These deadlocks of thought have a resource that is differended (not available to the discussion we are having for ideological reasons) but I will attempt a provocation: Philosophy. Precisely Graham Harmon's Immaterialsm and the analysis of form and the process of Duomining: This preoccupation with objects and forms cuts against the grain of most recent avant-garde theorizing in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Usually objects are either dissolved downward into material components and sub-individual, blob-like masses (“undermining”), or they are dissolved upward into holistic networks of relations, events, and practices (“overmining”), or both of these at once (“duomining”). Form, for its part, has been so marginalized by the repeated waves of materialist theories that it is usually mentioned only in the context of mathematical formalization (for recent examples see Badiou 2006; Meillassoux 2008), precisely the opposite of what object-oriented philosophy means by form: a surplus beyond any access, mathematical or otherwise.(https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315641171... )
Overthinking
51–60 of 75 posts
Re: Overthinking
#52I'm so astonished that we are so careful not to overthink, to the point we accept "you're overthinking it" as a valid excuse to disregard rare risks. But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people ove…
Relax the amount of overthinking people do is negligible compared to the amount of under thinking. Overthinking is not a problem, seriously.
This guy in the article only thinks it's a problem because people are acutely aware of overthinking. They are completely unaware of under thinking.
There are simply too many topics in the world to think about so in order to make sense of the world at a macro level you under think almost everything.
I mean the guy is a software engineer OF COURSE he overthinks software related stuff. Guaranteed he's under thinking most of everything else.
Re: Overthinking
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people overthink. We do this all the time. We just don't use the word "underthink". "You didn't think this through." "It sounds like you haven't gotten to the…
To add to this: - Look before you leap. - Measure twice, cut once. - Stay silent and have people think you're a fool, open your mouth and confirm it. I'm sure there are many more common idioms pointing towards the idea of "think before you act".
Where I'm from we have similar sayings:
- Don't dive head first into water.
- Measure nine times, cut once.
And a random saying I just remembered: "Autumn has the eyes of a summer and the teeth of a wolf."
Edit:formatting
Re: Overthinking
#54Overthinking is when the Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in. You can see it happening every day in the meeting rooms while planning new features/releases, we don't really get any new information but it's comforting to just talk about it.
Re: Overthinking
#55I'm so astonished that we are so careful not to overthink, to the point we accept "you're overthinking it" as a valid excuse to disregard rare risks. But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people ove…
> I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this".
"We need to think about it more" definitely exists. "We need to turn it into proper plan first" exists too.
Re: Overthinking
#56I'm so astonished that we are so careful not to overthink, to the point we accept "you're overthinking it" as a valid excuse to disregard rare risks. But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people ove…
> But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people overthink. We do this all the time. We just don't use the word "underthink". "You didn't think this through." "It sounds like you haven't gotten to the…
The trouble is those phrases are all quite hostile whereas telling someone they are overthinking can't be construed to mean "your stupid".
Re: Overthinking
#57Thank you, I really liked that post. I'am 40years now and started to teach myself programming 4 years ago. I do a lot of overthinking, like "Linux or Windows", "Should I learn some C before Python? What about all this networking stuff, how does that work?". I know it probably doesn't really matter, because I consider myself still a beginner in programming, but it is sometimes really hard not to feel overwhelmed by al…
It certainly does matter, but it might not be the angle you want to approach the problem from. If you set a goal and/or find a mentor, the choices suddenly become easier, and the chance to get yourself lost in ideology -- slimmer.
Re: Overthinking
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
In America, if there's no law against it you can do it. In France, if there's no law allowing it, you can't do it.
Would you care to give a few examples? Where something was forbidden _without any law_ and then later allowed _with a law_?
Well there are so many rules and official norms (approx. 400,000) and exceptions about pretty much anything in France that this is pretty accurate... Just look up the rules of the road regarding phone calls while driving for examples and see how it has evolved over time: specifically holding the phone was forbidden but using headphones were explicitly allowed until the latter also got banned by another law a few years back. Now to have calls we must put our phones on speakers (but not too loud) and use both hands for driving, effectively forbidding us to give any calls while driving all that without explicitly saying so.
It's hardly enforceable, but wait until you encounter a zealous police agent that's been tasked to give a certain amount of tickets
Re: Overthinking
#59I overthink things and end up in analysis paralysis, not for any of the reasons listed, but because I don't want to have to untangle an incorrect mess later on.
That feels a lot like the "marketing" one. I think the belief that if you just think enough, you won't have to untangle anything later, is almost always incorrect. I've worked on a lot of systems that were very thought through but also ended up very messy - in large part because circumstances and needs changed over the years in ways that would be near-impossible to plan for all of them. But people selling framework X…
Haha, exactly! You'll have to untangle a mess no matter what you choose. It's in the name -- SOFTware! Soft, because it can and will change.
Re: Overthinking
#60I'm so astonished that we are so careful not to overthink, to the point we accept "you're overthinking it" as a valid excuse to disregard rare risks. But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people ove…
Overthinking stuff while the requirements are not stable get into the details is what people want to communicate.
Lots of Detail gets worked out, while the project is not even down this path.