Overthinking

I&#x27;m so astonished that we are so careful not to overthink, to the point we accept &quot;you&#x27;re overthinking it&quot; as a valid excuse to disregard rare risks.<p>But we don&#x27;t have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend &quot;you&#x27;re underthinking this&quot;. Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it&#x27;s easy to see why some people overthink.<p>I overthink everything all the time and there are still many things I miss and do wrong. I can&#x27;t imagine trying to limit my thinking just for the sake of not overthinking.<p>I&#x27;m not necessarily concerned about this blog post, but I&#x27;m curious if our frequent warns against overthinking can be a net loss?

The problem is not overthinking but losing contact with reality.<p>Not thinking too much, but thinking too much on the wrong things that are not important.<p>You focus your time, money and effort on the wrong things.<p>Those are not the important things because you lack knowledge about reality, about the system as a whole.<p>But humans solved that problem long time ago. It is called &quot;authority&quot;. If Michael Phelps tells me I am swimming wrong and wants to give me advice I listen. Idem If John Carmark tells me how to program.<p>The problem is that humans could be tricked: Michael Phelps could use his authority in swimming to sell microprocesors.<p>Noam Chomsky could use his authority in languages to sell you totalitarian political regimes that have failed over and over again.<p>Also the fact that someone knows something very well does not mean that he will tell you. People can deceive you because they profit from that.<p>Most con mans are experts on what they do. They know very well the Truth.<p>An intellectual can sell you a bad political regime because he personally expects to profit from that. A youtuber can sell you a product because she is an affiliate and earns a commission.<p>If you know how to compensate the biases, you can get very far reading the right books, and listening to the right people.

I often wonder where I would be in life now if I hadn&#x27;t &quot;overthought&quot; so many decisions in my 42 years of life. I feel like I often got stuck at different points, and am even feeling that way now, because of &quot;overthinking.&quot; That being said, I have a lot to be grateful for and have been able to &quot;summit so many mountains&quot; that were unattainable by my immigrant (and sacrificial) parents and their families. Perhaps I often get &quot;paralysis by analysis&quot; because as pointed out in the post, I tend to overanalyze each potential outcome of a business idea instead of just testing things out and moving forward. Thankfully, I did take some steps to co-found two previous companies, one of which got off the ground so I don&#x27;t always stay &quot;stuck.&quot; Currently, I&#x27;m thinking about how to channel society&#x27;s consumption habits for good.

When I feel myself approaching overthinking, one strategy I try is to identify if there are different requirements or criteria I may have missed and write them down. A lot of decisions involve complicated trade-offs, and it is often too easy to punch holes in ideas, move on to the next idea, punch holes in that one, and end up back where you started!<p>By ranking the relative importance of requirements you can at least try to optimize for the most important requirement, and be able to see that other ideas may be better for other requirements but not the most important one!

One struggle I have is how to simultaneously embrace uncertainty and take responsibility for the impact of my actions. A high amount of uncertainty makes me feel like I’m a chef taking chicken thighs out of a warm fridge.<p>I think there is a time to just say “no” — even if we fear that others will accuse us of overthinking.

I find that overthinking is a byproduct of overly complex expectations.<p>These expectations are often externally imposed either by industry or by our own experiences.<p>This dissonance is exacerbated by tools which require as much complex skills or lack the expected complexity in their output.<p>&quot;Hello world&quot; town reminds a hopelessly overpopulated slums detached from glitzy shine of a megapolis that one can experience but not truly become one.

If I can recommend anything in this area, it would be the book &quot;Art of action&quot; by Stephen Bungay. It examines in quite a lot of detail how the military has &quot;solved&quot; the problem of having to make decisions without perfect information, and how you can improve the structure of your decision-making process when you find you are getting bogged down in process and bureaucracy.

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&#x27;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.(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.routledgehandbooks.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.4324&#x2F;9781315641171.ch2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.routledgehandbooks.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.4324&#x2F;9781315641171...</a> )

&quot;You&#x27;re doing it all wrong.&quot; said someone doing nothing at all.

