Quality is Fractal, from restaurants to software. | Hacker News Reader

Quality is Fractal, from restaurants to software.

contrast.ie

102 pointsdestraynor22 comments

This is a nice piece on aesthetics, right up to the last bit where it talks about technology and veers off the cliff.

The example simply makes no sense. In what way is a laptop with (gasp) modular panels and air vents (the horrors!) of lower quality than the apple thing? Modularity is good, it allows piecewise replacement of parts by untrained (or less trained) service personnel. Air vents are good, because they keep the CPU cool. Clean design is good too, because it makes people happy. What we have here is a collision of design goals, not a quality metric.

The author is trying to make a purely aesthetic point (Apple laptops look pretty) and extend it to one of hardware (and even software) quality. But that fails, because "quality" isn't always about aesthetics. It's about practical concerns. Maybe the Mac aesthetics are a net win, even at a $200 premium; maybe they're not. Maybe better ventilation is important; maybe it's not.

Many of the people who commented on the post called out the author for the Apple example as coming out of left field and not being relevant to an otherwise well thought out post.

When I worked as an Emergency Medical Technician I observed that nursing homes who regularly trim their residents' toenails are always of significantly higher quality.

This account reminds me of a company manager who oversaw their external printing jobs. He would visit different printery/bindery operations, not your kinko's sized stuff, but large Lith-o-man type offset presses.

He said he had all different types of metrics he used when evaluating a potential vendor for his jobs. But what it usually all boiled down to was how clean was the press area.

If the presses and surrounding area were grimy and tools, supplies etc. were scattered about, he knew the jobs they did would most likely not meet his expectations.

If however the area was clean and the press operators keeps things in order, he could count on that vendor to produce a superior product.

But counter examples along those lines are plentiful. I remember reading a breathless writeup on a tour of a new VW plant. The cleanliness and spotless floors were apparently the main important factor there. Yet VW cars are well known in the industry as having serious quality issues with everything from blistering paint to the continuously faulty electrical systems of the New Beetle.

Here's a video of said plant. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd5WGLWNllA

If this dog-and-pony show was representative of VWs efforts to reach parity with the mechanical quality of say, the Honda Civic and Accord, then I would say this "quality is fractal" idea would have some merit. But even a cursory review of something as basic as mechanical reliability in consumer reports or on true delta shows VWs to regularly be just "meh" in terms of reliability.

This article follows a line of reasoning about quality which seems to lead to the conclusion, in part, that Apple makes superior products. My question is "compared to what?"

The conclusion is drawn based on the fallacious view that the properties optimized by Apple are universally important. Britney Spears may be hot and rich, but I wouldn't consider her a quality mate. She doesn't meet the minimum set of criteria I'm looking for. In the same vein, not all of Apple's products optimize on properties I care about (e.g. open source, full control of configuration, etc.). Lots of other people probably disagree on both counts, and that's okay.

The point is that while I agree quality is important, it's just as important to know what properties of a thing you're judging or optimizing, and why. This is especially true since the resources for producing anything are finite.

Seems to me that the only conclusion he comes to is that Apple makes quality products. Where does he imply that they're superior?

But he doesn't even come to that conclusion in a logical way.

"Gordon Ramsey, in his auto-biography, defended his obsessive perfectionist nature..."

Ramsay! It's Gordon Ramsay!

So what can we say about bloggers who cannot get the names of the people they quote right?

Hilarious. The equivalent of someone putting "amazing attention to detial" on their resume.

I bet his surname is misspelled more than almost any other celebrity. I see it with the "e" all the time.

(My own surname is Ramsey, so it always leaps out at me.)

Since I'm hungry I want to talk about restaurants for a second.

You can usually tell quality restaurants by a signature dish more than their napkins.

For example, Pho places have to have good Pho. Pho is a touch dish to make requiring lots of detail to assemble complex ingredients in the right proportions over many hours. Good places are famous, bad places die.

Around where I live the best Pho place is "Pho 75". However, eating there is like eating at a cheap cafeteria. There's almost no decoration, everybody eats at long, fold-up tables like you might see at a middle school. They don't really have much of a menu and it's printed as cheaply as possible and then laminated so they don't have to print more. Napkins are the $2/1000 type you get at institutions, the silverware is so cheap it's possibly dangerous, and the chopsticks and soup spoons are made of heavy grade, dishwasher safe plastic. There's almost no service from the staff, they get your order and come back to drop off soup.

There are fancier places, with better napkins and silveware, tableclothes and expensive statues of dragons and such in the area. There's a few places that try to make Pho hip and trendy with modern lighting and fancy, custom interior decorator designed decors and fancy napkins.

But Pho 75 regularly beats them all. The line at lunch is always out the door (even in frigid weather), usually giving you about 10-15 minutes to actually eat the steaming bowl of soup. Yet from appearances to new people, it's a dive.

Anybody who's asked says they go to Pho 75 instead of some other place because of the quality of the soup. Not because of the napkins.

Reminds me of the importance of a good product manager. So many big software shops develop product today on the "feature level". As a result, developers and "managers" lose sight of the customer's workflow. Understanding the product from entry to exit and seeing how all of the pieces fit together is critical to creating a good product.

The basic observation is that, since all/most aspects of a system are likely to be of high or low quality, you can use the quality of any of them as s proxy metric for overall quality.

Note that this fails if the proxy metric becomes popular or standardised in any way, since those providing the systems will realise they can appear to be better by improving only that proxy metric.

Abuse of language warning;

I can't see any connection between restaurant quality and the particular properties of fractals.

I mean, fractal properties appear in a situation such as when one section of the coast of England resembles (statistically) another section of the coast of England. I don't see the comfortable chair of a restaurant resembling the thick napkin or the delicious steak of the restaurant in such a fashion. They're just all product of a single, conscious plan - something fractals generally are not.

It's shame people know so little about mathematical process that "fractal" is the only analogy that's become popular enough to use. If people had a larger pallet of terms, they could perhaps use them more correctly. Restaurant quality and overall quality is like a dynamic, feedback system. If only the author had known...

One of the defining characteristics of fractals is that they are self similar, meaning that a small part is similar to a larger part, or to the whole. The authors argument is that there is a self similarity in the quality of restaurants, by looking at a small part (in this case the napkin) you can with a some certainty say what a larger part is like. Fractals don't have to be geometric patterns, in this case it's the quality that's self-similar. Fractals aren't pictures, they're a mathematical concept. In this case I think the analogy is a good one.

They're also non-Euclidean geometric shapes. So calling it fractal is ambiguous at best and requires you extract one element that makes a fractal. While there are times writing in such a way can be helpful, this is not one of those times. Instead, "Quality is consistent across levels" or even "Organizational quality is self-similar".

I didn't think fractals had to be geometric shapes, but Wikipedia seems to agree with you, so I stand corrected. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal)

I still think the analogy is pretty good though.

Uh as you admit below, your argument here is mistaken.

Fractals are geometric patterns only. The restaurants are not "self-similar" in any geometric or fractal sense - the napkins don't particularly resemble the steaks. The only thing a good restaurant has a consistent quality. They don't resemble fractals any more than steaks resemble chairs and napkins.

With a reasonably defined quality space, what the article is saying is that the measure in any quality dimension is likely to correlate highly with that in any other: i.e. the measures are self-similar.

Way to be overly literal and pedantic, captain bring down.

The use of the term "fractal" here is in reference to "quality" not, say, appearance. And that use of the term (specifically meaning: self-similar at many different levels of scale) is meaningful, accurate, and helps clarify the point being made, which is the highest purpose of language.

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