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Overthinking (2021)

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Re: Overthinking (2021)

#11

Post by throwawayarnty »

This made me think of science and academia. One of the things that seems to distinguish productive people in science is the balance between “doer” mentality and “thinker” mentality.

Too much “thinker” mentality and the project never goes anywhere. Too much “doer” mentally and the project moves but may go down an unproductive path.

Perhaps an analogy is that “thinker” and “doer” mentalities work together like a stochastic gradient descent algorithm.

The “thinker” mode tries to calculate accurate gradients, but never moves towards the goal.

The “doer” mode takes a step towards the next iteration, regardless of whether you have an accurate gradient already.

Balancing the two correctly can give beautiful momentum dynamics that steers towards your goal.

Re: Overthinking (2021)

#12

Post by imoverclocked »

wnolens wrote: post #3
imoverclocked wrote: post #2

A refreshingly good take on paralysis by analysis. I have suffered from this in the past as well. I found that having projects that are otherwise meaningless that I can hack together helps. It’s almost like a mini hackathon where the only thing that matters is the end product. Maybe I’ll choose something completely out of my professional life (eg woodworking with scrap wood) or write something in a language nobody ar…

Kind of like practicing non-perfectionism? I received that advice from a friend once. Pick a domain with much lower stakes, and practice making decisions.

Yes, I find failure is a key component here too. Without being able to fail, you get stuck in the perfection loop.

Re: Overthinking (2021)

#13

Post by Deritio »

contingencies wrote: post #5

Living in China it's quite amazing how the business culture differs from many western markets. People seem to throw themselves in to ventures without business plans, market research or specific costings. I suppose that when the cost of failure is reduced, dynamism results, because reaction times to opportunities are reduced and people are able to take the risk of following a new path. These days, when I think of anal…

There are not many industry breaking huge china based companies globally in comparison of how many people they have.

Perhaps our way might not be that bad after all.

And while Chinese currently the EV market discovers it's totally unclear how the car industry will look in 10 years

Re: Overthinking (2021)

#14

Post by Archelaos »

contingencies wrote: post #5

Living in China it's quite amazing how the business culture differs from many western markets. People seem to throw themselves in to ventures without business plans, market research or specific costings. I suppose that when the cost of failure is reduced, dynamism results, because reaction times to opportunities are reduced and people are able to take the risk of following a new path. These days, when I think of anal…

> If you thought corporate VC was bad, try that in an old-Europe context...

I am not sure whether it is specific for old-Europe or not just a universal symptom for long-running companies unable to re-invent themselves, because they were somehow locked into an established pathway, so that fundamental changes promissing probable benefits in the long run would mean certain short-term losses in the near future due to major investments and canibalization of their legacy businesses. An example outside of Europe seems to be Boeing's stretching of a several-decade-old airplane design towards a limit were it became increasingly problematic, while starting over would have involved extremely large investments and the loss of much of the experience gained from the old design.

On the positive side, such lock-ins of traditional companies can mean sound business opportunities for small newcomers. I was myself working with small dynamic companies in Germany and Austria who were afraid that one day a large, financially strong competitor might decide to copy their successful products and business modell or enter their highly profitable niche market -- however, it never happened. In other words: If the parent is right and established companies in old-Europe are even more unflexible than elsewhere, it should be safer to attempt to disrupt their old-Europe markets than to try the same somewhere else.

Re: Overthinking (2021)

#15

Post by glial »

throwawayarnty wrote: post #11

This made me think of science and academia. One of the things that seems to distinguish productive people in science is the balance between “doer” mentality and “thinker” mentality. Too much “thinker” mentality and the project never goes anywhere. Too much “doer” mentally and the project moves but may go down an unproductive path. Perhaps an analogy is that “thinker” and “doer” mentalities work together like a stocha…

> Balancing the two correctly

There are some famous examples complementary and different personalities working together very well, like e.g. Kahneman and Tversky:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-two-friends-...

Re: Overthinking (2021)

#16

Post by UIUC_06 »

> I've also noticed that, up to a certain point, the smarter a person is, the more it has to be apparent in their work. Every algorithm needs to be perfect, every function needs to be side-effects free, every data structure needs to be the fastest, and every best practice needs to be followed.

Many engineers are somewhere on the Asperger's spectrum, as Temple Grandin tells her Googler audience in [1]. Overthinking is a prime symptom of it. I'm disappointed to see that not even mentioned in this article.

There are some engineering practices that, unfortunately, amplify this rather than tamping it down. Code reviews, in particular, can do that; a reviewer gets points by nitpicking ("you could have done that in one line instead of two!").

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA4tE3_2qmI

Re: Overthinking (2021)

#17

Post by astrange »

blocked_again wrote: post #8
kissiel wrote: post #7

Thing that helped me with avoiding this kind of problem was learning about wabi sabi[0]. A mindset of accepting and finding beauty in imperfection. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi

Are there any books you recommend?

I’d recommend https://metarationality.com/.

It’s a book optimized for arguing with rationalists (who among other things think overthinking can solve every problem) so some of the points seem irrelevant to most people, but they can be useful.

Re: Overthinking (2021)

#18

Post by astrange »

hinkley wrote: post #9
bombcar wrote: post #4

A big part of learning this is not overanalyzing past failures. Check and see if you missed something major, but then don't dwell much on the details; perhaps anything you would have done would have been doomed to failure; it wasn't the time, etc.

PA Yeomans, the 'other' father of permaculture, had a checklist he called the Scale of Permanence. It's a sort of priority list for irreversible decisions, and is helpful for figuring out if you're expending energy on something that's easy to change later, or rashly deciding on something that is going to be difficult or infeasible to change later. In a system that favors watching first and acting at the last responsi…

> PA Yeomans, the 'other' father of permaculture, had a checklist he called the Scale of Permanence.

What an interesting case of nominative determinism.

Re: Overthinking (2021)

#19

Post by itsmemattchung »

Amazon has an internal tool called "Forte", a tool used once a year for employees to provide "anonymous" feedback for one another. One piece of feedback that cropped up multiple times for me, from multiple people, was that I could improve in "bias for action", akin to analysis paralysis mentioned in the article.

At first, I got a bit defensive ... and in response, I ended up running an experiment, delivering code & written documents that — inside my head — felt incomplete, unpolished, not quite at the "bar".

The feedback following?

Overwhelmingly positive.

I had anticipated that my peers and leadership would notice a drop in quality. Instead, I was commended for speed of delivery.

Re: Overthinking (2021)

#20

Post by UmbertoNoEco »

Deritio wrote: post #13
contingencies wrote: post #5

Living in China it's quite amazing how the business culture differs from many western markets. People seem to throw themselves in to ventures without business plans, market research or specific costings. I suppose that when the cost of failure is reduced, dynamism results, because reaction times to opportunities are reduced and people are able to take the risk of following a new path. These days, when I think of anal…

There are not many industry breaking huge china based companies globally in comparison of how many people they have. Perhaps our way might not be that bad after all. And while Chinese currently the EV market discovers it's totally unclear how the car industry will look in 10 years

By our way you mean leverage fiat currencies and take advantage of being in total control of international multilateral organizations?
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