
Presumption of stupidity - garry
http://www.aaronkharris.com/presumption-of-stupitidy
======
minikites
Chesterton's Fence:

> In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is
> one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a
> paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us
> say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The
> more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the
> use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of
> reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I
> certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can
> come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to
> destroy it.

~~~
HCIdivision17
This philosophy is one of the cornerstones of my engineering practice. IFF you
can describe why something is there - without using shortcuts/crutches like
'their dumb' \- then we may be able to consider changing it. Otherwise, it's
dangerous and risky to fool with it. Too many times did I see something absurd
and paint myself into a corner trying to 'fix' it, when there really _was_ a
bizarre edge case that this covered. (And in plants, you usually only find
these edge cases after enormously expensive production loss events!)

And it's a fantastic principle in general, since it's like the technical
equivalent of the Principle of Charity.

(
[http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html](http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html)
)

~~~
Bartweiss
Chesterton's Fence should be one of the core principles of software
development, and it calls to mind the famous "Never rewrite software" article.

If you're refactoring, you can use unit tests and proofs of equivalence to
demonstrate that your changes don't pose a threat. If you're rewriting a whole
codebase, you're likely to wander down the same paths of "wait, the simple way
doesn't work" that the person before you took.

Even bafflingly small changes like removing always-false tests have been known
to break code, which ought to inspire real hesitation any time you see
"stupid" code written by a smart person.

~~~
loup-vaillant
> _Even bafflingly small changes like removing always-false tests have been
> known to break code_

Okay, how is this even _possible_? Reflection/pre-processing magic?

~~~
barrkel
Compiler codegen bugs.

~~~
Gibbon1
I've had a few compiler bugs where, adding an if false or changing the order
of an if test 'fixes' things. And the complement changing the code exposes a
compiler bug. And also, new improved compiler results in code that's broken.

Other issues I run into a fair amount is dealing with hardware/naked
interrupts often involves a lot of subtle timing and read/write access issues.
Sometimes this happens in code you don't own.

------
swanson
The same presumption happens for people, too. Developers tend to assume that
the people that wrote the terribly messy code that you inherited were
incompetent. I think a much more productive and healthy attitude is to assume
that everyone was doing the best they could, given their resources, knowledge,
and deadlines at the time.

That might be a false assumption (look, some people just don't care) but you
gain very little by complaining and getting mad at things that already
happened.

We love to complain about things our predecessors did wrong, but often, we
don't do those things either :)

~~~
pc86
Some of the worst code I've had to work with in my nearly 10-year long career
so far was written by one of the smartest programmer's I've met. His problem
was that everything because an exercise in designing this all-encompassing
abstracted-to-hell-and-back web of interfaces, services, aggregates, domains,
etc etc.

Indicative of this was a request to take a table of data that already existed
(on a website) and add a button to export a CSV of that data. For anyone
familiar with .NET (and I assume most other languages) if you've already got
the data in the format you want to export this is literally a 10-minute task,
_including_ a unit test or two for the functionality. His quote was something
on order of 18 hours which included time to write a set of
TableDataExportService methods that would support a whole host of file formats
in the future.

~~~
tomjen3
YAGNI.

Software should be implemented as simple as possible, and then refactored as
necessary when new functionality is required (the only exception is things you
are very sure is going to be needed, e.g a password reset functionality on a
password dialog).

Anyhow that is my development philosophy.

~~~
pc86
Yeah this was some of the most anti-YAGNI stuff I've seen.

Which is not meant to detract from the fact that the code was great 99% of the
time. It just took 10x longer than it should have and cost 10x as much and
half of it was never used.

------
brandonb
To generalize: competitors in a market usually behave rationally, and what
looks like "stupid" behavior from afar may actually be unseen incentives.

Which suggests a test for your understanding of a market: can you map out the
incentives and explain why what looks like apparently-irrational behavior is
happening?

