> In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

And it's a fantastic principle in general, since it's like the technical equivalent of the Principle of Charity.

( http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html )

Obvious "errors" like if(false) is a stupid example of this, why would someone commit if(false)? Is it supposed to be if(true)? Is it for debugging only or is it code that should actually be removed? Maybe it's used for other reasons by a preprocessing-tool that you are not aware of?

I've had the joy of seeing code which broke completely if you removed the line while(false){}. Some hideous synchronization bug was solved by this line, and while it obviously wasn't the right solution, simply deleting it produced bad outputs. Profilers and processing tools are, as you say, other likely causes of dumb-looking code choices.

The stupider the "error", the more suspicion you should assign to its presence in any half-decent code.

Assume that those who came before you had good reasons for their actions, and assume that those after you will be unable to identify any motivation you don't state explicitly.

I'd be curious to see a strong legislative version of this - enshrining the spirit of the law in the text, and giving courts explicit rights to strike down laws which no longer fulfill their original intent. Done well, it's the sort of change which could have worked wonders on our legal system's constant failure to adapt to technological change. The Aereo suit, for instance, shouldn't have happened under any kind of intent-based legal system.

There's a limit to that assumption, though. I'm always inclined to assume that people had reasons, and that they looked good at the time, but without knowing what those reasons are, there's no way to know if the reasons are as good now as they were then, even if you make the charitable assumption that they were good reasons at the time.

I would be a big fan of the idea that legislation had built-in turnover clauses, for instance, that required renewal every N years (for a value of N not much larger than the turnover rate of legislators). Which then means if you want something to persist, you would have to document your rationale for posterity, and convincingly argue that that rationale still applies.

> I'd be curious to see a strong legislative version of this - enshrining the spirit of the law in the text, and giving courts explicit rights to strike down laws which no longer fulfill their original intent.

I agree completely. Laws should state up front that "the purpose of this law is to ...", and for that matter explicitly state any other relevant considerations or side effects and whether they're considered beneficial, undesired, or simply neutral. That would mean there would have to be at least a pretense of a sensible motive, and that interpretations that don't serve that motive could be thrown out.

> The Aereo suit, for instance, shouldn't have happened under any kind of intent-based legal system.

It still could have, depending on the intent. The intent of copyright law, for instance, is supposed to be "we want more works produced, but we also want more works to enrich the public domain, so there's a tradeoff". The intent was never about authors and what they want; that's a means to an end. However, that rarely seems to be reflected in deliberations.

Let's be honest. These things would mostly be just bundled up and passed all at once. Or, alternatively, they would be used as leverage like the budget currently is. Actually, it would pretty much be exactly like the budget at this point. It either sails through with no issues, or it begins months of partisan bickering.

EDIT: Also, could you imagine the kind of flex we might see on major laws? I can only imagine large sets of laws sunsetting every time the Congress majority changes... Hey, at least it will create a whole industry centered around these adjustments! That's job creation right there! And, as always, the lawyers will be making their money.

It might be simpler to just sunset every law by default after some period and require lawmakers to periodically renew them - if a majority can't form to support renewal, then it's reasonable to assume the original motivation lacks support. It's also a handy way of nudging updates to the laws to keep up with current times.

While that doesn't seem like the main intent of such an approach, it certainly sounds like a beneficial side effect. New legislation is not a thing that should occur particularly often, or lightly.

> It's also a handy way of nudging updates to the laws to keep up with current times.

Agreed. (You'd also need to have some requirement to prevent any omnibus renewal legislation.)

If you're refactoring, you can use unit tests and proofs of equivalence to demonstrate that your changes don't pose a threat. If you're rewriting a whole codebase, you're likely to wander down the same paths of "wait, the simple way doesn't work" that the person before you took.

Even bafflingly small changes like removing always-false tests have been known to break code, which ought to inspire real hesitation any time you see "stupid" code written by a smart person.

Yes, but really, if you write stupid-looking code because of arcane reasons you really owe the rest of humanity at least

    //THIS SHOULD BE LIKE THAT BECAUSE ARCANE REASON

This is the main purpose of comments.

Okay, how is this even possible? Reflection/pre-processing magic?

>I've had the joy of seeing code which broke completely if you removed the line while(false){}. Some hideous synchronization bug was solved by this line, and while it obviously wasn't the right solution, simply deleting it produced bad outputs. Profilers and processing tools are, as you say, other likely causes of dumb-looking code choices.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10036050

I can also imagine methods with side-effects. The test is always false but a side-effect is necessary.

Other issues I run into a fair amount is dealing with hardware/naked interrupts often involves a lot of subtle timing and read/write access issues. Sometimes this happens in code you don't own.

    def stub():
        while(False):
            print("smart stuff")

    print("hello, world")
    stub()

  def stub():
      return

  print("hello, world")
  stub()

That said, boo Python for not admitting empty bodies. It needlessly adds a special case to its syntax. I suspect this comes from the implementation of its lexer.

