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Nirvana fallacy
- mock-possum 3y agoOops, I’ve been calling this the ‘utopia fallacy’ for who knows how long.
- mtraven 3y agoThat's a much better name actually.
- readthenotes1 3y agoRight? I would say "utopia fallacy" is the perfect label for this meaning over "nirvana fallacy" because it can never be misconstrued as something associated with the musical band Nirvana.
- tangent-man 3y agoAs a Buddhist I agree. Heh.
- eikenberry 3y agoThe band has more in common with the usage here than the Buddhist idea.
- FiatLuxDave 3y agoTodd Rundgren feels left out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(band) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(band)
- Brendinooo 3y agoSomething I say often is "utopia means 'no place'" or "no such place as utopia" - people too often focus on trying to build a perfect world/thing/product/whatever rather than focusing on how to exist in an imperfect world.
- compiler-guy 3y agoI've always called it that too. I suspect it is a common alternative name.
- eikenberry 3y agoThat at least is a name that somewhat represents the idea. Nirvana was a poor choice and probably stems from a misunderstanding of the idea by the economist.
- thewataccount 3y agoMy favorite is still the "Fallacy fallacy" aka "Argument from fallacy". From my understanding it's very difficult to make a good faith debate without one of the bajillion fallacy's being applicable somewhere. Is there a name for the difficulty of making a debate without any single fallacy?
- gpderetta 3y agoFallacy Fallacy Fallacy?
- xg15 3y agoI see the same problem with the various lists of cognitive biases, rethoric devices, etc. I think the trick is to see them as patterns which should allow you to more easily construct a counter argument - instead of pretending that merely pointing out the pattern itself would already be enough to disqualify the argument. e.g., in the examples from the "perfect solution" section, they didn't just shut down the discussion with "well, that's a Perfect Solution Fallacy, so your argument is invalid!", they actually explained in each case, why a non-perfect solution is still desirable. You could compare it with chess: An opponent is absolutely allowed to leave a piece vulnerable and you don't get an automatic win by just pointing out a bad position - you only get an advantage if you actually take the piece.
- Natsu 3y agoThis is very much the better way to do things, because it leaves both sides better informed instead of playing out like someone shouting "you triggered my trap card!" in a game.
- avgcorrection 3y agoMost “fallacies” are informal and rhetorical and not direct logical fallacies. Almost no one will say that X is not perfect, therefore it can be discarded. But plenty will focus their argumentation on how X is not perfect and leave the implication on the table that X is not worth bothering with.
- n4r9 3y agoReminds me of the classic parental rebuttal "life's not fair". True enough, but it's still worth trying to be fair in the here and now.
- skulk 3y agoThat's a great example of the is-ought fallacy. "Life's not fair" is, but perhaps not ought to be.
- lr4444lr 3y agoThat's usually a shorthand for a child's limited understanding of complex factors when parents are too tired or unable to explain things better - not an actual moral claim.
- n4r9 3y agoIn many cases, yes. And it's understandable, at least for pre teens. But it's good to be aware of the knock-on effects: the child doesn't feel respected, and learns that it's acceptable to forgo reasonable justification in the face of frustration.
- MontyCarloHall 3y agoThis is a corollary of the fallacy of relative privation, aka the “kids are starving in Africa so you have no right to complain about anything less severe” fallacy. Both fallaciously dismiss arguments by comparing them to unrealistic extremes.
- mistermann 3y agoIf the "so you have no right to complain" part actually happened. Many people (including smart ones) throw around popular memes with little regard for whether they are using them legitimately. This meme has excellent potential for that as the definition is subjective, but not explicitly disclosed as such creating a dependence on the reader to realize this. Another excellent point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36076175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36076175
- Loquebantur 3y agoFunny you would respond with a fallacious comparison. Relative privation is not fallacious because comparison was useless. Kids do starve (realistic) and there is even worse in the world (so not an extreme either). But you need to choose by some metric where to use your abilities, if you don't want to end up being an egotistic hedonist. You should help to right wrongs in ways amenable to your abilities, not more, not less. Honesty is key obviously, both ways.