For example, in healthcare, we waste 30%+ of the $3T we spend each year. Much
of that waste is due to hospital readmissions for an ongoing condition like
heart failure. Startups sometimes try to fix this by developing a special
machine learning algorithm to predict readmissions and apply an intervention.
But even when the technology succeeds, the business fails: hospitals charge
for readmissions, so there's an active disincentive for the hospital to buy
the product. (That is now changing with ACOs, and a change in incentives is an
opportunity for new companies.)

~~~
StavrosK
I don't understand your comment. You say "we waste 30%", but then say
"hospitals charge". Who's the "we" who's wasting 30%, and why are startups
trying to sell something to prevent X to the people who _make_ money from X,
rather than to the people who _lose_ money from X?

~~~
brandonb
"We" referred to US healthcare spending [1], and the party with the right
incentive for this problem is the payers: Medicare, Medicaid, and private
insurance like Aetna, Blue Shield, United Healthcare, etc.

While the payers have the incentive to reduce readmissions (saves them money,
leading to lower insurance premiums for you), they don't usually have the
access to do so -- they're not the one seeing the patient or prescribing
medicine.

The payers could, of course, try to change the way that THEY reimburse the
hospital to align the incentives. For Medicare and Medicaid, that requires a
law--which is why the Affordable Care Act is creating opportunities for new
startups as it rolls out. For private insurance, I think they'd like to change
reimbursement, but they have relatively little market power compared to
healthcare providers: [http://rockhealth.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/12/Kocher-et-a...](http://rockhealth.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/12/Kocher-et-al-Overcoming-the-Pricing-Power-of-
Hospitals.pdf)

[1] Completely different set of incentives (and thus problems) in other
healthcare systems.

~~~
StavrosK
That clarifies things, thank you.

------
tomcam
I have never disparaged my competitors, but I'm a small fry. I can say that
during four years at Microsoft (1996-2000, Development Tools group) I never
heard the products of competitors disparaged that way. In fact, there was a
weekly presentation of competing products and invariably the interest was in
where we were lacking, not what was bad about them.

Likewise when customers came to visit us at trade shows my boss would sit
politely through their compliments, then immediately jump to the question "So
what don't you like about our product?"

Fast forward to today. I'm friends with top people at a Really Big Guitar
Company and a Huge Amplifier company. Even in private, these C-level execs
show nothing but respect for products of their competitors. They are not
ashamed to own and even personally use said products (especially vintage
ones).

It seems to me that dissing your competitors even privately can make you
dangerously blind to the challenges they pose to you, set a bad example for
your employees, and also restrict your job prospects should you decide to work
for a competitor one day.

~~~
stuxnet79
Interesting - thank you for sharing this.

------
dceddia
This is a great thing to consider, and I think this presumption of stupidity
bleeds over into other areas of life too.

Developers: inherited code is considered guilty until proven innocent. Or
maybe more accurately, guilty until you've rewritten it. Surely the old
developer had no idea what they were doing.

The "other faction": Democrats/Republicans, different religions, rich vs. poor
people... most generalizations about the faction you don't belong to start off
with thinking "they're so stupid". "Look at those Republicans/Democrats. Can't
they see that Trump/Obama is just lying through his teeth?"

Bad actors: The presumption of stupidity carries over into the way people
think about computer hackers and terrorists and the like. You'll see stories
about how "those terrorists are learning how to use cell phones to detonate
bombs!" or how "criminals are migrating online to prey on people with phishing
attacks!" The underlying assumption is that they're stupid, but getting
(dangerously) smarter.

I think we'd make a lot more headway in most areas by assuming our
competitors, detractors, and wrong-doers are probably already pretty smart.

~~~
pacala
> Inherited code is considered guilty until proven innocent. Or maybe more
> accurately, guilty until you've rewritten it.

I'm facing this dilemma right now, and I find it a whole lot more nuanced. The
previous dev definitely had the right ideas, but he also produced XXXXX lines
of code. I would take me years to wrap my head around the reasons for all
these lines. Is this a bug or a feature? It would take me weeks to rewrite it,
drop 75% of the corner cases for which I have no test case / clue why they
have been coded. Then become the grumpy old dev that says "no" to 95% of
feature requests and keep things simple. At the risk of my job.