It was implied that we were talking about a C based language. You proved nothing. Others did.

It's important to try to understand why something exists, but it is also important to understand that the reason often is that it was either unintentional or silly, but you won't be able to prove it because it isn't documented and the person responsible is gone/unknown.

Usually this meant digging in deep, questioning really basic stuff like "Are we sure this model is normally open or closed? Did the manufacturer forget to tell us?", and normally there would be clues or evidence to hint at the next round of questions. Eventually you'll have enough information that the evidence fits the questions, and there's no clear line of inquiry left. Life experience and just volume of work teaches one the limits of inquiry (old engineers can be shockingly good at this, to the point of appearing sloppy :)

I once spent 6 hours overnight troubleshooting a confusing gas non-leak that ended up being the result of a default setting changing on a valve being replaced off-the-record by not-the-usual-guy. It gave me the confidence that this process does eventually get to the bottom of it, but it was a long, meandering path from miswired panels to out of date schematics in the wrong language to noting how clean the part was to know someone replaced it. All to dig out the missing tribal and undocumented information, proving the PLC was actually correct to interlock the whole machine out. (It's like knowing your program will halt - you can't prove it, but you can still be damn sure it will. At least until it doesn't ;)

For example, I could prove that I don't have a dragon in my pocket without breaking a sweat.

... which I'll happily sell you for just $2000. Remember, phase-shifted dragons are dangerous!

But I do have two formative things: Feynman's lecture on Cargo Cult Science is excellent, with this gem:

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that... I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen." - Feynman [0]

I can't tell you how many times this has saved me in the field. Replace the word 'scientist' with '<YOUR DISCIPLINE HERE>' as needed. (And I think moreso for engineers than scientists, since safety absolutely requires this mentality.)

And I really like the ideas in The Pragmatic Programmer [1]. More than anything specific, the idea of not being married to any particular concept or solution, but rather to pragmatically chose what is correct then for that circumstance helps a lot. The book is opinionated, but reasonable, and copying that pleasant tone is a fast way to make allies when solving problems in a group. And it's a pretty good book to boot.

[0] http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html (and is an HN favorite, to be sure)

[1] https://pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer (another HN favorite, though not always brought up in terms of engineering)

The 'assumption of truth' step doesn't require us to believe anyone who walks up and says "A ^ ~A". Rather, it says that you shouldn't immediately reject a philosophy because it disagrees with your prior notions.

The 'resolve contradictions' similarly doesn't mean that we have to overlook flawed claims. It's a tool to help learn an idea even if you don't get a perfect presentation of it. There may be a valuable concept available even if the person explaining it to you can't properly work through every detail.

As an example, most people who could talk to you about evolution can't explain the development of eyes, but that doesn't mean you should assume evolution is bunk when you hear about it. The principle of charity says "there might be a good reason here, whether or not they can provide it".

In short, the principle is an attempt to get value out of ideas you're presented with. That might mean you're engaging with a different idea than what you were actually presented with, but it gets you more insight. It's not something you want to use when faced with a concrete form of the document - it's not a reason to pass a bad-but-well-intentioned law.

He had a great story to go with this, but the TLDR is that the PoC is the safe choice when applied to engineering: give a true, best-faith effort to prove the opposing view correct. (And best-faith is important: you can not approach it with bias, lest you waste everyone's time.) If you're right, then you'll find an irrefutable flaw in the engineering, and if you're wrong you've learned something new.

If it sounds like a lot of effort, it is.

But this is also utterly win-win. It's a way of assuring that you've been careful. Avoiding the humiliation of hubris is great if a detail of the implementation was missed at first glance. But you also will inevitably more fully understand the problem when you've failed to implement the opposing view; it also puts you in the excellent position to graciously be on the same side as your opponent and now you can sway your now-ally-in-war in their reasoning. In either way, your goal must be to solve the problem, and not merely "win" political points.

Of course, there's crackpot theories and stupid ideas and foolish plans which should be dismissed with prejudice. But hopefully you're working in a professional environment where your coworkers really are trying their best to succeed. And even then, a serious engineer will still give the stupid ideas at least some (small) time of day, as you must have a reason for all decisions, even dismissals; as you become experienced, you'll be able to properly dismiss these faster and more precisely, but you'll still need to go through the process. That process is what separates the people who loudly proclaim they are smart and right from those who would testify in court they are right.

(Incidentally, this is part of the reason why I get immensely frustrated with "idea people", as it takes much more work to flesh out their half-assed ideas into full-assed ideas. Non-engineers don't get that there's a huge amount of effort to constantly take everything and everyone seriously.)

If you can't concoct a strong* argument favoring the opposing view, you don't understand the issue well enough.

*Edit: as suggested, it's "strong" argument, not necessarily "convincing". If you can make a convincing argument for the other side but not for your own, perhaps you need reconsider your stance.

