
Prescriptions Are a Dead End - gbasin
https://garybasin.com/prescriptions-are-a-dead-end/
======
40four
C’mon man! A blog post just to link to a twitter thread? Should be the other
way around ;p

For those like me, averse to twitter threads, a more readable form.

[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1274859897826488322.html?...](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1274859897826488322.html?refreshed=yes)

I’ll get over it. I am interested in the concepts, it’s something I’d like to
think more about.

When/ what areas do prescriptions (or recipes, programs, protocols, and what
have you) prove to be useful and successful, and where do they break down?

~~~
gbasin
Sorry, it wasn't my intention. Typically I think out loud on Twitter, and then
try to summarize it succinctly in a blog post

~~~
40four
Just messing around, couldn’t help myself.

I’ve ranted in the past about this, and had folks tell me they _prefer_ a
Twitter thread. So there’s that, and once I learned about thread reader, my
life was changed!

I’ll check the podcast out!

~~~
gbasin
Indeed. Thanks for posting the link!

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jimkleiber
I love this and yet it brings up a conundrum for me: explorative learning
seems to be more effective, and yet people seem to want prescriptive learning.

I see a lot of people, myself included, clicking on the "how to" links, even
though they almost never help me. I've seen this struggle with self-help books
even more so.

Any suggestions on how to make explorative learning more sexy in marketing? Oh
no, I just asked for a prescription! Perhaps I should just explore and figure
out what works for me lol.

Again, I find when I explore and play with different solutions, I learn MUCH
faster and more appropriately.

Anyway, grateful to have read this tonight to remind myself to stop reading so
much stuff. Reminds me of reading a book by David Deida, I think The Way of
the Superior Man, and in one chapter he said that we have all the answers we
need within ourselves and then I paused and asked myself, "So why am I reading
this book again?"

Thank you for this spark tonight :-)

~~~
baddox
Consider that “here’s how to do explorative learning” is also prescriptive. I
tend to think of exploration as just exploring everyone else’s prescriptions,
testing them, and seeing what appeals to me and whatever my goals may be. In
that sense, I don’t think prescriptions are bad. I still think explorative
learning is that way to go, but you need to have something to explore.

~~~
jimkleiber
haha well said :-)

------
dexwiz
I think we spend too much time online. I have read this same idea over and
over again in the last few weeks. The idea that we study too much and do too
little. The idea that reading a walkthrough is easier than doing the thing,
but it feels about as good.

With the internet there are a billions of How To articles, and lessons, and
lectures, and advice articles. It is easier to read about how to do something
now than ever before. Often its the same entry level info repackaged over and
over. While the internet symbolizes limitless knowledge, it has started to
replace real knowledge gained through practice.

------
awinter-py
oh I thought this was going to say doctors are bad at prescribing drugs and so
we should just 'tantum quantum' it

but author is actually saying that copying napoleon will not make you king of
france

a claim that has not been proven

~~~
devindotcom
It will not make you king of france -

It will make you l'empereur

~~~
awinter-py
l'etat c'est mois

------
gumby
I see it as a form of cargo culting and yes, see it all the time. It’s sadly a
fundamental part of the educational systems, everywhere. For a current
example: in school, science “experiments” are performed (make this acid, stick
litmus paper into it, write down pH) for which there is a right and wrong
answer. So people grow up thinking that science is about certainty when it’s
the other way around. As a result they are confused by the ambiguity and
unknowns around, say, COVID-19. They have an introduction to the _process_ but
not the basic point.

It’s like asking a photographer what kind of camera they use. Learning the
syntax doesn’t mean you have learned a language.

