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I'm so astonished that we are so careful not to overthink, to the point we accept "you're overthinking it" as a valid excuse to disregard rare risks. But we do

I'm so astonished that we are so careful not to overthink, to the point we accept "you're overthinking it" as a valid excuse to disregard rare risks. But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people overthink. I overthink everything all the time and there are still many things I miss and do wrong. I can't imagine trying to limit my thinking just for the sake of not overthinking. I'm not necessarily concerned about this blog post, but I'm curious if our frequent warns against overthinking can be a net loss?

WA 5y ago
- You didn’t think this through - That was a stupid idea - Do you even have a plan? - Do you know what you’re doing? - Darwin awards - … I think there is a lot of cultural concern about not thinking enough.
- WJW 5y ago
  I was going to post basically this. There are tons of people saying "you are underthinking this", but they almost never use those exact words. (BTW, to the point where my spellchecker flags "underthinking" as a word that does not exist)
mdp2021 5y ago
So this friend of mine receives a call from the Director about to evaluate his work, and is told "Clearly you are brilliant, but other colleagues are faster than you... For example, yesterday I asked about X, and see how A was fast in replying?" It was not easy to express that A gave a quick response with a largely false content. It is called rushing, it came from a culture of stopping well before decent quality, and it should not be a value.
- nuclearnice1 5y ago
  This great story is only half told! Is the director the hero, who gave clear feedback to her employees then listened to the response and corrected the course? Or is the director a lizard who demanded the impossible received junk in reply and didn’t recognize it even when courageously told?
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    These things, in different forms, happen frequently, unfortunately. It would be interesting to know how many times the outcome is "hero" and how many "lizard", under which conditions, in which contexts etc.
- nivertech 5y ago
  "Agile"/Scrum plannings is one example of rushing with design decisions in order to assign the tasks to developers. Of course you can assign the design tasks, but the rest of the tasks are depend on the outcome of it, so it doesn't work in practice. Waterfall on the other side, does overly encourages overthinking.
steve_adams_86 5y ago
> I overthink everything all the time and there are still many things I miss and do wrong. If you're like me, this is probably because the time spent thinking wasn't necessarily productive. It wasn't spent thinking about the right things, or about the things in the right way, with the right understanding or knowledge, etc. This is hard to overcome because at least in my case this occurs because of a lack of understanding of what I'm doing, or perhaps a worry that I won't execute on something as well as I believe I could. But in there lies a significant problem. My overthinking is motivated by 1) impressions and hypotheticals (could I actually execute better? And what if I don't need to understand the problem better? What if there is no attainable solution to the problem that's better enough to warrant researching it?) and 2) insecurities like fear of failure, fear of being wrong, of appearing incompetent. I often overthink because I want to do the best job I can (good) but... I want to do it on my first try (bad). I end up with massively diminishing returns on the thinking I do because of the first point mentioned above. I'm pursuing something that is arguably imaginary, and if I make good progress it's often pure luck rather than a calculated, predictable step forward. This is what makes it overthinking in my case. I'm wasting my energy and potential. I could act on what I know much sooner and be more productive, then revise my work with what I learn in the process or what I learn later. I should move forward with a better balance of confidence and critcal thinking, being sure to consider what I know carefully, how well I understand what I'm engaging in, but also knowing that I'm acceptably competent and that I'll learn more by doing. Easy to say, harder to do. But I do believe I lose a lot of my potential to overthinking. It becomes more neurotic than effective after a point. I'm often unaware that I'm even doing it; almost like I'm addicted to the process of analyzing, deconstructing, reconsidering, starting again. It feels somehow safer than taking the risk of making a (likely correctable) mistake! I agree that underthinking, or I suppose an absence of thinking, should be more critically considered and addressed when it occurs. It's a much different beast though. I believe they occur for perhaps entirely different reasons.
Yoric 5y ago
> I'm so astonished that we are so careful not to overthink, to the point we accept "you're overthinking it" as a valid excuse to disregard rare risks. Very good point. > But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people overthink. I believe that it's largely a cultural thing. For instance, in French companies, US Americans definitely have the reputation of underthinking things (which US employees feel is "being productive"). Reciprocally, in US companies, the French have a reputation for overthinking them (which French employees feel is "assessing risks"). One more reason for which balancing cultures (and backgrounds, etc) is actually really important for the future of a company: we all have different blind spots.
- kodah 5y ago
  > we all have different blind spots. I'm not going to dabble in your cultural representations because I think they're a bit dangerous. I will say that maintaining the idea that we have blind spots is good, overaddressing this is usually called "hand wringing" and is equally prohibitive. To me, it's about having a mix of the two. Think about things critically, but accept that you are not in total control of the world and that any good solution takes iteration and learning.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  In America, if there's no law against it you can do it. In France, if there's no law allowing it, you can't do it.
  - niyaven 5y ago
    Would you care to give a few examples? Where something was forbidden _without any law_ and then later allowed _with a law_?