And although "ignorance" has a negative connotation, I argue it's a neutral thing unless otherwise modified, ie. as opposed to "willful ignorance".

The healthcare field uses the gentler term "knowledge deficit" regarding patients; I've taken to using that term in engineering contexts as well.

Yes.

Have you never used a flat map for navigation? Did the map deviate from what you observed on the earth by enough to notice? The curvature of the earth is very small, so it is trivial to come up with a world-view in which it would be "obvious" that the earth is flat.

Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long."

- Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong, http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm (read the whole thing.)

Rather, I'd have to rely on local measurements. And that'd nail me too: the Earth only curves about 12cm / km. So if I could only resolve a local rise-over-run of 1/1000, I wouldn't be able to fail the null hypothesis that the Earth is flat. (But if I could manage an order of magnitude better, I could!) And given that hills and such are all kinds of lumpy, and large bodies of water are rarely still, getting even that level of resolution without advanced optics would be difficult. (Though if you can be sure you've got a straight enough stick...)

So I think it really comes down to how well you can prove or measure anything. Once we had telescopes, there really wasn't too much confusion about the spherical nature of the planet. (And people had suspected for a very long time the earth was - at least in some way - round. Eclipses give that away a bit.) But the details really give us the resolving power to be sure. That and it helps to get away from local measurements - get up really high, and it becomes easier to tell (and IIRC some early experiments measuring the size of the Earth took advantage of really large height differences).

After all, Newton was right, too. But add a few extra zeroes to the solutions, and we start seeing some deviation from our relative measurements...

[0] http://mathcentral.uregina.ca/QQ/database/QQ.09.02/shirley3....

I mention that to set premise that one can be remarkably unaware of a plain truth just around the corner. The strong argument for Earth being flat is little different from the strong argument for Earth perceived as flat. The flaw obviously is the objective difference between fact & perception.

I go thru trouble of writing this to note that while you're pointing fingers at the difference between being and perceiving, you are yourself holding the mistaken notion that Earth is a lumpy sphere, when Earth is, in objective reality, a very long and slightly bent 4-dimensional _spring_ shape, which we see just a 3-d cross-section of which looks spherical to us lower-dimensional beings.

While making a strong argument, be humble - your perception may be objectively wrong, misguided, or incomplete as well.

"I use a flat map to navigate. I perceive no difference between the map and reality. Therefore reality is like the map."

For things that are very strongly one-sided you almost certainly aren't going to make an argument that convinces yourself, but if it's not at least as good as the arguments used by people that disagree with you, you are doing yourself an intellectual disservice.

What if the fence was put there for purposes of adverse posession? Those who would defend the fence, absent any documentation, would ascribe the most noble uses to it, as their desire is to maintain the status quo, or at least the status pro se. They would, to use Chesterton's term, 'go gaily up to it' and defend it with their lives, saying "clearly this fence always existed, and thus should always be."

Chesterton's 'modern reformer' is a strawman as bald-faced as any, and it's all too easy to use "Chesterton's Fence" as a defense of mindless conservatism.

Answering that question is the very reason for pausing to investigate its purpose. Questioning past purposes before reforming is not equivalent to "defending the fence absent any documentation." Your own characterization of this "mindless conservatism" is itself a straw-man of the behavior Chesterton's fence recommends.

The alternative is an endless cycle of deconstruction that impedes any progress, as every possible step or rational for it brings a possible mask to power. The Nietzschean project, though fun, has produced nothing besides criticism, and would never succeed in taking any kind of action about said fence.

So you answer the question and determine the fence is there because of adverse possession. And then everyone else you present your findings to says, "that's not a good reason, so clearly you're not using Chesterton's fence and we shouldn't make any changes." See the issue?

Chesterton's fence and/or the Principle of Charity only have the potential to lead you to a good answer if the other party is putting in a good faith effort. But as soon as that's not the case, these cognitive rules of thumb basically become tools of oppression. And if you've ever watched congressional testimony where the parties are forbidden by rule from criticizing each other, it's easy to see that lots of people purposely take advantage of this.

Also, in the context of business the PoC means assuming that people are acting in their self interest, but in the context of politics or whatever it means assuming that people aren't acting in their self interest. As a rule of thumb for improving your thinking then these sorts of ideas probably make sense, especially for things like entrepreneurship or software engineering, but at an epistemological level the phrase "not even wrong" comes to mind.

I must confess that I don't. I guess this depends on why you are doing this: if your goal is to convince other people that you should remove the gate, you must accept that it is a possibility that other people may not find your argument convincing. That is their prerogative, right? If you need their permission to remove the gate, there is nothing you can really do without convincing them anyway.

If, however, you are doing this for your own benefit, it may help you understand the system and propose/tweak your own solution to the problem better.

Or maybe I don't understand what you are saying here.