~~~
swanson
You might find value in exploring the idea of Characterization Tests or
Software Seams.

~~~
steveklabnik
or Working Effectively with Legacy Software.

------
jleader
A lot of people seem to be unaware that companies survive by satisficing. That
is, you don't have to do everything "right" to succeed in business. You just
have to do most things well enough to not fail (don't break the law, don't
forget to file your paperwork, pay your bills, etc.), and a few (one?) things
outstandingly enough to win customers.

We've been brought up in school to think we have to get nearly every answer
right on the test in order to get a good grade (and get more than half of the
answers right just to not flunk out). In the real world, getting one right
answer, and not screwing the rest up too badly is often enough (and sometimes
only barely achievable!).

So maybe your competitor did something "stupid" because they're stupid, or
maybe it's because that thing doesn't actually matter that much, and they're
focused on doing something else incredibly well instead.

------
thenomad
An important line in the piece:

 _" Of course, just because you presume intelligence doesn't mean that every
decision made was smart."_

I'd rephrase as follows: it's unwise to assume stupidity on the part of your
competition, but it's very wise to allow the possibility of stupidity.

With the corollary that if there's an inexpensive way to capitalise on that
stupidity if it exists, it's probably worth trying, just in case the thing
that's walking like a duck and quacking like a duck is in fact a duck.

As a tangent to that - the chances that assumptions of stupidity are correct
go up in direct proportion to your level of domain knowledge.

I see a lot of non-film people say "the movie industry does $FOO and that's
really stupid", for example, and 95% of the time, they're wrong and there are
good reasons for doing $FOO.

However, I also see people who know the film world (including me) say "a lot
of / most filmmakers do $BAR and it's dumb" \- and $BAR has a considerably
higher chance of actually being a dumb, common mistake.

~~~
mcphage
A little more succinct might be: "It's unwise to assume stupidity on the part
of your competition, but don't rule out stupidity."

------
k__
I had the experience, that things people identify as "stupid decisions" are
often just "economical decisions"

For example, a company I worked for had the best technology, but bad UI and
the competitors had good UI, but their tech was old and inaccurate.

For years we thought they were imbeciles, because they didn't update their
tech and we would smash them in the future, because they cannot catch up with
us.

But in the end the customers bought the software with the better UI and didn't
look behind the scenes.

So their decision was logical. Why pour money and time in parts of the
software when noone wants to pay for this.

------
csense
This sounds like an instance of the fundamental attribution error [1]. It's a
known human cognitive bias to blame others' failings on internal
characteristics while seeing your own situation as more of a product of
external influences.

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

~~~
griffinmahon
Also relevant is the reversed phrase, "Never attribute to stupidity that which
can be adequately explained by X (some other reasonable cause)."

------
brianmcconnell
The important thing in analyzing a competitor's behavior is to understand the
incentives motivating that behavior.

A common example in startupland is a company whose senior management has short
term incentives that reward a fast exit over long term growth. That company
may very well behave in ways that appear dumb to competitors with a long term
focus. But if the "seasoned" CEO and his cronies get their compensation even
in a mediocre deal, why bother trying to build a company for the ages when
they can cash out, rest a bit and land in a similar situation at the next gig?

------
jasode
When I read the essay, I thought of P Thiel's question of self-reflection that
analyzes in the reverse direction:

 _" What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"_[1]

I interpret " _truth_ " to really be a highly-opinionated belief rather than
something like "2+2=4". In other words, what factors do you believe in that
would make the business model successful that outsiders would dismiss as
insane or stupid?

(On trivia related note: I notice the blog as the title of "stupitidy" instead
of "stupidity" so I'm not sure if there's an inside joke I missed.)

[1][http://fortune.com/2014/09/04/peter-thiels-the-challenge-
of-...](http://fortune.com/2014/09/04/peter-thiels-the-challenge-of-the-
future/)

------
normloman
Founders presume the stupidity of the competition because they're arrogant.
Silicon valley, with it's notion of creative destruction and disrupting the
establishment, encourages arrogance. We're blinded by the notion that new
always trumps old, so we never consider that the established industry has
reasons behind how it runs.

~~~
Patrick_Devine
I agree, but I think this is what makes SV wonderful. You have to be somewhat
naive to think your approach is going to be better than the status quo,
particularly when your competition is well established, and probably well
capitalized.

