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The best way to understanding something is by creating it.

• bbgm 18y ago
  Not necessarily true. To really get a fundamental understanding of a phenomenon, you do not have the time to build it and often you don't have the inclination. Nothing wrong with that. It's up to others to take that research, distill it and build solutions.
• mechanical_fish 18y ago
  The world needs both creators and analysts. Both kinds of people suffer from a problem of limited perspective: The analyst spends so much time above the problem that she may miss the aspects that are only visible from the inside... but the creator is stuck inside and doesn't really have the chance to look at her creation dispassionately from a distance. Also, there's no guarantee that the designer of a thing has any understanding of it at all. That's pretty much the essence of the theory of evolution. I wouldn't argue that the design of social networks is a totally mindless process of variation followed by selection, but it certainly does involve a lot of trial and error. I'm not sure that the designers of, say, Craigslist have much better understanding of why it works than anyone else does. They just happen to have made some initial choices that worked, and when they made changes they used feedback to guide them toward what their users liked. That's a rational process, but it doesn't necessarily reflect understanding.
  • volida 18y ago
    Trial and error involve a heavy amount of analysis. And as far as I know this is what happens in successful startups. So, I can't see how any creator doesn't have the analytic-side in him/her.