That's exactly the point though - If a person can successfully defend the existence of a fence against your insistence for change, they've not demonstrated that the fence is required beyond all doubt, they've demonstrated that YOU are not capable enough to be the one that changes it, since your knowledge of the domain can't even defeat a "silly" insistence of maintaining the status quo.

I more or less don't believe that principles are actually possible to act on in a principled manner. If everyone all at once took a deep breath and started calling the things they call principles ideals, we could probably avoid a lot of bad discussions (because implicit in that labeling is the observation that compromise sometimes happens).

http://www.amazon.com/Whose-Justice-Rationality-Alasdair-Mac...

"There are often very valid (and even necessary) reasons for why certain things are done in certain ways; these reasons often become clear to us only after we have more deeply investigated into the full details of how things work, whereas our first, less than fully informed reaction may be to regard them as silly, or to attribute them to the wrong cause or agent, or to entirely misunderstand them." (John H Meyers)

There's also the implication that alternatives have already been tried. But what if they haven't? How are you supposed to tell?

Clearly you can't, unless the alternatives have been documented historically. If there's no documentation you're firmly in the land of convention, tradition, and opinion - not effectiveness.

I'd prefer a model that assumes running a start-up is like running an experiment on a market. You probe the market with a complete package of technology, marketing, networking, and funding. Then you assess the results. And then - the hard part - you try to work out which parts of the package aren't working, and design a new experiment.

You absolute should examine competing models for validity, and you absolutely shouldn't assume they're wrong because you're just that awesome.

But assuming they're a better market fit without reality-testing and evidence makes as little sense as assuming they're bad at what they're doing.

If that were true, there would be no room to innovate at all.

The only problem is that it's sometimes not possible anymore to find out why something is the way it is.

If you've ever worked on legacy software, you know what I mean.

That might be a false assumption (look, some people just don't care) but you gain very little by complaining and getting mad at things that already happened.

We love to complain about things our predecessors did wrong, but often, we don't do those things either :)

One example I see all the time is my more liberal/left-leaning friends assuming that their conservative adversaries (especially on the internet) are motivated solely by stupidity.

This trips them up when they are confronted with evidence of intelligence and solid reasoning from the people they had presumed to be capable of neither.

The reverse also happens of course, with the conservative person characterising their adversary as the stereotypical "Dumb Hippy".

At one extreme, you may discover a flaw in your reasoning. Even if not, you may find that while not entirely sound, there are valuable aspects to the other person's point of view, which can make your world-view more nuanced. Or perhaps you will simply confirm your initial perspective... but even then, you're much more likely to inspire the other person to think on the subject than if you come in with the perspective that they're provably wrong (and perhaps a bit pitiable for it). By seeking to really understand someone, you inspire them to do the same for you.

You said: "by definition is an unjustified belief ... no reason or logical backing ... malfunction of your reasoning system"

exactly proving the point. You've made a blanket statement regarding anyone who has come to a different conclusion from you regarding the supernatural. It must be stupidity! It can't possibly be justified, or even clear the bar of not-totally-irrational! There's no room to even try to have a conversation, because "by definition" people on the other side are stupid.

I was raised in a religion that emphasizes understanding the belief system and arguments for it (the focus on valuing the truth was what caused me to ultimately leave, btw.). So I do have first-hand experience of what it means to believe in something for perfectly good reason with strong, consistent arguments. And I have to tell you, while most religious people probably believe for reasons like you just described, I've seen and talked to many self-proclaimed atheists and many refuse to believe for exactly the same reasons - they were raised as atheists. Or they discovered that atheism is what cool people do, or didn't want to stand out from the crowd.

People who don't believe in supernatural aren't inherently smarter than those who do. For many (I suspect most) of them, atheism is a blind faith, the same way Christianity is for their parents.

I have met very few people like this.

And, again, you are making the OP's point. You have it all figured it out -- you know how wrong everyone who disagrees with you is. Whether you call it "stupid" or "a disease" or "irrational", the point is that you're not attempting to learn from them or understand them, you're simply being dismissive of everyone who concludes differently from you.

Religion is 'solved' in the sense that they are man made belief systems, all which proclaim to be true, and most holding mutually exclusive claims between each other.

It is not debatable in a way left-right politics and their backers' stances and reasonings are. I'm not hating on them because it is not their fault. I feel for those trapped, I really do.

Given time societies turn (and have already turned in large parts) away from it through education and the undrstanding of the universe and the human condition via scientific method. There is no middle ground in this specific instance.

You would not entertain an alchemist or an astrologist either. Religion will soon join them in that regard in the collective consciousness.

And why do you think people won't entertain an alchemist or an astrologist? Why do you think religion will become similar to those disciplines?

It's not because people are getting smarter. It's because alchemy is not popular, science is! Most people don't understand a thing about either, but they have a firm opinion. That's just blind faith, the only thing that changes over the centuries is the object of faith.

