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Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots

374 pointsby stanriversalmost 4 years ago

32 comments

ethbr0almost 4 years ago
I first heard about this in the context of software project estimation.<p>The author (forgotten to me) made the point that nobody has <i>permission</i> to think about disasters when estimating project completion time.<p>So why not explicitly ask them to? &quot;So now we have our estimate, what would cause us to miss it?&quot;<p>And in the course of giant monster attacks, you give people permission to talk about specific scenarios that are actually very likely to derail the schedule.<p>It was an interesting observation, vs the &quot;just multiply the everything goes right estimate by X&quot; method.<p>If everyone else is being positive, no one wants to be the lone (realistic) downer.
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markmsmithalmost 4 years ago
Before I do anything, I ask myself: &#x27;Would an idiot do that?&#x27; And, if the answer is yes, I do not do that thing.<p>- Dwight Schrute
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sam_lowry_almost 4 years ago
The basic premise of TIPS was that one could train engineers on solving problems, pretty much like martial arts trainers do: by exercising and learning tricks.<p>Theory of Inventive Problem Solving nicely abbreviates as TIPS. That&#x27;s how it has been known in the west for decades. ТРИЗ is a Russian acronym. TRIZ just replaces Cyrillic letters with equivalents. If the author digged a bit deeper, they would have known it and a few funny stories. Like the fact that Genrich Altshuller did not want his teaching to carry on once he dies, but fan groups of engineers existed until the fall of the Soviet union when many of their members emigrated and continued the TIPS cult following, selling courses and software to large enterprises (Dassault, Lockheed Martin and the likes).
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madmadsalmost 4 years ago
There is a good book employing the TRIZ mindset for self-improvement called &quot;How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use&quot;[0]. Although some of the outcomes the book lead you to can seem banal, if you approach them from the perspective of how to optimize misery, it can give you a new perspective. It certainly did for me in some areas.<p>CGP Grey also made a video based on the book, called &quot;7 Ways to Maximize Misery&quot;[1] that may be easier to digest.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;25898044-how-to-be-miserable" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;25898044-how-to-be-mi...</a><p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o</a>
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adrianmonkalmost 4 years ago
Lots of parallels to &quot;know your enemy&quot;, if you&#x27;re willing to broaden &quot;enemy&quot; to include the impersonal.<p>Quotes[1]:<p>&gt; <i>It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.</i><p>and<p>&gt; <i>Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy&#x27;s strategy.</i><p>The part about both knowing yourself and knowing your enemy is similar to the idea of iterating back and forth between thinking about how to fail and how to succeed. The universe is not actually out to get you, but you can ask what its &quot;strategy&quot; would be if it were.<p>---<p>[1] see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikiquote.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sun_Tzu#Chapter_III_%C2%B7_Strategic_Attack" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikiquote.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sun_Tzu#Chapter_III_%C2%B7_Str...</a>
kortexalmost 4 years ago
Suppose I wanted to make a program inscrutable, hard to modify, hard to test, heavily coupled, and hard to reason about:<p>- hide information so that it&#x27;s not queryable<p>- force information to flow through multiple hops<p>- make it hard&#x2F;impossible to set the true state of the system in its entirety<p>- allow state to be mutated silently<p>- give interfaces roles and force certain state to have to flow through specific paths<p>- multiple concurrent access<p>- pointers<p>- spray the app across as many machines as possible<p>Sounds familiar, maybe like a scathing criticism of OOP? Well check this out. What if I wanted to make a program as slow and bloated as possible?<p>- put all state in one place. Bonus points if you can bottleneck it and force all changes to be well-ordered and sequential<p>- all data has to be immutable and copied over in its entirety when propagated<p>- use larger data structures than necessary. Lots of wrapping and indirection<p>- no caching. Can&#x27;t trust data unless it&#x27;s fresh<p>- read&#x2F;write from disk&#x2F;net tons<p>- use scripty garbage collected languages<p>- spray the app over as many machines as possible<p>The latter kind of feels like a criticism of FP, though really it&#x27;s more critical of distributed monolith. What if I want to make my app as vulnerable to outage and overload as possible?<p>- concentrate the app in as few machines as possible<p>It&#x27;s really interesting how all the different tradeoffs of approaches just kinda appear when you take this inverted approach. It&#x27;s all too easy to get caught up on the positives of an approach.<p>(opinion - I still think FP comes out looking better than OOP, but it does suggest that you need a lot of techniques to safely hide optimizations to make FP more performant, which can make it harder to scrutinize all the layers)
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jedbergalmost 4 years ago
I&#x27;ve been doing this my entire working career. I didn&#x27;t realize it wasn&#x27;t something everyone does!<p>When I worked in security, the first question I always asked was, &quot;how would I defeat this system&quot;. When I worked in reliability, my first question was always, &quot;how can I break this?&quot;. And now that I&#x27;m founder, I ask myself, &quot;how will my business fail&quot;.<p>I know that the executives at a lot of large public companies have an annual exercise where they spend a couple of days just thinking about how the company could fail, what competitors could do that would be disastrous, and then what they can do to mitigate those things.<p>I also teach my kids these kids skills. When they build something I ask how it might break, or when they are about to do something risky I ask them how it might go wrong and what they will do to make sure it doesn&#x27;t.