- MontyCarloHall 3y agoRelative privation is fallacious because the logical existence of a bad problem isn’t negated by the existence of a worse problem. Nobody is claiming that the worse problem is fallacious, but rather that it doesn’t logically invalidate the bad problem. For example, the statement “a lot of people died on 9/11” is not logically negated by the statement “but a lot more people died during WW2”; the fact that the latter statement is true has no bearing on the validity of the former statement. Or to bring it back to Africa, the statement “there is food insecurity in America” is not negated by the statement “but there are famines in Africa.”
- klodolph 3y agoI see this a lot when people are looking for some library / framework / programming language / game engine. You keep adding requirements and assume that you can spend some additional time evaluating alternatives to make up for the longer list of requirements you have. Reality is, there are often only a few serious alternatives in the first place. Adding more and more requirements to your search is, in some way, a stubborn refusal to prioritize among those requirements. Prioritization doesn’t just mean affirming that some of your priorities are important, it means acknowledging that some of your priorities are unimportant and can be discarded. Related is the assumption that any custom-built library you write is going to beat an existing, well-known library that doesn’t exactly match your needs. It’s easy to come up with a list of problems with existing libraries, but your theoretical custom-built library can be perfect, because you’re not imagining that it has any serious bugs or design flaws. You end up building your own solution and, in the process, rediscover why the existing library was built the way it is.
- remkop22 3y agoThis hits home. Manytime have I come to appreciate a library or technology only after delusionally attempting to create a 'better' version. Mid attempt I actually start to understand the problem space, at which point I humbly and thankfully start depending on said library or technology.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoWhat kind of problem spaces need so much trial and error to understand?
- mcphage 3y agohttps://xkcd.com/592/ https://xkcd.com/592/
- MichaelZuo 3y agoWhat does this comic have to do with the topic?
- davidw 3y agoOh. That Nirvana... Whatever.
- w10-1 3y agoBy contrast, the transaction cost economics models make-or-buy decisions as rational choice between real, available alternatives, imposing the reality principle at choice time. In my experience of collective decision-making, it's often the case that more aggressive, less-proven technologies are rejected as unproven or unrealistic, largely because no one wants the reputation in the group of having championed a mistake. By contrast, people deciding alone often will take the more optimistic choice. In technology, that can mean that person/engineer who's now on the hook finds ways to make the new technology work (and avoid its flaws). That translates to high-achieving organizations giving individuals the power to decide, but also holding them responsible for the consequences. Whether the "move fast, break things" permission to fail in service of learning new technologies and the problem domain actually works depends on some real capture of knowledge. Probably the job cuts in tech now (particularly at Twitter) are driven by realizing this "real capture" ain't happening. So it's not enough to avoid the Nirvana fallacy. You also have to get past decision paralysis to learn, but show the lessons you learned are worth something to the company.
- TheAceOfHearts 3y agoMaybe related to this but with different framing, I actually think comparing the real world to the ideal can help us prioritize and take steps towards making improvements. For example: I think abortions should be legal, but in an ideal world the number of abortions would be near zero because access to social safety nets, birth control, and sex education is plentiful. The thing about reality is that it forces us to deal with engineering constraints, and we have to carefully consider and understand the tradeoffs being made.
- pachico 3y agoI like this Wikipedia article, however, I would have preferred it's contents to be transmitted directly to my brain in real time when I opened Hacker News. That would have been so much better.
- tbm57 3y agoThis article is talking about 'unrealistic' solutions - what you just said is going to be a neuralink plugin in 2030
- jjeaff 3y agoIs neuralink even claiming to be working on input to the brain? I thought it was just trying to read the human brain.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoThe advertising potential of writing directly to the brain is too big to ignore. Instead of hoping that a portion of viewers will buy the product, it's much more efficient to simply modify their desires directly. Sure, it will put a bunch of marketing folks out of a job, but such is the march of progress.
- birdyrooster 3y agoI already mostly feel like an NPC so I am sure this will get rid of that uncanny valley.
- LoganDark 3y agoI don't think it will necessary "write directly to the brain" but rather just act as an extra sense of sorts. Which would still be extremely cool—I would personally love to experiment with giving myself all sorts of new senses, or even just finding patterns of stimulation that feel particularly nice.
