
Tarpits and Antiflocks - andyraskin
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/08/09/antiflocks/
======
aytekin
“Individually, each team’s approach is almost certainly wrong. But
collectively they are doing the right thing. They are an antiflock, exploring
a tarpit.“

Last week we were trying to find a solution to a tough product decision. Here
is what we did: We asked 5 product designers to spend a week on it (we do this
time to time and call it design week).

In the beginning they were pretty hopeless. They started trying different
things. During the middle of the week, I met with them to see where they were.
I was also pretty hopeless. But one of the designers found a way to solve the
problem in an elegant way which also solved many other problems.

Here is the twist. We’d have never found that solution if we attacked the
problem head on. Because this Designer wasn’t very familiar with that feature,
she made a weird unexpected illogical change and that change opened the door
for the accidental discovery of the good solution.

~~~
lou1306
This somehow reminds me of an interesting tidbit in an old paper about the
architecture of natural multi-agent systems such as ant colonies. Basically
the resilience and reliability of the overall system is a result of agents not
being "afraid" to fail. When ants look out for food, there is a chance a
number of ants gets lost and starves; on the other hand, when a single ant
finds a food source, the whole colony benefits from it. [1] Some VC firms
operate in a similar way, if you think about it.

[1]: Parunak, H. Van Dyke. "Go to the ant": Engineering principles from
natural multi-agent systems. Annals of Operations Research 75 (1997): 69-101.

------
zkms
> That is why I pay attention to kooks and antiflocks. If you can explain
> precisely why something is impossible you’re halfway to making it possible
> after all. And if nothing else, kooks are really good at pulling those
> explanations out of you.

reminds me of [https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-
consultant-f...](https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-
for-autodidact-physicists) , which i think is a pretty neat ethnography of the
"crank"/pseudoscientist phenomenon.

