In chess there's an idiom for this. "Long think, wrong think" because it's a quite common phenomenon that very good players will ruin positions by rather than playing with their good instinct, over-analyzing a position, there's a related situation of the hardest games to win being already won positions because there's so many ways to win that people will on occasion start doing something really stupid akin to the exa…
I don't think this proves anything other than there are often contradictory idioms in chess, here's one attributed to Larsen: "If you find a good move, look for a better one".
It might apply to some traditions. However, for others, this is more accurate: "Tradition is a set of solutions for problems that don't exist anymore". An example of the latter that immediately springs to mind is circumcision.
As someone who's been programming for years, one of my biggest complaints in software is over-engineering. It's so universally prevalent, I literally expect to get downvoted for even making this comment. I strongly advocate for simplicity in software implementation, allowing for maintainability and flexibility... the cleanest solution that reaches the goal and doesn't lock us too far into a narrow approach that may b…
It's a weird term, "over engineering". Think about over-engineering a bridge. What does it look like? Huge and bulky, way too expensive, able to hold much more weight than it should, lots of walkways and access points and design features that nobody really wants? But wait: "any fool can build a bridge that doesn't fall down. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that just barely doesn't fall down." The whole point o…
In chess there's an idiom for this. "Long think, wrong think" because it's a quite common phenomenon that very good players will ruin positions by rather than playing with their good instinct, over-analyzing a position, there's a related situation of the hardest games to win being already won positions because there's so many ways to win that people will on occasion start doing something really stupid akin to the exa…
> very good players will ruin positions by rather than playing with their good instinct, over-analyzing a position
I wonder if this is due to errors happening and getting mixed into the search. Computers pretty monotonously improve with thinking time, and the algorithm is pretty simple once you have good intuition to guide it. However, a single memory error down a line will turn the whole thing to mush.
It might apply to some traditions. However, for others, this is more accurate: "Tradition is a set of solutions for problems that don't exist anymore". An example of the latter that immediately springs to mind is circumcision.
In chess there's an idiom for this. "Long think, wrong think" because it's a quite common phenomenon that very good players will ruin positions by rather than playing with their good instinct, over-analyzing a position, there's a related situation of the hardest games to win being already won positions because there's so many ways to win that people will on occasion start doing something really stupid akin to the exa…
> very good players will ruin positions by rather than playing with their good instinct, over-analyzing a position I wonder if this is due to errors happening and getting mixed into the search. Computers pretty monotonously improve with thinking time, and the algorithm is pretty simple once you have good intuition to guide it. However, a single memory error down a line will turn the whole thing to mush.
Even disregarding the errors, when "overthinking" is easy t go deeper in some branches than in others, without a very good probability estimation (which something the computer can do more easily: weight the branches).
The "intuitive" approach is not that deep, but the depth is more even.
Being already known by my friends and family to be an "overthinker" and prone to "analysis paralysis", I sometimes wonder why I'm still a SWE. I've slowly started to realize over time that my profession is filled with overthinking and over-engineering, and that our interview process can even select for it. IMO its hard to be the person that aces the technical interview gauntlet then walks out of the building and turn…
As someone who's been programming for years, one of my biggest complaints in software is over-engineering. It's so universally prevalent, I literally expect to get downvoted for even making this comment. I strongly advocate for simplicity in software implementation, allowing for maintainability and flexibility... the cleanest solution that reaches the goal and doesn't lock us too far into a narrow approach that may b…
In my opinion over-engineering is a symptom of not enough thinking. Complex, over engineered solutions don't happen because a problem is too well understood, they happen because a problem is not understood well enough.
This is based on the assumption that more thinking == better understanding.
In chess there's an idiom for this. "Long think, wrong think" because it's a quite common phenomenon that very good players will ruin positions by rather than playing with their good instinct, over-analyzing a position, there's a related situation of the hardest games to win being already won positions because there's so many ways to win that people will on occasion start doing something really stupid akin to the exa…
>Alfred Whitehead's observation that 'civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them'. Reminds me a bit of a quote I heard recently: "Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back."
Variant of Chesterton's fence?
Of course, sometimes the underlying problem has gone away entirely or been dealt with by a different solution. Then you run into traditionalists defending ridiculous things with arguments that make no sense.