It's completely orthogonal to the discussion about which is right and which is wrong. Most people don't know and don't care, as long as they believe the same thing their peers do, so I wouldn't be quick to judge one group, because the other is not smarter, it just sticks to the currently popular belief.

I feel fairly confident not entertaining someone who claims to be able to turn a lead brick into gold in their living room, because I know enough about physics and chemistry to understand the energy difference between lead and gold. But I would entertain someone who had nuclear-lab-grade equipment who claimed to be able to convert a small number of atoms. They might actually be full of crap, but my domain knowledge is not specific enough to be able to say.

When it comes to religion, I think the same thing with non-experts happens, and you're doing it. You claim to know all religious are "man made belief systems", "unjustified", with "no logical backing" -- claims that a domain expert can make regarding perhaps a few religions they're intimately familiar with, but not that anyone can actually make for all religions. How many religions have you studied deeply enough to really be able to make that claim? If Christianity is on your list, have you ever read the Didache, or De Principiis? If Mormonism is on your list, do you know about the Seer Stone or Elijah Abel? If Judaism is on your list, are you familiar with the Midrash or Siddur? These aren't particularly obscure references; they're things anyone well-enough versed in any of these religions to say "it's bogus because..." should know about.

If you don't know about those things, but you're sure each of those religions are "man-made", "unjustified", with "no logical backing", you should consider where your certainty comes from and how certain it really is.

- identify the central claims of a given religion

- identify the version of a central claim which is actually necessary for the religion

- determine what it would take to "refute" one of those claims sufficiently (rather than, for example, merely calling into question one of those claims, or refuting only one variant of a claim which has other variants.)

I contend that nobody on earth knows enough about "all religions" to be able to make such a claim. I further contend that, of the religions I mentioned above, if you didn't at least recognize the details I named, it's reasonably likely that your expertise is not deep enough to be able to follow those steps. For example, if you have never heard of The Didache, your awareness of Christianity is probably focused on only a small subgroup, whose "central claims" don't necessarily correspond to the claims of the broader religion; refuting one of that subgroup's claims may or may not have any relevance for someone from another subgroup.

With regard to identifying essential claims, I'd propose that any claim that is believed by a good number of the sect's adherents is an essential claim, as refuting it invalidates those particular adherents' beliefs.

Beyond that, the question is what epistemological value can be derived from the remaining religions? What reason can be given to accept them? The burden of proof should be on them to demonstrate that they together, or one of them alone, should be accepted as accurately describing reality.

P.S. Thanks for the interesting discussion.

Sure -- but unless you're reasonably well-educated on a particular religion, how do you know if the variations are subtle or substantial? How do you know if they're "broadly held", particularly among that religion's scholars? (You brought up "unerring divine origin of scripture", which is a common belief of Fundamentalist Christians; do you know how broadly that belief is held by non-Fundamentalists? Do you know what the other common views are among the more populous Christian and Jewish sects regarding the same scriptures? Are you aware that Mormons believe the Bible has been corrupted?)

> "any claim that is believed by a good number of the sect's adherents is an essential claim, as refuting it invalidates those particular adherents' beliefs"

In practice, it doesn't work that way. Every religion I've studied carefully has a lot of inessential beliefs which are nonetheless widely held -- beliefs which, if they were overturned, would not in any way shake the faith of that religion's adherents.

It's common for outsiders to misidentify how popular certain beliefs are, how strongly they are held, and how essential they are. It's also common for outsiders to believe they've refuted something, when in reality they've stated some fact that has been known and accepted for centuries and which is actually the tip of the iceberg for scholarly study within a given religion.

That's why I suggest that, if you haven't heard of some of the specifics I named above, you're probably not capable of actually refuting those religions. It's not that those things are critical, so much as that to identify and address the actual core beliefs in relevant ways requires a depth of knowledge which would also expose you to topics like the Didache, the Seer Stone, or the Midrash. (And I wouldn't dream of making any sort of claim about the refutability of "all" African tribal religions, or "all" eastern religions, because I don't have that sort of depth of knowledge. I can say that I don't presently believe any of them, but that's a much weaker claim than "they're all irrational and a disease".)

> "The burden of proof should be ... to demonstrate that they ... accurately describing reality"

This ties us back to my original contribution to this discussion. How does one demonstrate that their position accurately describes reality, to an audience that thinks they are "motivated solely by stupidity"? How does one demonstrate there is value to be found in their belief system to someone who issues blanket dismissals? How does either party get value out of a conversation if one of them believes it's a monologue -- an opportunity to tell their stupid opponent how wrong they are, with no expectation that they might learn something?

If you begin with the assumption that someone else is stupid and you don't need to listen carefully to them, whether you're talking about their religion or politics or software, then it's unlikely you'll go through the sort of critical thinking process the original article described (and likely you'll "get lazy about challenging your own assumptions".)

But let s just say that some of the greatest philosophers were also believers of some sort of diety. As well as some of the greatest scientists.

