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Inasmuch as this post is about encouraging people to follow Wheaton's law and give a little more benefit-of-the-doubt to those actually in the trenches, I concu
by roc 14y ago
Inasmuch as this post is about encouraging people to follow Wheaton's law and give a little more benefit-of-the-doubt to those actually in the trenches, I concur.
But I read it as dipping toward "defer to consensus" and I'm not sure that's necessarily desirable.
Haven't we seen that pressing forward with your own pet theory, in relative ignorance to the size of the challenge being undertaken, is a key driver of innovation?
So, yes to improving tone, presentation and not immediately assuming everyone else is an idiot. But, no to actually deferring to their research, their solutions, or even their statement of the problem.
- harshreality 14y agoFurthermore, in the soft sciences (including politics and economics), much of the status quo is built on assumptions that, while they have a basis in historically observed human behavior, are still not "true" in the hard-science sense, and might become false if aggregate human behavior changes even a little.
- zmjones 14y agoAlmost all of the empirical work done by political scientists and economists is on aggregate human behavior. Yes, the predictive power of the social sciences is often very weak, but social systems are incredibly complex, and in many ways vastly more difficult to understand than physical systems.
- ketralnis 14y ago> Haven't we seen that pressing forward with your own pet theory, in relative ignorance to the size of the challenge being undertaken, is a key driver of innovation? But we're not talking about innovation. We're talking about people saying "I could do better" and then doing nothing.
- roc 14y agoI'm working from the assumption that the more people talk about something, and the more we view that talk as acceptable, the more likely people are to follow through on that talk and do those things. And vice-versa. (The more we shut down communication the more we shut down action.) I don't believe it can be absolutely effective. And I don't have any data to support the notion. But in looking at various social strategies aimed at encouraging/discouraging various behaviors, it certainly seems to be accepted wisdom. And, anecdotally at least, it seems to effect real behavior among people I've known.
- jeltz 14y agoIf people are not allowed to talk how could any of them ever innovate?
- tedunangst 14y agoBy doing. Instead of talking about how you'd build a reliable cloud service, you can innovate by actually building it. Feel free to tell people how easy it was after you've done it.