- throwawaylinux 3y ago
- freeopinion 3y agoWhat do you call the opposite fallacy? The one where any proposed solution is worse than the status quo because of all the things that could hypothetically go wrong? What-if-ism? Add: Example: A restaurant that throws away 10% of their supplies each day proposes to donate them instead to a soup kitchen a day before they would normally dispose of them. Then somebody asks, "What if the soup kitchen holds on to them too long and then somebody gets sick from the food we donated and we get sued?"
- cperciva 3y agoI would probably go with "status quo bias".
- minsc_and_boo 3y agoPossibly the Slippery Slope fallacy. There's also an appeal to consequences where if the outcome of something is considered undesirable, then that something must be false.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoThe restaurant example doesn't seem to be a fallacy? That is a real legal concern in US jurisdictions. I'm fairly certain there's some on-the-record case law too. Plus, a real system can be almost limitlessly decomposed, the lower bound is the black hole limit. So it doesn't seem like there could be an inverse fallacy.
- fknorangesite 3y agoI think GP is trying to get at "unintended consequences", "this was a good idea at the time but didn't scale", or "we made totally-reasonable assumptions that turned out to be incorrect" ... all of which I'm sure we've all experienced first-hand in our lives.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoI can't see how saying there were, or could be, unintended consequences becomes a fallacy. All systems more complex then two electrons can behave unpredictably. That's just a fact, that will always be true in 100% of all possible scenarios. There's of course a norm in day-to-day life to not quibble about every possible combination of 3 electrons or however many below a reasonable threshold, but that norm is based on the differing opinions of individuals in society.
- pessimizer 3y agoThis is usually just used as a sneak attack on someone's else's suggestion, a way to call it unrealistic without actually making a case that it's unrealistic. Rest assured, the people who tell you not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good do not think that what you suggested is either perfect or good, they just want you to shut up. The "fallacy" in this vein that I see is when after Bob suggests idea A to solve problem X, Mary says that idea A shouldn't be done because idea B is better for problem X, but Mary also doesn't support idea B. Mary actually supports problem X, but if she admitted that, she would lose her influence on the reaction to problem X.
- zokier 3y agoI think this is closely related to no true scotsman, both involve comparison to idealized version of something.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoaka every single one of Elon Musk's product pitches, especially the Hyperloop
- tangent-man 3y agoI think you'll find Nirvana ≠ Fallacy https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/nibbana.html https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/nibba...
- jehb 3y agoIs there a corollary fallacy for people who wait seemingly forever to reach the perfect and then give up and and call it done? The Duke Nukem Forever fallacy, maybe?
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoIn my experience, this is how clueless managers try to force their coders into doing the impossible. I just ran into this, a couple of days ago. We had a usability problem. Basically, the user could end up in a sequential-navigation “rabbithole.” It would be an unlikely scenario, but there was nothing preventing it. I proposed a solution that I have seen before, where a second “all the way back” button appears, after a prescribed number of stack pushes. This would unwind the entire stack, instead of just jumping back one. A “kludgy” solution, but one that I actually implemented and demonstrated in about 15 minutes. It was safe, obvious, and bug-free. Probably, 90% of our users would never see this second back button, and, if they did, its function is completely obvious. Instead, the team leader wanted to hack the Tab Bar, so that the selected item would enable, after the stack started, and would do the same thing as the “all the way back” button. This was actually a more elegant solution. This would have required messing with the tab bar, or replacing it with a toolbar. Since the app had been designed from the start as a tab bar app, the second option would have required a complete rewrite of the app structure, and the first option could risk strange bugs, and, almost certainly, issues with future screen configurations and operating system updates. I’ve hacked the tab bar before, and regretted it. I made every effort to give them what they wanted, but there was really no way to do it, without that rewrite. Since the app is at about the 70% complete stage, this would be a disaster. I put my foot down, and insisted on my kludgy solution, while making the toolbar implementation a “2.0” feature. I really don’t like to throw my weight around, like that. I think it damages team cohesiveness, and intimidates creative discussion, but it needed to be done.
- quickthrower2 3y agoThere needs to be a common understanding of iterative development, tradeoffs, solution design etc. It should be possible to get to pragmatic solutions without someone throwing weight. But it needs a good leader to get there.