Indicative of this was a request to take a table of data that already existed (on a website) and add a button to export a CSV of that data. For anyone familiar with .NET (and I assume most other languages) if you've already got the data in the format you want to export this is literally a 10-minute task, including a unit test or two for the functionality. His quote was something on order of 18 hours which included time to write a set of TableDataExportService methods that would support a whole host of file formats in the future.

And once you've done that ten minute job on this page, how long will it take you to add it to the other 25 pages which also have tables of data that need CSV export? And when the table format changes to add another column, does the next developer also have to adjust your CSV output code?

Sure, YAGNI, but... there's no excuse to just throw a bunch of CSV-export logic inline into a page that previously had shown no interest in knowing how to format CSV files. Take a little longer, think about where to put the logic. There's a middle ground here.

Six months later everything was going horribly wrong because there was not a single one of us who was willing to solve a simple problem with simple code. Everybody was engineering the hell out of every single 'solution' and the code was impossible to read.

From this I learned a couple of things. One was that I had not learned as much from my Second System Syndrome as I thought I had. The second was that every project benefits from having people who are entertained by solving 'mundane' problems, to whom you can assign all concerns that are not part of the information architecture.

But the most important is that the best solution is -never- the one that is dazzlingly brilliant. It's often the one that's subtly clever (everyone agrees "that works", but some can wax poetic about how great it is at satisfying the concern), but sometimes it's the one that's dead simple.

Few solutions are easier to replace than the dead simple one.

Maybe this client was notorious for asking for CSV export but really meant CSV, XLS, XLSX, PDF? Maybe the build and release infrastructure is so slow that any change - no matter how small - needs 3 days to be built, tested, and deployed? Maybe the complexity makes sense in other areas of the system and they decided to adopt patterns across the codebase to aid in teaching/onboarding new developers?

Just to be clear, maybe you will find that the reasons are totally invalid and this is gold-plated-abstracted-to-hell code. (It sounds like you probably will)

But if you assume from the start that everything is an over-complicated pile of junk and you could rewrite it in a day, I think you will find yourself jaded and unhappy with your environment.

Software should be implemented as simple as possible, and then refactored as necessary when new functionality is required (the only exception is things you are very sure is going to be needed, e.g a password reset functionality on a password dialog).

Anyhow that is my development philosophy.

Which is not meant to detract from the fact that the code was great 99% of the time. It just took 10x longer than it should have and cost 10x as much and half of it was never used.

Don't over-generalize.

There is a messy code and there is a messy code. Changing shared data without synchronization is incompetence, but having a 3-page long for-loop is not. In reality though, once you've cleaned stables a dozen times spaghetti code is the red flag of incompetence and the correlation is there.

Question is, where's the incompetence?

Yup, like any profession, there are developers out there who just suck.

But the same is true of middle and senior company management. Can you honestly say you've never cut a corner because some incompetent manager mismanaged the schedule or customer expectations and then forced you to compromise quality in order to meet an absurd date?

And in any organization with that type of management, those issues are rarely isolated. Any one manager can do a little damage, but when an organization is dysfunctional, well-meaning coders on the ground may be forced to compromise code quality time and time again in order to deal with unrealistic schedules.

Think of it like a professional sports team. Sometimes, yeah, the players just suck. But a bad coach or general manager can have an outsized effect on an organization.

Now, I would never claim that all bad code is a product of bad management. Again, some folks just suck at their job. But speaking as a guy in middle management, I'd be willing to believe at least half of the bad code lying around in the real world is a product of an incompetent management structure.

Getting back to the article, that would represent the kind of hidden incentive that would cause an outsider to assume developer incompetence, even though the reality is very much different.

Even in your example of shared data/synchronization - what if the original developers were told that the code would never need to be thread-safe? Or what if there was a constraint that required this trade-off to be made? It's not so black and white.

I've worked on a legacy codebase where the developer both admitted that the code was a hack job, got guilty-defensive about it, and then refused to schedule any time to help make progress.

You just want to shake them by the shoulders and be like "Look, it's fine that you did the best you could, but you need to either help clean up the mess or get out of the way."

Chesterton's Fence is wise in moderation--otherwise, it ends up as technological hoarding.

Which suggests a test for your understanding of a market: can you map out the incentives and explain why what looks like apparently-irrational behavior is happening?

For example, in healthcare, we waste 30%+ of the $3T we spend each year. Much of that waste is due to hospital readmissions for an ongoing condition like heart failure. Startups sometimes try to fix this by developing a special machine learning algorithm to predict readmissions and apply an intervention. But even when the technology succeeds, the business fails: hospitals charge for readmissions, so there's an active disincentive for the hospital to buy the product. (That is now changing with ACOs, and a change in incentives is an opportunity for new companies.)

https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/medicare-fee-for-service-paymen...

