
The Partial Control Fallacy - nancyhua
http://pathsensitive.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-partial-control-fallacy.html
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trjordan
I mostly agree with this, but don't discount the idea of only improving by a
couple percent. Most things (like grants) are stack ranked, and if everybody
has between an 85% and 95%, a 10% improvement could put you at the top of the
list.

There's a similar argument about athletics. Sure, the people who win gold
medals and get MVP at the Super Bowl have amazing genetics, but they also
worked crazy hard to get there. _Your_ hard work isn't going to get you a gold
medal, but if _they_ didn't work for it, they wouldn't get it either.

The core message is good, though: if you don't have whole package, don't apply
the polish. But if you think you have a shot, don't think you can skate by on
what you already have.

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thaumasiotes
> Applying that to the above, and you can see that, if I worked infinitely
> hard on my essays, I could only make my apps 11% better versus not doing
> anything at all. (At least to the extent that it really does follow that
> rubric [the essay being worth ten percentage points of 100], even if I
> submit a blank essay.)

This is wildly incorrect. _Assuming you have a perfect score on every other
part of the rubric_ , the maximum improvement you can get through the essay is
11% of your non-essay score. Without that assumption, the maximum improvement
is positive infinity percent.

~~~
oneloop
So? This text is aimed at people who care about the final 10%. People who
score zero on every other part of the rubric aren't falling into the partial
control fallacy.

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scribu
This is such a useful concept! Surely someone gave it a name much earlier,
right?

Edit: The closest thing that came to mind is the idiom "penny-wise and pound-
foolish".

~~~
pesfandiar
Parkinson's law of triviality (aka bikeshedding) could be considered a subset
of this behaviour.

~~~
ddt_Osprey
Bikeshedding is when a group of people form opinions about, and squabble over
something frivolous and irrelevant, but appealing to the lowest common
denominator.

Offer a group of people the opportunity to design a nuclear powered aircraft
carrier, and no one says boo, but ask them which color is prettiest for a shed
to park their bikes in, and suddenly everybody puts in their two cents, ad-
nauseum.

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dnautics
Although they may give out a "rubric"; this is just a smokescreen. In most
places, Grad School Fellowships are basically awarded based on 1) whose
advisors are hotshots and 2) whose advisors are willing to play politics for
them. Very little else matters, unless your essay is a steaming pile.

If you strongly desire a fellowship, I recommend researching which professors'
students have gotten them in the past. Then, make sure you are on good terms
with your PI, that the PI thinks you are a hard worker (whether or not you
actually are), and write milquetoast essays that hit all the science buzzwords
and PC stuff ("I'm interested in mentoring minorities"[0] - whether or not you
actually do any of that).

[0] I actually did mentor minorities and didn't write about that in my essays,
taking a more frank approach about what I thought was wrong with minority
recruitment, and I lost out on a fellowship to a guy who now is a professor
and has exactly zero nonwhite nonasians in his lab. Let's just say they don't
really care about honesty and followthrough.

Incidentally, this student also had a research project where all of the data
presented in the primary paper were artefacts of the preparation method (It
didn't affect the overall conclusion). I confronted the student about this and
even went through the process of repeating the experiment with a better prep,
resulting in data that actually made sense. Some of the figures were
completely invalid, and one of the subsidiary conclusions was wrong. I
suggested that he issue a correction and at least stop talking about the
subsidiary conclusion, but he continued to present it at several conferences
afterwards, and as far as I can tell, the data have not been corrected in the
literature. But he did get that fellowship. And now, is getting NIH grants.
Your tax dollars at work.

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paulsutter
It's a great point, too bad the author is focused on loserisms like winning
competitive awards. Most ironic of all is applying for a Thiel fellowship
because it's prestigious.

From "Competition is for losers" ([http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-
competition-is-for-l...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-
is-for-losers-1410535536)):

"Always prioritize the substance of what you're doing. Don't get caught up in
the status, the prestige games. They're endlessly dazzling, and they're always
endlessly disappointing.” -Peter Thiel

~~~
angersock
> Don't get caught up in the status, the prestige games.

Easy to say if you're a billionaire.

~~~
paulsutter
An entrepreneur needs to create some unique value. That won't happen if you're
following the same path as many others. Prestigious paths are very
competitive, and they're competitive for precisely the reason that so many
people are pursuing them. Thus competition is for losers.

Which is a better direction? Investing your energy in solving a problem where
no good solution exists today? Or competing for a corner office?

~~~
angersock
> _If you 're going to succeed as an entrepreneur, you need to create some
> unique value._

That's _a_ way to succeed.

> _That won 't happen if you're following the same path as many others._

Yep, and that's why Valve and Epic shouldn't have bothered entering the FPS
goldrush after Id and 3D Realms owned the market. :|

> _Investing your energy in solving a problem for others where no good
> solution exists today? Or competing for a corner office?_

How about doing _what gets me paid_? A lot of investors are seemingly more
than happy to blow money on mundane rehashes of ideas in hopes of betting on
the best rehash. There is no shame in being the not-quite-as-good rehash, if
you get paid along the way.

Talking about "solving problems for others" is just a way of grandstanding
pretending there's any more legitimacy to your narrowly-defined path of
success as anything else. Lawyers and finance folks aren't solving _anything_
new for others, and yet they're better compensated than any of us.

Jesus, stop buying this bullshit...it is how we (developers and entrepreneurs)
are getting taken advantage of.

EDIT: Also, how is spying on consumers and modeling their data making the
world a better place or solving a new problem, exactly? At least Transium was
kinda new in the search tech space. :|

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laurimak
I think this is called bikeshedding.

~~~
Normal_gaussian
Bikeshedding is from Parkinson's law of triviality [1], which essentially says
that deciding trivial issues takes a disproportionate amount of time - partly
because there are many ways it could be done, and partly because non-trivial
issues are hard to comprehend and are therefore easy to agree with.

This differs from the OP, where it is the ability to control an issue that is
to blame - in Parkinson's law control is equal yet understanding is not.

Though of course the relation is strong.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality)

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kazinator
Amdahl's Law: if you toil and sweat to thoroughly optimize some step in a
process that takes 10% of the time, so that it takes almost no time at all,
you get only a 10% improvement out of it overall.

