

Smart People Can Rationalize Anything - dschoon
http://habitatchronicles.com/2006/12/smart-people-can-rationalize-anything/

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arvinjoar
I had a school assignment about writing a letter as if I were part of the
Trojan War. I figured I'd learn Dactylic Hexameter and write it all in
Dactylic Hexameter. Bad idea.

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Deestan
This is a project management problem, not a problem with too smart developers.

The problematic activities described here, overgeneralization and solving
imaginary problems (aka Coding for A Rainy Day), are simply typical newbie
mistakes.

Otherwise highly competent developers almost always fall into this trap early
in their careers, so the important thing is to have someone experienced in
charge of the project who can veto their weirder ideas until they mature.

I think every software company should hand out a copy of "The Pragmatic
Programmer" to all new hires. It gives much good advice on how to not
overcomplicate things.

~~~
notauser
Three of the Stages Of Programmer:

\- Designing too much flexibility at the start of a project and regretting it
when it takes ten weeks to build a prototype.

\- Designing too little flexibility at the start of the project and ending up
living with unmaintainable cruft.

\- Realizing that all projects are hell and planning on a
rethink/rewrite/refactor when the real requirements become clear because no
one can predict the future, so why not hold some contingency for the
inevitable.

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brlewis
Most valuable point in here, vital for startups: You can’t sell someone the
solution before they’ve bought the problem

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aliston
I think there's another implicit point as well, echoed by a lot of more recent
startups, which is to fail early and often. If you're going to make the
engineering decision to go down a path which will take a year+ to validate
(i.e. developing a "PhD thesis" of a filesystem), then you'd better have a
very compelling reason to do so over the current solution.

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stcredzero
Garrison Keillor: An intellect is like 4-wheel drive. It just gets you stuck
in deeper snow.

~~~
presidentender
It's a good quote, but the simple solution is to do your driving in 2, and
only switch to 4 when you do get stuck. Most times, that'll get you out.

In the real world, I suppose, that means not doing anything clever, except to
backpedal and fix a problem.

~~~
gojomo
Conserve your best thinking for emergency use only? (Something about that
seems wrong, even though the systematic logic of leaving a tolerance for error
is sound.)

~~~
presidentender
No, no. Conserve _cleverness_ for emergencies. Logical consistency is the best
policy: most of the time, you should trudge along, applying existing solutions
(2 wheel drive). The only time you should be clever and try to do something
innovative is when your traditional models fail you. (4 wheel drive).

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khafra
Anybody can rationalize anything to his own satisfaction, regardless of IQ.
The problem with being smart is that there are fewer people who can see
through your rationalizations. The skills of dissasembling your own cognitive
biases and testing your ideas against reality grow in value as your IQ
increases.

~~~
lotharbot
"Anybody can rationalize anything to his own satisfaction"

... but smart people tend to require a bigger rationalization to be satisfied.
And they also tend to be more capable of creating a rationalization of that
magnitude.

The question is whether they've developed the habit of "reality testing" and
discarding flawed rationalizations.

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dmfdmf
A rationalization means to come up with reasons to support a belief, idea or
action that one knows (or could know) is not actually rational. It is a form
of dishonesty mimicking rationality. The issue with smart people is not that
they rationalize (i.e. are dishonest) but they are able to come up with
sincere reasons, often very convincing reasons, for their beliefs. This makes
it very difficult to get them to question their premises.