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kaycebasquesalmost 4 years ago
HN loves this idea of thinking in reverse. Is anyone here actually doing it? What problem did you solve?
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mherdegalmost 4 years ago
I&#x27;ve worked with engineers who have used a premortem -- once they have the bare sketch of a project to solve a problem, they imagine that it failed and think about the most likely causes, then adjust their project to mitigate those risks.<p>The process described here happens a step earlier, when you&#x27;re deciding which projects to tackle in the first place, which is an interesting angle.
pmichaudalmost 4 years ago
There&#x27;s a saying in my neck of the woods that captures this: If you can&#x27;t optimize, pessimize!
taconalmost 4 years ago
Suppose you wanted to become as fat as possible, as fast as possible? How would you pull off that trick? You might stop to think about your answer before continuing.<p>One way that happens all over nature is to gorge on fruit, just like bears and other animals do every fall before they hibernate.[0][1]<p>An old article from Ken Hutchins entitled &quot;So, Your Ambition Is to Become a Circus Fat Lady?&quot;, is essentially a TRIZ failure design for fat loss.[2]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peterattiamd.com&#x2F;rickjohnson&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peterattiamd.com&#x2F;rickjohnson&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Fat-Switch-Richard-J-Johnson-ebook&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B009XVKUDE&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Fat-Switch-Richard-J-Johnson-ebook&#x2F;dp...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nebula.wsimg.com&#x2F;e2e6c217edf4c5dd64bb0486df430804?AccessKeyId=C51AAAB48BC458E4316B&amp;disposition=0&amp;alloworigin=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nebula.wsimg.com&#x2F;e2e6c217edf4c5dd64bb0486df430804?Ac...</a>
sobriquet9almost 4 years ago
This is a common pattern, also found in proofs by contradiction and optimization techniques. If you know how to find the minimum, you may be able to use that knowledge to find the maximum.<p>The problem with using this pattern in real life is that it rarely applies. Unlike the one-dimensional toy examples, in real life there are many more ways to fail than there are to succeed. Eliminating or even enumerating all possible ways to fail may be prohibitively expensive. Even if you do that, you only found a way to maintain status quo, not necessarily to improve.<p>This can be said about the rest of TRIZ&#x2F;TIPS. I learned about it a long time ago, but can&#x27;t remember a single time I solved a practical problem by applying it. I may be able to find examples that can be classified under one of TRIZ rules, but only in hindsight. It&#x27;s not like you can look at a new problem, apply TRIZ approaches one by one, and find a solution faster than you normally would.
spydumalmost 4 years ago
Sounds a lot like threat modelling. It&#x27;s great, if you are creative enough to imagine all the threat scenarios.
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asimjalisalmost 4 years ago
I did not like this article because it was superficial, clickbaity, and did not explain the main idea with a worked out example.<p>&gt; Charlie inverted the problem in a similar way to the TRIZ practitioners — if he wanted to kill pilots, he could get them into icy conditions whereby they couldn’t continue flying, or put them in situations where they would run out of fuel and fall into the ocean. So he drew more applicable maps and better predicted the weather factors that were relevant by keeping in mind the best ways to do the exact opposite of bringing his pilots home.<p>This tells me nothing about how Charlie Munger avoided planes crashing. There has to be more to this than this trite summarization.<p>Can someone shed some light on this and explain why this is insightful.
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ameliusalmost 4 years ago
&gt; thinking about how to do the exact opposite of your goal is sometimes the best way to ensure you achieve it.<p>It also makes for a great clickbaity headline.
