Don't Feed the Thought Leaders • Hacker News Board

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#221

Post by j_wtf_all_taken » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 12:19 PM UTC

> He found that experts could be split into two broad categories, the first of which he called Hedgehogs. A Hedgehog had one big idea like free-market capitalism (or nordic model capitalism or demand-side economics), which they used as a lens to look at many issues. They applied this big idea to every situation, which resulted in noncontingent and straightforward advice. You always need more freedom, nutmeg, and unit tests. Hedgehogs are “Confident forecasters”.

> When all the predictions were added up and scored, hedgehogs lost out to his second category: Foxes. Foxes were the opposite of hedgehogs. They had complicated advice and were skeptical of even their own predictions. Tetlock also found that foxes were less likely to be famous because contingent advice is harder to explain in a sound bite.

This explains so much - unfortunately, because there's no fingers to point and no quick solution. Its just all of us and our stupid brains that always fall for the hedgehogs.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#222

Post by croon » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 12:21 PM UTC

sn41 wrote: post #218

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different thing. "I told you so" is a smug, nasty statement. It wins no friends, and closes the ears of those most in need of it. A postmortem is a clinical, reasoned, and scientific review. Everyone is on board, and agrees to abide by the results. I worked for a Japanese company, for a long time. I made some colossal mistakes, during my tenure, and was told "That was, indeed, a mistake. We expect you to mitigate it,…

Yup, I tell my teammates, fix the error, not the blame. I refuse to find who did wrong. After an initial hesitation, suddenly everybody jumps to it and solves the issue.

Sometimes it's necessary to find who did something to find out what happened (maybe), but if the culture is good that's not a problem.

I've had no issues admitting mistakes at my places of work, and vice versa: "This is what happened/I did, which led to this. We fix it this way. What can we do to prevent it/similar things happening in the future?".

Edit:

People do most things with good intentions and for hopefully good reasons. When things go wrong it's usually down to unforeseen interactions or second order effects (or brain farts), and/or a lacking review process.

The person making "the mistake" is usually just the last person crossing a faulty bridge, and if it wasn't them it would've been the next person. It's not a problem identifying the person if everyone realizes we all want a sturdy bridge.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#223

Post by CGamesPlay » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 12:22 PM UTC

This fox/hedgehog distinction seems to be a label that you apply to a person post-hoc, based on if you think they did a good job of predicting? I watched the talk linked in the article and it didn't seem to help. If somebody says something about, say, TDD and you don't agree, you mentally just say "oh, this person is a hedgehog about TDD" and then write them off? Doesn't seem like a useful mental framework.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#224

Post by throwaway_fjmr » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 12:26 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #211

goodpoint wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have learned that "I told you so." is absolutely, 1000% worthless. This is proof of bad company culture. Doing post-mortems is important to learn what went wrong in the decision process and how to prevent it.

Different thing. "I told you so" is a smug, nasty statement. It wins no friends, and closes the ears of those most in need of it. A postmortem is a clinical, reasoned, and scientific review. Everyone is on board, and agrees to abide by the results. I worked for a Japanese company, for a long time. I made some colossal mistakes, during my tenure, and was told "That was, indeed, a mistake. We expect you to mitigate it,…

How do you, or how should anyone in a similar situation learn that actions have consequences?

I work for a large (not FAANG but spatially close) ecommerce company, and I’ve yet to see substantial changes or learnings after outages or mistakes.

I often find that wishy-washy post-mortems smear responsibility and deflect accountability. This doesn’t incentivize a change in behavior, and when people blindly get more trust, they often seem to simply repeat mistakes.

I think I’ve yet to master post-mortems and transforming “I told you so”s into improvements - I’d appreciate tips and ideas, thanks!

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#225

Post by croon » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 12:32 PM UTC

throwaway_fjmr wrote: post #224

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different thing. "I told you so" is a smug, nasty statement. It wins no friends, and closes the ears of those most in need of it. A postmortem is a clinical, reasoned, and scientific review. Everyone is on board, and agrees to abide by the results. I worked for a Japanese company, for a long time. I made some colossal mistakes, during my tenure, and was told "That was, indeed, a mistake. We expect you to mitigate it,…

How do you, or how should anyone in a similar situation learn that actions have consequences? I work for a large (not FAANG but spatially close) ecommerce company, and I’ve yet to see substantial changes or learnings after outages or mistakes. I often find that wishy-washy post-mortems smear responsibility and deflect accountability. This doesn’t incentivize a change in behavior, and when people blindly get more trus…

If you ingrain a culture of "actions have consequences" you disincentivize actions. This is why everyone is fine with letting nowhere projects run ahead, and adding to technical debt, or just keep on incurring running costs instead of cutting them.

