
Ask the Wizard: You Always Start the Last Company - brett
http://www.burningdoor.com/askthewizard/2007/04/you_always_start_the_last_comp.html
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gyro_robo
This is a case of overgeneralizing. Evolution favors the organism most
responsive to change; thus, one must recognize conditions how they are,
instead of operating from a mental model of how they were, to increase one's
chances.

It's _always_ relative; a combination of idea and environment. The mistake is,
when something doesn't work out, that we are tempted to say that the idea must
be a bad idea. The correct inference is that the combination of the idea and
that particular environment did not work.

The corresponding mistake is to assign blame to the environment and say the
environment is just bad for everything. Note that hardly anyone makes _that_
mistake -- instead, they say, "the environment isn't _ready_ for this idea
_yet_ ", noting that change is inevitable.

Another way of stating this is that the author failed to investigate _why_
something was problematic. Instead, it's as if he was operating blindly; "I
got burned by X, so in the future I will avoid X, because X burns." That's
somewhat like a child bumping into a kitchen table and getting mad at the
table. "Tables are a problem -- let's get rid of them."