While the payers have the incentive to reduce readmissions (saves them money, leading to lower insurance premiums for you), they don't usually have the access to do so -- they're not the one seeing the patient or prescribing medicine.

The payers could, of course, try to change the way that THEY reimburse the hospital to align the incentives. For Medicare and Medicaid, that requires a law--which is why the Affordable Care Act is creating opportunities for new startups as it rolls out. For private insurance, I think they'd like to change reimbursement, but they have relatively little market power compared to healthcare providers: http://rockhealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Kocher-et-a...

[1] Completely different set of incentives (and thus problems) in other healthcare systems.

There's an inevitable conflict between "Make as much money out of patients and the entire health system as possible" and "Care for patients as efficiently and effectively as possible."

Likewise when customers came to visit us at trade shows my boss would sit politely through their compliments, then immediately jump to the question "So what don't you like about our product?"

Fast forward to today. I'm friends with top people at a Really Big Guitar Company and a Huge Amplifier company. Even in private, these C-level execs show nothing but respect for products of their competitors. They are not ashamed to own and even personally use said products (especially vintage ones).

It seems to me that dissing your competitors even privately can make you dangerously blind to the challenges they pose to you, set a bad example for your employees, and also restrict your job prospects should you decide to work for a competitor one day.

Developers: inherited code is considered guilty until proven innocent. Or maybe more accurately, guilty until you've rewritten it. Surely the old developer had no idea what they were doing.

The "other faction": Democrats/Republicans, different religions, rich vs. poor people... most generalizations about the faction you don't belong to start off with thinking "they're so stupid". "Look at those Republicans/Democrats. Can't they see that Trump/Obama is just lying through his teeth?"

Bad actors: The presumption of stupidity carries over into the way people think about computer hackers and terrorists and the like. You'll see stories about how "those terrorists are learning how to use cell phones to detonate bombs!" or how "criminals are migrating online to prey on people with phishing attacks!" The underlying assumption is that they're stupid, but getting (dangerously) smarter.

I think we'd make a lot more headway in most areas by assuming our competitors, detractors, and wrong-doers are probably already pretty smart.

I'm facing this dilemma right now, and I find it a whole lot more nuanced. The previous dev definitely had the right ideas, but he also produced XXXXX lines of code. I would take me years to wrap my head around the reasons for all these lines. Is this a bug or a feature? It would take me weeks to rewrite it, drop 75% of the corner cases for which I have no test case / clue why they have been coded. Then become the grumpy old dev that says "no" to 95% of feature requests and keep things simple. At the risk of my job.

Also "starters" - people who are good with getting something shippable fast and iterating on features and not the same people as the ones that write truly great code - simply b/c they're driven by different things.

But it's very situational.

We've been brought up in school to think we have to get nearly every answer right on the test in order to get a good grade (and get more than half of the answers right just to not flunk out). In the real world, getting one right answer, and not screwing the rest up too badly is often enough (and sometimes only barely achievable!).

So maybe your competitor did something "stupid" because they're stupid, or maybe it's because that thing doesn't actually matter that much, and they're focused on doing something else incredibly well instead.

"Of course, just because you presume intelligence doesn't mean that every decision made was smart."

I'd rephrase as follows: it's unwise to assume stupidity on the part of your competition, but it's very wise to allow the possibility of stupidity.

With the corollary that if there's an inexpensive way to capitalise on that stupidity if it exists, it's probably worth trying, just in case the thing that's walking like a duck and quacking like a duck is in fact a duck.

As a tangent to that - the chances that assumptions of stupidity are correct go up in direct proportion to your level of domain knowledge.

I see a lot of non-film people say "the movie industry does $FOO and that's really stupid", for example, and 95% of the time, they're wrong and there are good reasons for doing $FOO.

However, I also see people who know the film world (including me) say "a lot of / most filmmakers do $BAR and it's dumb" - and $BAR has a considerably higher chance of actually being a dumb, common mistake.

For example, a company I worked for had the best technology, but bad UI and the competitors had good UI, but their tech was old and inaccurate.

For years we thought they were imbeciles, because they didn't update their tech and we would smash them in the future, because they cannot catch up with us.

But in the end the customers bought the software with the better UI and didn't look behind the scenes.

So their decision was logical. Why pour money and time in parts of the software when noone wants to pay for this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

A common example in startupland is a company whose senior management has short term incentives that reward a fast exit over long term growth. That company may very well behave in ways that appear dumb to competitors with a long term focus. But if the "seasoned" CEO and his cronies get their compensation even in a mediocre deal, why bother trying to build a company for the ages when they can cash out, rest a bit and land in a similar situation at the next gig?

"What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"[1]

I interpret "truth" to really be a highly-opinionated belief rather than something like "2+2=4". In other words, what factors do you believe in that would make the business model successful that outsiders would dismiss as insane or stupid?

(On trivia related note: I notice the blog as the title of "stupitidy" instead of "stupidity" so I'm not sure if there's an inside joke I missed.)