"If I don't make a choice, it's not my fault".

It's much better to establish a culture of "try doing good things, and we're in this together". If you trust your colleagues and are good at recruiting, you'll get a lot more done.

I don't know if I have any specific tips and ideas for post-mortems as it usually... "depends".

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#226

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 12:33 PM UTC

throwaway_fjmr wrote: post #224

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different thing. "I told you so" is a smug, nasty statement. It wins no friends, and closes the ears of those most in need of it. A postmortem is a clinical, reasoned, and scientific review. Everyone is on board, and agrees to abide by the results. I worked for a Japanese company, for a long time. I made some colossal mistakes, during my tenure, and was told "That was, indeed, a mistake. We expect you to mitigate it,…

How do you, or how should anyone in a similar situation learn that actions have consequences? I work for a large (not FAANG but spatially close) ecommerce company, and I’ve yet to see substantial changes or learnings after outages or mistakes. I often find that wishy-washy post-mortems smear responsibility and deflect accountability. This doesn’t incentivize a change in behavior, and when people blindly get more trus…

If you work for an eCommerce company, then invest in mops. Hackers love eCommerce companies that fail to learn from mistakes.

Someone mentioned "bad corporate culture." In fact, the OP was really a sort of indictment of dysfunctional culture.

The Japanese are heavily process-oriented (not always a good thing). They have a consensus-based approach, where all stakeholders agree to a common set of rules and remedies before the meeting begins. If a problem is found, then the meeting doesn't end until there is a plan (and responsible person) for a remedy. Assigning tasks (not blame) is a goal. People are assumed to accept personal responsibility for their own mistakes. It's not the job of the meeting to do that (there's a common cultural mythology of responsible managers committing suicide, if they screw up badly enough. I never saw it, so I can't speak to its accuracy).

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#227

Post by l33t2328 » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 12:35 PM UTC

mmaunder wrote: post #66

These aren’t thought leaders. They’re insecure employees trying to justify their existence. You see it in most tech companies, particularly after employee 100 joins. As a leader of an early stage high growth biz, it’s critical to prune the team as these folks emerge. It’s not a happy event, but not everyone is the perfect fit for their current role and sometimes tough changes need to be made. Not making these changes…

> it’s critical to prune the team as these folks emerge

How do you identify them?

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#228

Post by l33t2328 » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 12:39 PM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #25

Tetlock also found that foxes were less likely to be famous because contingent advice is harder to explain in a sound bite. Yep. Occasionally there will be a complex problem with a simple solution. More often, complex problems have difficult solutions. And unfortunately, If you're in a room discussing the problem and one person gives a simple solution and you try to start a conversation about the complexities involve…

> one person gives a simple solution and you try to start a conversation about the complexities involved and resolving sub-problems

A simple “that solution doesn’t seem to address $subProblemA or sufficiently handle $efgeCaseB” would do the trick, eh?

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#229

Post by vp8989 » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 12:40 PM UTC

spyckie2 wrote: post #35

Being a hedgehog is useful on the journey to domain mastery because sticking to frameworks saves you time and headache compared to not having any frameworks at all. The 3 stages of domain mastery: Stage 1 - No knowledge or structure to approach a domain (everything is hard, pitfalls are everywhere) Stage 2 - Frameworks that are useful to approach the domain (Map to avoid pitfall areas) Stage 3 - Detailed understandin…

This is absolutely spot on, great interpretation.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#230

Post by sn41 » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 1:02 PM UTC

croon wrote: post #222

sn41 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I tell my teammates, fix the error, not the blame. I refuse to find who did wrong. After an initial hesitation, suddenly everybody jumps to it and solves the issue.

Sometimes it's necessary to find who did something to find out what happened (maybe), but if the culture is good that's not a problem. I've had no issues admitting mistakes at my places of work, and vice versa: "This is what happened/I did, which led to this. We fix it this way. What can we do to prevent it/similar things happening in the future?". Edit: People do most things with good intentions and for hopefully go…

What you say makes sense in a good atmosphere. I work in a very toxic culture. Once people start blaming someone, their own blood boils with their rhetoric, and then it becomes a bitter fight.

I see it as etiology vs. teleology - rather than thinking "how did we get here?" we think "how do we get out of here?" The two are interrelated, but the second somehow gets things moving, and reduces resentment in toxic workplaces.