pulling the power in the datacenters). We had way too many people with global root access that could have done something about it, so the point would be to consider engineering to restrict access (this was before kubertnetes took over the world). Walking down the street yesterday I saw someone had a little bucket full of dog treats for anyone to take and my first thought was the risk of someone spraying a bit of poison on them. I don't necessary "fear" things like that, but its just obvious to me that you're implicitly trusting the thousands of people who has walked past that box not to be pathological. Probably good that not everyone in the world thinks the way I do.

LorenPechtel 5y ago
It's an occupational hazard for us computer guys. It's the failure mode you didn't think of that brings the system down, so of course you learn to think of the failure modes.
themodelplumber 5y ago
> Probably good that not everyone in the world thinks the way I do. It's funny because HN (in contrast to the world at large) seems to be frequented by a lot of people who are gifted with the forward-looking contingency mindset. I'll bet that's why you got upvoted, and it's probably why the article was posted. One reason why a community like this would exist online is because it's effectively a saf...err I mean friendly place for people who are concerned about future events, but in a positive, problem-solving sort of way. The rest of the world doesn't always reward this or want to hear about it. IT, operations, and even software development need people who can think this way (particularly the opportunistic side of software dev, as it is more COTS-components oriented and thus less NIH and thus theoretically more battle-tested/hardened against future events). Sadly one of the things I've noticed about those with this mindset is that if they are not able to act on their perceptions constructively, for example if they were raised in an environment where it was considered a crazy way to think about things (focus only on past or present), it can turn into a more subjective, fear-based practice. In those cases it seems you get more outcomes like a stance where even just going outside feels to a person more like gambling with their life. Just observationally speaking...

jedberg 5y ago

I've been doing this my entire working career. I didn't realize it wasn't something everyone does! When I worked in security, the first question I always asked was, "how would I defeat this system". When I worked in reliability, my first question was always, "how can I break this?". And now that I'm founder, I ask myself, "how will my business fail". I know that the executives at a lot of large public companies have an annual exercise where they spend a couple of days just thinking about how the company could fail, what competitors could do that would be disastrous, and then what they can do to mitigate those things. I also teach my kids these kids skills. When they build something I ask how it might break, or when they are about to do something risky I ask them how it might go wrong and what they will do to make sure it doesn't.

djmips 5y ago
Yeah, I think this way by default. It really does seem a natural for security!

zaroth 5y ago

At a previous job many years ago, after a project would fail my coworker and I would habitually remark, “we’ve learned another way not to do things!” There’s just such an abundance of creative ways to screw things up! But that’s kind of the point of the mental model — our brains are pretty good at spitting out tons of ways that things will fail. So hijack that process by making that list and then invert it.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

This almost is more of a testing methodology for engineered solutions to find failure scenarios, but I can see how using this would be perversely useful while searching problem spaces.

adrianmonk 5y ago

Lots of parallels to "know your enemy", if you're willing to broaden "enemy" to include the impersonal. Quotes[1]: > It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle. and > Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy. The part about both knowing yourself and knowing your enemy is similar to the idea of iterating back and forth between thinking about how to fail and how to succeed. The universe is not actually out to get you, but you can ask what its "strategy" would be if it were. --- [1] see https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sun_Tzu#Chapter_III_%C2%B7_Strategic_Attack https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sun_Tzu#Chapter_III_%C2%B7_Str...

steelframe 5y ago

First, a tangent. I've noticed recently that a number of websites aren't letting me do old-school copy-to-clipboard. They're hooking highlight events and only allowing copy according to their own method (e.g., Twitter or whatever). ScriptSafe causes them to hide the article completely. I've found that the "Absolute Enable Right Click & Copy" Firefox extension works with the article for this post, but there may be other extensions that unbreak copy-to-clipboard. That said, from the article: > Prioritize near-term income over long-term value. In terms of one's career, I'm not sure what the author has in mind. I've found that, in the long run, work experience is work experience, and your skill in interviewing plays an outsized role in your future career prospects. If you're getting paid a lot of money to do something, that generally means there's going to be competition for your job, and it's noteworthy that you're the one who got it! I'm sure there are some exceptions (and in my experience people on social media Internet forums like this one love to point them out), but I'd argue those exceptions are mostly outliers. In addition, high income early in your career means you can start accruing compound interest earlier. Disproportionate quantities of money in an index ETF in your early 20's is a very, very powerful force function for your entire life. Play your cards right, and you can FIRE by your early-to-mid-30's, at which point you can pursue any work you want without the stress of needing to care about performance reviews, layoffs, toxic work environments, etc., etc., since you can always walk away. Even if you don't end up walking away, simply knowing you can easily walk away can have a significant impact on your overall quality of life. Of course this can be easier said than done. I spent most of my 20's hardly paying any attention at all to what I was paid, focusing my efforts on the type of work I was doing and my education, and the company I worked for (a faceless Big Tech entity) was more than happy to take advantage of me. I had to spend my 30's catching up on savings. If I could rewind the clock and do it again, I'd aggressively hone my interview skills and spend a lot more time negotiating comp with a lot more companies once I had a year of two of professional experience on my resume. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you are fiscally responsible and invest wisely, short-term income can be a form of long-term value.

asimjalis 5y ago

I did not like this article because it was superficial, clickbaity, and did not explain the main idea with a worked out example. > Charlie inverted the problem in a similar way to the TRIZ practitioners — if he wanted to kill pilots, he could get them into icy conditions whereby they couldn’t continue flying, or put them in situations where they would run out of fuel and fall into the ocean. So he drew more applicable maps and better predicted the weather factors that were relevant by keeping in mind the best ways to do the exact opposite of bringing his pilots home. This tells me nothing about how Charlie Munger avoided planes crashing. There has to be more to this than this trite summarization. Can someone shed some light on this and explain why this is insightful.

bluetwo 5y ago
I thought the article was well written. Can I suggest trying again? The point was not tho explain HOW to avoid planes crashing, it was to explain how he saw his job not that of providing super-clear weather reports ,but focusing the reports on factors that would cause problems for pilots.
Wronnay 5y ago
Imagine the worst possible outcome and do the opposite. That will light your focus on what matters. I think that's the essence of the article.

failwhaleshark 5y ago

Ricin, anthrax, or polonium in FAA documents.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

shsbdncudx 5y ago

I think this is the approach Boeing took with the 737 Max