    - otagekki 5y ago
      Well there are so many rules and official norms (approx. 400,000) and exceptions about pretty much anything in France that this is pretty accurate... Just look up the rules of the road regarding phone calls while driving for examples and see how it has evolved over time: specifically holding the phone was forbidden but using headphones were explicitly allowed until the latter also got banned by another law a few years back. Now to have calls we must put our phones on speakers (but not too loud) and use both hands for driving, effectively forbidding us to give any calls while driving all that without explicitly saying so. It's hardly enforceable, but wait until you encounter a zealous police agent that's been tasked to give a certain amount of tickets
civilized 5y ago
It's not that thinking more is bad, it's just not always the best thing to be doing. You could also make a decision tentatively and revisit when more information is available. The costs of this could be much less than you fear or assume.
tshaddox 5y ago
> I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". I mean, probably not with those exact words, but isn't that essentially the feedback you would get for almost any mistake you make at work that was foreseeable but not foreseen? Or even things like a code review, where pretty much all comments are of the form "you might want to consider how this effects OtherSystemX," which is a more helpful way of saying "you might be failing to think about something you ought to think about."
- xyzelement 5y ago
  That's exactly right. Under-thinking is often more obvious in terms of consequences so you talk about those.
Dudeman112 5y ago
>I overthink everything all the time and there are still many things I miss and do wrong Maybe you are just thinking? It only becomes overthinking when you have been at it for "too long". As in, it is not reasonable to guess that thinking more about it will be of value. Of course, knowing when that is the case is hard. IMO we should spend more time figuring out when it is overthinking than warning people about overthinking.
- gnulinux 5y ago
  I mean I have a clinical problem with overthinking (I am diagnosed with OCD) and I'm not disputing at all there are cases where overthinking is irrational and unproductive. I'm just pointing out that just like there are risks of overthinking, there are also risks of underthinking. And I usually see advises about how to prevent overthinking, and not underthinking. If I were to make a perfectly rational choice, I'd risk overthinking more than the opposite. So, although balance is ideal, if a balance is not possible (you don't have enough data to make a perfect decision) then I think, rationally speaking, you want to err slightly on the side of overthinking.
cuddlybacon 5y ago
> But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people overthink. We do this all the time. We just don't use the word "underthink". "You didn't think this through." "It sounds like you haven't gotten to the details yet." "Are you sure that's how it works?" "You need to start thinking things through." "You have a brain. Use it." "Pull your head out your ass." I think all of those phrases are suggesting the same thing underthink would.
- xyzelement 5y ago
  I think that's exactly right. If you run into traffic and get hit by a car, the conversation is about that, not "under thinking" because the impact is painful and obvious. However, it's more subtle for someone to notice that it takes you 30 minutes to cross the street because you're way too cautious, and the impact of that ("you could be doing a lot more with your life than standing here") is less obvious.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- TapWaterBandit 5y ago
  To add to this: - Look before you leap. - Measure twice, cut once. - Stay silent and have people think you're a fool, open your mouth and confirm it. I'm sure there are many more common idioms pointing towards the idea of "think before you act".
  - jyriand 5y ago
    Where I'm from we have similar sayings: - Don't dive head first into water. - Measure nine times, cut once. And a random saying I just remembered: "Autumn has the eyes of a summer and the teeth of a wolf." Edit:formatting
    - 5y ago
trhway 5y ago
the issue is that those meta-tools - fallacies, razors, poe/godwin/etc. laws, "otherthinking", etc. - are primarily intended for people to be able to improve the quality and manage the deficiencies of their own thinking, and instead the people weaponize it to use against other people's thinking.
ksec 5y ago
I cant even count how my "overthinking" and analytic conclusion has 90%+ hit rate but all my friends and colleagues told me I am overthinking it. When 99% of the world are under thinking, not thinking it through or worst and most likely the case, not thinking at all, then of course the 1% are overthinking. There are downside to overthink on small things, procrastination.
deltasixeight 5y ago
Relax the amount of overthinking people do is negligible compared to the amount of under thinking. Overthinking is not a problem, seriously. This guy in the article only thinks it's a problem because people are acutely aware of overthinking. They are completely unaware of under thinking. There are simply too many topics in the world to think about so in order to make sense of the world at a macro level you under think almost everything. I mean the guy is a software engineer OF COURSE he overthinks software related stuff. Guaranteed he's under thinking most of everything else.
watwut 5y ago
> I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". "We need to think about it more" definitely exists. "We need to turn it into proper plan first" exists too.
uCantCauseUCant 5y ago
Overthinking stuff while the requirements are not stable get into the details is what people want to communicate. Lots of Detail gets worked out, while the project is not even down this path.
gentleman11 5y ago
If you accuse somebody of overthinking, it’s almost a compliment in that they are too intelligent and might get them to reconsider. If you accuse them of being thoughtless, it’s like saying they are unintelligent, and you made an enemy who will resist changing their mind

WA 5y ago

- You didn’t think this through - That was a stupid idea - Do you even have a plan? - Do you know what you’re doing? - Darwin awards - … I think there is a lot of cultural concern about not thinking enough.