The reason why big companies can't turn on a dime is that they have a lot of
people who work for them, and an existing customer base. It's difficult to
align all of those people on a new, and potentially better way of solving a
problem. It's not that they are collectively "idiots", it's that they have an
established business with an established track record. This is
quintessentially the Innovators Dilemma. Technology markets _almost always_
move downmarket to the cheaper solution which at first looks like a "toy".

~~~
normloman
Yes! I wish more people would actually read that book instead of throwing the
word "disruption" around vaguely. After reading it, you'll realize the
established business almost always has the advantage, and start ups only
succeed in certain environments.

------
PaulHoule
One thing I learned the hard way is that if you are on the right track, your
competitors are probably barking up the same tree and are further along than
you would think baes on what is public.

For instance there was a period of many years where both Google and Bing image
search were embarrassingly bad and I was able to build something far better
for a certain range of queries.

It took me a year to build out my system but in that year, Bing and Google
both improved dramatically, so my demo comparing results with them was no
longer impressive at all.

~~~
marcosdumay
Technology has some phase changes, where it suddenly changes from "doing X is
extremely hard" to "hey, X is actually very easy to do!" without any ado, and
no obvious reasons.

There are too many histories where after a long time of nothing happening,
everybody suddenly starts working on the same problem, without any kind of
coordination.

------
suhail
Great advice.

I do think that you should try to think about how you might try to solve
something before looking at what your competitors do. The reason being that
it's easy to trap our minds into thinking that there are no other solutions
unless they fit into a similar box of what's already working. Naïveté combined
with thinking for yourself can often be a powerful reason why many startups
succeed.

If your solution ends up looking similar, at least, it was likely derived from
first principals vs the path of least resistance: blind copying.

------
jacquesm
I tend to err on the side of caution with stuff like this, for instance when
inheriting a code-base I assume the previous author actually knew what he/she
was doing. But _sometimes_ (not often) that can work against you as well. For
instance when after spending sufficient time with said codebase you realize
the original writer was entirely out of their depth and this was likely the
first time they'd attempted to write something this complex.

But more often than not it is the presumption of intelligence that pays off.

------
logicallee
I couldn't disagree more. When Mark Zuckerberg turned down $1 billion from
Yahoo[1] when he was 22, and FB was two years old at the time, because they
were "stupid and didn't get it, so they obviously were't valuing the company"
properly he was right.

The direct quote is:

>Thiel described the argument Zuckerberg finally came down on like this:
"[Yahoo] had no definitive idea about the future. They did not properly value
things that did not yet exist so they were therefore undervaluing the
business."

Yahoo's market capitalization in July 2006 was $42.51 billion. A 22 year-old
presumed they were stupid, and he was right. [2]

Today FB has a market cap of $264.91B and Yahoo? Down to $35 billion after 9
years of growth.

\--

[1] [http://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-
zuckerberg-...](http://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-zuckerberg-
luck-day-facebook-turned-down-billion-dollars.html)

[2] by the way to get the market valuation at the time, I did this search:
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+was+yahoo%27s+mark...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+was+yahoo%27s+market+capitalization+in+july+2006)
I can't believe it worked! I used wolframalpha because this is the kind of
search they promise they can answer - and they were right, they actually
delivered. Nobody else on the face of the planet does this, and it shouldn't
even be possible. But it is. If you think something is possible, JUST DO IT.
If you think your competitors are stupid (compared to what you think you can
do), you're probably right. (or you wouldn't have that thought.)

~~~
yaur
> If you think your competitors are stupid (compared to what you think you can
> do), you're probably right. (or you wouldn't have that thought.) No, you are
> probably not the next Zuckerberg, or Jobs, or Page. If you don't understand
> why your behaving a certain way its much more likely that you are the one
> who doesn't understand the market.

~~~
logicallee
yaur, I'll simply have to disagree with you. If you ask most people "why is
Nike stupid, why are their running shoes completely wrong" nobody would give
you an answer, nor do I have an answer. Anyone (including me) would say:
"They're not stupid, they put billions of dollars of research into engineering
and have a great understanding, their shoes are very comfortable and that's
why they can charge $100+ for them."

... except for the 50 people in the world who know something that Nike
doesn't. Those 50 people who _do_ have an answer to that question are the
people who can topple them by doing something better.