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tjchearalmost 4 years ago
Is there a software invention&#x2F;systems equivalent of TRIZ matrix?<p>Some of the dimensions&#x2F;parameters we wish to analyze that I can think of may include:<p><pre><code> - latency - throughput - modifiability - binary&#x2F;data size - memory size - cpu cycles - interoperability&#x2F;compatibility - accuracy - precision - staleness - bandwidth - availability - etc </code></pre> As a simple example, perhaps we want to reduce bandwidth while preserving data size. One of the resolutions may include compression (lossless&#x2F;lossy).
dTalalmost 4 years ago
&gt; rather than solving for success, solve for failure. If you want to design a dust filter that works at 600 Celsius within a steel mill, instead design all the ways you could develop a filter that would fail miserably in those conditions.<p>That&#x27;s a strange example. There are infinite ways of <i>not</i> accomplishing a task, and as a non-expert in filter design I have no trouble listing them: make the filter out of butter, make it just a big hole, pay someone to pluck dust out of the air with tweezers... how exactly is this helping?
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lamontcgalmost 4 years ago
I do this all the time.<p>At work, I&#x27;d consider what it would take to wipe all the servers, and all the backups (while creating enough of a distraction on the network to delay people from pulling the power in the datacenters). We had way too many people with global root access that could have done something about it, so the point would be to consider engineering to restrict access (this was before kubertnetes took over the world).<p>Walking down the street yesterday I saw someone had a little bucket full of dog treats for anyone to take and my first thought was the risk of someone spraying a bit of poison on them. I don&#x27;t necessary &quot;fear&quot; things like that, but its just obvious to me that you&#x27;re implicitly trusting the thousands of people who has walked past that box not to be pathological.<p>Probably good that not everyone in the world thinks the way I do.
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andridkalmost 4 years ago
As I was clicking this link I was thinking &quot;Oh great, now I&#x27;m on watch list&quot;. Turns out, it&#x27;s about thinking and problem solving and I was pleasantly surprised.
wildermuthnalmost 4 years ago
There’s a really interesting parallel here with evolution: exaptation. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Exaptation?wprov=sfti1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Exaptation?wprov=sfti1</a><p>This occurs when a trait that evolved to solve one problem also happens to solve (or almost solve) another problem — for example, perhaps feathers originally evolved for the purpose of keeping warm but also opened up an evolutionary path to flight.
zarothalmost 4 years ago
At a previous job many years ago, after a project would fail my coworker and I would habitually remark, “we’ve learned another way not to do things!”<p>There’s just such an abundance of creative ways to screw things up! But that’s kind of the point of the mental model — our brains are pretty good at spitting out tons of ways that things will fail. So hijack that process by making that list and then invert it.
mmcconnell1618almost 4 years ago
Is this another way to help define the problem you&#x27;re trying to solve? It sounds like &quot;Keep pilots alive&quot; wasn&#x27;t detailed enough. By thinking about all the failure conditions, you&#x27;re building a more robust description of the true problem you&#x27;re trying to solve. I also wonder where you draw the line and stop thinking of failure conditions.
lordnachoalmost 4 years ago
Suppose I want to build a program that trades in the markets to make money.<p>So to do the opposite I would try to lose money as fast as I could, according to this?<p>But the way to do that is just to churn my book a lot and pay costs and spreads.<p>It&#x27;s not clear how that illuminates how to make money.
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steelframealmost 4 years ago
First, a tangent. I&#x27;ve noticed recently that a number of websites aren&#x27;t letting me do old-school copy-to-clipboard. They&#x27;re hooking highlight events and only allowing copy according to their own method (e.g., Twitter or whatever). ScriptSafe causes them to hide the article completely. I&#x27;ve found that the &quot;Absolute Enable Right Click &amp; Copy&quot; Firefox extension works with the article for this post, but there may be other extensions that unbreak copy-to-clipboard.<p>That said, from the article:<p>&gt; Prioritize near-term income over long-term value.<p>In terms of one&#x27;s career, I&#x27;m not sure what the author has in mind. I&#x27;ve found that, in the long run, work experience is work experience, and your skill in interviewing plays an outsized role in your future career prospects. If you&#x27;re getting paid a lot of money to do something, that <i>generally</i> means there&#x27;s going to be competition for your job, and it&#x27;s noteworthy that you&#x27;re the one who got it!<p>I&#x27;m sure there are some exceptions (and in my experience people on social media Internet forums like this one love to point them out), but I&#x27;d argue those exceptions are mostly outliers.<p>In addition, high income early in your career means you can start accruing compound interest earlier. Disproportionate quantities of money in an index ETF in your early 20&#x27;s is a very, very powerful force function for your entire life. Play your cards right, and you can FIRE by your early-to-mid-30&#x27;s, at which point you can pursue any work you want without the stress of needing to care about performance reviews, layoffs, toxic work environments, etc., etc., since you can always walk away. Even if you don&#x27;t end up walking away, simply knowing you <i>can easily</i> walk away can have a significant impact on your overall quality of life.<p>Of course this can be easier said than done. I spent most of my 20&#x27;s hardly paying any attention at all to what I was paid, focusing my efforts on the type of work I was doing and my education, and the company I worked for (a faceless Big Tech entity) was more than happy to take advantage of me. I had to spend my 30&#x27;s catching up on savings. If I could rewind the clock and do it again, I&#x27;d aggressively hone my interview skills and spend a lot more time negotiating comp with a lot more companies once I had a year of two of professional experience on my resume.<p>I guess what I&#x27;m trying to say is that if you are fiscally responsible and invest wisely, short-term income <i>can be a form of</i> long-term value.
