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New theory claims to unite Einstein's gravity with quantum mechanics

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Re: New theory claims to unite Einstein's gravity with quantum mechanics

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't speak for OP, but I've had more than a few similar experiences (from both sides of the fence FWIW). I can think of one example in software deployment frequency. The observation (many years ago), was that it's painful and risky (therefore, expensive) to deploy software, so we should do it as infrequently as the market will allow. Many companies used to be on annual release schedules, some even longer. Many organ…

I don't see why a slow deployment cadence is a nightmare. When I've worked in that setting, it mostly didn't matter to me when something got deployed. When it did (e.g. because something was broken), we had a process in place to deploy only high priority fixes between normal releases. Computers mostly just continue to work when you don't change anything, so that meant after the first week or so after a release, the c…

Good question. The nightmare was mostly organizational.

The amount of politicking was incredible when it came to which features would be in the next push and which features would slip. The planning meetings, the arguments, the capability slashing, the instability that came from all these political decisions. It was not great and this enormous amount of churn literally disappeared when they moved to daily pushes.

Re: New theory claims to unite Einstein's gravity with quantum mechanics

#202
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't speak for OP, but I've had more than a few similar experiences (from both sides of the fence FWIW). I can think of one example in software deployment frequency. The observation (many years ago), was that it's painful and risky (therefore, expensive) to deploy software, so we should do it as infrequently as the market will allow. Many companies used to be on annual release schedules, some even longer. Many organ…

That's more "the experts had a (wrong) opinion on something" than "the experts overlooked something obvious". They didn't overlook it, they thought about it and came to a conclusion. And if by "many years ago" you refer to a period where software deployment was mostly offline and through physical media, then it was indeed painful and risky (and therefore expensive). The experts weren't wrong back then.

Great points, I agree with you.

Re: New theory claims to unite Einstein's gravity with quantum mechanics

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give any examples of times you’ve easily anticipated X when a whole field of subject matter experts have demonstrably overlooked it?

* [insert every example of "15 year old unknown vulnerability in X found" here] * have to be a bit vague here, but while working as a research scientist for the US Department of Defense I regularly witnessed and occasionally took part in scenarios where a radical idea turned "expert advice" on its head, or some applied thing completely contradicted established theoretical models in a novel or interesting way. Consist…

I missed this comment first time around, but I really appreciate this write-up.

I apologize for being a bit snide in my original challenge, I'm fairly sensitive to the "why don't you just" attitude, but I agree with pretty much everything you have to say here.

I have a very similar approach around enumerating and testing assumptions when the going gets tough, and similarly have found that has enabled me to solve a handful of problems previously claimed impossible.

I think the tautological issue with our initial framing is that if you're able to easily identify these problems you probably are a subject matter expert. In many ways it's the outsider art of analytical problem solving - established wisdom should not be sacred.

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