Nobody delusional can explain something clearly, and answer all your questions
about it - if someone clearly explains something and you think they're
delusional for it, likely you're just not qualified to judge. You may be the
kind of person who, if you got back sent 1,000 years into the past, would
learn to ride a horse and learn some trade, because it's obvious that
recreating anything from the future is "impossible", or someone would do it.
Nothing wrong with that. Just doesn't apply to startups.

That advice in the context of startups is simply completely wrong, irrelevant,
and inappropriate. Couldn't disagree with it more.

------
jusben1369
I think this is the classic problem of advice giving that's so prevalent in
the startup community today. It won't be too long until we're all praising a
tweet or article that talks about only those who brashly challenge the status
quo and assume the entrenched players are vulnerable, bogged down with legacy
issues and fat and lazy on an existing revenue stream are ripe for the
disrupting. Those who sit back and say "Well maybe there's a reason they do
things this way I'm not sure" aren't bold enough and won't be the recipients
of the spoils of disruption.

Not that this article is bad. It's just datapoint 107 that a founder has to
reconcile with all the other competing advice.

~~~
amsilprotag
Many times throughout the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast[1], a
founder expresses the sentiment, "If I had known how hard it was going to be,
I might not have started the company." The difficulty discounting has also
been cited as the reason why many successful founders are young and
inexperienced. So while hubris can lead to disastrous consequences for
engineers, it could be viewed as an asset for inciting action.

[1]
[http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html](http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html)

------
bro-stick
Not much else to add. Presume a larger, smarter, better funded team is working
stealthily in another office somewhere to kick our ass... anything else is
complacency. Worse, following that path, leads to hubris at some juncture:
excuses rationalizing cutting the wrong corners or shortchanging the customer
that could prove fatal in a game of inches in the marketplace. There are at
least a quadrillion ways to fail, and 99.997% of them will be my doing.
Rational paranoia is healthy, because your product/service needs to be so
well-regarded by people other than the team or supporters that it demoralizes
potential adversaries that they don't want to compete. Even then, it still may
not be currently as good in other key areas of focus as a competitors.

(Btw, the Thiel view of not picking fights you can't dominate and Buffett's
sticking to defensible business models is a good mindset to calibrate a
venture's success per risk gut perception. And with timing, team and execution
you might just make something that hits.)

------
simonswords82
Great article, taking the thinking further...

Everybody watches their competitors, it's entirely natural. It's solid advice
to study them, and try to stay/get ahead of them where possible. This doesn't
just apply to app features, but every facet of the business across many
disciplines (sales/marketing/development/back office etc).

On the other hand, building a business based solely on a competitor's business
decisions and not doing your own homework is the path to madness. We might
take inspiration from our competitors, but we always check in with our
customers next to make sure they actually want the feature. It's also our job
to get feedback on not just what we're doing but also how we're planning to do
it, as our users might have unique business requirements that our competitor's
users do not.

------
artumi-richard
I think you can generalise one more step up. Markets that look horribly
inefficient may well not be.

~~~
codyguy
Or maybe they are ;) How to find out? For some people, the only way to confirm
is to try and be tested.

------
joseraul
People may have a sense of superiority, especially smart ones. Chess world
champion (and genius) Bobby Fischer once said: "My opponents make good moves
too. Sometimes I don't take these things into consideration".

------
colordrops
This mindset can be seen in other systems of thought. There are a large number
of species known to man, yet we somehow think that we are the pinnacle of the
tree of life, despite the fact that this is statistically highly unlikely when
only taking into account pure numbers. Considering the dimensions now
accessible to us that were completely unknown even 500 years ago, it doesn't
seem a large leap at all to posit that there are other dimensions we are
currentlt unaware of that contain life forms in the same tree as ours that are
far more advanced and perhaps even invisible to us.