WJW 5y ago
I was going to post basically this. There are tons of people saying "you are underthinking this", but they almost never use those exact words. (BTW, to the point where my spellchecker flags "underthinking" as a word that does not exist)

mdp2021 5y ago

So this friend of mine receives a call from the Director about to evaluate his work, and is told "Clearly you are brilliant, but other colleagues are faster than you... For example, yesterday I asked about X, and see how A was fast in replying?" It was not easy to express that A gave a quick response with a largely false content. It is called rushing, it came from a culture of stopping well before decent quality, and it should not be a value.

nuclearnice1 5y ago
This great story is only half told! Is the director the hero, who gave clear feedback to her employees then listened to the response and corrected the course? Or is the director a lizard who demanded the impossible received junk in reply and didn’t recognize it even when courageously told?
- mdp2021 5y ago
  These things, in different forms, happen frequently, unfortunately. It would be interesting to know how many times the outcome is "hero" and how many "lizard", under which conditions, in which contexts etc.
nivertech 5y ago
"Agile"/Scrum plannings is one example of rushing with design decisions in order to assign the tasks to developers. Of course you can assign the design tasks, but the rest of the tasks are depend on the outcome of it, so it doesn't work in practice. Waterfall on the other side, does overly encourages overthinking.

steve_adams_86 5y ago

> I overthink everything all the time and there are still many things I miss and do wrong. If you're like me, this is probably because the time spent thinking wasn't necessarily productive. It wasn't spent thinking about the right things, or about the things in the right way, with the right understanding or knowledge, etc. This is hard to overcome because at least in my case this occurs because of a lack of understanding of what I'm doing, or perhaps a worry that I won't execute on something as well as I believe I could. But in there lies a significant problem. My overthinking is motivated by 1) impressions and hypotheticals (could I actually execute better? And what if I don't need to understand the problem better? What if there is no attainable solution to the problem that's better enough to warrant researching it?) and 2) insecurities like fear of failure, fear of being wrong, of appearing incompetent. I often overthink because I want to do the best job I can (good) but... I want to do it on my first try (bad). I end up with massively diminishing returns on the thinking I do because of the first point mentioned above. I'm pursuing something that is arguably imaginary, and if I make good progress it's often pure luck rather than a calculated, predictable step forward. This is what makes it overthinking in my case. I'm wasting my energy and potential. I could act on what I know much sooner and be more productive, then revise my work with what I learn in the process or what I learn later. I should move forward with a better balance of confidence and critcal thinking, being sure to consider what I know carefully, how well I understand what I'm engaging in, but also knowing that I'm acceptably competent and that I'll learn more by doing. Easy to say, harder to do. But I do believe I lose a lot of my potential to overthinking. It becomes more neurotic than effective after a point. I'm often unaware that I'm even doing it; almost like I'm addicted to the process of analyzing, deconstructing, reconsidering, starting again. It feels somehow safer than taking the risk of making a (likely correctable) mistake! I agree that underthinking, or I suppose an absence of thinking, should be more critically considered and addressed when it occurs. It's a much different beast though. I believe they occur for perhaps entirely different reasons.

Yoric 5y ago

> I'm so astonished that we are so careful not to overthink, to the point we accept "you're overthinking it" as a valid excuse to disregard rare risks. Very good point. > But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people overthink. I believe that it's largely a cultural thing. For instance, in French companies, US Americans definitely have the reputation of underthinking things (which US employees feel is "being productive"). Reciprocally, in US companies, the French have a reputation for overthinking them (which French employees feel is "assessing risks"). One more reason for which balancing cultures (and backgrounds, etc) is actually really important for the future of a company: we all have different blind spots.

kodah 5y ago
> we all have different blind spots. I'm not going to dabble in your cultural representations because I think they're a bit dangerous. I will say that maintaining the idea that we have blind spots is good, overaddressing this is usually called "hand wringing" and is equally prohibitive. To me, it's about having a mix of the two. Think about things critically, but accept that you are not in total control of the world and that any good solution takes iteration and learning.
908B64B197 5y ago
In America, if there's no law against it you can do it. In France, if there's no law allowing it, you can't do it.
- niyaven 5y ago
  Would you care to give a few examples? Where something was forbidden _without any law_ and then later allowed _with a law_?
  - otagekki 5y ago
    Well there are so many rules and official norms (approx. 400,000) and exceptions about pretty much anything in France that this is pretty accurate... Just look up the rules of the road regarding phone calls while driving for examples and see how it has evolved over time: specifically holding the phone was forbidden but using headphones were explicitly allowed until the latter also got banned by another law a few years back. Now to have calls we must put our phones on speakers (but not too loud) and use both hands for driving, effectively forbidding us to give any calls while driving all that without explicitly saying so. It's hardly enforceable, but wait until you encounter a zealous police agent that's been tasked to give a certain amount of tickets

civilized 5y ago

It's not that thinking more is bad, it's just not always the best thing to be doing. You could also make a decision tentatively and revisit when more information is available. The costs of this could be much less than you fear or assume.