Ugh, this is a very complicated struggle for me, personally. However I have been in the Health sector for the past 15 years. I had a short stint at a retailer.<p>I think Finance, Health and Social Media we can&#x27;t really &quot;under&quot;think too much because at a certain point you have potential death in the health sector for making a mistake. You have the potential for a billion dollar lawsuit in the financial sector, and a major class action privacy lawsuit in the social media sector...<p>So while I tend to think, yeah this sounds great, at the same time we have to be very careful about what Jr level person that wants to start underthinking about stuff...<p>I think a good balance is to have old geezers overthink and young ones underthink and come to some middle.

Overthinking is when the Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in. You can see it happening every day in the meeting rooms while planning new features&#x2F;releases, we don&#x27;t really get any new information but it&#x27;s comforting to just talk about it.

I get called out by others for overthinking - until the risks I&#x27;ve pointed out become reality<p>It&#x27;s all relative - one person can be thought of overthinking and the other person can be thought of as a &#x27;cowboy&#x27; and just winging it

Thank you, I really liked that post. I&#x27;am 40years now and started to teach myself programming 4 years ago. I do a lot of overthinking, like &quot;Linux or Windows&quot;, &quot;Should I learn some C before Python? What about all this networking stuff, how does that work?&quot;. I know it probably doesn&#x27;t really matter, because I consider myself still a beginner in programming, but it is sometimes really hard not to feel overwhelmed by all of this stuff, and just stop thinking about what, or what not to use.

We&#x27;re all guilty of overthinking sometimes and under-thinking others.<p>Of course, context is everything.. so perhaps the blanket statement is a useful reminder for the author.. but also maybe dangerous advice for those reading who this just gives license to continue not putting enough thought into things they should.<p>A bias towards action might be a good default, but how many of us are dealing with untenable situations stemming from rushed decisions?<p>So be careful with this advice.. and do your best to know yourself and the situation.

I think this advice assumes a lot about the reader. I find that quite a fraction of people rather think too little, often sold on some distorted misconception of &quot;agile&quot;.<p>I guess there is an art of thinking through things at a reasonable amount, knowing when to move forward, and when to stop again and think more.<p>Sure, learning this art surely has to be done to a large part by experience, so the points in the article has their merits, but things, people and circumstances are not always the same.

This is a rational analysis of a non-rational problem.<p>&quot;Risk aversion&quot; is the closest term I can find in common use. &quot;Oh, this might be wrong!&quot; or &quot;Oh, someone might criticize me!&quot; become risks you&#x27;re unwilling to run. &quot;If I give a talk about my idea, people might make fun of it!&quot;<p>Everyone goes through this. Instead of <i>thinking</i> about it even more, Kerkour needs to work on his emotions. There&#x27;s no shame in it. We&#x27;re all afraid.

There comes a point where you&#x27;re only thinking and not doing. If your thinking is paralyzing you into taking no action that&#x27;s &quot;overthinking&quot;. Just do something even if it&#x27;s wrong sometimes.

&gt;we end up with whole countries filled with people who think, think, think but never start doing anything. The result is a lot of debates, whether it be online or on the TV, and stupid &amp; complex rules and bureaucracies coming from people in need to justify all the time they are paid to think, think, think.<p>Sounds exactly like Canada. The country with the highest post secondary education rates, so much good it does us.

<i>&quot;Over thinking, over analyzing separates the body from the mind. Withering my intuition, missing opportunities and I must feed my will to feel my moment drawing way outside the lines&quot;</i> I&#x27;m not a Tool fanboy, I really ain&#x27;t, but I use this as kind of &quot;a mantra&quot; when I catch myself overthinking it.

What about pure fun?<p>No ego. No marketing. I don&#x27;t even the Education section is part of it. The simple amusement one gets of solving a puzzle. And if the actual problem is boring and repetitive, why not spice it up?<p>Certainly a Poison, but none mentioned by OP.

I overthink things and end up in analysis paralysis, not for any of the reasons listed, but because I don&#x27;t want to have to untangle an incorrect mess later on.

I remember a period of time before I could confidently call myself a productive programmer in which I’d spend 90% of my time trying to understand best practices instead of building shit. It came from a place of wanting to “get it right” as education had incentivized rather than “being valuable” as capitalism rewards.<p>I got out of that frame by working with and watching other doers. I think real education happens when we see masters practicing their form, not when we symbolically learn about the form

As a dev who was forced to learn functional programming i very much approve of #3.