[1]http://fortune.com/2014/09/04/peter-thiels-the-challenge-of-...

The reason why big companies can't turn on a dime is that they have a lot of people who work for them, and an existing customer base. It's difficult to align all of those people on a new, and potentially better way of solving a problem. It's not that they are collectively "idiots", it's that they have an established business with an established track record. This is quintessentially the Innovators Dilemma. Technology markets almost always move downmarket to the cheaper solution which at first looks like a "toy".

For instance there was a period of many years where both Google and Bing image search were embarrassingly bad and I was able to build something far better for a certain range of queries.

It took me a year to build out my system but in that year, Bing and Google both improved dramatically, so my demo comparing results with them was no longer impressive at all.

There are too many histories where after a long time of nothing happening, everybody suddenly starts working on the same problem, without any kind of coordination.

I do think that you should try to think about how you might try to solve something before looking at what your competitors do. The reason being that it's easy to trap our minds into thinking that there are no other solutions unless they fit into a similar box of what's already working. Naïveté combined with thinking for yourself can often be a powerful reason why many startups succeed.

If your solution ends up looking similar, at least, it was likely derived from first principals vs the path of least resistance: blind copying.

But more often than not it is the presumption of intelligence that pays off.

The direct quote is:

>Thiel described the argument Zuckerberg finally came down on like this: "[Yahoo] had no definitive idea about the future. They did not properly value things that did not yet exist so they were therefore undervaluing the business."

Yahoo's market capitalization in July 2006 was $42.51 billion. A 22 year-old presumed they were stupid, and he was right. [2]

Today FB has a market cap of $264.91B and Yahoo? Down to $35 billion after 9 years of growth.

--

[1] http://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-zuckerberg-...

[2] by the way to get the market valuation at the time, I did this search: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+was+yahoo%27s+mark... I can't believe it worked! I used wolframalpha because this is the kind of search they promise they can answer - and they were right, they actually delivered. Nobody else on the face of the planet does this, and it shouldn't even be possible. But it is. If you think something is possible, JUST DO IT. If you think your competitors are stupid (compared to what you think you can do), you're probably right. (or you wouldn't have that thought.)

Finding someone who happened to ask the exact same question by doing an Internet search is a different problem entirely. Wolfram Alpha can instantly answer questions that require certain levels of deduction or calculation, and which have never been asked in the history of the world. Google can do that too: for mathematical equations like 453442433 * 234523432 + 3485478347434879. Applying this to questions of a general type that require real-world data is miraculous.

Not that this article is bad. It's just datapoint 107 that a founder has to reconcile with all the other competing advice.

[1] http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html

(Btw, the Thiel view of not picking fights you can't dominate and Buffett's sticking to defensible business models is a good mindset to calibrate a venture's success per risk gut perception. And with timing, team and execution you might just make something that hits.)

Everybody watches their competitors, it's entirely natural. It's solid advice to study them, and try to stay/get ahead of them where possible. This doesn't just apply to app features, but every facet of the business across many disciplines (sales/marketing/development/back office etc).

On the other hand, building a business based solely on a competitor's business decisions and not doing your own homework is the path to madness. We might take inspiration from our competitors, but we always check in with our customers next to make sure they actually want the feature. It's also our job to get feedback on not just what we're doing but also how we're planning to do it, as our users might have unique business requirements that our competitor's users do not.

Then later, while developing my own work, I find that I end up with the same complications, that I'm forced to make the same background assumptions, and I have the same difficulty in motivating my choices.

In either case, successful solutions have to work around the gap in the system rather than simply charging into it.

However when you are considering the general public it is best to presume stupidity and design with that in mind.

Sometimes what our competitors were doing was stupid, and we ate their lunch.

Sometimes what our competitors were doing was the only way to really run things, and we had to adapt to follow them.

https://xkcd.com/277/

Once it finds such a thing, subconsciously the mind registers the competitor as weaker than they actually are, to redeem your mind from the uncomfortable prick of a all-powerful competitor. It doesn't happen for everyone though. It takes a bit of rationality to overcome such conclusions.

I personally know people who'd read and stress negative reviews of their competitors' products, and eventually conclude that their competitors are not really thoughtful in their decision making.

TL;DR - Yes.

So can we assume people who assume other people are stupid, are stupid? Or is there some benefit from doing things that way that might not be apparent at first sight?

One possibility that comes to mind is the substitution of parallelism for serial processing, or put another way, letting the world be its own model. Instead of one startup spending a lot of time thinking and researching (and maybe missing the market window if there was one), let ten startups just assume and go for it. Maybe nine will be wrong and fail and one will be right and succeed.

But that'd be something like evolution or anthropic computing. In order to find a solution to a hard problem, write down something. If it is not a solution, kill yourself. Conditioned on looking at anything at all, you look at the correct solution.

Or we could use the distinct advantage of humans and think about it properly.