------
mnw21cam
Love the (deliberate? ironic?) mis-spelling of stupidity in the title/url.

~~~
akharris
Wish I could claim to have been either deliberate or ironic...but I actually
got careless. Thanks for pointing it out!

------
lpolovets
This is so true. As a investor, I hear a lot of pitches where the founders say
their competitive advantage is that they execute better (the flip side of
believing everyone else is dumb is believing you're especially smart). Do you
know who else claims they "execute better"? Everyone. That kind of attitude
usually reveals that a founder doesn't have a real sense of what makes their
company special and defensible, and is a bit of a yellow flag for investors --
well, at least for me.

------
tr352
Working in academia, I've experienced this too. I've read work in my field of
research that I dismissed as bad work or not worthwhile, simply because I
didn't fully understand them. Too complicated, strange background assumptions,
not well motivated, etcetera.

Then later, while developing my own work, I find that I end up with the same
complications, that I'm forced to make the same background assumptions, and I
have the same difficulty in motivating my choices.

------
DrNuke
Uh, I was thinking this article is more business-side than operational? Easily
put: a business exists if it stays afloat and fences are often the way not to
go under, even if they appear stupid from outside. Many times, fences are the
only common ground between sellers and buyers. Removing fences is, a lot of
times, pretty stupid = you geniuses operate at a loss and survive from
artificial money or VCs until you are allowed to.

------
Bartweiss
This is an excellent observation. When you encounter a suboptimal system,
there's a substantial chance that it either produces some unnoticed benefit or
results from some coordination problem that can't be overcome by "just not
doing that".

In either case, successful solutions have to work around the gap in the system
rather than simply charging into it.

------
riemannzeta
Despite the flaws in the rational model of economics and the efficient market
hypothesis more generally, I have always been fond of the more humble,
observant posture it gives us in considering others' behavior. The flaws in
the rational model are well-known. But as a presumption, it certainly works
better than its opposite.

------
codyguy
I am confident of the value I deliver but I don't call my competitors stupid.
One person being correct or a winner doesn't mean others are stupid. Maybe
some people can deliver value where the competition doesn't. Could be due to
some leverage or insight or creativity.

------
nitwit005
This is probably not a correctable problem. People don't start businesses if
they think the competition is highly competitive and intelligent. They start a
business of they perceive a weakness in the market, or believe they have a
unique capacity to succeed.

------
ZoeZoeBee
This works well when considering people in your own field, you know what it
took for you to get there and you can assume they've had similar experiences.

However when you are considering the general public it is best to presume
stupidity and design with that in mind.

------
danielweber
I've experienced this myself.

Sometimes what our competitors were doing was stupid, and we ate their lunch.

Sometimes what our competitors were doing was the only way to really run
things, and we had to adapt to follow them.

------
jhonovich
It is valuable to determine what technology, not available in the past, would
cause a reasonable insider to change their decisions if they could implement
that technology.

------
donarb
Once again, xkcd explains all.

[https://xkcd.com/277/](https://xkcd.com/277/)

------
QuantumRoar
Really? Is that the way some people reason about their competitors? Something
like: "Oh, I guess they're just stupid and we're so smart."

Who in their right mind would do such a thing. Even if the competitors really
are stupid (who knows?), it doesn't give you any advantage to assume that.

~~~
rwallace
Ah, metaness!

So can we assume people who assume other people are stupid, are stupid? Or is
there some benefit from doing things that way that might not be apparent at
first sight?

One possibility that comes to mind is the substitution of parallelism for
serial processing, or put another way, letting the world be its own model.
Instead of one startup spending a lot of time thinking and researching (and
maybe missing the market window if there was one), let ten startups just
assume and go for it. Maybe nine will be wrong and fail and one will be right
and succeed.

~~~
QuantumRoar
> Instead of one startup spending a lot of time thinking and researching (and
> maybe missing the market window if there was one), let ten startups just
> assume and go for it. Maybe nine will be wrong and fail and one will be
> right and succeed.

But that'd be something like evolution or anthropic computing. In order to
find a solution to a hard problem, write down something. If it is not a
solution, kill yourself. Conditioned on looking at anything at all, you look
at the correct solution.

Or we could use the distinct advantage of humans and think about it properly.

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btbuildem
Those folks are just being introspective, that's all..

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shurcooL
Agree with the first 3 paragraphs so much, well put.

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andyidsinga
see also: Sarah Silverman's bit on scientology and things that sound weird.

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noobplusplus
A nice article to manipulate your competitors from doing a market survey!