tshaddox 5y ago

> I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". I mean, probably not with those exact words, but isn't that essentially the feedback you would get for almost any mistake you make at work that was foreseeable but not foreseen? Or even things like a code review, where pretty much all comments are of the form "you might want to consider how this effects OtherSystemX," which is a more helpful way of saying "you might be failing to think about something you ought to think about."

xyzelement 5y ago
That's exactly right. Under-thinking is often more obvious in terms of consequences so you talk about those.

Dudeman112 5y ago

>I overthink everything all the time and there are still many things I miss and do wrong Maybe you are just thinking? It only becomes overthinking when you have been at it for "too long". As in, it is not reasonable to guess that thinking more about it will be of value. Of course, knowing when that is the case is hard. IMO we should spend more time figuring out when it is overthinking than warning people about overthinking.

gnulinux 5y ago
I mean I have a clinical problem with overthinking (I am diagnosed with OCD) and I'm not disputing at all there are cases where overthinking is irrational and unproductive. I'm just pointing out that just like there are risks of overthinking, there are also risks of underthinking. And I usually see advises about how to prevent overthinking, and not underthinking. If I were to make a perfectly rational choice, I'd risk overthinking more than the opposite. So, although balance is ideal, if a balance is not possible (you don't have enough data to make a perfect decision) then I think, rationally speaking, you want to err slightly on the side of overthinking.

cuddlybacon 5y ago

> But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people overthink. We do this all the time. We just don't use the word "underthink". "You didn't think this through." "It sounds like you haven't gotten to the details yet." "Are you sure that's how it works?" "You need to start thinking things through." "You have a brain. Use it." "Pull your head out your ass." I think all of those phrases are suggesting the same thing underthink would.

xyzelement 5y ago
I think that's exactly right. If you run into traffic and get hit by a car, the conversation is about that, not "under thinking" because the impact is painful and obvious. However, it's more subtle for someone to notice that it takes you 30 minutes to cross the street because you're way too cautious, and the impact of that ("you could be doing a lot more with your life than standing here") is less obvious.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
TapWaterBandit 5y ago
To add to this: - Look before you leap. - Measure twice, cut once. - Stay silent and have people think you're a fool, open your mouth and confirm it. I'm sure there are many more common idioms pointing towards the idea of "think before you act".
- jyriand 5y ago
  Where I'm from we have similar sayings: - Don't dive head first into water. - Measure nine times, cut once. And a random saying I just remembered: "Autumn has the eyes of a summer and the teeth of a wolf." Edit:formatting
  - 5y ago

trhway 5y ago

the issue is that those meta-tools - fallacies, razors, poe/godwin/etc. laws, "otherthinking", etc. - are primarily intended for people to be able to improve the quality and manage the deficiencies of their own thinking, and instead the people weaponize it to use against other people's thinking.

ksec 5y ago

I cant even count how my "overthinking" and analytic conclusion has 90%+ hit rate but all my friends and colleagues told me I am overthinking it. When 99% of the world are under thinking, not thinking it through or worst and most likely the case, not thinking at all, then of course the 1% are overthinking. There are downside to overthink on small things, procrastination.

deltasixeight 5y ago

Relax the amount of overthinking people do is negligible compared to the amount of under thinking. Overthinking is not a problem, seriously. This guy in the article only thinks it's a problem because people are acutely aware of overthinking. They are completely unaware of under thinking. There are simply too many topics in the world to think about so in order to make sense of the world at a macro level you under think almost everything. I mean the guy is a software engineer OF COURSE he overthinks software related stuff. Guaranteed he's under thinking most of everything else.

watwut 5y ago

> I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". "We need to think about it more" definitely exists. "We need to turn it into proper plan first" exists too.

uCantCauseUCant 5y ago

Overthinking stuff while the requirements are not stable get into the details is what people want to communicate. Lots of Detail gets worked out, while the project is not even down this path.

gentleman11 5y ago

If you accuse somebody of overthinking, it’s almost a compliment in that they are too intelligent and might get them to reconsider. If you accuse them of being thoughtless, it’s like saying they are unintelligent, and you made an enemy who will resist changing their mind