~~~
trowawee
I'm interested when I see this critique, because I definitely agree with you,
but I also see a strong bias against new pedagogical approaches like Common
Core math that focus more on teaching concepts like numerical composability
and less on memorization and recitation. Personally, as someone whose mental
map of how math works lines up much more with the CC standards, I wish I had
been taught that way; the memorization & recitation approach fell apart for me
when I reached higher level math classes.

~~~
gumby
Same problem happened when it was attempted in the 1960s under the name “new
math”. And that’s what I mean when I say it’s a fundamental part of the
educational system.

At the primary school level in particular, teachers aren’t necessarily (in
fact are unlikely to be) that conversant with mathematics anyway; it’s just
another subject to be taught. So as long as the results are correct, all is
well.

------
prawn
_" We start focusing on the How To, and too easily lose sight of the actual
end goal. The prescription ⏤ the training regimen ⏤ becomes the object of our
desire. To execute it perfectly. And just like that, we become robot instead
of artist."_

A counterpoint to that is the idea of "trusting the process". Work out the
path to the goal and then focus on the path without distraction. Don't be
mislead by hunches that you incorrectly think will get you there, or bad
habits come naturally. There'd be issues though if the goal moves or if a
significant part of it all was about enjoyment.

------
kfk
I am a big fun of learning best practices but also of iterative “projects”.
You know why most business projects fail? Because they are too big and to
reduce risks the tendency is to follow _only_ best practices. This doesn’t
work because each project is different with its own set of challenges and
unknowns. Prescriptions are a good guidance but only sticking to prescriptions
is path to failure. These days I rather iterate to a solution the same way
startups iterate to a product. In fact I started to call our team’s project
managers product managers instead.

~~~
AstralStorm
That's the dangerous way of thinking. As far as I'm concerned and seen
projects fail because their either build the wrong thing, or don't deliver (on
time). The practices can slow you down, but they can also speed you up.

Sometimes the failure to deliver is a managerial failure or the problem is too
complex for the team tasked with it to deal on deadline. It's rarely because
of "we keep code clean and production running" or "instrument everything".

What I've seen instead much more often is that good practice is replaced with
common practice or deviation (problem) is normalized.

The latter leads to some rather interesting failures - bugs, and failing to
deliver. Sometimes explosions if you're dealing with rockets.

I've also seen bad workflows cause serious slowdowns and issues, while not
being replaced because things are "done" on paper. I find this on par with
lying to your boss, which it is. Also in case of bigger multiple teams,
tardiness to implement improvements because someone might have to change
something about their setup, instead of engaging them with a discussion,
leaving it for a flag day. (When everything invariably goes wrong.)

