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Suppose I Wanted to Kill a Lot of Pilots (2020)

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Re: Suppose I Wanted to Kill a Lot of Pilots (2020)

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably you can only refute hypotheses, if you're of the empiricist mindset about testability, so in a sense that's even _more_ stringent. TRIZ seems to admit of situations where basically, you don't know enough about what your hypothesis ought to be that 'the scientific method' won't get you far enough, so you must proceed by walling off as much of your search space as possible as fast as possible by prioritizing t…

Doesn't this implicitly assume that the negatives are easier to enumerate than the positives? What is the test for this? Gut feeling?

> Doesn't this implicitly assume that the negatives are easier to enumerate than the positives?

In my experience, the lowest-hanging fruit tend to be negatives. Once those are gone, the negatives that are left require more creativity to ascertain.

Re: Suppose I Wanted to Kill a Lot of Pilots (2020)

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I see in responses to you, Munger has designed other well-received dorms in the past so that gives him credibility on this topic. It doesn't mean he's right but it's a good chance his thinking is more nuanced than those shitting on it - especially coupled with the current article that describes how he thinks. This is total conjecture but I can imagine him doing something like this: Question: how do you make…

> his thinking is more nuanced than those shitting on it To be fair, an architect with 15 years on the UCSB Review Committee resigned over this... so it's not just outsiders and the media who are bagging on the design. https://www.independent.com/2021/10/28/architect-resigns-in-...

Architects for his other buildings didn't resign though. Why do you trust this one specifically over the other ones who followed through creating the buildings?

Re: Suppose I Wanted to Kill a Lot of Pilots (2020)

#73
I've long carried a suspicion that some relentlessly negative people are expressing their gift for TRIZ and troubleshooting.

Because their early years are filled with people who are push back against this ability, their nature tends to devolve into unproductive reactions.

Re: Suppose I Wanted to Kill a Lot of Pilots (2020)

#74
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, TDD has a bit of a similar effect on your perception on a problem. By first designing the test that would make the code fail, then making sure it fails, then create the code to have the test pass, you kind of change the way you think about the original problem, and it sometimes helps.

Unit tests only catch known failure modes. TDD only catches assumed known failure modes.

That's not a particularly relevant criticism here. The point is that TDD teaches you to think adversarially about your code all the time. The fact that you are not always successful isn't a very interesting criticism; if you don't think adversarially about your code at all you're even less successful. "Testing can't catch all bugs!" is an objection for another discussion.

Re: Suppose I Wanted to Kill a Lot of Pilots (2020)

#75
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad things can happen, therefore, we should not discourage bad things from happening?

Having a windowless bedroom isn't some terrible tragedy that happens to you. It's a minor inconvenience and bit of adversity that is temporary. Probably about 20% of all of the people that I know who moved to New York to pursue their dreams lived for at least a year in an illegal windowless-bedroom shared apartment (they exist because there is demand for cheap housing). Young people need to be challenged with small b…

This is a good example of pointless suffering and self flagellation

Re: Suppose I Wanted to Kill a Lot of Pilots (2020)

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The navy pays people to live like that; the university is charging people. Not sure this is comparable.

If the education were worth a damn, people would be climbing over each other to get into those dorms. The juice not being worth the squeeze is not the dorms' fault.

The goal when designing something isn't to be as shitty as will be tolerated. And people are doing lots to get these educations... going massively in debt seems like a pretty strong indicator that people want the education I'd say.

Re: Suppose I Wanted to Kill a Lot of Pilots (2020)

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I see in responses to you, Munger has designed other well-received dorms in the past so that gives him credibility on this topic. It doesn't mean he's right but it's a good chance his thinking is more nuanced than those shitting on it - especially coupled with the current article that describes how he thinks. This is total conjecture but I can imagine him doing something like this: Question: how do you make…

> his thinking is more nuanced than those shitting on it To be fair, an architect with 15 years on the UCSB Review Committee resigned over this... so it's not just outsiders and the media who are bagging on the design. https://www.independent.com/2021/10/28/architect-resigns-in-...

Yup. For what it's worth I couldn't find any examples of that architect's work to compare with.

And I would also say if you are a professional who got cut out of the process, you are gonna be pissed off no matter what.

not to say this architect is bad/wrong, just that he doesn't exactly have any incentive to celebrate this.

Re: Suppose I Wanted to Kill a Lot of Pilots (2020)

#78
post #11

> "He eventually pulled together lists of best practices and key principles of innovation based on this work, which became “the theory of inventive problem solving” alternatively known as TRIZ. > Believing he was on to something, he got a little excited and sent Joseph Stalin a letter in 1948 criticizing the lack of innovation within the Soviet system. This earned him a political prisoner title and a 25-year sentence…

Yep, that's how Stalin's science worked if you dared to think that you know better how the system should be run. For example, the USSR space program leader Korolev lost his teeth from malnutrition in a Gulag camp between his earlier rocketry work and sending Gagarin to space; and arguably the best Russian agronomist/geneticist Vavilov died in prison because he dared to criticize the pseudoscience of Lysenko, who was…

The same happens in Brazil nowadays. You dare to criticize Bolsonaro and you're excluded. A scientist was going to receive a prize last week for his research showing that chloroquine doesn't help against COVID-19 and once the Bolsominions discovered it, the prize was cancelled (because the president is a proponent of "alternative" treatments and against vaccines -- he recently said they cause AIDS).

Re: Suppose I Wanted to Kill a Lot of Pilots (2020)

#79
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> his thinking is more nuanced than those shitting on it To be fair, an architect with 15 years on the UCSB Review Committee resigned over this... so it's not just outsiders and the media who are bagging on the design. https://www.independent.com/2021/10/28/architect-resigns-in-...

Architects for his other buildings didn't resign though. Why do you trust this one specifically over the other ones who followed through creating the buildings?

Surely the architect working on this building is the one to listen to about this building.

Re: Suppose I Wanted to Kill a Lot of Pilots (2020)

#80

I've long carried a suspicion that some relentlessly negative people are expressing their gift for TRIZ and troubleshooting. Because their early years are filled with people who are push back against this ability, their nature tends to devolve into unproductive reactions.

The problem with being relentlessly negative is that it doesn't work. Not unless the people you're explaining the problem to are receptive to your approach, and they don't think you're just a naysayer. You must explain what you are doing and, if possible, show good results you obtained through this method.

To be effective, you don't have to be just right; you have to convince others that you are right as well.

To give an extreme example, the Soviet engineer of this story was lucky Stalin died, because he certainly didn't understand the mindset of his interlocutor and wasn't well received.

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