- davidmnoll 3y agoThe way I've done it is to get "quantitative" polling from other teammates. Basically I do a poll of something like (a) confidence that the solution will fix the problem (b) estimated 80% confidence time range required. I do that for whatever options have been proposed, and then use the information to determine which option is the most promising. There's some principle that the average of many guesses is better than one, so I try to use that to make a better decision.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoThere’s a sign that many mechanics have in their shops: Fast Cheap Good Pick 2.
- themodelplumber 3y ago> Seat belts are a bad idea. People are still going to die in car crashes. These examples are _such_ straw arguments. lol. Might as well prefix them with, "so this one time a guy in the subway / buddy of mine in the bar / guy on the radio says..." because at least that'd provide context toward a bit of face-validity. And first, never reply with a logical fallacy PSA to someone who actually says this. It's a waste of time. Better to understand that logically-stunted sentence as permission to explore other, less-logic-focused ways of influencing them. So many people who talk like this are not reasoning with logic. The logic is a foil for their emotion. They are stressed out about things they can't control (seat belt laws for example), terrified of their own future (to say nothing of the world's), and therefore unsuited to this more formal debate & logic approach. Better to say--"hey. I care about you buddy. I don't care if you think it's a secret plot by the lizard people, I hope you'll wear that seatbelt and not end up looking like one of those crash test dummies when a zombie driver crosses into your lane." You expose the emotion in the room, you make a caricature of the fear, and you refer back to hard evidence in a visceral way. But really. Still a straw man. I wish the examples themselves could be better characterized: Is this in a university class setting? A university bar with Ph.D. candidates? Or a bar full of military conscripts at the end of a hard day? Or some mommy blog that you can't help but comment on, as a Ph.D.?? If you know and can acknowledge _any_ of these things you will probably be far better prepared than by knowing about logical fallacies.
- diehunde 3y agoNot really. The first one about the anti-drunk driving is pretty similar to what many pro-gun people say: "banning guns won't stop murders". And just answering that the point is reduction seems reasonable in this case.
- russdill 3y agoThe point is to make obvious non controversial examples to get the idea across.
- gitgud 3y agoPosit (fallacious): Why should I read HN comments, if I'm not going to remember every word verbatim? Rebuttal: Reading comments can still provide valuable insights, broaden your knowledge, and improve critical thinking skills and reading comprehension, regardless of remembering every word verbatim.
- osigurdson 3y agoI think the opposite argument is more common: “net improvement is not possible” fallacy (maybe there is a real name for it). The argument here is there is that improving one thing will make something else worse, therefore nothing is worth doing.
- acidburnNSA 3y agoIn the nuclear industry we call this "Rickover's paper reactor memo" https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html
- DiscourseFan 3y agoI think this is a real fallacy, but akshually a logic fallacy generally only refers to operations that can't be performed under formal logic. Which is a very useful definition for computer languages, not so much for natural language which doesn't really follow formal logic (since people make actually fairly good arguments all the time that would be "fallacious" under the terms of formal logic). I don't know if its appropriate to just apply the name fallacy to any old worldview or system of argument that one dislikes. You could call communism a "labor activism fallacy" or capitalism a "capital investment fallacy." You deride any sort of system of argumentation by saying it's fallacious. Now, to be totally fair, if we accept Godel's incompleteness theorem as true, then the Nirvana Fallacy really is a fallacy under the terms of formal logic. But I believe that there is more complexity to this than that.
- xeromal 3y agoMy initial thoughts when reading the headline was more related tot he band and how when something tragic happens to them, they become more popular than they probably would have.
- mjklin 3y agoI read a memoir once by a serviceman who heard endless complaints that things were screwed up in the service because the situation was “not real army”. He called it the “real army carrot” because it was intended to get you to stick around until you could experience this mythical “real army” situation. The last straw was when someone said “that’s because we’re at war, real army is peacetime”. Seems like the “real army” would be necessary for fighting wars.
- ttonkytonk 3y agoThe linked article "Appeal to consequences" is also interesting.
- ChrisRR 3y agoSo any manager who's started studying Agile