------
qzw
AKA a recipe. You can follow a Michelin starred chef's recipe all you want,
but you're not getting your own star that way. You actually have to learn to
cook. But recipes can still be useful anyway.

~~~
Spivak
But the statement is extremely context dependent and depends on if the reward
requires novelty.

Novelty: If the person you're copying isn't doing something novel (like
playing Bach on piano) then in all likelihood you will get the same reward
did. If you copy someone who built a CRUD app for their company and do the
same for yours you'll probably get the same reward.

Context: If you make a delicious meal for yourself, you and your SO, your
coworkers, your friends, or the public the rewards are all different and
context can sometimes be complicated so it's really hard to know if captured
it.

------
thaumaturgy
Yeah, we see a lot of these here. At one time, I thought they must be
valuable, because successful people were telling everyone else, for free, what
it was that made them successful. If we just followed their advice, we too
could be successful.

I now see it differently, and though I'm quite certain I was wrong before, I'm
less certain that I'm right now. But here are my two thoughts on this anyway:

First, no successful person, that I can recall, has ever credited their
success entirely to following some other successful person's habits. No great
inventor has said, "yeah, I just looked up Ben Franklin's habits, and followed
them exactly, and here I am." People have credited other people for
inspiration, for guidance, for mentorship, but if there's any evidence
whatsoever that a person's success is entirely due to their habits -- that is
to say, that the same success can be replicated by anyone who follows exactly
the same habits -- I haven't seen it. Likewise, no successful person has ever
turned out to be a clone of a previously successful person. Each one has made
their own name, developing their own habits according to their own innate
strengths and weaknesses. At YC, Sam Altman did not become Paul Graham; sama
continued to become the most sama he could be, while pg was the most pg he
could be.

Second, I've reluctantly decided to believe -- careful choice of words there
-- that these sorts of "prescriptions" are not only not helpful, they are
unhealthy. The natural conclusion for a shlub like me, having read so many of
these, is, "if that's all it took for that person to be successful, then why
am I not?" Am I lazy? Perhaps. Stupid? Too arrogant? Not arrogant enough? Am I
not sacrificing enough of the other things I love? Am I sacrificing the wrong
things? Too many things? Have I read the wrong books? Do I have the wrong
priorities? Am I broken?

A lot of people are fond of saying that certain fields of study aren't science
because they're not testable or repeatable enough. I submit that the nature of
success has _never_ been tested in the scientific sense. It's all, mostly,
cargo-cult flim-flam. There is no way to know whether one successful
individual could be born into entirely different circumstances and still come
out as successful; it's unknown to what extent biology, early childhood,
developmental psychology, and dumb circumstantial luck each factor in to the
result. There is no equation for it, no universal constants.

25 _million_ copies of _The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People_ have been
sold. 25 million! Has it made 25 million successful people? 10 million? A
hundred-thousand?

Maybe I could have made different decisions and found some great success years
ago. Maybe it is yet to come. (See? I've still kept my youthful naivete.) Or,
perhaps, my equation long ago determined that I could only be a decent uncle,
or mentor for some better programmer, or maybe just... not a shitty person.
That one's still a work in progress.

So there it is. I've come to see those essays "On How I Became So Successful"
as approximately indistinguishable from heavily-altered Instagram photos of
pretty people on beaches.

------
baryphonic
I'm sorry, but I don't think this is true at all. Like not even remotely. The
closest thing I could say is that prescriptions are almost never sufficient to
achieve real innovation, but that's a far cry from "dead end." It's like
saying that flu vaccines are a "dead end" because they don't cure AIDS. Sure,
they may not be not sufficient, but no one would want to get the flu without
an immune system.

We should find it shocking how many "new" things aren't really that new, but
just looking at some existing problem slightly askew and seeing a cleaner
arrangement. Pure accident is likely an even bigger cause of the new. This is
true of the invention of calculus to the discovery of penicillin. (Does anyone
seriously find it mysterious that Leibniz and Newton independently invented
calculus at roughly the same time?)

"Prescriptions" themselves often take the form of a procedure or algorithm
that is used to improve some instrumental or operational aspect of achieving
the new. If I follow the Pomodoro technique, for instance, that's not new, but
it might help me actually stay a bit more focused and even creative. Maybe it
won't. It's just a prescription, it's not going to change my life by itself,
but it might move me in the right direction.

Finally, prescriptions can often help us do "dimensionality reduction" on the
present and help filter out a lot of the extra _signal_ (not just the noise)
from the present, which is simply too vivid for a human to process. Our brains
do this normally with most sensory-level information, but we can use
prescriptions as sort of a higher-order, more conscious variant of this. Since
most genuinely new things actually involve tearing down a complex thing and
rearranging it just a bit better, filtering out everything except for what is
most likely to help you solve a problem (and thus create something new) can
make you much more productive and see the problem more clearly.

I'd also observe that most great artists find some set of constraints under
which to work. Picasso was excellent at producing classical-style art (most
great artists actually are, contrary to popular "my-five-year-old-paints-
better" bullshit), but constrained himself to imagining the objects of his
paintings as cubes. Monet, Manet and Van Gogh constrained themselves to seeing
a very short (possibly infinitesimal) glimpse. I have had Hollywood
screenwriters say to me that they can get nothing done if they don't constrain
themselves in some way, even if it's something like "I'm writing sci-fi
today."

TL;DR: Prescriptions are all they're cracked up to be, and nothing more;
(almost) never sufficient but often necessary.

