"In the process, SciAm played a small but important role in the self-immolation of scientific authority—a terrible event whose fallout we'll be living with for a long time."
Which is it - small or important? All that seems like a bit much.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
If a tiny problem can cascade like that, it seems that there’s a systemic logistics issue going on here, the problem wasn’t the nail it was some high-level problem in the overall organization.
One nail is small and unimportant but the general problem of getting enough nails is a big important one.
And anyway, the messenger also could have been shot, the horse could also have tripped on a rock, the battle could have been lost even with the message getting through. If their plan hinges on everything going right, the kingdom has put themselves in a position where they don’t have any small problems, just big ones.
I think the argument the poster is making is as root cause analysis.
The root cause of the messenger failing was the missing nail. Sure it could have been many other things, but in this case it was the nail. And if it was a pitched battle that was narrowly lost by one message, sure, they could have won or lost because of a dozen other factors, but in this case it was the missing message. There are likely many other important things to worry about, but in the system as it is today, it failed for want of a nail.
Plenty of large engineering outages were because of single keystroke typos. Should these systems be less prone to human error? Of course. Are they? Some of them are, but right now some of them aren't.
The point being made is that small things can be important if other things go wrong. We should fix the other things, but often they are much harder to fix than the small thing. And really, we should care about both, since humans are capable of that.
For me, this is the moral of horseshoe nail story. It's something I preach to my team - details matter. I’ll add that unfortunately we often don’t know which details will matter ahead of time.
If you look at the problem as a swiss cheese model and not just a teleological propagation from one root cause, then there are many things that need fixing, not just a cobbler being short one nail.
It was a data point not a horse shoe in a critical chain of events. I think people will get a taste of promoting “alternative facts”when it comes to the current “let’s hit the reset button” crowd. then they will regret it and maybe reassess “alternative facts” like government grand schemes to create autism with vaccines and “make America fat” like are being touted. Most Americans need to only look in the mirror to see the source of their life’s problems.
Why does a person want a nail and then lose a shoe? Why does a person want a shoe and then lose a horse? Why does a person want a message but lose the rider? Why does a person want a message and lose the battle? Why does a person want a battle but lose the kingdom?
I don’t understand the point or reference being made.
It’s so contrived and yet needs so many leaps of abstraction that I don’t think it makes its point well at all. “Bro my controller totally didn’t work that time! We would’ve won the match otherwise I promise.” Do you really think it was the controller that lost the match?
It is a well-known proverb that is centuries old [1]: it's essentially a canonical way of refering to the concept of something small having big consequences.
Proverbs are often contrived (e.g., "Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones" - who lives in a glass house?).
There are too many leaps of abstraction, which to me, proves the missing horseshoe nail is irrelevant in the big picture. Too many other things could have transpired positively for the kingdom in a space so expansive. It’s classic scapegoating. “Bro my controller totally didn’t work that time! We would’ve won the match otherwise I promise.”
Tbh it seems entirely plausible to me that a messenger being unable to deliver an important message could have an outsized effect on that outcome of a battle. What if they're letting their side know about a surprise attack?
Seems also plausible that risks might apply to the messenger that wouldn’t apply to the troops in garrison—that is, the thousands of other horseshoe nails in inventory could have gone unmissed or doomed a less important horse.
A more robust treatment of risk factors in both ideas.
You want to ask whether the system needs to be tracking nail quality if the kingdom relies on nails that much. You also want to be asking why critical information is being sent by only one messenger.
have you ever heard of a lynchpin? They're small and usually extremely important. For example, lynchpins hold the backhoe on to the back of my tractor.
In fact, lynchpins are so small and important that the term is used when there's something that is small but so important that missing it would ruin a project, because the lynchpin ties it all together into a cohesive whole.
Also the replies to my sibling have me confused if i am even awake... who hasn't heard "for want of a nail"?
I think it's possible they may. I used to get 50 - 150 of those "I hacked the camera on your computers and videoed you wacking. Pay me bitcoins and I won't release it to all your friends". Many come from .kz, .cn, .in, and various others. I'd notify those ISP NOCs that their networks are being used of obvious criminal activity and criminals love to break into servers and networks. I also put in bitcoin abuse reports using the IP addresses that sourced the emails.
Google addresses started show up about 4 - 6 months ago; their IPv6 addresses. So I prominently mentioned in those bitcoin abuse reports that google should make any effort at all to secure their servers and notified their NOC/security email addresses. I also mentioned their addresses would appear in those public bitcoin abuse reports.
After a couple of months the google addresses stopped appearing as sources.
NOTE: I used a honeypot email address to snare these emails.
A fee schedule would help, but I think what may end up happening is what happened to spamcop. The realtime black hole list at one point shutdown open SMTP relays, but how spammers got around it was Spam As A Service providers like mailchimp, sendgrid, salesforce, maropost, and others. Someone will come up with a fee based reddit spam service one can buy to flood reddit with spam drowning out real people (the 'reals' or 'non-bots').
It seems like there are things reddit could do to squelch spam that it doesn't seem to be doing, like disallowing duplicate text in posts as one example. Beyond a certain karma it seems like posting rate becomes unrestricted and I think more than one post every 10 seconds is spamming regardless.
So I think reddit right now doesn't have much incentive to squelch spam since it's not doing that much, it would take effort, and effort == money.
I think the for profit model is reddit's biggest problem right now. Others have pointed to USENET's problems, but in an open protocol those were things that could have been surmounted with effort. The for-profit problem with reddit looks to be insurmountable and the rate of enshitification will only accelerate.
Probably a clone of the old reddit is in order. Like cleddit (.com is squatted on but not .org or .net) or something like that. Or a new version of the USENET protocol. For all it's problems USENET did reveal what made scientology 'tick' behind the scenes on alt.religion.scientology. Some new version of USENET might also address DMCA abuses also.
I can remember when you had to have a credible account of a coding run to converse with people who were self-described 'hackers' - EMACS/TPU skills notwithstanding.
Brew makes me cringe. Apt just installs what you need and then it's done. Brew makes a thing about updating everything - I'm always reluctant about it. It does make having multiple versions of python fairly easy.
If I drink this tea will I gain latent mutant powers?
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