AtlasBarfedalmost 4 years ago
This almost is more of a testing methodology for engineered solutions to find failure scenarios, but I can see how using this would be perversely useful while searching problem spaces.
MattGaiseralmost 4 years ago
Isn’t this basically just a failure mode and effects analysis?
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wildermuthnalmost 4 years ago
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”<p>Inverted problem solving, done naively, is an infinite task — you could kill all the pilots in infinitely and progressively improbable ways (e.g., use time-travel to kill someone in their chain of ancestry, or their pilot instructors, or the aircraft engineers, etc).<p>So inverted problem solving must identity the most probable modes of failure until their hypothetical resolution causes failure to becomes improbable.<p>This sounds a lot like unit tests, which in my experience are notoriously bad at correctly estimating probable modes of failure for complex units of functionality,<p>Contrast this to generative testing of simple units of functionality, which in my experience do in fact provide comprehensive coverage of failure modes.<p>Or contrast both of them to languages like Rust and Haskel which many claim to solve a set of discrete failure modes automatically by virtue of the limitations set upon problem solving itself.<p>It seems to me that it is better to set limits upon problem-solving that are known to often lead to failure rather than attempt to estimate the probabilities of an unknown infinite — i.e., identify types of failure modes across domains that have high failure rates and construct a framework of problem-solving that precludes those types.<p>This is done all the time in the form what I would call “worst-practices”. Cheating on your partner is almost always a bad way to increase marital happiness, and the framework of marriage excludes it (even “open marriages” require honesty as part of its framework).<p>Paul Graham puts cofounder disagreements at the top of his list of ways that startups fail — the most basic form of such failure being that cofounders disagree on whether to give up on their startup. Although there are infinite ways for cofounders to disagree, perhaps it is possible to proactively address the manner in which disagreements are identified and resolved before they become lethal. The only good solution I’ve seen to this problem is the advice to split equity equally — ensuring that the problem is more obvious and severe by amplifying its consequences.<p>This is similar to Rust — the consequence of a “poorly” written program is that it won’t run at all.<p>This is also why monopolies in America are sometimes broken up: a monopoly can succeed by failing, whereas a startup can only succeed by actually making something people want.<p>Perhaps a better framework for problem solving would be something like, Make Problems Catastrophic, or Burn Your Lifeboats, or Amplify Consequences of Failure.<p>It has always fascinated me that Leprosy doesn’t directly cause your body to fall apart — it indirectly causes failure by removing the feedback of pain. Without pain, we hurt ourselves unknowingly and profoundly.<p>Make Problems Painful?
shsbdncudxalmost 4 years ago
I think this is the approach Boeing took with the 737 Max
BLanenalmost 4 years ago
I like how it references the Gulag Archipelago which two links to buy it, a pseudo-historical book. For no reason. Except for that a certain controversial person likes to talk about it a lot.<p>Of course 3 articles back they reference Jordan Peterson.
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0xF57Aalmost 4 years ago
&gt;Continue to be a rent-taker as opposed to adding value<p>One of the most pervasive falsehoods in existence. Take them out of the equation and play the scenario through. What do you end up with?
failwhalesharkalmost 4 years ago
Ricin, anthrax, or polonium in FAA documents.
simonhalmost 4 years ago
Convince them that the world is a globe, when it&#x27;s actually flat, so they get their navigation calculations wrong and their plane&#x27;s crash when they run out of fuel.