8 ms·

> If you can’t explain why you’re doing something, and you’re just doing what you’ve been seeing others do, maybe rethink it and educate yourself on the topic.

• BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  First, you can't learn anything, you don't have the time, the energy, nor the talent. Second, it's inefficient. You should leverage humanity experience. Third, you can learn a lot faster if you start by repeating something without understanding it. Even maths. So yes, understanding is useful, but doing without understanding is not bad. It's just a tool.
  • mbrodersen 5y ago
    Blindly doing anything without first having tried to understand what the pros/cons are and in which contexts the advise applies and where it doesn’t is crazy.
• mint2 5y ago
  It’s not a 1-1 analogy but reminds me of English sailors preventing scurvy by using lemons only to later start getting scurvy again because they used limes and copper pots. But for a more 1-1 example: A lot of food is cooked by habit, I’m not sure how many people actually know uncooked beans or potatoes will make you sick but they all do “y” and cook them. Skipping “y” in some cases will make you sick or poisoned.
• picsao 5y ago
  Vaccacinate controlled after years of protective strategy to reproduce the memory of reason for strategy.
• philwelch 5y ago
  This basic idea is called Chesterton's Fence: > There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” Even that isn't a perfect solution. Cultural evolution is smarter than you are; a cultural practice may provide value that even its own practitioners aren't consciously aware of. Joseph Henrich's The Secret of Our Success discusses the traditional processing of manioc, a cyanogenic tuber in South America: > In the Americas, where manioc was first domesticated, societies who have relied on bitter varieties for thousands of years show no evidence of chronic cyanide poisoning. In the Colombian Amazon, for example, indigenous Tukanoans use a multistep, multiday processing technique that involves scraping, grating, and finally washing the roots in order to separate the fiber, starch, and liquid. Once separated, the liquid is boiled into a beverage, but the fiber and starch must then sit for two more days, when they can then be baked and eaten. Figure 7.1 shows the percentage of cyanogenic content in the liquid, fiber, and starch remaining through each major step in this processing. > Such processing techniques are crucial for living in many parts of Amazonia, where other crops are difficult to cultivate and often unproductive. However, despite their utility, one person would have a difficult time figuring out the detoxification technique. Consider the situation from the point of view of the children and adolescents who are learning the techniques. They would have rarely, if ever, seen anyone get cyanide poisoning, because the techniques work. And even if the processing was ineffective, such that cases of goiter (swollen necks) or neurological problems were common, it would still be hard to recognize the link between these chronic health issues and eating manioc. Most people would have eaten manioc for years with no apparent effects. Low cyanogenic varieties are typically boiled, but boiling alone is insufficient to prevent the chronic conditions for bitter varieties. Boiling does, however, remove or reduce the bitter taste and prevent the acute symptoms (e.g., diarrhea, stomach troubles, and vomiting). > So, if one did the common-sense thing and just boiled the high-cyanogenic manioc, everything would seem fine. Since the multistep task of processing manioc is long, arduous, and boring, sticking with it is certainly non-intuitive. Tukanoan women spend about a quarter of their day detoxifying manioc, so this is a costly technique in the short term. Now consider what might result if a self-reliant Tukanoan mother decided to drop any seemingly unnecessary steps from the processing of her bitter manioc. She might critically examine the procedure handed down to her from earlier generations and conclude that the goal of the procedure is to remove the bitter taste. She might then experiment with alternative procedures by dropping some of the more labor-intensive or time-consuming steps. She’d find that with a shorter and much less labor-intensive process, she could remove the bitter taste. Adopting this easier protocol, she would have more time for other activities, like caring for her children. Of course, years or decades later her family would begin to develop the symptoms of chronic cyanide poisoning. > Thus, the unwillingness of this mother to take on faith the practices handed down to her from earlier generations would result in sickness and early death for members of her family. Individual learning does not pay here, and intuitions are misleading. The problem is that the steps in this procedure are causally opaque—an individual cannot readily infer their functions, interrelationships, or importance. The causal opacity of many cultural adaptations had a big impact on our psychology. > Wait. Maybe I’m wrong about manioc processing. Perhaps it’s actually rather easy to individually figure out the detoxification steps for manioc? Fortunately, history has provided a test case. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese transported manioc from South America to West Africa for the first time. They did not, however, transport the age-old indigenous processing protocols or the underlying commitment to using those techniques. Because it is easy to plant and provides high yields in infertile or drought-prone areas, manioc spread rapidly across Africa and became a staple food for many populations. The processing techniques, however, were not readily or consistently regenerated. Even after hundreds of years, chronic cyanide poisoning remains a serious health problem in Africa. Detailed studies of local preparation techniques show that high levels of cyanide often remain and that many individuals carry low levels of cyanide in their blood or urine, which haven’t yet manifested in symptoms. In some places, there’s no processing at all, or sometimes the processing actually increases the cyanogenic content. On the positive side, some African groups have in fact culturally evolved effective processing techniques, but these techniques are spreading only slowly. Scott Alexander comments (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...): > A reasonable person would have asked why everyone was wasting so much time preparing manioc. When told “Because that’s how we’ve always done it”, they would have been unsatisfied with that answer. They would have done some experiments, and found that a simpler process of boiling it worked just as well. They would have saved lots of time, maybe converted all their friends to the new and easier method. Twenty years later, they would have gotten sick and died, in a way so causally distant from their decision to change manioc processing methods that nobody would ever have been able to link the two together.
• hinkley 5y ago
  > If you can’t explain why you’re doing something It's not that I can't explain it, it's that it does me no good to do so an in some cases makes things worse. Where human factors are concerned, software developers in the large (which noteworthy exceptions), are so deeply in denial about what is easy and what is difficult that it's downright toxic. Especially when considered as a whole. Yes, this task is not particularly onerous by itself, but it's one of twenty tasks we have to juggle all the time, and that's simply ridiculous. I have reasons for most of the things I do. I could write chapters for (someone else's) books about them. But I'm not going to explain them to people because they'll just try to line-item veto everything to try to protect their ego, turf, or both. Complementary practices (those with a multiplier effect) typically have very little payoff when you eliminate half of them. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy when you block enough of them that the overall improvement is in the low double digits, instead of say 50% spread across six behaviors.
• Vinnl 5y ago
  My preferred solution, in a situation where you've forgotten (or never learned/experienced) X, to keep doing Y until someone on your team perceives problems with it, at which point you can acknowledge that you're not familiar with the reasons for Y and hence can invest some time finding out what they were why prototyping not doing Y.
• kreeben 5y ago
  In my mind, here's a Good Tradition (TM): before crossing a street, look to your left then your right then your left again. The only reason I as a small child learned this was because in a world where cars drive on the right side it makes perfect sense. But there are so many traditions that are senseless: shaking hands, wrapping food in plastic, celebrating Christmas, abiding to corporate hierarchies and work for a dictatorship while living in a democracy, documenting code, bullying the weak, as was tradition when I went to school, having stand-ups when you're not doing SCRUM and so on and so forth. Traditions might not necessarily be good things. Trail and error has been my only strategy to find out which are good and which are bad. I wish I could stand on the shoulders of giants because then I would probably be much wiser that I am today, because of the head start it would give me.
  • baud147258 5y ago
    it'd depend on the various team, but even if the team doesn't follow scrum, I feel like having stand-ups is useful, to share information across the team.
    • kreeben 5y ago
      I do to and this is partly my point. If I had taken for granted that traditions are good then I wouldn't have questioned waterfall project stand-ups, a concept that is essentially good and I would have been much wiser for it. For me, the non-SCRUM stand-up is still in the "trial" phase. My mind still resists the very thought of it.
      • linker3000 5y ago
        "I wouldn't have questioned waterfall project stand-ups" Back in 1956, Teams, Slack etc. were still pre-alpha and it was possibly difficult or technically impossible to have a group phone call, so a stand-up for larger teams spread round a building might have been the only way to quickly share info + it got the folks out of the noisy computer rooms (plus ça change there!)
    • linker3000 5y ago
• l0b0 5y ago
  That top quote is enough to turn me off reading this article, and your comment perfectly explains why. Ironically, telling everybody else to think about what they're doing is something a lot of people have been doing since forever, seemingly without realising that thinking about everything you do is the ultimate analysis paralysis. I'm going to bloody well learn the best practices, thank you very much, practice them until I notice the flaws and then figure out whether the practice was anywhere from plain bad to needing a few exceptions for corner cases.
  • mbrodersen 5y ago
    If you can’t explain why a so called “Best Practice” is useful in a specific context, and what the pros/cons are, then you should honestly just keep quiet and wait until you have more experience.
  • zpeti 5y ago
    This is why Bruce Lee I think is so right with: - Learn the rules - Master the rules - Break the rules You can't go in straight away into life, or anything, and break the rules. Because you know fuck all about why those rules are in place, and what purpose they serve. The only people who really should be breaking rules are those that have mastered them and understand everything about them. The most obvious place to illustrate this is art generally. You can't as an 18 year old paint a canvas red and say its art, people will laugh at you. But once you've built a reputation of being a master, like Mark rothko, you paint a canvas basically red which doesn’t need much skill. But you might be able to get away with breaking all the rules.
    • PopGreene 5y ago
      The Bruce Lee quotation is like Chesterton's Fence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
      • zpeti 5y ago
        It's also the basis of Burkean conservatism IMO, but I didn't want to bring politics into it :)
• dm3 5y ago
  Could you give some examples of traditions that an average American follows which are beneficial and would be hard to explain? I honestly couldn't come up with anything...
  • mint2 5y ago
    Cooking beans. Cooking potatoes. People may be able to explain that they taste better that way, but I doubt everyone would say they are cooked so they don’t make you very sick Another habit or practice is buying single use water bottles wherever they go or drinks and food on road trips as if it’s not super easy to bring food or water. Yes, in some cases buying is more efficient but definitely not all cases and yet some people never bring food/water.
  • humanrebar 5y ago
    Free speech. Suburban lifestyles. Monogamy. Organic lifestyles. Public schooling. Legal gun ownership. Funerals. Burials. Traditional weddings. Car culture.
    • Minor49er 5y ago
      I don't think any of those are particularly hard to explain
    • mbrodersen 5y ago
      Not hard to explain. Hard to agree on.
  • AussieWog93 5y ago
    >I honestly couldn't come up with anything... How about the entire idea of economic growth? It made perfect sense to strive for increases in GDP during the 19th and 20th centuries, where economic gains directly correlated with improvements in material wealth and a better quality of life. Now, I don't think anyone really understands why we're still doing it.
    • hnfong 5y ago
• nickspicer1993 5y ago
  I don't think this is really true if we apply an example: - We need a way to travel faster and I've made a car to do that - cars spread in adoption - travel is much easier - people now use cars without knowing why I can't think of many solutions where we don't also have the original problem it solves? The real problem is people do not have enough knowledge in a domain to infer whether a new proposed solution is better or not. So to take the example further: - Cars should no longer be used because they are causing climate change - People fight against it because they do not have the knowledge to infer the right decision - Person takes a decade or longer proving out why they are right - new normal is adopted